Crystal Wise
Says Don Williams: “My primary passion is helping people drive massive growth in sales. I don't really care what kind of business they're in. You can help almost anyone when you bring in the right principles because selling is really easy when you do it the right way."
Editor's note: Each quarter Fort Worth Inc. features a member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. The following first appeared in the Fall issue.
There are lots of people out there who possess an extraordinary capability, a so-called “superpower” that, put into the marketplace, could be a service in demand.
One might be a plumber, a bricklayer, a therapist, or even a writer. That know-how, though, might not translate to business without an acumen for marketing and sales.
That’s the part of the business equation Don Williams Global fills.
Don Williams, an entrepreneur now going on 37 years and four times an author, is a sales consultant who provides businesses counsel on sales and marketing. Many of his clients are Fortune 500 companies.
“My primary passion is helping people drive massive growth in sales. I don't really care what kind of business they're in. You can help almost anyone when you bring in the right principles because selling is really easy when you do it the right way. It can be brutally hard when you do it the wrong way.”
Williams also hosts a podcast, the “Proven Entrepreneur Show,” which has about 310,000 downloads. In the show, he discusses the journey of entrepreneurship with successful startup founders.
Williams, 63, has been good at this for a long time. At 19, he was the top salesman in the country at a company with 450 sales people. At 20, he was the top sales manager in the country out of 40 offices. In time, he moved into real estate.
“I sold 17 houses my first month only because I didn’t know you can’t sell 17 houses in a month. I didn’t know that most people didn’t sell 17 houses in a year. Nobody told me that, so, I just did it.”
His book, Romancing the Customer, details the parallels between the romantic journey and customer journey and uses dating as a metaphor for prospect activity and improving the sales process.
“Merely by working in those two areas, it’s shocking the difference it makes,” he says. “Let's say you have a software service company and they're converting 20% of their sales from qualified leads, and you help them improve to 30%. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it's 50% more volume to the top line. It's huge. And what I've found is that most problems the business has, if you sell enough, about half of those problems just evaporate. They just go poof, and they're gone. And the other half, if they're a little more concrete than that, you now have enough money to afford somebody to help you fix them, and you can make your life a lot easier.”