jerry stapleton
A few decades ago, I pivoted from metallurgical engineering into sales.
Then I pivoted into sales effectiveness, working in a way no one in the training space ever had.
Unlike traditional sales trainers, I conducted ride-alongs. And unlike
traditional ride-along “experts,” I wasn’t a passive, notepad-toting observer.
I was an active participant—always carrying a client business card—and sharing responsibility for the outcome (Sampling of cards is shown on this page).
Over ten years, I completed more than a thousand ride-along calls with
customer-facing people from dozens of companies across multiple industries.
Many weren’t “salespeople” in the formal sense. But the dynamic was the
same: a buyer/seller interaction.
And I wasn’t just a trainer in the trenches. I spent those same years observing—like a fly on the wall—the very interactions my clients and I were conducting together.
I became fixated on two questions:
1. What—really—triggered positive and negative responses in customers?
2. Were there predictable, common patterns in the way people behaved
when they were with customers in a sales interaction?
Those questions were answered! And the answers were—as I often say—as
mind-blowing as they were undeniable. And they became the foundation of
the Atmosphere of Trust and Mindset Journey on which all our work is built.
My work continued for several years inside Minneapolis-based APi Group. Not as
a training effort, but as a shift in how the company understands and approaches customer interactions.
Working closely with senior leadership and frontline teams in the trenches, we created a company-wide sales mindset shift—and built the skills and behaviors required to bring that shift to life.
With a license to my intellectual property in place and a strong cultural foundation established, that shift is being carried forward by APi’s leadership team.
