jerry stapleton

A few decades ago, I pivoted from metallurgical engineering into sales, then to sales effectiveness. But I worked in a way no one (except for a few colleagues) in the training space ever had—or has since. Unlike traditional sales trainers, I conducted ride-alongs. And unlike traditional ride-alongs, 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. (A sampling of cards is shown on this page).  Over a period of ten years, I completed more than a thousand such ride-alongs with customer-facing people from 40-plus companies across multiple industries. Many weren’t “salespeople” in the formal sense. But the dynamic was always the same: a buyer/seller interaction.  While I was doing this as 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? Over time, the answers emerged. And they were—as I often say—as mind-blowing as they were undeniable.  And they became the foundation of the Mindset Journey, especially the Atmosphere of Trust and the Traditional Sales Mindset. My work continued for several years inside Minneapolis-based APi Group (though no longer in the trenches). Working closely with senior leadership and frontline teams, 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. The experience brought something into very sharp focus for me. The barrier—keeping salespeople from achieving the results they know they're capable of—was universal. And while the world of sales continued its futile pursuit of breaking through that barrier by getting better at traditional selling, we were breaking through it every day at APi. How? By helping people shed the Traditional Sales Mindset. I saw what that shift could accomplish. And I knew it needed to reach much further. Not only to more companies, but to individuals as well. And I knew companies would have to make it part of their culture, carried forward by their own leaders, not sustained by an outsider. But how could I accomplish all of that at scale? That's why we built the Mindset Journey the way we did. We created a scalable learning experience that can reach people without sacrificing the human feedback essential to making a mindset shift real. Signals Lab is the cornerstone of that feedback. And our leader-led approach gives companies a way to make the Journey their own—permanently. Not by turning leaders into trainers, but by helping them guide and mentor their people.