There’s nothing like cold calling from a company that nobody’s ever heard of, to people who don’t want to hear from you, to develop key sales skills! The good news is that it helped me to become tenacious and resourceful, as well as learn how to objection handle & consistently refine my pitch. 

I started out my career in sales over 23 years ago from a basement home office in Estoril, Portugal. My tools were a phone and a spreadsheet full of numbers of marketing managers, and my job was to cold call and book as many meetings as possible. That experience then landed me a job at Bloomberg in London, with some skills that my new firm valued, and I was excited to be at a big company that was well known, or so I thought! One of my first calls went something like this:

Grant: Good morning, this is Grant calling from Bloomberg, can I speak to X please.

Prospect X: Thanks but we don't need any fridges or washing machines.......

Perhaps Bloomberg, the financial information firm, was not as famous as Blomberg, the household appliance firm!

22 years later, having worked for 13 years across Europe and 8 years throughout APAC, I've started my own sales consulting firm, Saleslocker! We focus on Sales Consulting & Business Development for Fintech & Financial Services, based out of Singapore with a number of clients already onboard.

Saleslocker couldn't have been launched without the amazing support of Sofia Coombe, Carol Liao, Caroline Hall, Chris Hall, Erica Hadfield, Gina Fyffe Jaime Thio, James Rotheram, Lorraine Raijeck, Michiel Verhoeven, Min Yi Woon, Rahil Kotowala, Sanjay Garodia, Stuart Nix and many others! I'd also like to say a big thank you to my Bloomberg family who taught me so much and have left me with so many lifelong friendships!