Lance Cooper, Founder
A Tale of Two Salesmen
After stints in engineering, retail, teaching, and direct selling, Lance Cooper finally found his passion in sales training. He founded SalesManage Solutions in 2000, and dozens of books and several training programs later, Lance experienced great success helping sales teams improve their face-to-face skills.
He persuaded Steve Suggs, a former Northwestern Mutual Agency Manager, to bring his expertise to Sales Manage, and over the past twenty+ years, Steve has helped Sales Manage Solutions’ double its sales revenue almost every year.
The two noticed that some salespeople failed to increase their sales, despite understanding and even practicing better listening, presenting, and closing skills. What was the problem? They began to identify other factors, such as sales planning and activity management, that affect consistent goal achievement.
As they continually trained client companies, they used a number of assessments to help sales leaders understand their teams and recruit with better information. They soon migrated to Dr. Larry Craft’s CPQ (Craft Personality Questionnaire) which had been used in many large corporations with great success. It was written up in the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review and used sales-specific data gleaned from testing millions of sales representatives at all levels and statistically linking their responses to the data collected from their assessments.
Steve Suggs, Co-Owner
When Dr. Craft sold the CPQ to a large international company, Lance and Steve approached him to find out if he would help them develop a next-level assessment for SalesManage Solutions. As soon as his non-compete clause was over, he helped them do just that, and SMS bought the full rights to the new CTS Sales Profile.
