Digital Chatter Episode #012: Brendan Alen Barrett

Eric: Hello and welcome everyone to today's Digital Chatter. I'm Eric Sharpe and we have our guest today Brendan Alen Barrett. He is a sales coach, trainer, and a podcaster, and a father and he's going to tell you a little bit more about himself. So Brendan take it away.

Brendan: Hey, thanks Eric. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I do a bit of training. I do a bit of coaching. Hm, probably.. The people that I work with most are entrepreneurs, early stage entrepreneurs or people who own larger businesses and either they need help selling themselves because they've got a craft and that craft is out selling. Right. But they need customers. Or they're trying to grow their sales effort by adding sales people or adding sales development reps to help feed opportunities to their salespeople.

Brandan: But probably what I'm most excited about lately is my podcast project which started out as Facebook Live and we're getting ready to ramp and launch to iTunes. But that's The Business of Family and Selling and that kind of marries my two worlds, my home life my professional life. And on that show we talk about the shared experiences of people who either sell for a living as people or run their own organization. And you know the dynamics of being a family first seller, somebody who's got kids, a spouse to, you know, that they want to show their affection and love and support to. But also a business that's also kind of maybe their baby or a book of business that they need to grow and nurture. And how do they either balance or integrate the two.

Eric: That's awesome. And I'm looking here at your bio on her Website you've got your beautiful son. Right?

Brendan: Yes. Yes.

Eric: And so you know you're in Phoenix, correct? So you live and work in Phoenix and I

Brendan: Yes, sir.

Eric: Checking out your, you know, we've checked out your stuff before the interview but you know tell me kind of how you got started with all of this. I mean what's the background? You didn't really start out by doing sales in the beginning, did you?

Brendan: Well my first.. I guess my first sales training was my junior year of college. I accepted an offer to do one of those Student painter internships, I was actually working with student painters which is basically it's an opportunity for kids college students to learn the skills of entrepreneurship through the exercise of managing and running a branch of an exterior painting business. So that was my first sales training. Once that summer was done after, you know, being in charge of going out finding the work, selling the work, organizing the work, managing the production, closing out the projects.

Brendan: I went, I got a job selling at RadioShack you know commission retail sales. Upon graduating from college where I started pursuing a degree in econ and then decided I didn't want to go to graduate school right away so I switched to communications with an emphasis of PR. But then upon graduation moved to California thinking I was going to get a job in marketing communications you know start low level work my way up couldn't find a gig, first serious offer I got was a sales gig in construction and so I've been working in sales ever since. About a year or so after landing in California relocated to sunny Phoenix and..

Eric: There must have been a reason behind that. What was the reason for relocating?

Brendan: Better salary. So I was working you know, as an employee salesperson and they had an opening in the territory, they wanted to you know expand, put a new office but they needed the revenue base to fund a new office and new equipment in the area. So they wanted to put somebody there permanently because for half the ...