Michael Gray

---

I’m the director of sales training at a Chicago-based SaaS company in the loop. I've been fortunate to spend pretty much my entire career communicating ideas to people from a variety of backgrounds. For the last 5 years, my team has built a training program focused training and coaching sales executives on the sales processes, sales skills, operations, and product knowledge they need to be successful, while also sneaking some professional development and management development into the program.

MORE

I love making the complex simple and executable.

I work in the sometimes hazy world of big ideas, complex processes, and personnel development. My role is to identify, craft, and clearly communicate simple, repeatable processes that enable our people to succeed, and to make sure its scalable.

That means I work with specialists at all levels of the organization, from all different backgrounds, to differentiate the “need-to-know” from the “nice-to-know” from the “too-much-to-know,” and then communicate any ambiguities as unambiguously as possible. Essentially, I’m like a translator for different specialities (How do you say “.NET 4.0 Framework” in sales speak?)

Some of the things I believe are key to successful training:
• Expert content
• Simplified (“non­jargony”) language
• Clean & logical presentation
• Relatable­ness of information
• Timeliness of delivery
• Reinforcement/Accountability

Specialties: coaching, public speaking, facilitation, virtual & e-learning, professional development, inside and outside sales training, training strategy and development, project management, technical training, process improvement, ILT, curricula design, presentation development, performance management, Web-based training, public speaking, Salesforce.com (CRM), Adobe Captivate, instructional design, onboarding