Mark Keating

Background

About Mark Keating

For me, sales is a life-long passion. From early days in a ‘boiler room’ environment in the City of London selling over the phone (and not being able to sit down until I’d made a sale … no joke) to my current role as co-founder and CEO of SALESGURU, sales has been the one constant in my life. I believe it’s the greatest career in the world and I have lived it for the greatest part of my professional career. As the CEO of SALESGURU, my role has been to build a great company that is focused on one specific thing: to help South Africa’s salespeople embrace professionalism and great selling practices and to help businesses grow and improve their sales teams through education and training. Here’s why it’s different: SALESGURU isn’t just a company of clever wordsmiths who can put together a monthly magazine or a training course based on trite theory; we’re a commercial operation which faces the same challenges of lead generation, pipeline management, closing sales, customer loyalty and picking a future strategy in an uncertain market as you are. That means we live the same challenges every day as our customers so our solutions are based on real-world experience. Added to that however, we have one killer advantage: our days are spent entirely with salespeople in South Africa and though they range across industries, they have in common that they’re all trying to make a success of things right here. We get their stories and their lessons – good and bad – and we are able to tailor everything we do to ensure we provide immediate value to them. Aside from leading SALESGURU since its inception in 2006, I have a number of keynote speeches and have done talks and live training for more than 300 companies over the past few years. It’s another real passion of mine, but it’s something that is borne of real-world experience also. I’m not a ‘speaker’ per says. I am a salesman and company CEO by daily activity who happens to also speak professionally and train sales people.