Our team in South Africa

SuperSmous is the web persona of QuadS formed in May 2004 to market and deliver the full range of Infoteam Intellectual Property to the South African market. Based in Johannesburg, this team has its sights set on becoming the premium team in the territory based on turnover and quality of delivery.
Our Team;	est.2004
Peter French - Managing Member CRSP - UPSA member 0601220013 Peter has 40 years experience in sales having entered the profession directly from college. His sales skills cover hardware sales in mainframe and distributed computing to large customers with complex IT problems. He has managed sales teams in Hardware, Customer Relationship, Channel and Software sales. He is a Registered and Certified Sales Professional against the body of knowledge contained in the United Professional Sales Association Compendium of Professional Selling. He reads extensively about the profession and some of his articles can be viewed at; Evan Carmichael
Jan Venter has over 30 years of sales experience having both carried a bag through 1-on-1 B2B sales as well as building and managing sales teams in similar market dynamics. Jan concentrates on the Manufacturing Segment of our market having added a Production Certification to his long list of interests. Jan is keen on nurturing and coaching young sales folk and to this end utilises electronic means to stay in touch, give presentations and collect performance metrics. He has become an expert on the Cisco "Go-to-meeting" Webinar technology both in it's use as well as deploying it in our customers.
*Johann van Vuuren* has been in sales since he graduated from La Hulpe University in Belgium. He has only ever worked for IBM and made his mark in the B2B space in their commercial unit. Johann has extensive knowledge of the IBM "Sales School" concept having been in charge of training in IBM until he decided to branch out on his own. He joins QuadS bringing a huge amount of IP and has been instrumental in rebuilding our body of knowledge into an acceptable format for e-delivery Johann's interest is teaching, mentoring and certifying salespeople that do not want to take a scheduled course but use the structured components in their own time to eventually become certified. Johann's great passion is to be "available" to them on chat 24-7-365!
*Decent Sibanda* joins us from a successful B2B Sales and Sales Management career in an American vendor of Information Technology in Africa. Born in Johannesburg, he studied at the University of Nairobi where his parents were diplomats representing South Africa. His studies and 8 year corporate sales career, enables Decent to bring a complete understanding of the business revenue generation process and he is keen to implement optimisation to that process. Decents' areas of expertise include; reviving sales teams, introduction of sales processes and procedures, one-to-one or group sales training sessions, sales inductions and effective sales recruitment.
Tanja Batchelor - Sales Administration, joins QuadS straight from St. Mary's college. She is veracious and keen to learn the supporting functions that make a great sales team. Her duties will include the logistics on training courses and also managing our e-contact with customers and prospects. She has an academic interest in Lead Nurturing and will write her dissertation on FINDING, KEEPING and SERVICING customers using e-technologies. Tanja is currently studying for a Bcom Marketing degree at UNISA. Tanja will travel extensively in Africa delivering logistics to our Sales training Interventions.
*"Look Here!"* We're looking for at least 1 new Sales Process Performance Consultants. Make a rewarding career change by implementing your life-time of sales person optimisation to the benefit of our clients. Check out the Careers page for the specifications we're searching for!
The business case for the customer to buy needs to be overwhelmingly good to succeed (the business case in their context, not from the seller's perspective!) Many of the root causes for under-performing sales teams lie outside the sales group. Typical response to the symptom of falling win rate is to provide more conventional training to the sales team, which seems to achieve an average 10% - 20% improvement in sales over a period of about 120 days after which sales performance drops back to the status quo. Whilst most companies believe that they have successfully clarified their customer value, in 100% of cases over the last 15 years Lucidus has found this not to be the case. A recent review of our client base showed that NO client had quantified, connected and agreed more than 15% of its customer value. This means that competing vendors all look broadly the same to a purchaser leaving the primary differentiating factor to be price. However, if some significant portion of the un-clarified value can be brought into play then this can form the basis for significant differentiation. Nearly all companies endeavour to communicate value to their customer by means of an 'assault' using all the value elements they can think of - with the result that most of the impact is lost. The case is proven that if the seller can identify the 4 or 5 most powerful value drivers (in the context of the customer's business KPIs) and solely focus on these, the chances of earning high levels of value recognition will be maximised A strong value proposition is only strong if relevant to customer needs. So, the key elements of vendor value need to be connected to the customers perceived value requirements and business performance metrics if the customer is to have any real chance of understanding, validating and agreeing the value. This requires specific skills and tools. Typically, only 5% of sales team are naturally equipped to do this. They deliver at 4 – 5 times the average of the rest of the sales team. 40% of the sales team will never be able to perform in this way, leaving 55% of the sales team capable of being taught but only assuming the necessary information, tools and techniques can be made available to them.
Indutech enables innovation through combining excellence in business engineering methodologies and sensitive change management to deliver competitive advantage. The FuGle™ - Innovation Reference Architecture is centred on a generic innovation process that combines the convergent “fuzzy-front-end” of innovation (termed the funnel) with the divergent deployment and exploitation of innovation (termed the bugle). The model was developed by Indutech through collaborative research with the Enterprise Engineering group within Stellenbosch University’s Industrial Engineering Department’s, as well as various international research partners in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The aim of the model is to help businesses identify, evaluate, develop, implement and exploit new products and services more efficiently and effectively within their enterprises.
Just about every sales team we work with is unable to; Forecast accurately, be assured that they will make their Financial Year target and know, without doubt, what to do to rectify these problems. We expect that at the end of the month the company will pay 100% of our "salary" and wouldn't even begin to understand how a manager could subjectively "de-risk" our worth by 30% and his manager by a further 50% making our pipeline reflect only 35% of its actual value. Would you accept that they did this to the salary bill? Would you be part of a company that "may" pay an unknown percentage of your salary every month depending on "how they felt?" We're passionate about the Sales Process but adding a customer centric view to that process enables us to design a "No Funnel"™ outcome! By implications, a Funnel means what you "put-in" is reduced to what you "get-out". Using a process to design the activities which are delivered during the opportunity management phase, ensures that we synchronise "your" sales process with the "prospects" buying-process. Designing that specifically for your team, product, market and enterprise demands will produce the following results. We are so confident of these and other benefits that we will do the Analysis and deliver the intervention entirely based on return. Would you like to see; Increased win-ratios from the Rule of Thumb (RoT) 3:1 to 1:1? Repeatable* and reliable forecasts which value your revenue potential not at "maybe" RoT 35% but >90% accuracy Optimise the Sales and Support teams utilization to decrease cost-of-sales by not< 30% Sales Manager *coaching "conversations"* to upset the RoT 80% of revenue from 20% of the team to 60/40 Improve customer engagement decisions to increase deal-value by not<15% Engage marketing in creating a persuasive value argument the benefit of which can be measured Review this collateral and allow us to do the research in your team and we will show you how to make an order of magnitude difference to your revenue and along the way, increase market share and gain higher customer buying experience.
The United Professional Sales Association® (UPSA) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to individual sales success for all salespeople around the world. As a member based organisation of sales professionals, the primary goal of the UPSA is to help attain worldwide excellence in the methodology and practice of professional selling. By creating a framework that embodies all existing selling knowledge they enable the objective understanding of training needs and certification of the sales professional.
Most industry watchers will agree that a >30% positive selection of prospective sales people is about as good as it gets. Through a long search for a better mousetrap, we have covered specialist “occupational psychologists”, "character analysts", "handwriting analysis" and other ways of making selection more repeatable and accurate. Our association with H R Chally brings a world wide database of sales competencies to bear on the selection process. It removes the “black art” of divining to a repeatable scientific actuarial process of analysis against defined job criteria and world-wide high achieving competencies. H R Chally recommends the 30-30-30-10 rule where 30% of the decision is based on a background check, 30% on the interview, 30% on profile analysis and 10% on “gut feel” that the candidate fits into the ethos of the organisation. With their association, we can offer help in achieving a good interview based on objective criteria, coupled with analysis of the individual (web based) against high performance criteria. Wouldn't you like to have a >70% accuracy in the hiring decision?