Guy Cournoyer - 2002. 30 years, 30 top business influencers.

2002 - Guy Cournoyer

America's Return Inc. turns 30 in 2017.  In the first 30 weeks I'll recognize each of the 30 most influential people in the history of my business.

It was not fated that Guy and I should become great colleagues. When presented with our S.A.L.E.S. program, his first impression was that the timing could not have been worse. Based on his very successful call center leadership during the preceding five years, Guy had been recruited to build and manage a 100-person sales team at Comark. When HP’s Scott Anderson, Vito LoCascio and Susan Vail offered to sponsor our program if Guy were willing to apply it, he hadn’t fully reflected yet on how much his success of those earlier five years depended upon the insatiable Y2K and dot.com IT appetite. That riotous demand had created a chaotic sales model with a low-qualifying recruiting threshold, an extremely high-turnover rate, and an outbound call script that might simply ask: “How many PCs does your company use?” followed by a peremptory “click” if the answer were a number less than 30.

But that party was over by 2002. Comark’s Sales leader, Tim McGrath, an early ex-HP S.A.L.E.S. grad and current CEO at Connection, was building a business based on services delivery and solution selling by educated, experienced reps, and he approved our program. That seal of approval was what Guy needed to refine his team’s selling methods to transform box-pushers into solution providers. And it marked the start of Guy's progression to become one of the finest practitioners of "Managing S.A.L.E.S." with whom I've ever worked.  While it is difficult to manage people, Guy has repeatedly demonstrated that it is more effective to manage a process that people use. At Comark (acquired by Insight) he proved he could build his staff rather than burn them out. At Broadsoft’s iLinc, a web conferencing provider, he customized our train-the-trainer model in virtual classrooms to teach his team to sell subscription online services. More recently he deployed our sales recruiting methods outside the IT market to build a sales bench with eager people who want to become professionals. However, I think the results he would take most pride in are the careers of team members he developed into sales managers. For example, Jon Bennett now of Securematics, Michael Major now of PCM, and Anthony Tolles now of SAP – all charter members of The S.A.L.E.S. Network – will credit Guy for modeling the personal character that has helped each assure success.

Along with a pronunciation guide for his surname (“corn-wah-yay”), Guy has provided me with what any self-respecting French Canadian will rely on to communicate essential truths: hockey metaphors. He has now skated to the open ice to meet opportunities that will come his way as a partner in his own enterprise: CodeFour Planning, a corporate event planning agency where Guy hopes to reconvene with ex-colleagues when managing their conferences, meetings and incentive trips.

The list so far.