Sales “Shark Tank” for Veterans

November is Veteran’s Month and transitioning Veterans need your help.

We are going on year 17 of a war, an unprecedented time in US history. With this sustained deployment burden, many service members naturally contemplate leaving military life to the commercial world. It can be a daunting transition.

According to the SBA report entitled “Veteran-Owned Businesses and Their Owners,” small business firms owned by veterans employed 5.03 million people, had an annual payroll of $195 billion and receipts of $1.14 trillion. Veteran-owned firms represented 9.1 percent of all U.S. businesses yet 7.3 percent of the population.

St. Joseph’s University, one of ten universities successfully sponsoring Veteran Programs for Entrepreneurs, has successfully built 350 volunteers mentors/teachers, and I’ve been fortunate to be one of those volunteers over the last five years. Two times a year, these volunteers help with best practices in sales, marketing, accounting, finance, and in other areas relevant to entrepreneurs that are building a business. Prior to graduation, students compete with one another in a ‘Shark Tank’ environment attempting to seek over $10,000 to help fund their small business concept.

As part of the class I teach on sales best practices, we incorporate learning by industry leaders - enabled by previous generous donations from @DanielPink, @AnthonyIannarino, @JebBlount, @JulianaCrispo, @JillKonrath, @JoanneBlack, and @TimSanders among others. In our last class, we talked about the role of empathy in the selling process via this recent Hubspot video as well as Jeb's most recent book, Fanatical Prospecting that all sales and marketing leaders should read.

We need your help.

• If you are an author or know of an author in a relevant entrepreneur area of how to scale a business, a tax deductible book donation would be extremely helpful for future classes.
• We continue to recruit mentors to help telephonic coaching these veterans on areas of how to grow a business in your area of expertise – public relations, accounting, sales, marketing, finance, information technology, etc.
• We actively seek tax deductible corporate or individual donations (or introductions to the relevant team members) to keep the program momentum going.

Please message me if you think you might have interest in either mentor or tax free donations. We'd appreciate it!

For the Vietnam Veterans – welcome home. And to all Veterans and their families, thank you for your service.

Jon in the Army - my twin teenage girls can't understand why Dad's hair was so dark and full - wonder if there is a correlation somewhere?

Jon Russo is a three-time global Chief Marketing Officer in successful public and private high tech companies in Silicon Valley, New York City, and Luxembourg.

Today, he leads B2B Fusion to optimize marketing technologies and business process to drive revenue growth, with an expertise in email deliverability, Account Based strategies, and marketing automation. Enterprise clients include Level (3), Thomson Reuters, Ricoh, and Anthem among others. Jon also currently serves on the Board of Directors of MOCCA, Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance, the industry best practice association that drives operational excellence in Marketing, with fellow board members from Intel, SAP, Adobe, and others. 

A former active duty U.S. Army officer, Jon earned his MBA from the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley and his Bachelors of Science in Finance from the University of Connecticut. In addition, Jon is a certified master in Eloqua and a Marketo Certified Expert. 

#veterans, #sales

@ralphgalati, @andrewcolkett, @josephdiangelo, @vanazervanos