Nicholas Read Email & Phone Number

Melbourne, Vic, Au

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

To resolve a perplexing gap in the market, this role sees me guiding a global team of practitioner and academic thought leaders in sales and management to create the world's first definitive encyclopaedia for the profession, as a foundation text for the development of future training, standards, governance and automation. The Encyclopedia of Sales and Sales Management will be released by Edward Elgar Publishing late 2025.

New York, London, Melbourne

Starting in Melbourne I opened and staffed offices in New York, London and Chandigarh India, and established channel partners in 50 countries. This led to an amazing experience pushing the frontiers of sales analytics, coaching methods, software development, and the psychology of adult learning and sales training ever since.Clients have reported breakthroughs valued at an aggregated $50bn by applying SalesLabs’ commercially-proven, research-based sales training methods, some of which I authored with fellow innovator Richard Owers, a sales genius who became a Partner in the firm.I led several research projects on:how to overcome the Forgetting Curve that plagues all training exercises; which B2B selling skills make a real difference; how sales managers achieve peak performance; how executives really get involved in major purchases, and how to sell to them; which sales methodologies work, and how to improve them; and how the neuroscience of the brain shapes learning strategy. These investigations led to me write three bestselling business books and peer-reviewed papers, which attracted interviews for television, radio, podcasts, magazines and newspapers, plus ongoing ghostwriting, editing and keynote speeches at major training and professional sales conferences worldwide.

Canberra And Melbourne, Australia

With a growing track record in Australia's education sector, a number of RTO owners asked me to explore why private Vocational Education and Training colleges are not represented offshore in the Government's marketing of Australian education; why eight Government-run universities get all the airplay and funding; and what could be done to identify the best vocational colleges in the nation and promote them to international students as a "VET Ivy League". They were asking me to help democratize the education sector. I thought it a worthy goal, and launched an independent study of 1,100 RTOs to develop analytics capable of benchmarking relative performance. A VET RTO scorecard, change management and executive coaching program were developed in line with best practices I had created in the UK, for "The Architect Leader in Education" program, which was featured in the Harvard Business Review and on BBC Newsnight. On request, my insights were shared with the Australian Trade & Investment Commission, and taken up by Labor MP Julian Hill in the 2023 Parliamentary Inquiry on Education, as well as prompting interviews with The Age and Forbes.

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

I sold some of SalesLabs' technology IP to a French consulting house, and relocated my family to Australia intent on taking over SalesLabs in Asia-Pacific. But a long-time friend asked if I would do him a favour and spend a few months coaching the CEO of a College his company had acquired. I was later invited to take over as CEO and join the Board to turnaround the school in a difficult market. As part of my interest exploring how to formalize sales education and governance standards at the tertiary level, this was a great hands-on opportunity.The school was a Registered Training Organisation (RTO), and as its revenue model relied on international students migrating to Australia, the border lockdown imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic meant new revenue streams needed to be identified. At the same time, I gave oversight to its regulatory compliance, growth of international channels and admissions, expansion of curriculum, and renovation of the company culture, Trainer and Assessor quality, and campus facilities. These new strategies permitted the school to grow without cutting prices. This made the institution an attractive target for acquisition, giving the Board an opportunity to exit.In this role I was an active member on the ACT Vocational Education & Training Committee for the Independent Tertiary Education Council of Australia (ITECA), and led the college to win the 2022 Austrade Export Award for the ACT, place as a Finalist in the 2022 Australian Export Awards and in the ACT Chief Minister's Training Awards.

Moscow, Russia

RANEPA ran Kington University's courses in Russia as a channel. Based on the popularity of my classes in London, I was invited to lecture on Operations Strategy, Operations Management and Strategic Negotiations to the sons and daughters of Russia's elite families, who were gaining their Masters degrees or International MBA at the prestigious Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), in Moscow.

London, England, United Kingdom

Although my personal brand was in sales training, and I was running SalesLabs full-time, the work I had done with CEOs and COOs to implement new operational systems and run change management initiatives saw me invited by the leadership team at this university to lecture to adult business managers who had gone back to school for their Executive MBA at Kingston University in London. It was nice recognition, and I added some non-academic, real world pragmatism to the program.

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

This was a brilliant role. It was only one year but felt like five, and stretched me by being in a team of peers with equal experience. Nirvana!EY sought to broaden the impact of its Strategic Markets practice by opening a new advisory unit focused on reducing client risk in Sales & Revenue Growth. The firm invited top-ranking sales, marketing and management practitioners to build the services and launch them to market. Because of my thought leadership in sales training and experience operationalizing growth in enterprise environments, I was honored to be appointed as Executive Director (COO), reporting to the Partners. We networked to clients in finance, manufacturing, retail, technology and energy in Australia, Singapore, Middle East, UK and the USA. My team was involved in EY's Entrepreneur of the Year programme, in staging CEO Breakfast Briefings, helping start-ups find seed funding, and facilitating training workshops and reinforcement coaching using Funnel Camp IP from Align.me and sales training IP that I had written as part of the SalesLabs portfolio. In Q2/2008 the global financial crisis caused EY to jettison its consulting divisions and refocus on core accounting. I made lemonade in a deal to pay out selected client contracts to bring them to SalesLabs.

Singapore

Projects at Cross-Bridge started to intersect with Korn Ferry and ASK Learning more and more. We partnered on a few client sales training assignments, then ASK offered me a regional role. This provided a neat segue for my family to relocate from our adventure in China and move back to the West, which I couldn't do if I stayed so deeply immersed in the China operation. Headquartered in Sydney, ASK Learning was Australia’s top developer of sales and technology training, eLearning, Instructor-Led Training and rewards-based LMS. My brief was to work from ASK’s regional HQ in Singapore and shift the company from selling ‘sales training seats’ to selling enterprise business solutions, working on regional and global projects with clients that included Celestica, Dell, Dimension Data, Orange, Cisco Systems, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Alcoa, Singapore Airlines, Symantec and others. This was a role focused on all aspects of sales cycle management, direct sales and customer account engagement with multinational clients, where team effort often led to million dollar months.

Shanghai, China

After China entered the WTO and a flood of partnerships and acquisitions followed, its State-Owned Enterprises needed to modernize. Hewlett-Packard opened a Business School in Beijing, and invited me to move to China to design its sales training curriculum, all training collateral, and coach their managers to deliver education on sales, ethics, customer service and modern management to customers. I did this at a time when my SalesLabs organization was expanding. SalesLabs took a stake in a Shanghai sales training company, Cross Bridge Consulting China Co Ltd, to expand the delivery team beyond HP’s capability. I was heavily involved in the sales and delivery side as well as executive management. Initially all the firm's revenue came from the HP contract, and in a partner capacity I operated for HP as leader of the sales education function, training HP sales and management teams and preparing local trainers to consult to the Business School's clients. As the Cross Bridge partnership grew, I had a staff of 20 who helped me deliver the curriculum around China to SOEs and multinational companies that included Shanghai Telecom, Bank of China, Ping An Insurance, China Legend Computers (Lenovo), Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Henkel, Yum Foods, Symrise, Sony, Lexus and others. It was a gold rush era, never to be repeated, never to be forgotten.This role had all the complexity of establishing and maintaining sales and distribution channels in a volatile and often ambiguous (non-English) speaking market that presented a complex lattice of cultural and operational 'unspoken rules', while getting results through partners with their own agendas, at the same time as taking charge of an existing team with the intent of updating their organizational culture to be more accountable and transparency with improved procedures and skills to achieve weekly target-based sales, service and profitability results.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Because I was certified to train in "Strategic Selling", "Solution Selling", and the 14 courses that made the "Target Account Selling" portfolio, a Sydney sales training company, Alcuin International, contracted me to set up two offices, hire support managers, and expand its footprint into Melbourne. I incorporated SalesLabs to support this assignment. By the end of 1998, I had monetized the opportunity with a contract to train every division of Telstra in the newly deregulated telecommunications industry, followed by Ericsson, NAB, AGL and BHP: a headcount of 2,000 people. I was also a lead in regional and global rollouts with IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, KPMG, EMC, Symantec and Fuji Xerox. In 2000, Alcuin's distributorship was acquired by the largest training company it sold products for: OnTarget, which in turn was acquired by Siebel Systems for $259m (later sold to Oracle for $5.58bn). I became a regional lead on client engagements and certifying new trainers on the products.

Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

SAS was the world’s largest privately owned enterprise software, customer intelligence and visual analytics company, headquartered in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, USA. Four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall, my brief was to turn former Eastern Bloc partners into fully-integrated offices for SAS, and align their cultures and operations to Western norms. I helped build a sales culture in 27 offices in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and delivered training programs and coaching to 1,100 sales, service, education and management staff. During this time, SAS started winning against ‘unbeatable’ rivals. EMEA started outselling the USA parent company. SAS exceeded $1bn by doing a lot of things right, with great people on board. The training I designed achieved a return on investment of 1196:1. This training model was rolled-out worldwide. I was certified to deliver sales training from Miller-Heiman, SPI and OnTarget. As one of the most admired companies in the world, I might have stayed with SAS forever, but I fell in love and married an Aussie girl, she couldn't work in Europe, and SAS didn't have a role for me in Australia. I had to find a new path. Much later I would be privileged to have SAS as a global client of my own sales training products, for over a decade.

Sunningdale, England, United Kingdom

This was an old fashioned hands-on apprenticeship learning Organizational Analysis, Management Consulting and Sales Training in Britain's oldest sales performance advisory firm. I worked with the Boards of firms that included BT, Biffa, Peacocks, Costa, Wimpey Homes, Winterhalter, Vaillant, Timac, Plus Plan and Mitsubishi.The role focused on auditing staff on all-day accompaniments, observing their skills and effectiveness, trending results across the organization, and designing remedial training and coaching for groups and individuals. Classroom delivery of the training, then ongoing in-field monitoring and refresher coaching produced significant client ROI.

Queensland, Australia

I'd made some money and wanted to give back. For two years I laboured full-time in an unpaid, self-funded capacity teaching lessons on Christianity and self reliance to Australian and First Nations families across Queensland. This involved more cold call prospecting than I had ever done before, and taught how to operate in a remotely-managed team, be self-reliant, and develop lasting relationships with people from all backgrounds.A highlight was coordinating community support efforts with Red Cross and Meals on Wheels during flood disaster relief efforts in regional Queensland, including taking the lead in coordinating talent, logistics and resources for the 1992 Carols by Candleight Concert to collect toys, clothing and food for families whose homes and businesses were wiped out.I managed and motivated teams of volunteers assigned from around the world, and learned how to get the best from people using non-financial motivators. By serving the sick, the weary, the downtrodden, those in prison and others searching for greater meaning, I learned to labour for and love being involved in a for-purpose cause where success is measured in terms of delivering people from various forms of bondage, whether financial, literacy, emotional, spiritual or social, and giving them the tools to achieve greater direction, meaning and happiness, based on the principles contained in scripture and the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

A 12-month assignment to turnaround a life insurance call centre of 220 operators. Its function was to make appointments for the agents of National Mutual Insurance (now AXA), which the agents had to pay for. The problem was only half the appointments were home, and half of those only wanted brochures, so were deemed a waste of Agent time and money. I put in place better training, quality standards and a new reward system. I also had telemarketers call back all appointments to talk them out of seeing an Agent, to flush out the serious parties. This resulted in highly qualified leads, and Agents went from a 10% conversion rate to 90%. The call centre improved from producing 120 leads a week to 400. Small incremental gains made a multi-million dollar impact. It wasn't rocket science, but it had never been put together the right way before. My 'systems thinking' brain got a workout that returned handsome dividends for the owners.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

I left Yellow Pages because the future had arrived...mobile telephones had become a reality. I saw a big opportunity. These were the days when each unit cost $10,000 and cell coverage was awful. They were being marketed as an alternative to CB Radios in trucks and taxis, but I believed they could be sold retail to tradespeople and professionals who spent their time on the road, to replace pagers. I negotiated distributor licenses with NEC, Motorola and Philips, and set up a retail presence with financing facilities to make the product affordable to personal buyers. A colleague joined me, we hired help, and the business took off. But we were young, in a hurry to expand, and learned more from what we did wrong than what we got right. Hutchison Telecom offered to buy our customer base, providing a worthwhile exit opportunity.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Starting in the telemarketing division, I achieved 300% of my annual target and was promoted to field sales. With a larger portfolio and weekly target, I achieved 200% of my sales quota. I was then hand-picked to join the elite Key Accounts team responsible for major display advertising clients. The sales training at Yellow Pages was incredibly professional, and gave me my first exposure to the psychology process of selling. I took to it like a duck to water, and regularly placed in the Top 1% of salespeople nationally. My territories included metropolitan suburbs and regional cities, with clients across the A-Z of business, from Accountants, Brothels and Chiropractors to X-ray clinics, Yachtbuilders and Zoos, with lots of insurers, florists, hotels, restaurants and plumbers in-between.What I liked most is that the product really worked. I could sell it with full confidence that clients would get many times their investment back. You don't always get to sell a product where this is true, so the company really appealed to my sense of integrity.I learned much about customer research, time management, being a self-starter, cold calling, territory coverage, copywriting, layout design, qualifying needs, pitching, networking, objection handling and closing skills. I was exposed to working with Advertising Agencies like Ogilvy, Clemenger, Saatchi and Young & Rubicam when clients needed a combination of directional advertising to connect with informed buyers, yet also needed creative advertising to create the initial awareness and interest.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Commission sales role selling cinema advertising and then designing the layout of the slides and copy for the voiceovers. It was a flashy industry working between advertisers and the managers of local cinema chains, with red carpet events and free cinema tickets. I was in heaven.

Camberwell, Melbourne, Australia

My second sales role selling luxury jacuzzi baths and outdoor spas, in retail showrooms and on exhibition stands at public expo events. The training I received included listening to audio cassettes of Tom Hopkins teaching people how to sell. I was fascinated to learn that the job could be broken down into procedural steps. This made such an impression on me that the rest of my career would be built around demystifying how businesses can actually grow by design.

Frankston, Melbourne, Australia

My first sales role serving customers at the front desk and managing the stockroom of the sporting goods and apparel department of my local MYER department store, every Friday night and Saturday morning to earn extra money while I was finishing high school.

Clyde, Melbourne, Australia

Scheduling deliveries; weighing the gross and net weight of trucks dropping off sorghum, ripo, corn and tallow to a chicken feed mill; sampling product for laboratory analysis; validating driver tonnage for invoicing and payment. This was a recurring role I filled 0700-1700 on weekdays whenever my high school took a term break.

Frankston, Victoria, Australia

Learning to be a reporter for a weekly suburban newspaper developed probing, analysis and writing skills for the career that would be ahead of me. I learned Pitman shorthand and typing for this after-school role, and loved the sense of achievement gained from being briefed by my editor every Thursday and seeing my articles appear in the press the following week.When I look back at my career development, being a teenager with a weekly newspaper column (along with winning national writing competitions) were early experiences that gave me confidence to A) find my voice and B) punch above my weight.

Certificate, Fundamentals Of Neuroscience And Unlocking The Immunity To Change

Master Of Education - Med, Adult Education And Educational Technologies

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Marketing