Sue Crofts, Partner

Sue Crofts graduated with a B.A. (Hons) in French and English from Middlesex Polytechnic.  She started her career delivering practical training on word processing, IT systems and scanners then moved into sales in the mid-1980’s.  At first she was in territory based roles selling into medium-sized companies, then into public sector and FT Top 250 corporate customers.  She built experience in product, IT hardware, software and solution-based sales, whilst also gaining an extensive knowledge and understanding of different industries and market sectors.

She joined Toshiba Information Systems (UK) Ltd in 1990, initially building experience as a UKchannel account manager, with responsibility for creating demand for product, managing marketing funding, events and generating customer sales with reseller sales managers and their teams.  The opportunity to take up a corporate sales role attracted her back into direct customer relationship-based selling and she gained several years experience in major UK and global corporate accounts for Toshiba.  Successful campaigns into companies such as Deloitte & Touche, The Post Office, British Gas, the BBC, and global wins in Astra Zeneca and BP typically involved her and respective teams in pro-active “partnering” with the UK’s leading resellers, consultants and systems integrators. 

After gaining promotion to Toshiba’s management team, she went on to focus on corporate and new business development strategy in a team management role and latterly headed up the UK-based Corporate Sales ‘managed account’ team.

Sue decided to go freelance in 2000, bringing together her extensive industry and sales experience together with a passion for helping people develop and enhance their own skills.  She now specialises in providing training, coaching, sales process consultancy and skills analysis and development, predominantly for organisations in a sales, customer or consumer-focused environment. 

Projects in the last 6.5 years have included extensive work with global suppliers in the IT sector and leading organisations in the Utilities, Healthcare, Services, Manufacturing and Retail sectors.  Training programmes have mainly been focused on relationship-based selling, opportunity reviews, business development, performance management, presentation and sales skills workshops

Consultancy projects in the last 2-3 years have included helping organisations to change and improve management and sales staff skills and simplify in-house processes.  Sue has delivered this via personal development interviews, training-needs analyses and consultancy, leading on to the design and implementation of new processes, review tools and techniques and direct skills training delivery.

Having qualified as a Certified NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) Practitioner this year, she also brings these simple and powerful techniques into her consultancy, coaching and training programmes for clients.  Her main focus is in helping people to enhance their own communication techniques with others, focus on successful personal development and improve their business through a better understanding of their staff, customers and partners.

Pete Davis, Partner. Head of Business Development

Pete has thirty years experience in the IT industry and has worked in the UK , the US , Sweden and the Netherlands . He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1977 and spent ten years following a technical career path at LogicaCMG and then Deloitte Consulting. In 1987, Pete took his first full-time commercial role – that of sales manager for a small UK software house called IPL. Since then he has held a range of sales management roles at companies as diverse as Global Recall (a privately-funded UK-based new venture) thru to Microsoft – with stops in between at Oracle, Siebel and BroadVision.

Whilst at Microsoft, from 2002 to 2004, Pete led the global relationship with Vodafone Group. It was during this period that he began to take an active interest in finding new ways to make the B2B sales process more effective – taking into account the impact of eCommerce and the mobile internet.

Pete left Microsoft to join QA, the leading independent UK provider of IT training services, where he created a mobile email accreditation programme for Vodafone which was part of their global SME partners programme.

Following his success at QA, Pete was invited by one of the founders of On Demand Distribution (OD2) Limited to help them to market and sell their multi-channel full-track digital music download service to the European mobile operators. He worked for OD2 as an independent consultant, helping to introduce best practice B2B sales processes and mentoring the existing sales force.

Pete has been a Member of the British Computer Society and a Chartered IT Professional since 1992 and takes an active interest in the teaching of Information and Communications Technology.