Sales & Customer Acquisition

Why organisations work with Willie Jolley Cavett Award winner, the National Speakers Association’s highest honour and an award given to one peer-elected member per year. Few keynote speakers active today carry that level of inside-the-profession validation. Worked with Ford Motor Company during its 2006 to 2009 turnaround period; former Ford CEO Alan Mulally endorsed the book that came out of that work. A named framework, Setback to Comeback, that gives leadership teams a shared language for how to behave when the business is under pressure, not just inspiration in the room. Sustained media platform on SiriusXM and Radio One puts him in front of senior business audiences weekly, so his frame is already familiar to many of the executives he speaks to. Equally credible with a senior executive room and a wider all-employee audience, which matters for clients running town halls, sales kickoffs and culture events off the back of restructure. Biography highlights Cavett Award, National Speakers Association, 2023; first African American man to receive it. Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award, January 2023, for sustained voluntary service. Inductee, NSA Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE Council of Peers Award of Excellence). Author of five books including A Setback Is A Setup For A Comeback and Turn Setbacks Into Greenbacks, the latter endorsed by former Ford CEO Alan Mulally. Host, The Willie Jolley Wealthy Ways Show on SiriusXM Channel 141, with companion podcast distributed on iHeart Radio, C-Suite Radio, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Engaged by Ford Motor Company during the Mulally era turnaround; corporate client list includes Walmart, Verizon, Marriott, Johnson and Johnson, Coca-Cola and Prudential. Biography Ford was burning through cash in 2006 when Alan Mulally arrived as CEO. The turnaround that followed is now a business school case. Jolley was inside that period as a regular speaker to Ford teams, and the work formed the spine of Turn Setbacks Into Greenbacks, a book Mulally went on to endorse. That engagement still defines how serious operators read his work: practical content for leaders managing pressure, not a stage act. His core proposition is a framework called Setback to Comeback. Across five books, including A Setback Is A Setup For A Comeback and An Attitude of Excellence, he treats resilience as a leadership discipline that can be taught, with named steps. Vision. Decision. Action. Desire. That gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for how to behave when the numbers are bad and the workforce has stopped trusting the announcements. The credibility inside the speaking profession is unusual. In 2023 the National Speakers Association awarded him the Cavett, its highest honour, voted by peers and given to one member a year. He was the first African American man to receive it. The same year he received the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award for voluntary service. Earlier in his career, Toastmasters International named him one of the outstanding five speakers in the world. The platform compounds the message. The Willie Jolley Wealthy Ways Show runs weekly on SiriusXM, interviewing business leaders and operators. By the time he walks on a corporate stage, the framework is already in circulation with the audience. Key speaking topics Resilience and recovery after organisational setback Leadership through change and restructure Attitude and performance in high-pressure teams Personal effectiveness and self-leadership Workplace culture and engagement Sales force motivation and renewal Excellence as an operating discipline Ideal for Leadership teams running restructure, integration or cost programmes that have fatigued the workforce CHROs and culture leads booking all-employee town halls or post-restructure resets Sales leaders running annual kickoffs where the team needs renewed conviction, not new product slides Public sector and faith-aligned audiences where a motivational frame is welcomed alongside leadership substance Audience outcomes A named four-step framework, Vision, Decision, Action, Desire, that leaders can apply to their own situation the same week A reset in how the audience reads setback inside their own organisation Specific behavioural moves a manager can take with a struggling team A lift in collective conviction at the moment a leadership team most needs it A shared reference point that survives past the event and into team conversations

Why organisations work with Peter Nelson He has run the same flagship influence programme at Henley Business School for over fifteen years, which means executive cohorts arrive at a method that has been stress-tested across hundreds of senior leaders, not a workshop assembled for the brief. He pioneered the use of professional actors in corporate influence and pitching training, and built the rehearsal-led methodology now common across UK executive education before it was standard practice. His client base spans law firms, asset managers, oil majors, professional services, the European Commission and Army HQ, which gives him a working vocabulary for influence in highly regulated, technically complex and politically sensitive environments. He works at the level of behaviour and live performance, not frameworks: leaders rehearse the actual conversation, board moment or client pitch they will face, with feedback in the room. Biography highlights Executive Fellow, Henley Business School; lead faculty on the “Influence and Impact” programme for over 15 years. Member of the Executive Faculty, Southampton Business School. Works with Cambridge Judge Business School, Warwick Business School and Duke Corporate Education on senior executive development. Pioneered the use of professional actors in business roleplay for influence and pitching training in the 1990s. Client roster includes Man Group, BP, BMW, Motorola, Allen & Overy, Baker & McKenzie, Barclays, Deloitte, ING, McLaren, the NHS, the European Commission and Army HQ. Signature programmes: Influence and Impact, Influencing and Negotiating, Business Pitching, Client Relationship Management, Team Effectiveness. Biography Most executive education on influence stops at the framework. Leaders leave with a model of stakeholder mapping or persuasion archetypes, then walk into a board meeting and revert to slides. The gap between knowing the theory and behaving differently in the room is the practical problem of senior communication, and it is the problem Peter Nelson has spent more than three decades working on. At Henley Business School, where he is an Executive Fellow, Nelson has led the “Influence and Impact” programme for over fifteen years. The same method now runs across Cambridge Judge Business School executive clients, Warwick Business School corporate cohorts, Duke Corporate Education and Southampton Business School, where he sits on the Executive Faculty. Cohorts include senior partners in global law firms, asset managers, professional services boards and policy leaders inside the European Commission and Army HQ. The methodology is distinctive in its mechanics. Nelson brought professional actors into corporate influence and pitching training in the 1990s, before it was standard, so leaders rehearse the actual conversation they will face: the regulator briefing, the new business pitch, the board update, the difficult client renewal. Feedback is delivered live, in the moment, on behaviour rather than theory. The result is a body of practice rather than a body of writing. Clients include Man Group, BP, BMW, Motorola, Allen & Overy, Baker & McKenzie, Barclays, Deloitte, ING and McLaren, and Nelson is most often booked when an organisation has identified that its senior people are technically excellent and commercially under-converting in the moments that matter. Key speaking topics Influence and persuasion at senior levels Executive presence and leadership impact High-stakes business pitching Negotiation skills Senior client relationships Presentation skills for leaders Team effectiveness Ideal for Partners and senior leaders in law, professional services and asset management preparing for client pitches and renewals Executive committees and boards developing presence and senior communication capability Sales, business development and relationship management leaders selling to sophisticated buyers HR and L&D heads commissioning executive development on influence, negotiation and leadership impact Audience outcomes A concrete sense of how senior audiences read presence, and what to change in the next conversation that matters Sharper command of the pitch, the board update and the negotiation set-piece, rehearsed against live feedback rather than discussed in abstract Specific tools for moving from technical credibility to commercial conversion in client-facing moments A working vocabulary for coaching their own teams on influence and impact after the session

Why organisations work with Louis Gudema He has published an award-winning framework for the order in which B2B marketing should be built. The Bullseye Marketing model, set out in a 400-page second edition that won the 2023 Goody Business Book Award for Best Marketing/Branding Book, sequences fast-payback demand programs before brand investment rather than running them in parallel. He has run the playbook himself at scale. Gudema founded Magic Hour Communications, pivoted it from services into an early SaaS business with a Web CMS product, grew it into one of the top firms in its national market, and exited in 2009, so the operating advice is tested against a P&L he owned. He has worked across roughly 200 organisations from IBM down to early-stage MIT spin-outs, which means a CMO or founder gets advice calibrated to the actual stage of their business rather than a generic enterprise template. His MIT Venture Mentoring Service work, including ten consecutive years of the MIT marketing boot camp, gives him pattern recognition on what actually moves revenue for a young technology company versus what wastes founder time. He brings a behavioural-economics layer that most B2B marketers ignore. His brain-science talk applies seven named heuristics (anchoring, authority, availability, liking, loss aversion, reciprocity, scarcity) to live sales and marketing decisions. Biography highlights Author of Bullseye Marketing: How to Grow Your B2B Business Faster, second edition 2023. 2023 Goody Business Book Award winner for Best Marketing/Branding Book; finalist at the Book Excellence Awards; named to Book Authority’s Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time. Founder and former CEO of Magic Hour Communications, an early SaaS firm with the MagicWand Web CMS, sold in 2009. Founder of Revenue & Associates, LLC, a fractional CMO practice for B2B startups and growth-stage companies. Mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and leader of the annual MIT marketing boot camp, tenth edition in 2024. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MarketingProfs, HubSpot, VentureBeat, Content Marketing Institute, Chiefmartec, and TechTarget. Biography Most B2B marketing budgets are spent in the wrong order. Brand campaigns get funded before the demand-generation programs that would have paid for them, and the pipeline arrives late. Bullseye Marketing, the book Louis Gudema published in its second edition in 2023, exists to fix that sequencing problem. The framework is built around three concentric rings. Start with the customers and prospects already in the system, where conversion is fastest. Move outward into demand capture and active-buyer programs, search, retargeting, and review sites. Then, with cash flow funding it, invest in the brand and awareness work that compounds over the years. The book won the 2023 Goody Business Book Award for Best Marketing/Branding Book and a Book Excellence Awards finalist nod, and was named one of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time by Book Authority. Gudema runs the playbook for a living. He founded Magic Hour Communications, pivoted it from a marketing-services agency into an early SaaS firm built around a Web CMS product, grew it into one of the top three or four firms in its market, and exited in 2009. He now operates revenue & associates as a fractional head of marketing, and has worked with roughly 200 organisations from IBM to early-stage MIT spin-outs. The MIT connection runs deep. Gudema mentors through the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and led the tenth annual MIT marketing boot camp in 2024. His writing in Harvard Business Review, MarketingProfs, HubSpot, and VentureBeat extends the same operating thesis: B2B growth comes from disciplined sequencing of programs with measurable ROI, not from creative reinvention. Key speaking topics B2B marketing strategy and demand generation Bullseye Marketing framework Startup and scale-up growth marketing Behavioural economics in B2B sales and marketing Fractional and interim marketing leadership Account-based marketing and pipeline acceleration Ideal for CEOs and founders of B2B technology and SaaS companies under $50m in revenue CMOs and heads of marketing at growth-stage businesses need to defend program spend to a CFO Investor-backed startup cohorts and accelerator programs looking for a sequenced go-to-market playbook Sales leaders responsible for the pipeline who want to align marketing programs to revenue-cycle reality Audience outcomes A defensible order in which to run B2B marketing programs, with the fastest-payback work first A working knowledge of the three-ring Bullseye Marketing Framework and how to apply it to an existing budget Specific demand-generation tactics, search, retargeting, ABM, customer expansion, that map to short payback windows A view of how seven behavioural heuristics change conversion in real B2B sales and marketing assets A shared vocabulary for marketing, sales, and finance to evaluate program ROI on the same terms

Why organisations work with Tara Renze Twenty years inside CareerBuilder and Stella & Dot give her a sales-floor credibility that few EQ speakers carry. She has run the number, trained the new hires, and built a multi-million-dollar book of business before stepping onto the stage. She works in the practical intersection of Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence and applied emotional intelligence, translating both into language that revenue teams and women’s networks will sit through, take notes on, and act on. Her core framework, “Be Who You Came To Be”, is a trademarked through-line across keynote, workshop and book, which gives client teams a shared vocabulary that survives past the event. Repeat work from operationally serious clients including T-Mobile, Pfizer, Aflac, Amazon, Shaw Industries and Women’s Foodservice Forum, not only inspiration-circuit buyers. Biography highlights Author, Be Who You Came To Be, published by Amplify Publishing Group (second edition). Host, Be Who You Came To Be podcast. Certified practitioner in Emotional Intelligence and Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence methodology. Former Sales Leader of the Year at CareerBuilder.com; led the company’s national new hire sales training programme. Founder of a multi-million-dollar nationwide social selling business with Stella & Dot. Degree from the University of Kansas; executive leadership studies at the Wharton School and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Biography A sales floor is one of the more honest places in a corporation. The number is the number, the pipeline is the pipeline, and the people carrying the quota tell you quickly whether the culture, the leadership and the personal motivation are real. That environment is where Tara Renze spent two decades before she ever called herself a speaker, first as Sales Leader of the Year at CareerBuilder.com, then as the founder of a multi-million-dollar national social selling business with Stella & Dot. She moved into the emotional intelligence and positive intelligence space with that operating background still attached. Her practitioner work draws on the EQ tradition and on Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence methodology, which she applies to the specific tensions she watched up close for twenty years: high performers who lose their edge, women leaders who hide their ambition, sales teams whose self-talk eats their pipeline. The frame she has built around this work, “Be Who You Came To Be”, anchors a book published by Amplify Publishing Group, a podcast of the same name, and the keynote and workshop programme she takes into clients including T-Mobile, Pfizer, Aflac, Amazon, Shaw Industries and Women’s Foodservice Forum. The through-line is consistent. Authenticity is treated as a performance variable, not a wellness slogan, and mental fitness is taught as a learnable discipline with practical tools that a sales manager or a CHRO can actually deploy on Monday morning. What clients tend to book her for is the combination buyers struggle to assemble otherwise: a speaker who can hold the room on confidence, self-leadership and EQ, who has also personally carried a quota, run a sales training programme and built a national business. Key speaking topics Emotional intelligence in commercial environments Positive intelligence and mental fitness Authentic leadership for women Sales leadership and seller mindset Self-sabotage and saboteur patterns at work Culture, engagement and team performance Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers and sales leadership teams running enterprise sales kick-offs. CHROs and L&D leaders designing manager development and women’s leadership programming. Direct-selling and field-force organisations where individual mindset determines revenue. Industry associations and women’s networks (Women’s Foodservice Forum profile) seeking a keynote that holds an executive room. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the internal patterns (self-doubt, saboteur voices, performance anxiety) that quietly degrade individual and team results. Specific Positive Intelligence techniques for interrupting those patterns in real working conditions. A practical reframe of authenticity as a performance discipline, not a personality trait or a wellness extra. A shared language across a team or sales force that survives past the event and can be reinforced by managers.

Why organisations work with Scott Burrows A first-person account of recovery from a C6-C7 spinal cord injury that translates directly into how individuals make decisions when their assumptions collapse, not a generic resilience metaphor. Vision, Mindset, Grit, the framework behind his book of the same name, gives sales and leadership teams a simple shared language for goal-setting, response to rejection and persistence through downturn. Rare combination of elite-athlete background (Florida State football under Bobby Bowden, ESPN-broadcast kickboxing) and elite commercial performance (Million Dollar Round Table qualifier), which gives the talk credibility with sales and financial services audiences specifically. Track record with Fortune 500 buyers including Prudential, JPMorgan Chase, SAP, Thermo Fisher, Walgreens and Coca-Cola, and with national association audiences across healthcare, insurance and financial services. Biography highlights Walk-on wide receiver at Florida State University under head coach Bobby Bowden. Black-belt kickboxing champion whose final fight was broadcast on ESPN. Survived a car accident on 3 November 1984 that fractured the C6 and C7 vertebrae and left him paralysed from the chest down at age 19. Returned to higher education and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Finance. Qualified for the Million Dollar Round Table during a career in insurance and financial services. Author of Vision, Mindset, Grit: How to Stand Up When Life Paralyzes You; co-founder of a golf course fertiliser business operating in Southeast Asia. Biography Elite athletes are taught to hold their composure under physical pressure. What they are rarely taught is what happens when the body itself becomes the constraint. On 3 November 1984, a car accident left Scott Burrows, then a Florida State University walk-on wide receiver under Bobby Bowden and a black-belt kickboxing champion whose last fight had been broadcast on ESPN, with two broken vertebrae in his neck and a quadriplegia diagnosis at 19. The interest for senior audiences is not the diagnosis. It is what he did with the years after it. He returned to higher education, graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Finance, and competed in wheelchair rugby, the Paralympic discipline known as Murderball. He then built a career in insurance and financial services that qualified him for the Million Dollar Round Table, the global standard reserved for the top tier of life insurance and financial services producers. That commercial record matters because it is what makes the keynote land in front of revenue-carrying teams. Vision, Mindset, Grit, the title of his bestselling book and the spine of his talks, is a personal-leadership framework that names the three things he had to rebuild deliberately: a goal worth pursuing, a way of thinking that could absorb setbacks, and the daily discipline to keep moving when the original plan was no longer available. He has used that material with audiences at Prudential, JPMorgan Chase, SAP, Thermo Fisher, Walgreens, Coca-Cola and a long list of national associations across healthcare, insurance and financial services. The talk is most useful for organisations going through a period in which the previous playbook has stopped working and leaders need their people to keep performing while a new one is being written. Key speaking topics Resilience and recovery after setback Peak performance under pressure Sales performance and overcoming rejection Goal-setting and personal leadership Adapting to industry change Mindset and motivation for commercial teams Ideal for Sales kick-offs, top-producer summits and incentive events, particularly in insurance, financial services and healthcare Leadership offsites where senior teams are navigating restructure, market shift or sustained pressure National association annual conferences seeking a credible opening or closing keynote on resilience and performance All-hands and town-hall settings during periods of significant organisational change Audience outcomes A shared language, Vision, Mindset, Grit, that teams can carry back into pipeline reviews, goal-setting and one-to-ones A reset on how individuals respond to rejection, missed targets and unexpected setback Specific examples of how to hold composure and decision quality when external conditions deteriorate Renewed energy and commitment heading into a sales cycle, fiscal year or strategic reset

Why organisations work with David Brownlee Practical playbooks aimed at the frontline rep and the floor manager, not the boardroom. The content is built to be used on Monday morning, not filed in a strategy deck. Cross-sector range: the same core method has been delivered inside Harley-Davidson, McDonald’s, HP, Oakley, Google and LinkedIn, which is unusual in customer-service speaking. A named book with a commercial publisher (Morgan James) and a defined method, the Rockstar Customer Service Training Program, that organisations can extend beyond a single keynote. Direct lineage from Tony Robbins coaching, which shows in the delivery: high-energy, audience-driving, designed to land with sales floors and service teams rather than analysts. Concrete techniques on the two things service teams ask for most: building rapport in the first sixty seconds of a call, and recovering an upset customer without escalating cost. Biography highlights CEO of The Brownlee Group, LLC and founder of the Rockstar Customer Service Training Program. Author of “Rockstar Service. Rockstar Profits” (Morgan James Publishing) and “Customer Service Success: The 6 Keys To Deliver A World-Class Experience”. Former business coach and seminar leader for Tony Robbins, with thousands of one-on-one executive coaching sessions on record. Clients include Harley-Davidson, HP, Oakley, McDonald’s, Google and LinkedIn, with testimonials from named executives at each. Featured in Time, People and Success magazines, and across ABC, NBC, ESPN and CBS. LinkedIn Learning instructor with courses on customer service, remote work and leadership. Biography The cost of poor customer service is rarely on a single line in a P&L. It shows up as churn, refund volume, escalations to senior management, and the slow erosion of repeat business that quietly resets the cost of acquisition. David Brownlee built a career around the part of that problem that leaders can actually move: the behaviour of the person on the phone, in the showroom, behind the counter. He is the CEO of The Brownlee Group and the founder of the Rockstar Customer Service Training Program. His book “Rockstar Service. Rockstar Profits”, published by Morgan James, sets out a method for building rapport quickly, handling unhappy customers without inflating the resolution cost, and turning routine transactions into repeat ones. A second title, “Customer Service Success”, extends the same logic into a six-key framework for service operations. Earlier in his career, he worked as a business coach and seminar leader inside Tony Robbins’ organisation, and that delivery DNA is visible in the work. The keynotes are practical and high-energy, and they are designed to be used the next day by the people who actually serve customers. His client base spans Harley-Davidson, McDonald’s, HP, Oakley, Google and LinkedIn, with named executive testimonials from each. For organisations whose growth depends on frontline behaviour rather than abstract strategy, his contribution is straightforward: a structured, repeatable way to make service interactions a source of revenue rather than a cost line. Key speaking topics Customer service excellence Customer experience and retention Sales rapport and communication Frontline team training Leadership of service organisations Peak performance for sales teams Ideal for Heads of customer service, contact centre directors and operations leaders Sales leaders running B2C and dealer-network teams Franchise and multi-site service businesses (retail, hospitality, automotive, restaurants) Sales and customer-service kick-off events for frontline staff and their managers Audience outcomes A specific method for building rapport with a customer in under sixty seconds. A repeatable approach to handling upset customers that lowers escalation and refund costs. Sharper distinction between what drives short-term satisfaction and what drives repeat purchase. A shared service language that managers and frontline staff can use after the event. Practical talking points to take into the next team huddle or sales meeting.

Why organisations work with James Sinclair He runs the playbook he teaches. The Partyman Group is a roughly GBP 40 million portfolio across childcare, leisure, food and beverage, and heritage brands that he owns and operates, not advises. He has a concrete thesis on why price-led consumer businesses fail, set out in The Experience Business, and can show operators how to apply it inside their own units. He has done the hardest part of growth through acquisition in public: the 2023 rescue of Party Pieces from administration is a documented case study in buying a broken consumer brand and absorbing it. He raised GBP 700,000 from 21 lenders at 20 years old without venture capital, and has built every subsequent business on cash flow. Founders who are bootstrapped or PE-averse hear their own constraints in his story. He is direct, funny, and pitched at operators rather than boardrooms. Audiences of SME owners, franchisees, and consumer brand teams tend to leave with something they can action on Monday. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Partyman Group: soft play centres, Twizzle Tops Day Nurseries, Marsh Farm Animal Adventure Park, Rossi Ice Cream, a grade II listed hotel, and Party Pieces. Acquired Party Pieces from the Middleton family out of administration in May 2023. Author of The Millionaire Clown and The Experience Business: Why Price-Focused Businesses Fail And What Winners Do Instead. Host of James Sinclair’s Business Broadcast podcast and a long-running YouTube channel focused on business operating decisions. Built the group without venture capital, funded through cash flow and lender-backed acquisitions. Speaks regularly across the UK and Europe to entrepreneur, SME, and franchise audiences. Biography Party Pieces was insolvent and more than GBP 2.5 million in debt when James Sinclair bought it out of administration in May 2023, adding the Middleton family’s party supplies brand to a portfolio that already included soft play centres, nurseries, a farm park, and Rossi Ice Cream. That kind of deal sits at the centre of how he has built the Partyman Group: find a distressed consumer business, buy it cheaply, and fold it into an operating model designed around experience rather than discounting. The group now reports turnover in the region of GBP 40 million. Sinclair built it without venture capital, starting at 16 as a children’s entertainer and, at 20, raising GBP 700,000 from 21 separate lenders to open his first soft play centre in Basildon. The first location hit GBP 1 million turnover inside a year. Every subsequent acquisition has been funded on cash flow and operator credibility, not equity rounds. His book The Experience Business sets out the thesis that underpins all of it: price-focused consumer businesses lose because customers are buying a feeling, and the winners are the operators who invest in the moments that feeling depends on. The Millionaire Clown, his earlier book, is the operator’s version of the same argument told through the businesses he has bought, broken, and fixed. What buyers get when they book him is not a strategist commenting on a sector. It is an owner-operator describing, specifically, how he grew a multi-brand consumer group through acquisition, what he overpaid for, what he did not, and how he keeps experience from degrading as the portfolio scales. The register is closer to a founders’ workshop than a keynote, which is why he tends to land well with SME and franchise audiences. Key speaking topics Growth through acquisition in consumer businesses Buying and turning around distressed brands Experience-led differentiation over price competition Building multi-brand portfolios without venture capital Cash flow, profitability, and operator discipline Customer acquisition for consumer and leisure brands Entrepreneurship and founder-led scaling Ideal for SME founders and owner-operators scaling consumer businesses Franchise networks and multi-site leisure, hospitality, and childcare operators M&A and corporate development leads working on distressed consumer assets Entrepreneur conferences, business schools, and founder communities Audience outcomes A working mental model for when to compete on experience and when price still matters A concrete view of how to evaluate a distressed consumer business before buying it Operator-level tactics for protecting customer experience as a portfolio adds brands A bootstrapped founder’s case for funding growth through cash flow and lenders rather than equity Specific stories, including Party Pieces, that audiences can pattern-match against their own deals

Why organisations work with Cyril Jamelot He has launched products that reached scale inside the world’s most demanding FMCG marketing machines: Coke Light Lemon at Coca-Cola, Nalu, and Alpro Light at Danone Alpro. The storytelling discipline he teaches is the one he used on shelf, not a theoretical model. Two TEDx talks at TEDxULB, “Offering your soul, a disruptive marketing strategy” and “From silver to gold”, show him able to hold a serious commercial argument in a 15-minute format that translates directly to a keynote stage. His book I love marketing: The soul of tomorrow’s Marketing is yours sets out a thesis that brand love is built through specific narrative practice, not adjectives, and gives senior commercial teams a shared vocabulary for what their content is actually for. He delivers in French and English to international audiences, with more than 200 conferences across 10 countries; useful for European groups running cross-market brand or sales kick-offs. Through CECYDI and Morphoblue he is still operating as a consultant and researcher, so the material in the room is current commercial practice, not retrospective. Biography highlights Former marketing executive at Coca-Cola and Danone Alpro, with product launches including Coke Light Lemon, Nalu and Alpro Light. Founder of CECYDI, a marketing and communications agency, and principal of Morphoblue, a market research agency. Author of I love marketing: The soul of tomorrow’s Marketing is yours, Les secrets du Storytelling Stratégique and Ils étaient là. Two TEDx talks delivered at TEDxULB on marketing strategy and the senior consumer market. More than 200 conferences delivered across 10 countries in French and English. Marketing and communication faculty in business schools. Biography Coke Light Lemon, Nalu and Alpro Light all reached shelf because someone inside the marketing teams at Coca-Cola and Danone Alpro could explain, in a sentence a buyer would repeat, why the product mattered. Cyril Jamelot built that habit as an FMCG marketing executive before he ever called it storytelling. That operating background is what separates his work from agency-side storytelling consultancy. The argument running through his book I love marketing: The soul of tomorrow’s Marketing is yours is direct: brands earn attention by saying something specific about themselves, in language built for the customer, repeated across every channel the business actually controls. Adjectives and brand decks do not do this work. Narrative architecture does. He now runs two firms: CECYDI, a marketing and communications agency, and Morphoblue, a market research practice. He teaches marketing and communication in business schools, has delivered two TEDx talks at TEDxULB, and has spoken at more than 200 conferences across 10 countries in French and English. Les secrets du Storytelling Stratégique sets out the ten-step method behind the keynote material, used by sales, marketing and internal communication teams. The room he is most useful in is the commercial leadership offsite where the question is no longer what the brand says but whether anyone outside the building still recognises it. He gives marketing, sales and customer-experience teams a shared way of building a story the business can stand behind and the market will repeat. Key speaking topics Strategic storytelling for brands Brand positioning and differentiation Customer experience in retail and FMCG Sales narrative and social selling Internal communications and leadership communication Marketing innovation and product launch Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders running brand refresh, repositioning or product launch programmes Sales leadership and customer-experience teams at consumer brands and B2B sellers building a narrative-driven commercial approach Internal communications leaders and HRDs needing senior leaders to communicate change more memorably European commercial offsites and kick-offs requiring a bilingual (French and English) keynote Audience outcomes A working definition of strategic storytelling that maps to commercial outputs: a launch, a campaign, a sales pitch, an internal message. A clearer view of what a brand story is for, and what it is not, with examples from Coca-Cola, Danone Alpro and other FMCG operators. A vocabulary the marketing, sales and internal communication teams can share when they argue about content. Specific moves senior leaders can use to make their own messages more repeatable.

Why organisations work with Jenk Oz A live daily feed of Gen Z behaviour. Thred.com publishes in 17 languages across 220+ countries and territories, feeding his brand advice with first-party data instead of commissioned surveys. Consulting credibility built on named client work. Thred Media has advised Coca-Cola, Google, Ford, Dunkin’, Microsoft, Snapchat, and Ogilvy on Gen Z strategy, so executive audiences engage with a working commercial operator. Primary-source Gen Z insight. Thred’s editorial team is almost entirely Gen Z, which grounds brand strategy work in lived cohort behaviour. A structural edge in data. The combination of publishing arm, Change Maker Discord community, and consulting practice generates zero- and first-party signals on emerging youth culture that traditional agencies do not hold. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Thred Media, the Gen Z publishing and consulting business headquartered in London. Thred.com publishes in 17 languages, reaches audiences in 220+ countries and territories, and generates approximately 350,000 monthly article reads alongside 200,000+ social followers. Consulting clients include Coca-Cola, Google, Ford, Dunkin’, Microsoft, Snapchat, Ogilvy, Hilton, Meta, Universal Music Group, and Epic Games. Named on Forbes 30 Under 30 (Europe), winner of Digiday’s Future Leader Award and Greater Good Award, and recipient of a Webby/Anthem Young Leader Award in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Member of the Google Z-Council, Oracle for Startups, and the Microsoft Surface young entrepreneur programme. Delivered three TEDx talks and has spoken at 90+ international conferences, including Amazon AWS Summit London (where he interviewed Amazon CTO Werner Vogels), Forbes Summit Cincinnati, Vox YMS New York, Oxford University Model UN, and Brand Week Istanbul. Biography Most brand advice about Gen Z is produced from outside the generation it describes. Survey data and panel research reach brand teams after the fact, often long after the behaviour they track has moved on. Thred Media was built on the opposite principle. What became Thred Media began with a school show-and-tell by an eight-year-old Jenk Oz about the activities he was doing outside class. That project grew into iCoolKid, which was rebranded and repositioned as Thred Media in 2019. Today, Thred.com publishes in 17 languages and reaches audiences in 220+ countries, giving the business a live first-party read on what young consumers are actually doing and buying. The consulting arm applies that feed to commercial questions. Coca-Cola, Google, Ford, Dunkin’, Microsoft, Snapchat, Ogilvy, and Hilton have used Thred Media for Gen Z strategy work that draws on live behaviour from the Change Maker Discord community and the editorial desk. Recognition has followed: Forbes 30 Under 30 (Europe), the Digiday Future Leader Award, a Webby/Anthem Award in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. The commercial distinction is straightforward. He runs a functioning Gen Z business that advises major consumer brands, and he belongs to the generation he is paid to interpret. He has delivered three TEDx talks, interviewed Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS Summit London, and been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Fortune, and the Evening Standard. Key speaking topics Gen Z consumer behaviour Brand relevance and the Gen Z market Gen Z marketing strategy Youth culture and social change Digital activism and clicktivism Youth entrepreneurship The future of work through a Gen Z lens Ideal for Chief marketing officers, brand directors, and consumer strategy teams are trying to close the relevance gap with Gen Z consumers. Agencies and consultancies whose clients are asking sharper questions about youth audiences than internal research can answer. Corporate innovation and growth teams are building commercial plans that depend on reaching emerging consumer cohorts. Board and executive audiences wanting a primary source on Gen Z behaviour, not secondhand interpretation. Audience outcomes A live view of how Gen Z is actually behaving across purchase and media decisions, drawn from Thred.com’s daily publishing feed and Change Maker community. Recalibrated assumptions about the signals brands use to judge youth relevance, with examples from named client work. Specific examples of where established brands are winning and losing Gen Z attention, drawn from Thred Media’s advisory engagements. A direct read on how social change and purpose shape purchase decisions in the generation that now accounts for the largest share of emerging consumer spend.

Why organisations work with Tony Perzow Twenty years on the operator side of the table, buying and selling closeouts to Walmart, Amazon, and Costco, before becoming a trainer. The frame is procurement and sales floor, not classroom. Former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and former VP of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, giving him a structured pedagogical lineage in the most established commercial negotiation methodologies. His “Heart of the Deal” system is built around what happens to skilled negotiators when pressure rewires their judgement, not around tactic lists. Sessions are simulation-led. Teams negotiate, then get critiqued on the specific unconscious moves that cost margin, rather than walking out with a slide deck. Trained more than 20,000 commercial professionals, with a client roster spanning Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, and Daimler Trucks. Biography highlights Former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and former Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates. Trained more than 20,000 sales, procurement, and commercial leadership professionals. Past corporate audiences include Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, Daimler Trucks, and Starz Network. Built a procurement and sales operator background negotiating closeouts with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. Creator of the “Heart of the Deal” methodology, structured around decision-making under pressure rather than tactic playbooks. Working on a book titled “You Suck at Negotiating, But You Don’t Have to with a Mindful Negotiation Practice.” Biography Negotiation training has a credibility problem. Most of it is built on tactic lists that hold up in role play and fall apart the moment a real buyer pushes back. Tony Perzow’s work starts where that gap opens: the behavioural moment where a skilled negotiator, under pressure, makes a decision they would not have made on paper. That framing comes from a career on the operator side of the table. Before training, Perzow spent close to two decades as a procurement specialist and sales lead, buying and selling closeouts with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. The pedagogy came later, first as a trainer at the Karrass Organization, then as Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, two of the longest-running commercial negotiation institutions in the United States. His methodology, “Heart of the Deal,” is structured around pressure-triggered decisions rather than tactical repertoire. The training uses simulations followed by critique of the specific unconscious choices that leave margin on the table. The audience is sales, procurement, and commercial leadership; the deliverable is behaviour change in the room where contracts close, not a framework to read on a flight home. More than 20,000 commercial professionals have been through his programmes, with corporate audiences including Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, and Daimler Trucks. His forthcoming book, “You Suck at Negotiating, But You Don’t Have to with a Mindful Negotiation Practice,” extends the same argument: that the failure mode in negotiation is rarely ignorance and almost always the negotiator’s own state under pressure. Key speaking topics High-stakes negotiation Sales negotiation and deal-making Procurement and price negotiation Behavioural decision-making under pressure Commercial leadership and revenue strategy Persuasive communication in client relationships Ideal for Chief revenue officers, sales leaders, and commercial directors briefing teams ahead of major deal cycles Heads of procurement and supply chain managing high-value supplier contracts Account management and key account teams in industries with concentrated buyers Sales kick-offs, commercial leadership offsites, and procurement summits Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the behavioural moves that compress margin in live negotiations The ability to diagnose, in their own deals, where pressure is driving suboptimal concessions A planning discipline that shifts power before the negotiation begins, not during it Techniques for managing hardball tactics without escalating or capitulating A framework for value creation in deals that would otherwise be priced as zero-sum

Why organisations work with Lee Warren A six-step persuasion system built from twenty years of stage performance and a Head-of-Sales career, not from a communications textbook. The only Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence holder (2022) on most shortlists, the UK industry’s highest peer-awarded recognition. Author of a Business Book Awards finalist on presenting, which gives commercial buyers a published methodology to point sales teams toward after the keynote. A track record of named commercial outcomes from clients, including a reported 350 percent sales lift at New Scientist following his work. Booked repeatedly by Deloitte, HSBC, IBM, Pfizer, GE Capital, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, audiences that do not retain entertainers and do retain people who shift commercial behaviour. Biography highlights Bestselling author, The Busy Person’s Guide to Great Presenting; highly commended finalist, 2019 Business Book Awards. PSA Award of Excellence, 2022, the UK Professional Speaking Association’s top honour. Member of The Magic Circle for twenty years. Former Head of Sales at News International; earlier sales leadership at Eurotunnel and Hertz, including a database-led sales programme. Has delivered keynotes in more than twenty countries for Deloitte, HSBC, IBM, Pfizer, GE Capital, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Theatre work commissioned at The Almeida Theatre and the Royal Opera House (per speaker’s own biographical material). Biography Persuasion is the bottleneck most sales operations refuse to name. Pipeline tools improve, decks get tidier, training budgets rise, and conversion rates barely move. The reason is rarely the product. It is that the people in the room cannot yet make another person feel the case being made. Lee Warren built a career inside that gap. After commercial roles at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eurotunnel, and Hertz, where he co-created the company’s first database-led sales programme, he became Head of Sales at News International. In parallel, he spent two decades performing as a member of The Magic Circle and creating work for The Almeida Theatre and the Royal Opera House. The combination is unusual: a quota-carrying sales leader who can hold a thousand-seat room. His book, The Busy Person’s Guide to Great Presenting, was a finalist at the 2019 Business Book Awards and codifies the structure he teaches to commercial teams: build the talk around the audience, not the slides. In 2022 the Professional Speaking Association named him an Award of Excellence holder, the UK’s highest peer-awarded honour for professional speakers. Clients book him for hard commercial outcomes, not for entertainment. Deloitte, HSBC, IBM, Pfizer, GE Capital, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have repeat-booked him for sales conferences, partner meetings, and leadership offsites. New Scientist publicly reported a 350 percent sales increase after engaging him. Few presentation specialists have a number like that attached to their name. Key speaking topics Persuasion and influence in commercial settings Sales communication and pitching Presenting and executive communication Business networking Storytelling for B2B audiences Communication under pressure Ideal for Sales kick-offs and commercial leadership offsites Partner and client conferences where the audience is buying decisions, not information Business development teams, key account directors, and CROs preparing for high-stakes pitches Leadership populations needing sharper executive communication ahead of board, investor, or town hall moments Audience outcomes A repeatable six-step structure for persuading a specific audience, applied the next working day A method for opening, structuring, and closing a pitch that does not depend on slide ware A working technique for networking rooms and conversations without scripts Renewed confidence in front of senior internal and external audiences, grounded in stagecraft, not affirmation A shared vocabulary across a commercial team for what good persuasion looks like

Why organisations work with Dan Waldschmidt He has run the turnaround himself. As CRO then CEO of Panzura, he led 150% year-on-year customer base growth and 288% three-year revenue expansion, which gives the speaking material a current operator’s authority. The Edgy Conversations thesis is research-based, drawing on 1,000 case studies of outlier performers across business, science, and sport, and gives audiences a defensible argument for unconventional commercial choices. He speaks credibly to enterprise technology buyers. The Panzura mandate sits in hybrid cloud storage and ransomware resilience, which makes him useful for boards balancing growth ambition with infrastructure risk. His work travels well from sales kickoffs to executive offsites because the same framework is applied to revenue, talent, and brand positioning. The voice is direct and confrontational by design. Senior teams that are tired of motivational keynotes tend to respond to a speaker willing to name what is not working in the room. Biography highlights Chief Executive Officer of Panzura, appointed January 2024, having joined as reFounder and Chief Revenue Officer in 2020. Author of Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success, published 2014. Founder of Waldschmidt Partners International, a strategy consultancy active 2010 to 2018. Wall Street Journal listed his Edgy Conversations blog among the top sales blogs online. Contributor at Entrepreneur.com; featured in Forbes, CNBC, and Business Insider. Ultra-endurance athlete with multiple 100-mile race finishes, including the Everest Marathon course. Biography The hardest part of a turnaround is not the diagnosis. It is doing the work while the business is still running. Revenue targets do not pause for restructuring, customers do not wait for a refreshed value proposition, and the sales team needs a story to tell on Monday morning. Most strategy advice does not survive contact with that pressure. Dan Waldschmidt’s career has been built inside that pressure. At Panzura, the hybrid cloud storage company, he joined in 2020 as reFounder and Chief Revenue Officer, rebuilt the commercial engine, and was appointed CEO in January 2024. The published numbers, 150% year-on-year customer base growth, 288% three-year revenue expansion, 125% net retention, and Inc. 5000 recognition, came from a deliberate repositioning into the enterprise market and a tightening of the sales motion around ransomware resilience and data security. The intellectual backbone is Edgy Conversations, his book based on the stories of 1,000 outlier performers across business, science, mathematics, and sport. The argument is that breakthrough commercial outcomes come from a small number of unfashionable behaviours: deliberate focus, willingness to refuse the conventional path, and a narrow definition of what counts as success. Before Panzura, he ran Waldschmidt Partners International, advising leadership teams on revenue strategy, and his columns and blog have been cited by the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur.com. For senior buyers, the practical relevance is the combination of operator and author. The frameworks are not abstract. They are the same frameworks he is currently applying to a public-stage enterprise technology business with real customers and real quarterly numbers. Key speaking topics Revenue turnaround and commercial repositioning Sales transformation in enterprise technology High-performance behaviour in commercial teams Brand and category differentiation under pressure AI and data security as growth narratives Leadership of restructured commercial functions Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers and sales leadership teams resetting commercial strategy CEOs and boards navigating a turnaround or strategic repositioning Founders and scale-up leadership teams in enterprise technology Sales kickoffs, partner summits, and executive offsites where the audience is operators rather than observers Audience outcomes A direct read on which commercial behaviours predict outlier results and which do not A framework for tightening sales motion and customer focus during a strategy reset Specific operating examples from a current enterprise technology turnaround Language for repositioning a business in a contested category A challenge to the default assumption that incremental change will deliver step-change growth