About the Authors
Lou Schachter leads the Global BTS Sales Practice, a team of 50 around the world, and drives research and intellectual property development. He works with clients such as Salesforce.com, Toyota, Citizens Bank, and Schindler, building great sales forces through innovative customer engagement models and helping leaders, managers, and sellers See sales behaviors from the customer’s point of view. His deep global experience gives him the ability to help leaders shape their sales forces in markets all over the world.
He is passionate about moving the science of sales to the next level, looking for unconventional wisdom and challenging common sense that has become outdated. Lou is a true student of sales and all that has been written on it over the years.
Before joining the BTS team, Lou had a long career in sales for professional services firms. His experience includes selling to Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and large government institutions. He also helped lead the fast growth of a specialized communications firm. Earlier in his career, he was an investment banker.
Lou is the coauthor of the book The Mind of the Customer: How the World’s Leading Sales Forces Accelerate Their Customers’ Success, which was published by McGraw-Hill in 2006.
Lou graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. When not on airplanes, he lives in Los Angeles, with his partner, Wayne.
Rick Cheatham leads the U.S. Sales Practice for BTS. He works with clients such as Google, Accenture, Metlife, and IBM to drive their sales efforts into the future. Rick leads a team of over 20 consultants and conceptualizes many of the BTS solutions deployed in the United States.
He is passionate about making work a place that salespeople come to be successful, is totally pragmatic and experienced in getting results through being a purpose-driven leader, and is able to maintain an uncommon balance between vision and how things really get done.
Prior to coming to BTS, Rick was a sales leader for both regional and global account teams. Ultimately he led the sales force of a $1 billion business unit through a restructuring and shift in how they sold. That experience has shaped his thinking on how organizations can change what and how they sell faster and more effectively.
Rick lives in Austin with his wife, Jen, and four kids.
About BTS
The BTS Sales Practice partners with the most successful sales forces in the world, providing consulting, training, and technology to give salespeople the experiences and skills they need to do the best work of their lives. The BTS approach combines proprietary global sales research, clients’ organizational wisdom, and insights uncovered together, to design simulations and training that are executed upon in the field using on-the-job tools.
BTS is a global professional services firm headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with some 450 professionals in 32 offices located on 6 continents. Among the clients of the BTS Sales Practice are Autodesk, BBVA Bancomer, BlueScope Steel, Chevron, Cisco, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Microsoft, Nike, Oracle, Pfizer, Salesforce.com, SAP, Schindler, Sodexo, Standard Bank, Toyota, Twitter, UCB, UPS, and VMware.