Colin Chapman

At Prospectr I train and coach sales professionals to find new business. In my spare time I run B2B cold outreach campaigns for other businesses. If you understand the right customer to target and qualify them properly cold outreach is not that complicated. I have created a system to do effective cold calling.

Missing Link's ideal customer was the top 500 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. When I joined Missing Link they had no formal business development strategy. I pioneered their business development efforts. My responsibilities included defining, sourcing, qualifying and closing new business prospects. The cornerstone of my role entailed keeping the CRM system up to date and creating management reports to highlight the sales pipeline.

Unison sold telecommunications software platforms. When I joined their model was a capital expenditure model. The wanted to pivot their model to an operating expenditure or annuity model (software as a service). As I was tasked with new business acquisition I was the first sales professional at Unison to successfully complete a lucrative annuity based deal with Xstrata Platinum.

Psion Teklogix approached me and asked me to join their sales team in 2007. Shortly after I joined the subprime mortgage crisis hit. From inside the company Psion Teklogix appeared to be very much in trouble. As things got worse I felt that it would be in my best interests to leave. When they announced retrenchments I jumped at the opportunity and left.

Scantec went through a huge change while I was there. When I joined they had a direct sales model. When they were acquired by Datatec they merged us with the Weston division and changed our business model to a channel sales model. While I was at Scantec there were many economic and internal upheavals. This uncertainty taught me much about how to work under pressure.

Working at Clover taught me the fundamentals of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector. I had to manage the relationship and stock levels of all the retailers in a geographic area. A big part of this job was understanding the cold and supply chain. Ultimately I found that retail sales was not the kind of sales I wanted to pursue.