Positive selling

13th December 2017 |   Deirdre Coleman

Phill McGowan talks about entrepreneurial innovation and the art of creating sales opportunities.

Positive Selling

Serial entrepreneur and business consultant Phillip McGowan is studying for a doctorate at the University of Portsmouth, researching the causes of sales failure. Until now sales and the associated techniques have all been about discovery, but in today’s increasingly disruptive environment amid ways of working more usually associated with entrepreneurs, opportunities to sell can actually be created. McGowan contends that by looking at how we operationalise and teach entrepreneurial innovation, we can learn how to create sales opportunities.

DC: Please describe your “positive selling” model and how it came about (see Figure 1).

PM: I’ve been running small businesses for about 25 years and I spend part of my time as a business consultant and also as a teaching fellow at the University of Portsmouth, where I did a Masters in sales management and am now in a PhD programme. As part of the programme, I have been looking at sales failure, taking the view that failure is much more interesting than success in selling because there is only one way to succeed and that is to win the account – whereas with failure, there are many ways to not win the business.

Deirdre Coleman

Content Director, MAPS, the Medical Affairs Professional Society | + posts

Deirdre Coleman is a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation. She is Content Director, MAPS, the Medical Affairs Professional Society and previously worked as Editor, eyeforpharma.