Michael Palmer has been inspiring audiences from the stage for over 20 years. At the age of 16 Michael was traveling throughout British Columbia inspiring and empowering youth in developing their leadership, self awareness and communication skills. Today Michael travels around the world inspiring and empowering individuals and organizations to thrive from the bottom line up. Michael has found that the best way to get a business thriving is to have the people who form that business thrive. By developing values-based thinking, organizations and individuals benefit by increased employee engagement, breakthrough creativity and intense productivity. Have Michael custom-tailor a key note presentation or workshop specific to your organization, and have your business thriving.

Speaking Topics

Cold Calling 2.0

All the headlines are stating cold calling is dead, so what do you do when you have no leads?  Michael shares a story of how a small business he worked with went from zero sales to a quarter of a million in 6 months -- with 2 sales people, no website, no brochures and zero advertising. Just cold calling. Yes, cold calling can be challenging and have limited effect. However, it is one of the fundamental steps to keeping your business and the skills of your sales teams sharp and generating revenue.  Even if you have all the other bases of lead generation covered, you still have to outbound-call -- and cold calling will have you increasing your conversion to closed sales-ratio climbing.  It is not often easy or fun, but it is extremely satisfying when done consistently and done right.  When you do something others fear, you accelerate your growth and potential to succeed regardless of the outcome.

Do it the salesforce.com Way

Salesforce.com achieved a billion dollars in revenue in 10 years, which made them one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Having worked in the salesforce.com sales organization for 3 of those 10 years, Michael shares how you can take a page out of salesforce.com's play book, and think and behave like salesforce.com. Whether you are running a company or in front of a customer selling, you can implement these strategies and blow up your past performance track record. From innovation in hiring to the training, systems, communication, culture, selling strategies, employee relationships and leadership -- all are rolled out with an incredible speed of execution and commitment to excellence. Bring the startup.com environment that didn't blow up in the .com era to your business -- and start leading your industry in growth.

Increase the Quality of your Questions

 How many times did you hear "That was a great question!" come out of your customers' or employees' mouths recently? I am guessing not enough times -- because you can never get this enough from the people you're managing, leading or providing solutions to. The practice of asking great questions is both an art and a science, and gives your people access to breakthroughs in performance in any area of your business. Michael shares historically how some of the greatest achievements in business came from the ability to ask great questions -- and how you can start to lead your business with more questions and less answers. It is not about the questions you ask, but more about the mindset you are asking it with and how you're listening to the answers that bring the breakthrough results. Like most skills, anyone can do it -- but simply "doing it" does not guarantee success. Whether you want to increase your sales, have your employee engagement flourish, or ignite your innovation, Michael can arm you and your employees with fundamentals of mastering the art and science of asking great questions.

Leverage your Thought Leadership

Every person in your organization has unique abilities they use everyday to produce results in your organization. The amount these abilities translate into results is directly correlated to a person's understanding and ability to communicate these unique abilities. This is their thought leadership, and when nurtured, it can lead to amazing innovation, revenue growth and employee satisfaction. Have your organization and its people focused on developing and communicating their thought leadership.

Vision to Reality

Ideas are everywhere, but getting those ideas turned into results is much less common. As well, the value of an idea is in direct correlation to quality of the idea and the ability to execute on those ideas. Based on his work in the corporate world and coaching business people, Michael shows you how you can both increase the quality of your ideas and your execution by altering the way you think. Michael walks the audience through the parts of the brain at work creating and executing ideas, and how often the wires get crossed to have ideas rot on the vine. He then walks through the 5 phases of executing an idea, and how you can improve your performance at each phase. Michael will lift the lid on your organization's creative abilities and track record of execution.