I started selling as a teenager, working Saturdays in a town centre hardware store in Newport in South Wales. At university in Birmingham I talked two friends into helping me sell 500 “rag week” magazines in the city centre, for a promised crate of beer that the Students’ Union never paid. I’ve been selling ever since, although these days I prefer to agree the terms up front.

My career took off in London, selling large computer services contracts for the European market leader. I carried a quota that supported a team of 30, closed individual deals worth over £1 million and collected several President’s Club awards along the way.

In 2000, software testing automation pioneer Mercury Interactive hired me as its first Sales and Country Manager in Barcelona, where I still live. That is also where I found my calling. Since then I have built or strengthened channel programs for eight software vendors, six of which were acquired, including Gomez (by Compuware), Keynote (by Dynatrace) and Segue (by Borland). Most of that work has been in DevOps, application performance, CDN and cybersecurity, initially across EMEA, and now worldwide.

I learnt a basic channel sales lesson from those experiences: getting logos on your website is easier than getting those logos to produce consistent, reliable revenue. The programs that succeed are built around a structured framework designed from the ground up. That thinking sits behind my forthcoming book, The Channel Sales Manual, and also the work I do today as a Channel GTM Consultant, helping software vendors build a partner program that actually produces revenue.

Away from work I am a keen golfer, street runner, chess player and occasional nightclub MC. If you can find me sitting still, I will happily talk over a glass of wine about 1970s music and cinema, my lifelong passion Newport County FC and, of course, selling.