Ingrid Maynard: Your Sales Team Isn't Underperforming
Your sales managers were promoted for being good at selling. Nobody taught them to lead. That's usually the actual problem.
Ingrid Maynard: Your Sales Team Isn't Underperforming
When a sales team misses target, the reflex is to work on the salespeople. More training, another pipeline review, a tighter CRM. It almost never fixes it, because the problem usually sits one level up. Ingrid Maynard has spent 25 years inside that exact problem for Australian and New Zealand businesses, and she'll tell you plainly: most sales performance issues are leadership issues wearing a sales costume.
Who she is
Ingrid founded The Sales Doctor and still runs it. Twenty-five years working with iconic Australian brands, listed and privately owned, on the same question: why isn't this team performing? She started out at The Body Shop, spent eight years there, then moved into sales consulting and never left.
You'll also have seen her on Sky Business and Ticker News, or reading her in CEO World, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun.
Her argument
Nobody grows up wanting to be in sales. People fall into it, and it carries a bit of a stigma even inside the companies that depend on it. Ingrid wants to change that, because in her view sales isn't a dirty word at all. It's mutual enrichment and trust, done properly.
Here's the part that matters if you're programming for a leadership audience. Better selling on its own doesn't produce profitable growth. That takes leaders who can get a team selling commercially, which means watching acquisition costs, protecting margin, and understanding what it costs to serve a customer once you've won them. Most sales managers were promoted because they were good at closing. Nobody ever taught them any of the rest.
Her work sits on what she calls the Pathway to Enrichment, built on behavioural modelling and neuroscience. In practice that means the content is about changing specific behaviours rather than lifting the mood in the room.
Who should book her
Sales conferences and kickoffs, national sales meetings, leadership programs for sales managers, franchise and retail networks. She's comfortable in enterprise organisations and in complex professional services environments.
She's at her best in front of people who can actually change how the sales function runs, not just the people carrying a number.
Keynote or workshop?
She does both, and honestly the workshop tends to be the better spend. Alongside keynotes and masterclasses she runs sales leadership programs with coaching built in.
If you want to lift a national sales meeting, book the keynote. If you want something to be different in six weeks, book the program and get your sales managers in the room.
Worth asking yourself first: is your sales problem actually a sales problem? If your managers were promoted for closing and never trained to lead, you've probably found it.
