DisruptED: Selling and Customer Engagement

Taking risks can certainly be daunting, but it can also lead to opportunities one would never have fathomed. Taking risks is even a behavior aligned with entrepreneurial spirits.

How does taking a risk help an individual transition from an International Relations major to become current head of their own company? And how has customer engagement played a role in this transition?

On today’s episode of DisruptED, host Ron J. Stefanski speaks with William Gilchrist, CEO & Founder of Konsyg, an on-demand sales team service, to share his background passion for travel and how his educational route and experiences with a poor economy led him to a career in sales.

Sales is not a skillset that needs to be limited to the business industry; it can apply pretty much everywhere. Sales can help develop self-discipline, negotiation skills, customer engagement, determination, intrapersonal relationship building, and much more.

Gilchrist explained, “I moved to Singapore to take an unpaid internship in lead generation.” His supervisor said, “’Look, you need to know the sales stuff because you will always be able to exist anywhere in the world, any culture. Sales is the one skill you’ll always be able to use.’ And that was the start of my journey in Singapore.”

Stefanski and Gilchrist also discussed…

1. The roots of Gilchrist’s childhood passion for travel
2. What took Gilchrist from Chicago to Singapore to eventually creating his own company
3. How Gilchrist disrupted sales by finding others were experiencing gaps in their strategies despite being viewed as successful

Gilchrist explained, “Once you get to the meat of the skillset, what do you have? It’s not just reading off of a bunch of slides and talking about value. Nobody cares about your product. It’s about an actual skill to be able to morph it to something that is relevant to someone else. And that is what makes a professional salesperson different from someone who is just selling. Are you a salesperson, or are you just selling?”

William Gilchrist is CEO & Founder of Konsyg and was previously Vice President, Asia-Pacific at MyDoc Pte. Ltd., and Head of Knowledge ETO, as well as Asia Pacific and Regional Sales Manager, Southeast Asia, at Google. Gilchrist holds over 15 years of experience in multicontinental technology sales and is Teaching English as A Foreign Language (TEFL) Certified. He learned Mandarin at Cornell University and Peking University and earned his BA in International Relations from Bowdoin College.