Shiera has always enjoyed a challenge and her natural tenacity and drive seemed to compel her towards a goal of one day running her own business. Getting there probably had influences that span across her education, career and business life.
As a graduate in linguistic studies and working in the software localisation industry, language has always fascinated her, and in particular how some people are affected when communicating with others. She saw clearly how communication can have a very positive or negative impact on the listener, without the speaker even being aware of it!
With the call of sales and working with customers from early on in her career, she began to see the impact of communication in action with the clients. They sometimes bought, while others didn't. Her fascination with language never left and she began to look at how language and communication could help her to
increase sales.
Like all sales people, Shiera had good sales days and bad sales days and she discovered that selling in a conscious fashion was not something she did, which left with little sense of control over the sales process, which, at times, impacted her results. She therefore began to investigate her own attitudes to selling and how they were linked to her successes and failures. This started on the journey into the power of NLP and the psychology of selling and the strong link this had to how people communicate in business.
In 1999, Shiera left her sales role and joined IBM as a buyer. This was the first time she was consciously acting as a 'buyer', listening and observing the many sales pitches of vendors. She began to understand what made a 'good' sales person and what caused sales people to miss the opportunities. This led to a closer study of the psychology of buying, namely how buyers behave during the sales process when they decide to buy. She realised that poor sales people were often unable to 'connect' with the buyer or understand what motivated them to buy.
She returned to sales in 2000, working for one of the many
dot.com companies that sprang to life during that era. As with many of the
dot.com ventures, she was tasked with selling intangibles and the drive for revenue led many .com businesses, where it was more about delivering a speedy return for venture capitalists funding the projects, rather than serving the clients. This delivered the last 'piece of the jigsaw' if you will; successful sales requires integrity. Selling with integrity is basically
solution selling, which means selling what your customer needs and not what want to sell them. This in turn builds rapport, which leads to long-term relationship building.
Shiera left this role and began complimenting her experience with formal knowledge in the areas of NLP, Neurosemantics, Psychology and Psychometrics. She began using this to help sales and business people get better results, using these techniques. With this complete, she founded Zenith Training and Development and began offering her knowledge and experience to companies across Ireland. Since then, she has helped hundreds of coaching clients and companies to change their selling techniques and become more effective in building sales pipelines and better relationships over the long term with key customers.
