Mike Adams is the CEO The Story Leader and bestselling author of Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell(2018)
Mike’s best
stories are not in his storytelling book! To get those, you’ll need to ask
him about working on oilrigs or the times in Siberia when his Russian host made
a commercial airliner wait on the runway while drinking ‘formalities’ were
completed. The stories in his book
come from a surprisingly and perhaps unnecessarily challenging, multi-industry
international sales career whose only common threads have been good fortune and
storytelling.
After living in nine countries, in 2002,
when Chechen terrorists took 850 hostages in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre siege,
the police barricades went up outside Mike’s office, where he had a perfectly
good software sales manager role —it as time to bring the family home.
Back in Australia, Mike told the best story
of his career to land a job selling telecoms equipment. That led overseas again
in 2007 to Malaysia, from where he managed more than a hundred sales and
technical sales staff across Asia. The endless politics of a 60,000-staff
corporate merger drove Mike back to the oil and gas industry — but he kept the
same sales management territory (Asia), the same house and the same school for
the boys, while his office, in the same building, moved up four levels to 75.
Schooling forced the next move back to
Australia in 2012, this time with a job invitation to sell facility services
into the mining townships and camps of remote Australia. Mike navigated two
more industry changes after that — selling emergency communications equipment
and then industrial products — before starting his consulting business.
With each industry change landing him on
the wrong side of a steep learning curve with only a short time to succeed,
Mike learned the value of seeking out and sharing specific persuasive stories.
Now he finds stories and teaches storytelling to a client base as diverse and
international as his own sales career.
