Mike Adams, CEO at the Story Leader, Melbourne, Australia



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.

Listen to "The Secret to Sales Storytelling, Mike Adams CEO Story Leader" on Spreaker.

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