More sales. better teams. fast!
Technical salespeople hiding behind email? Reps who don’t pick up the phone or ask the right questions? The Renegade Sales Methodology gives your technical sales team the skills, confidence and action plan to build pipeline and close deals more easily and profitably than ever.
Dear Sales Leader,
If you’re an ambitious and sales-focussed owner or manager who wishes your technical experts and sales reps stopped hiding behind emails, stopped claiming to be '“too busy” and started having more of the right conversations with high-value potential customers…
…you’re in the right place!
After 20 years in technical sales, I’ve helped thousands of technical reps, scientists and experts build pipeline, close deals and as much as double their revenue – without the need for natural talent, old-school pressure or endless cold calls.
If you’re committed to improving your sales team’s performance, then read through the information below and book time for a sales consulting call.
Your friend,
Tom Mallens
Book a sales consulting call
N.B. If you’re not sure that improving your team’s sales performance is the right thing, it may be too early to talk. These calls are for people that know they want to help their people – but want to figure out if I’m the right person!
Are your sales reps hiding behind emails and failing to ask the right questions?
Does any of this sound familiar? You've got good people. Smart, technically capable and well-liked by customers. But when it comes to actually building pipeline, closing deals and hitting target, something's not quite clicking.
Maybe you've noticed your salespeople:
-- Let the customer set the agenda in meetings, instead of controlling the direction and outcome
-- Don't ask the questions that would properly qualify (or disqualify) an opportunity early
-- Walk straight past a perfectly good in-stock or standard option, chasing something custom instead
-- Jump to the lowest price almost immediately, instead of building value first
-- Struggle to say "this isn't a fit" and walk away from opportunities that are never going to close
-- Seem more focused on staying busy than on maximising their own commission
And when you talk to them about it, you hear vague excuses like:
"There’s nothing solid but I've got a few good opportunities coming up."
"They said they just need a quote and they’ll be back in touch soon."
"I’ve not heard from them. I'll follow up with them next week."
Meanwhile, they're hiding behind email. Avoiding the phone. Putting unqualified opportunities into the CRM just to make the numbers look busy and letting the prospects call every shot.
Me (and Mrs Mallens) at the NEC in my early days as a technical sales rep.
Here’s why that should worry you
(more than perhaps it actually does)
It's not just annoying. It's expensive.
Every quote your team puts together for an opportunity that was never really qualified costs real hours — design time, engineering time, pricing time — that could have gone into a deal you could actually win.
Every time a rep discounts instead of building value, that's margin gone. Permanently. You don't get it back next quarter.
Every forecast that turns out to be fiction means you're planning production, cash flow and hiring decisions around numbers you can't trust.
And here's the bit that keeps a lot of owners and sales leaders up at night, even if they don't say it out loud:
If you (or your top salesperson) stopped selling tomorrow, what would happen to the numbers?
For a lot of the businesses I work with, the honest answer is: not much good.
The company has quietly become dependent on the founder or sales leader's own deals to hit target, because the rest of the team either can't or won't run a proper sales process on their own.
That's not a sales problem anymore. That's a business risk. It means you can't step back, can't take your foot off the gas, can't build the thing you actually set out to build — because you're too busy carrying the sales number yourself.
You end up with a team that:
-- Believes their forecast about as much as you do (which is to say — not much)
-- Quotes for almost anything, rather than only the work they've got a real shot at winning
-- Loses deals for the wrong reasons — on price, on confidence, on process — rather than because a competitor genuinely had the better offer
-- Doesn't walk around thinking they're the best in the market, because deep down, they know they're winging it
And that's the real cost. Not just margin. Momentum. Confidence. The feeling of running the best sales team in the business, rather than hoping this quarter goes better than the last one.
During a visit to LinkedIn’s head office in London back in the early 2010s
The brutal truth about B2B sales
(and why so many technical reps struggle)
Here's the thing almost nobody talks about: virtually no-one grows up wanting a career in B2B sales. A pilot? Sure. A vet? Absolutely. A salesperson? Not exactly top of the childhood dream list.
People usually end up in technical sales one of two ways. Either their original plan didn't work out and this is what was on the table. Or they were a good engineer, scientist or technical specialist who realised they could make more money moving into a business development role.
Either way, you end up with salespeople who've got all the technical and product knowledge in the world — and almost none of the actual sales skills.
I know, because that used to be me.
Years ago, I was given the UK territory for a major European chemical manufacturer, selling industrial adhesives. The training was intense — chemists with PhDs walking me through melting points, viscosity, specific gravity, the works.
By the end of it, I genuinely thought: with all this product knowledge, just imagine how much I'm going to sell. I hadn't booked a single appointment yet, and I was already spending my commission cheque in my head.
Then a colleague handed me some business cards, said "see you at the sales meeting in a month," and that was it. Off I went.
A few weeks of rejection, fruitless cold calls and going-nowhere meetings later, reality landed like a brick to the face: specialist technical products don't sell themselves.
All that product training hadn't taught me any of the things that actually mattered:
-- Finding, qualifying and prioritising the right leads
-- Attracting inbound enquiries instead of chasing everything that moves
-- Making prospecting calls and booking meetings that actually happen
-- Running a discovery meeting that uncovers the real opportunity (not just the surface-level ask)
-- Closing business without needing to discount
-- Growing and protecting existing accounts, not just chasing new logos
I got taken apart in my first sales meeting for not bringing in enough business. I still remember exactly how that felt.
Here's the strange part: professional footballers spend a full week training for a 90-minute match. Professional salespeople — the people the entire business relies on — often spend close to zero hours a week practising the actual skill of selling.
And because almost nobody trains their sales skills somewhere safe, guess where they end up practising instead?
On your customers. On your pipeline. On your margin.
I even went and did an MBA a few years later, thinking that would fill the gap. It didn't. They didn't really teach sales properly there either.
It still stuns me how many companies expect brilliant sales results from their people, while only ever investing in their technical training. Product knowledge and sales knowledge are two completely different skill sets.
Product knowledge makes you feel clever.
Sales knowledge makes you money.
Working with the US sea freight logistics sales team of Keuhne+Nagel in Atlanta, Georgia.
the Renegade Sales Methodology gives you the sales breakthrough you need…
Which is exactly why I built the Renegade Sales Methodology
I didn't want your team to have to learn the way I did — through years of expensive, painful trial and error, at the cost of your pipeline and your patience.
So I took more than 20 years of my own lead generation, prospecting, sales and account management experience, ran it through thousands of hours working directly with technical sales teams, and pulled in feedback from thousands of technical salespeople worldwide.
Then I condensed all of it into one practical, structured system your team can actually pick up and apply — the Renegade Sales Methodology.
It's not another stack of generic sales theory that sits in a folder nobody opens again. It's a specific, step-by-step approach built for people who sell complex, high-value or specialist products — the exact situation your team is in.
Here's what it changes for your team, mapped directly to the problems above:
-- Instead of letting the customer run the meeting, they learn to control the direction and the agenda from the first conversation
-- Instead of guessing, they learn the right questions to properly qualify — and disqualify — an opportunity early
-- Instead of chasing custom every time, they learn how to confidently talk customers through the options that are right in front of them
-- Instead of leading with price, they learn how to build real value before a number ever gets mentioned
-- Instead of quoting for everything, they learn to walk away from the wrong opportunities early — with confidence, not guilt
-- Instead of drifting through the month, they learn to think like someone building their own commission, deal by deal
The result: a pipeline you can actually trust, quotes you're far more likely to win, margins that hold up, and a team that runs like the best in the business — not one that happens to be carried by you.
By working with me — depending on the programme you choose — you and your team will pick up sales skills including:
-- A trick inspired by how Elon Musk builds teams, that turns technical experts and engineers into genuinely capable salespeople — despite what most people assume, technical specialists often make outstanding salespeople when they've got the right process to follow
-- A simple fishing analogy that landed one client a £6K order from a single LinkedIn post within days of his first training session — and has kept inbound leads coming in ever since
-- How an experienced rep, close to retirement, grew revenue from £1.5m to £3.1m — while working five fewer hours a week, not more
-- An "anti-pressure" approach that gets even the busiest, most guarded decision-makers to reply — in industries where most salespeople get ignored completely
-- The planning routine that helped one rep hit and hold 175% of target in sea freight sales — a market where most reps don't make it past probation
-- A 90-second sketch on the back of a napkin that won a client a £103K/year order and solved an ongoing account management headache in the process
-- The Henry Ford approach to sales — a method inspired by the Model-T production line that makes your sales results as repeatable, predictable and scalable as a well-run production process, not a lottery
-- A three-word phrase that puts a salesperson straight back in control of a conversation, any time they feel pressured or caught off guard
-- A structured questioning technique inspired by Socrates, so your reps stop having to explain, justify or defend their pricing and credibility on the back foot
-- An objection-handling approach that dissolves objections before they become a problem — making the offer more compelling before a prospect even has the chance to push back
-- A rapport-building method that helps even naturally reserved technical experts come across as more confident, credible and persuasive — without changing who they are
-- A LinkedIn lead-generation approach so simple it's almost overlooked — one client used it to land four new accounts worth £68,500
-- A five-word closing question that's landed some of the biggest deals of my career, and helped one client secure six new accounts worth £60k–£70k within two months
-- A follow-up email that gets "gone quiet" prospects talking again — often within minutes of being sent, even after weeks of silence
-- A six-word question that uncovers the real reason someone wants to buy — so your team stops writing proposals for people who were never going to say yes
-- And a lot more, all built specifically for people selling technical, complex or high-value products
Book a sales consulting call
N.B. If you’re not sure that improving your team’s sales performance is the right thing, it may be too early to talk. These calls are for people that know they want to help their people – but want to figure out if I’m the right person!
“In just two months with Renegade, I’ve secured six new accounts worth £60k-£70k.”
– Tom Ashton, The Phillips Screw Company
“Over the past two-and-a-half months, the transformation has been huge. I’m now securing 2-4 quality meetings every week, something I simply wasn’t achieving before.”
– Dom Webb, BDM in electronics manufacturing
“Since the training, I’ve set up 4 trading accounts direct from Linkedin and have 4-5 more indirectly. It’s an extra £68,500 of business for us.”
– James Kynaston, BDM at Horizon Platforms
“Got a £6K order from a LinkedIn post today.”
– David Ayling, founder of Straighpoint
“The deal’s worth around 5k units every second month, so 30k units per annum, value around £103k per annum.”
– Paul Hindle, key account manager at Leggett & Platt
“As a result of following your advice, within 4 weeks, I generated £10K from Linkedin activity.”
– Benjamin Dennehy, sales trainer
“Having joined the training around 30 days ago, I’m delighted to say I’ve already achieved a 140% ROI.”
– Natalie Rooney, MD at the Midlands Wedding Show
Book a sales consulting call
N.B. If you’re not sure that improving your team’s sales performance is the right thing, it may be too early to talk. These calls are for people that know they want to help their people – but want to figure out if I’m the right person!
Clients I’ve worked with include…
