Guest Speaker David Pratt, From a Students Perspective

Molly Becker

Robert Nadeau

Professional Selling Skills I

9 April 2012

David Pratt

            David graduated from Plymouth State University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing. After graduation he went into sales, with his first job consisting of 100 to 150 cold calls a day. He then went to a company called One Communications and stayed there for about a year. While at One Communications he got an offer from their top competition, thinking the “grass is greener on the other side” he took the job. He was there for two years finding that in fact it was not the job he was expecting it to be. A man name Chris Patton was putting together a start up company called Monument Valley and heard about David through networking. The company was very new, only two years old and was located in the Boston area. David began working for Chris as a sales prospect; it was a perfect place for him to network. He became a team leader and currently has two people on his team.

David was very easy to listen too. He graduated from Plymouth five years ago therefore relating to him came very natural. He pressed upon the importance of networking and having a LinkedIn account. It was really interesting listening to how much he actually uses LinkedIn on a daily basis in order for him to be successful at his job.

            A typical day at Monument Valley for David is pretty simple. David’s job is to staff salespeople for firms, specifically concentrating on software companies. David is the middle person who finds potential salespeople and sets them up for interviews for the software company he is prospecting for. David starts by preparing his day, it is very important to manage his time. He has a team meeting discussing sales funnel, closing sales, and game plans. After meeting with his team David sets up interviews. At this point in his career at Monument Valley David is lucky to have more people reaching out to him then he has to reach out to them. He uses LinkedIn to search for companies within his reach, consists of 0-200 employees. LinkedIn is also used to find candidates for small firms. He even took the time to give us students the LinkedIn lowdown and showed us just how easy and beneficial it is to use.