Guest Speaker Heather LaDue, From a Students Perspective

Mason McGuire

Professional Selling Skills 1

Guest Speaker: Heather LaDue

Heather LaDue is a PSU alumnus who graduated back in 1992, majoring in marketing and also with a psychology minor. Heather now works for Robert Half as a sales representative / consultant. Heather’s job is to find temporary, to long-term employees for her clients employment gaps or needs. Basically Heather finds companies that are in need of analysis, CPA’s, book keepers, etc. She then fills those gaps with her association of people that fit the right needs with the correct abilities and qualifications.

Prior to listening to Heather speak I was taking in her appearance. She was well dressed and brought in materials she was going to use for her presentation. Based on her appearance alone I thought that she looked professional.

Once Heather took the stage she indicated that this was going to be the first time she had spoken to a class. Heather spoke briefly about her college experience and her first job at Cabletron Systems where she did inside sales. Heather was making over 300 cold calls a day as a development representative, qualifying people and companies for potential sales. To me that didn’t sound like anything that I would be interested in. But she did say that she gained some great experience from that first job. Those calls made her able to face rejection much easier and eventually overcome some objections.

Heather like most professional sales people really stressed the importance of networking. She talked about how her performance was tracked at Robert Half with their “matrix” system. Through this matrix system you can play with the numbers and figure out your statistics that are related to sales. She spoke about how in sales your performance is directly related to your work ethics, also known as the work to benefit ratio.

Heather spoke about setting meetings with clients. She talked about how to set them and always have an agenda, basically always being mindful of your time and theirs alike. One thing that I found interesting was her sales technique: the Feel, Felt, Found or the 3F’s. Heather reminded us to always believe in what we are selling and the trust relationship between seller and buyer will follow. Heather also talked about the sales funnel and how that works.

In all I would say that listening to Heather was nice, she was honest in explaining her experiences. Truthfully Heather wasn’t the most captivating speaker I have even been around but she did a great job considering that this was her first time speaking in front of a classroom. I’m glad that we had the opportunity to listen to Heather speak.