Mark S. A. Smith

Mark S. A. Smith (born January 26, 1959) is an American entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. Smith has long been a contributor of sales and marketing techniques to the high technology industry frequently invited to speak at events held by Ingram Micro, SYNNEX, and Tech Data.
His articles appear in industry magazines such as CRM Magazine and Telecom Reseller.
Minc Inc.
Smith joined Minc Inc., Colorado Springs in 1987 as Director of Sales to help the newly-formed company develop their sales channels. The company ultimately chose to focus on OEM sales of their logic synthesis software. (Minc was acquired by Xilinx in 1998.)
The Valence Group
In 1989, Smith invested $30,000 to create The Valence Group, a publishing company that focused on trade show sales tactics. He is best known during that time for prolific article writing, being featured in hundreds of magazines and newspapers around the world. For example, Sales Agency Magazine.
In 1993 Smith published "49 Ways to Be Your Best at Trade Show Selling" selling 13,500 copies. The text of this publication is in the public domain and can be found online. His work was quoted in a number of books including 101 Ways to Promote Yourself by Raleigh Pinskey.
Guerrilla Group
Along with Wilson, he developed the Executive Assessment sales tool for IBM with more than 100 versions produced.
Outsource Channel Executives, Inc
In 2002 Smith created Outsource Channel Executives, Inc. (OCE Inc) with Molly Leander to provide focused sales channel enablement strategies and services to the high tech industry. The initial customer was Ingram Micro.
One of the larger projects that the company undertook was to develop sales for Hewlett-Packard's blade servers in conjunction with Ingram Micro. They developed the BladeBuilder University™ for HP and deployed it worldwide with more than 500 training events conducted by OCE Inc.
Recently Ingram Micro engaged Smith and his company to produce a series of cloud computing training videos for use with their business partners.
Bibliography
Blog
Smith's blog discusses how organizations can create an environment where customers refuse to consider other options, regardless of price.

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