As a certified licensee for the Leone Resource Group, The SMG Group holds the exclusive mandate to train its phenomenally successful Whole Brain Selling®, Whole Brain Leadership, and Winning Account Management Strategies (WAMS) programmes in the Middle East, Central Asia, Asia Pacific and Africa regions.
With a stellar corporate career behind her that spans over 20 years’ in leadership, sales and retention – which includes leading multi-cultural global sales teams at executive level for eight years – company founder and CEO, Michelle Strydom, has first-hand experience of rolling out these programmes, having implemented them with outstanding results in her capacity as a decade-long Leone Resource Group client.
As an officially-accredited coach, Michelle possesses practical on-the-job sales, retention and leadership skills that were tried and tested with stellar results on a global scale for 17 years.
Having sat in the shoes of the seller, leader, and key account manager, Michelle has intimate knowledge of the business challenges and personal fears they all experience at the coalface on a daily basis.
“Very few trainers have actually sat in the trainee’s chair. Having occupied that position for more than a decade, I understand better than most the hardnose reality of what sellers, sales leaders and executives face daily in a highly competitive, fast-moving, price-sensitive global environment,” she says.
Having held the position of retention director in the UAE for six years, where she was responsible for implementing her employer’s client retention strategies, Michelle has direct, first-hand experience of the value these programmes deliver: under her leadership, retention rates jumped dramatically from 88-97%, thanks to her implementation of the Winning Account Management Strategy (WAMS) programme.
Seven years after Michelle’s first exposure to Ray Leone’s Sales Funnel© selling programme in 2001, Michelle got the opportunity to meet Leone in person and be trained by the guru himself.
Following this encounter, Michelle became his client and worked closely with him for over 10 years, during which time she successfully implemented his leadership, sales and retention strategies with her teams.
Recognising her outstanding sales achievements as a real-life testament to his Whole Brain Selling® vision, the maestro himself was determined to make Michelle one of his global ambassadors.
In 2018, Michelle was personally handpicked and endorsed by Ray Leone himself as a Leone Resource Group licensee to extend the reach and penetration of his global programmes, which since their creation over 30 years ago, have been trained in over 50 countries with phenomenal success.

About our founder

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About our founder

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