On leaving school Liam Venter joined New Zealand's largest company, Telecom New Zealand as an apprentice telephone technician. The incentive being that TNZ offered an excellent technical career path and fully funded technical training with paid time off for study and lectures to gain a Telephone Technician Certificate, a New Zealand Certificate in Engineering and from there through to a Bachelor of Engineering degree.
However somewhere along the way, between gaining an NZCE and commencing a Bachelor of Engineering degree he ended up as an Account Manager selling PABX systems and data communication services to mid size corporate clients. He had pretty good success (read: good commission earnings) and says that he mistakenly assumed he had good sales skills and processes. Not taking into account that TNZ at the time were a wholly government owned monopoly and the reality that most of the other sales people he was measuring himself against at TNZ at that time were as green and misguided as himself!
A few years years later he was enticed into joining a privately owned technology company as the Sales Manager for their communications division.
On arrival things were not as they had been portrayed through the job interview process. On closer examination of their circumstances he discovered that sales had pretty much ground to a halt in the division several months previously. However there was both a challenge and great potential.
By force of enthusiasm (and not much sales skill) Liam was able to build up the division’s business and saturate the market with their key product range to the point where the company needed to aggressively seek to broaden their product range.
In 1992 they offered him the opportunity to take over part of the operations of the company and he founded LAN 1 NZ Ltd, a computer network infrastructure distribution company. Initial operations for the new company started in the back room of a house in Mt Eden, Auckland.
It was only at this stage of his career that, he says he began to understand how to cohesively deploy all the sales skills he had been acquiring... and things really started to happen.
Just two years later, in 1994 Cisco/Kalpana awarded LAN 1 "Worldwide No. 1 Distributor of Kalpana". (The award was based on the GDP of each distributor's territory). In 1996 LAN 1 was awarded "Best Performance CiscoPro Distributor, Australasia". By 2005 LAN 1 had a nationwide client network of over 500 active resellers and systems integrators.
In 2005 at the age of 42, and with 17 years of experience in B2B sales, Liam sold the company to retire and pursue other passions in life. At about this time he was invited to create a sales training programme for one of his previous clients. The resulting 'Consultative Selling Professional' is the training that Liam wished he could have had when he started selling into corporate environments. Liam now provides free revenue growth mentoring for a number of organisations and conducts Consultative Sales Professional workshops.
Liam is also a keen motorcylcist and managers FastBikeGear, a lifestyle motorcycle accessory import and distribution business.
