Meet Your Trainers!
The creators of the Common Sense Selling® process are two not-so-common sales professionals and trainers, Jim Dunn and John Schumann. They saw the lack of results and frustration that most salespeople experienced using the old “feature, advantage, and benefit” selling approach in today’s more complex selling environment.
Using their combined 65 plus years of sales experience, they developed a new, common sense approach to selling that is unconventional, by most standards…and it works!
Jim Dunn
Jim founded Whetstone Group in 1992. With John Schumann, he developed Whetstone’s proprietary sales process, Common Sense Selling®, which is counterintuitive to the way the majority of people sell, and has been the gold standard for thousands of salespeople and sales managers in a wide variety of industries, including financial services, technology, commercial real estate, manufacturers and distributors, commercial banking, life sciences, and professional service firms.
He has been a featured speaker on the subject of sales for many national organizations, including the insurance industry’s Million Dollar Round Table (Top of the Table) and the American Banking Association.
Jim has authored or co-authored 6 books on selling, including Common Sense Selling, Sales Mastery and The Monday Morning Sales Coach. He is passionate about the need for professionalism in sales and continuous self-improvement as requisites for selling success.
He is a Certified Sales & Marketing Professional (CSMP) and a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA). Jim graduated from Bucknell University and served four years as an officer in the U. S. Navy.
In his spare time he enjoys golf and tennis.
John Schumann
John Schumann is an international sales trainer and a partner in Whetstone Group. He brings a vast experience in sales and marketing for national and international companies over 27 years, working with Johnson & Johnson, PSICOR (acquired by Baxter Laboratories), NOVUS and Coral Therapeutics.
His experience includes selling products and services in both large international and small entrepreneurial companies. In addition to training in Whetstone’s Training Center, he also teaches customized in-house/retreat sessions for corporate clients’ sales forces.
John received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin and was awarded “The Distinguished Flying Cross” and “The Air Medal” while serving as an USAF pilot in Vietnam.
John E. Flannery
John works with his customers to develop specific revenue generation programs based around sales process. He also provides them with the supporting implementation services to help companies maximize their investment and drive results.
With 26 years of sales, sales management, and business ownership experience, John has a comprehensive understanding of how sales organizations should run. After 10 years in Fortune 500 companies, including Pitney Bowes and Nextel, he founded, built, and sold his own business in the wireless industry. As the lead sales executive in a multinational organization , John drove the implementation of sales process into that company. For 8 years, John was a top producing business partner with CustomerCentric Selling.
