Ben Bennett

Ben Bennett has over 25 years of experience in skills development facilitation, consultative sales, and sales management. For the past seven years, Bennet has conducted management development training for over 700 Walgreen Company’s executive assistant managers to prepare them to become Walgreen store managers. The Walgreen curriculum: Applied drugstore management covers key management skills including communications, financial analysis, store operations, diversity, and customer service. Bennett's contributions have been widely acknowledged by senior management, and district managers frequently ask him to facilitate the training for their cities.

Bennett is a seminar leader for the American Management Association (AMA). He facilitates two seminars: Fundamental Selling Techniques for the New or Prospective Salesperson and Principles of Professional Selling. In addition to delivering public seminars, he works closely with AMA’s on-site division. He has been particularly successful at customizing and facilitating on-site seminars held at AMA’s customer locations. At Data Comm Networking, Incorporated, he served as the training coordinator, where he developed a two-week training curriculum for new sales representatives. The curriculum included industry knowledge, product applications and sales skills. In addition, Bennett sold a wide variety of telecommunications solutions to companies such as Novus Credit Services (Discover Card), Sophia Communications, and Rubloff Development Corporation.

Bennett served as an account manager with The Pace Group, where he sold and facilitated training programs/workshops in human resource services, including job analysis, manager and employee assessments, team development, presentation skills, basic skills and diversity workshops. One of his major accomplishments included consulting on a management development project for Dial Corporation that included job analysis, skills development workshops in leadership, communications and team development. He was also responsible for marketing, customizing and delivering training workshops to the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Midwest Region Executive Development Group to prepare them to become commissioners with the IRS. In addition, Bennett has facilitated over 150 upward feedback/professional management development workshops for AT&T managers and was repeatedly requested to facilitate the sessions for executive level management.

At Rockwell International, Bennett worked very closely with the sales force. He delivered sales training workshops—including Miller-Heiman’s Conceptual Selling and Strategic Selling workshops—to over 200 salespeople. He also supported Rockwell International in the introduction of new products by serving as project leader in the development of sales tools and seminars that addressed areas such as sales strategy, competitive analysis and financial marketing.

At AT&T and Illinois Bell, Bennett held numerous sales and management positions. One of the more interesting assignments included managing the accounts for all five brokerage exchanges in the City of Chicago, as well as managing the Paine Webber account. In this role as consultant to the financial industry, Ben sold major communications systems to both the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Paine Webber. He also sold an online system to the Chicago Board of Trade. In addition, Bennett also held a training position where he provided initial training for AT&T new account executives.