Walter Rogers: Disrupting the World of Sales Training and Transformation.

Walter found his direction at an early age, and he continues to pursue it relentlessly to this day…

We will be relentless in our pursuit for perfection. We won’t ever be perfect – but in the process we will achieve greatness.

~ Vince Lombardi

Success can never be achieved without traveling roads that are full of obstacles. But with perseverance and resilience, almost everyone can achieve their dreams. Success comes when we learn from our failures, stand back up, and correct our course to a new heading.  It’s that stubborn pursuit that leads us to success.  And it’s that relentless pursuit that made Walter Rogers one of the most dynamic entrepreneurs of our time.  Even his company’s tagline reflects his view on hard work and relentless pursuit: World-class performance never happens by accident.  

Walter Rogers has become a leading entrepreneur after finding his direction early in his career and then pursuing it relentlessly. This paragon of leadership began with several odd jobs before becoming a top-notch business executive. At the age of 12, Walter began his career by selling newspapers door-to-door. He says, “From that point on, I always knew I was going to run my own thing.” With an entrepreneur’s instinct in his heart, Walter plunged into selling VHS and Betamax recorders at a video store. Rogers was fascinated that he could create his own income based purely on his willingness to understand people and work hard. “From that moment forward I knew that nothing happens until something is sold.”

From there, he continued to flourish, and in the early 90’s he got involved in the sales force restructuring work at IBM. It was at that point that Walter developed his love for technology. That love of technology, along with strong, supportive encouragement from his mentors, led Walter to launch his first company.

“Once you have one company under your belt, it’s hard to stop!” 

Walter Rogers: A Business Entrepreneur

In the next several years after that first success, Walter went on to successfully fund, build and sell two software companies to publicly traded companies.  But he wasn’t done yet.

Fast forwarding to today, Walter Rogers has now created two new businesses that operate in 13 countries and on 3 continents. At present, he is the President, Chairman, and CEO of Baker Communications, Inc.  And simultaneously, Walter Rogers is also the Chairman and Co-Founder of CloudChomp, a software company that helps businesses and government agencies quickly and efficiently migrate to the cloud in order to modernize while achieving substantial savings. Both businesses are disruptive in their approach to helping their clients achieve success.  To find out more about CloudChomp, please visit www.CloudChomp.com. 

What is Baker Communications About?

Baker Communications, Inc. (BCI) is a consulting firm that helps enterprises create, implement, and sustain sales effectiveness programs for companies like Amazon Web Services, SAP, Honeywell, and many others. Since the establishment of BCI in 1979, the Company has helped over 1.5 million individuals reach their maximum potential in the workplace. 

The company uses innovative training solutions based on data, not opinion, that include proprietary, custom, virtual and physical workshops, as well as a full line of services and tools that provide advanced insights into each seller and sales leader’s capabilities.  Moreover, an online Sales Mastery Video Library, and several other new learning reinforcement applications, like SkillBursts, are continuously under development. Baker Communications helps sellers and leaders reach their full potential using data science, which allows Baker to individualize training and coaching paths, e-learning, and many more solutions that help sales teams unlock world-class performance. Walter Roger says, “We offer individualized in-person, virtual, and self-directed training, as well as one-on-one coaching to support our client’s ability to achieve their sales goals.”

Synchronizing with Market Trends

When you’re an entrepreneur, it is crucial to keep an eye on market trends. And this is the mantra that has guided Walter and his companies on the path to success.

Curiosity and Innovation drive Baker Communications to continuously keep abreast of changes in the market.  Keeping that curiosity alive about their customers, markets, community, and environment, helps the company spot trends as they emerge.  In many cases, BCI has stood at the very front end of those changes to better serve their customers.  They started ‘virtualizing’ the delivery of their courseware in 2003, long before COVID forced the world to jump forward into virtually led workshops. To expand the dimensions of the organization, in 2007 they introduced sales coaching to help individuals and managers excel, well before sales coaching became a de-facto standard for achieving higher levels of sales performance.  

Walter Rogers, BCI’s CEO states, “We now have more innovative projects to launch and expect to remain ahead of the curve as a result.”

Stand Out in the Crowd

Whatever Walter did in his career, he tried to add a touch of uniqueness and authenticity into it to differentiate his approach from his competition.  He felt that this aspect was ‘magical’ when it came to getting smart, innovative people to notice you.

Capitalizing on that same notion, Baker Communications sees the Data-Driven Sales Enablement approach to training and coaching as a “secret sauce” that companies have needed for decades.  With technology being so prevalent in our lives, it only makes sense to use technology to help individuals become better sellers.  Hiring the right people from the beginning shuts off the flow of sellers that were not a good fit for the type of sales role a company is trying to fill in the first place. Then, by assessing the team’s skill gaps, companies can easily adapt the training to rectify each specific skill gap to improve their performance and move one step closer to creating a world-class team. 

The Challenges

Overcoming obstacles can oftentimes make you stronger. You need to decide whether you’re going to embrace them or simply ignore them in hopes they’ll go away.

One of the biggest challenges that Baker Communications sees the industry needing to overcome is the “one-size-fits-all” world of training. The question, “How can we make training more engaging for everyone we train?” keeps haunting their entrepreneurial minds.

Walter Roger remarks, “Over the years we have learned that not everyone will respond to the same approach and that each seller has certain strengths and areas in need of improvement. So, with that in mind, how can we make the training customized to each individual participant? How can we meet each person “where they are” to provide them with the best solution to transform their performance? That is when we started looking at technology and data to help us solve the problem. And after years of testing and improvements, we feel like we are in a great place to share our discoveries and innovations with teams and organizations around the world.”

In the Future

The goal for the future is to transform sales training and sales enablement from an art into a science.  Using data to scientifically determine a sales force’s actual performance needs allows BCI to target specific gaps rather than use a one-size-fits-all approach to sales performance improvement. In doing that, Baker shortens the training cycle and time to productivity. Walter states unemphatically that Baker Communications will lead this next evolution in training.

Walter went on to illustrate his assertions, “Using data science to help make these decisions is like the diagnostic tests the medical profession uses to home in on your specific medical problem.  If you take those tests away, you’re left with only someone’s best guess.  I don’t know about you, but when it comes to medical opinions, I’m more comfortable when I see the data that supports those opinions.”  

Walter then went on to say, “Why not use data science to help customers with their hiring, onboarding, training, and coaching decisions?  Let the data identify a seller’s strengths and weaknesses.  Then map training and coaching to just the skill gaps that we find.  That shrinks the time to top performance and gets the sellers out of the classroom and back out selling. 

“That’s what we’re all about now.  If customers give us a chance to prove to them the science behind the data, we’re convinced they will become customers for life.  And that’s what our free Tailored Fit Analysis is all about.”   

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