Velocity Sales In Moreau Helps Businesses Achieve Their Sales Visions And Goals

BY PAUL POST

Alan VanTassel stays in business by working himself out of a job.

After 30-plus years in corporate America, he recently launched his own Moreau-based firm, Velocity Sales, which helps entrepreneurs achieve their sales vision and goals.

“Sales is an area of difficulty for most small business owners,” VanTassel said. “They’re passionate about what they do, but their experience is not often in sales. At some point they get to a place where sales are declining or they’re frustrated with revolving-door salespeople coming and going, and can’t attract good talent. Clients hire me on an interim business. We don’t just consult, we actually do the work for them.”

Adirondacks & Beyond Motorcycle Safety offers classes during the week and on weekends. Dion encourages even the most experienced of riders to consider taking one new class a year to enhance their skills.

“One of my coaches said something to me that hit hard and hit home with me. He said, ‘I’ll never understand why people will invest $20,000 on a bike, spend $5,000 on chrome, and hundreds more in gear but won’t invest $200 in themselves to become better riders and improve their chances of coming home at the end of the day,’” she said.

“Always invest in yourself through training and practice. It’s only $200, and it may help you in a situation for your muscle memory to kick in and to save you. Muscle memory kicks in when you are in a situation where you don’t have time to think about what you should do. It’s an automatic instinct, and in our classes, when you are on the motorcycle, we really work on your muscle memory.”

On April 29-30, Adirondacks & Beyond Motorcycle Safety will be hosting On the Road, a four-hour pilot course offered by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation.

“For this class, two coaches will take six students out on the road. They will do about an hour-long ride, and they will stop along the way and talk about a ‘what if’ scenario. It’s a great way to start the season,” said Dion. “We offered it last year and it went very well. If it goes well again this year, we are hoping to be able to offer it once a month.”

According to Dion, there is always something new to learn when it comes to riding a motorcycle.

“Probably 98 percent of the time, people walk away after taking one of our courses and say, ‘Wow, I learned something new.’”

For more information, visit www.adkmc. com

“The model is to help them build a sales structure they don’t have, to help them get their business to the next level,” he said. “I’ll help them hire salespeople, do weekly ridealongs and attend sales meetings. I can be part of the business and run sales while developing a long-term strategy or plan. After 12 to 24 months I’d be gone.”

Early in VanTassel’s career, he traveled the country for Melville Corp., the parent company of numerous nationwide chain stores such as Thom McAn shoes, Marshalls and KB Toys. Then he was a regional sales manager for Stride Rite shoes before moving to Verizon, where he managed sales in its upstate New York market’s messaging division.

Most recently, VanTassel spent the last nine years working for StoredTech.

Right before this, however, in 2000 he launched his own Glens Falls-based technology firm, which laid the groundwork for his newest venture, Velocity Sales.

“That’s where I got my first exposure to the life of an entrepreneur,” he said. “That’s when you become chief cook and bottle washer. In the corporate world, I didn’t realize how much got done by someone else. It gave me a new appreciation for business owners and entrepreneurs, how hard they work.”

VanTassel decided that 2023 was a good time to make significant career and lifestyle change. Velocity Sales was launched in early January, aligned with a global firm called Sales Xceleration, which supports more than 200 sales leaders like VanTassel throughout the U.S. and several other countries. Its stated mission is to provide “outsourced sales consultants to small businesses and mid-sized corporations that want to launch, expand or improve their sales operations to drive revenue growth.”

Small and new businesses are often plagued by declining or stagnant sales because the owner is focused on other tasks. Or, the enterprise may be growing too fast with no sales process or procedures in place, and the owner doesn’t have a good strategy and doesn’t know how to create one.

VanTassel helps solve these and many

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