Martyn R. Lewis is an acclaimed business professional with a vast background in all aspects of revenue generation. Born and educated in the UK, he emigrated to Canada in the 1980 and now resides in the Sonoma area of northern California. Prior to founding his own company, he had extensive executive management, sales and marketing experience. His positions included President and CEO for Drake International, North America, where he led a large, multi-divisional sales force to reverse a declining trend to growing the business at more than three times the rate of the industry. Prior to Drake, Martyn was with Digital Equipment of Canada for ten years. During his tenure at DEC he led several hundred sales professionals, culminating in the position of VP Marketing and Sales Services.
Prior to joining DEC, Martyn worked in the major accounts division of ICL in the UK. During these years, he participated in countless sales training programs; his proficiency rose to the point that he became certified to deliver one of the leading sales methodologies. He attended peer-level executive retreats, where he met and worked with the key opinion leaders and authors on the topics of business, sales, and marketing. In the mid-90’s, he left corporate life to start his own consulting company, Market-Partners Inc. It would be easy to say that he did so to escape the clichéd “corporate grind,” but the reasons were much more complex. Because as successful as he had become, he was not what most would define as a “natural salesperson”. His interests ran to engineering; tearing down and rebuilding his Lotus sportscar, designing and handcrafting high-end audio systems—science, methodology, planning, and results.
Yet throughout his sales career, Martyn continually ran into the myths and legends of the “art” and “black magic” supposedly utilized by top-drawer sales wizards. And perhaps for a tiny minority of overachievers, that might have been true. But his concern had always been for the majority—the whole sales force—to succeed, and perhaps not spectacularly, but certainly consistently and profitably. Martyn wanted to apply the elements and rules of science to sales and marketing, to prescribe method where madness often prevailed. And he wasn’t going to be shy about it, as his company’s original tagline was “The Science of Sales and Marketing.” Of course, with science comes research, and he knew that if they were to bring true scientific discipline to the needs of their clients, they had to exercise that same discipline in their own efforts of observing, recording, and analyzing what they found. Working now at arm’s length with his clients’ sales forces brought a much wider view of all the inherent issues that affect sales success.
And it was at this point that he and his team started to see a repeating pattern. These organizations all had offerings that delivered value to a particular market yet too often were falling short of hoped-for results. They uncovered the disconcerting fact that while most of their clients were doing good work offering a good product, the results all too often suggested otherwise. After seeing this phenomenon so many times, it was obvious to Martyn that something was missing; there was something more at play, and he needed to find out what that was. As their work continued to evolve and they talked to ever more individuals across organizations about how they buy and why they don’t, a number of observations began to materialize.
And once recognized, defined and documented, these revelatory observations crystallized into hard data and now form the basis of his foundational concept of Outside-In Revenue Generation. Martyn and his team have since distilled the theory, shaken out the bugs as it were, and by putting it into practice, have seen the results. He has seen their work create over a billion dollars of prospective business for a leading high technology company. He has seen it enable a small company that was stuck at revenue of