Paul Owen

At the age of thirty-two, Paul was £26,000 in debt and earning £8,000 a year in a data admin job which gave him no life skills, no career opportunity and no self-esteem. Nine credit card statements arrived on his doorstep each month. He was living for free in a friend’s small back bedroom. He had never thought his life would turn out this way. On 5 December 2000, he got a new job. It was a sales job, the kind of role he’d dismissed for years as something for people less able than him. It changed his life. He loved it. Four years later, he earned his first annual bonus, taking his total earnings that year to more than £100,000.

Since that life-changing discovery of sales at the age of thirty-two, Paul has spent fifteen years developing market-leading services alongside successful sales teams. In 2011, he founded Sales Talent, a company specialising in the recruitment and training of salespeople. In 2012, as part of his mission to re-sell sales as a career and raise its profile as a key business skill, he launched the nationwide skills programme – Let’s get Britain selling!© – to introduce thousands more people to the world of sales. It has been delivered at over forty universities across the UK.

Having grown up in Derby, he now lives in London with his wife, Claire, and three children, Samuel, Alfie and Violet. He loves sport, literature, business, politics, stand-up comedy and chewing the fat with friends and family over a beer and a bite to eat.