About

Sales Innovator teaches one way of selling and builds the software that makes it practical: find a growth opportunity inside a client's business that they haven't seen, one your offering makes possible, and bring it to them as a strategy.

Michael Scheelhardt speaking at the AI Summit in Melbourne.

A method for value selling

Most sellers respond to requirements the client has already written. The Sales Innovators method starts before that. You study the client's business from the outside in, the way their own customers experience it, and look for growth they haven't acted on that what you sell can enable. What the client sees is one researched claim about their business, and a specific next step.

That used to take a senior seller up to two weeks per account, so most sellers could only do it for a few. AI research now drafts it in minutes, so every account can get it.

The book sets the method out as six parts that work together:

The Feet: AI research that drafts a point of view on any account
The Hearts: breathwork and meditation for energy, focus and empathy
The Minds: growth strategy, built with The Serendipity Walk, The Customer Bug List and The Business Plan Canvas
The Mouths: storytelling that turns the point of view into something the client acts on
The Environment: incentives that reward this kind of selling instead of activity counts
The Sky Above: a maturity assessment that shows how far a team has come

It's a standard of practice, not a job title, and anyone who holds accounts can reach it. Each of our tools and programmes covers one of the six.

29 years inside enterprise sales

Michael Scheelhardt founded Sales Innovator after 29 years in enterprise technology sales, sales leadership and sales training at Oracle, Microsoft and Infor, selling across Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Europe. He spent 17 of those years in customer experience and 10 working with AI.

Three parts of that career shaped the method. At Bang & Olufsen, while writing his master's thesis at Copenhagen Business School, he co-developed the open innovation and platform strategy for a tablet more than three years before the iPad. In Abu Dhabi he facilitated partnerships for the Masdar City project. At Oracle he led conversational AI and sales innovation programmes across Japan and Asia-Pacific, and trained sales teams in Design Thinking, storytelling and the Challenger methodology.

A teenage start in martial arts led to years of studying Western and Eastern philosophy and a period living as a monk in India. He is an Art of Living instructor and now teaches his own meditation and breathwork method, built on the same teachings and designed for business people.

He teaches open courses at PMI Sydney, speaks at conferences and AI summits on where human connection and AI meet in selling, and wrote The Sales Innovators, now in its Second Edition.

Sales Innovator resells ControlShift AI voice agents and AI avatars, and runs its own inbound on the platform: Laura, the agent on this site, is a ControlShift AI agent. We place agents where the Consent Gradient says they belong (service, existing customers and internal work), and we'll tell you where they don't.

How we handle evidence

Every statistic on this site and in the book carries its source, and every source is labelled for what kind of evidence it is. Where nothing has been measured, we say so.

In a category full of unfalsifiable claims, that is the whole differentiation.

Get in touch Book Michael to speak