Book Hazel as a speaker

My name is Hazel Butters. I help startups and entrepreneurs to ask for the sale.

I fell in love with technology at Digital Equipment Corporation and during 19 years, I have worked with hundreds of startups and Fortune 1000 technology companies including Adobe, BMC, CA, Dell, IBM, Oracle, and Siemens. I am half of ‘Techie & Fuzzy’ a program which teaches nine to twelve-year olds how to code.

I know that sales is transformative and fun—but only if you get to ask for the sale.

My Increase Sales (Fast) as a Startup workshop has run more than 50 times across London, Boston, Austin, Chicago and New York, and I have spoken at coworking hubs, startup communities and universities in the US and UK including Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I help startups and corporates to overcome fear or frustration around sales and help them get processes in place for consistent sales-based revenue.

My LinkedIn Profile

Speaking Topics

Getting Comfortable Picking Up the Phone to Sell
Technology and Innovation
How to Increase Sales (Fast) as a Startup
Using the phone to ask

Why the phone is important in sales

In a world enthralled by social media and ever more innovative communications platforms, why are entrepreneurs hesitant to sell using the phone? We’ve had this tech for over 140 years. The telephone is one of the consistently overlooked sales tools available to business today. Hazel Butters is a sales coach renowned for teaching entrepreneurs how to ask for money, she knows that simply overcoming the fear of phone sales can often prove the key to unlocking sales success. In this presentation, Hazel asks:

Why do we prefer indirect, abstract channels of communications like email, when a phone call is so much more direct and personal?
What has made us ‘fear’ the phone, and what really is the worst that could happen?
How many different types of ‘yes’ exist in phone conversations?
What can we do to help stop the panic and take phone rejection in our stride?
How should we structure sales calls to make the phone feel friendly again?
What are the first simple steps to reclaiming the phone for sales?

DEC, dinosoars and your technical debt:
Why innovation might really be evolution…

“The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It’s hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead.”&mdsh;Robert T. Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies

Incurable technophobe Hazel Butters knows that her passion for all things new is inextricably linked to inspiration from the past. It was the ingenuity of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a company that existed from 1957 to 1998, that turned her on to all things tech, and continues to shape the way she sees innovation today.

So what debt do we each owe to our technological ancestry? What role did the giants of the past like Compaq, SCO or Netscape play? Are they still important? And how can we avoid overlooking the powerful role these ‘dinosaurs’ played in tech history?

In this talk, Hazel turns back the clock a few hertz, and revisits how we should think of the history of innovation in enterprise technology, and how it might evolve next…

Startups: How to rapidly increase sales
(and decrease the pressure)

Startups face enormous pressures to ramp up their reach and gain market momentum. While there are no shortages of suggestions for ways in which to achieve this—bootstrapping, investment, loans, government sources, incubators, crowdfunding—generating revenue through solid sales figures is the most empowering route for any startup.

So why do otherwise persistent entrepreneurs begin hesitating when it comes to selling?

Hazel Butters is a sales coach who is very happy to help tentative entrepreneurs ‘how to ask for the sale’. In this talk Hazel will show sales-shy startups how to: