MY JOURNEY

I spent 29 years inside world-class sales organizations before I understood exactly what most mid-market founders are missing.

That career started with an electrical engineering degree and a fortunate early break — I was trained in technical sales by some of the most skilled and experienced people in the business, at companies like ANSYS, Siemens, and AVL. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was that those organizations had deliberately solved a problem most mid-market companies do not even know they have.

They had separated the sales function into two distinct roles working in concert: a salesperson who was first and foremost a business person — owning the commercial relationship, understanding the financial stakes, driving the opportunity forward — paired with a subject matter expert whose job was to achieve what I call the technical close.

The technical decision maker in a complex sale rarely controls the budget. But they have something more powerful — the ability to say no to any change they believe represents unacceptable risk. Before any conversation about ROI or financial return can happen, that person has to be convinced that the proposed change will not fail. Only after the technical close is achieved can the salesperson approach the financial decision maker with the business case.

I had grown up inside this structure and taken it entirely for granted. It was not until I left the corporate world that I realized how completely absent it is in mid-market companies. Founders of technically complex businesses are typically doing both jobs themselves. They are the technical expert and the business closer simultaneously. Which explains exactly why they cannot get out of the sales seat.

That realization was the genesis of BlueWater Sales Advisors.

ABOUT MY “WHY”

But the foundation of what drives me goes back much further — to a broken dryer in Southfield, Michigan.

When I was 13 years old, my parents divorced and my mother moved me and my two younger brothers into a new home. Almost immediately, the dryer broke down. For a single mother with three boys and no budget for a service call or a new appliance, this was a genuine crisis. So I did what felt completely natural to me — I took the dryer apart, figured out what was wrong, fixed it, and put it back together.

Funny, I don't remember what was wrong or how I fixed it. My reward was the feeling afterward — knowing that something broken was now working, that my family had one less thing to worry about, that I had made a genuine difference in that moment. That feeling, the satisfaction of easing stress and restoring harmony, became the driving force behind everything that followed.

Looking back at my corporate career, I can imagine what people think when they see my LinkedIn profile. Sales people do move around, but there is a pattern that looks, on the surface, like someone who could not hold a job. It was actually something else entirely. I was finding broken situations, fixing them, and then — once they were running smoothly — moving on to the next broken situation.

I eventually realized the corporate world has a ceiling on impact. Big organizations move slowly. The inertia is real and frustrating. You can fix something meaningful but the benefits from that fix take entirely too long. After 29 years I knew I wanted something substantial — smaller companies, faster results, and the ability to experience the impact in a founder's business and in their life.

BlueWater Sales Advisors exists for one purpose: serve smaller companies, make a bigger impact. Every time.

WHY THIS WORK

One of my earliest clients made everything click.

The owner was exactly the kind of founder I would come to recognize across dozens of engagements — highly technical, naturally gifted at building relationships, and deeply fluent in the company's value delivery. He had hired a junior technical person and put him in a sales role, but that person was actually responding to inquiries and filling orders. The owner was still finding every meaningful new customer himself.

When it came time to hire a dedicated salesperson to hunt for new customers, the recruitment process produced an impressive candidate — bright, motivated, and completely non-technical. She came on board ready to build. And then promptly became confused and disoriented.

There was no infrastructure to onboard her into. The owner could not understand why she did not simply "get it" and copy his moves. In his mind, the knowledge was obvious. What he did not realize was that he had spent years developing a deep, instinctive understanding of how his products solved specific technical problems — and he had no system for transferring any of it to someone else.

The owner had developed into what learning theory calls an "unconscious competent." He knew exactly what he was doing and was extraordinarily skilled at it and operated almost entirely on muscle memory. He just could not transfer his skills and knowledge to someone else. Without that ability, no salesperson he ever hired would be able to replicate what he did.

The solution was not to find a more technical salesperson. It was to build the infrastructure to support the non-technical salesperson's success — clearly defining her role as the relationship and opportunity owner, and giving her structured access to the owner and the junior technical person at the right moments in the sales process. When a prospect raised technical concerns or showed hesitation about whether the solution would perform as promised, she knew exactly who to bring in and when.

Once the team understood the structure, everything changed. She started closing deals. The owner started getting out of the sales seat. That engagement helped me clearly understand the real problem and how to fix it.

I immediately started paying closer attention to how technical companies across the SMB space were approaching this challenge. Every company was struggling with the same problem — and attempting the same two solutions that consistently fail.

On one end of the spectrum, they take a technical expert and try to turn them into a salesperson. I know from experience that this rarely works. Technical experts who move into sales roles prefer talking about technical detail over moving a conversation toward a business decision. Many feel they are crossing to the "dark side" — joining the army of salespeople that focus on closing the deal instead of solving a problem. The result is a salesperson who prefers to educate rather than sell, and almost never closes.

On the other end, they hire a non-technical salesperson and try to teach them all about the technical superiority of their product. These salespeople tend to default to features and functions rather than outcomes — describing what the product does rather than what problem it solves. As every founder eventually discovers, that approach rarely results in a successful sale either.

I once heard an owner tell me with genuine pride that they spent twelve months giving new salespeople technical training before allowing them to talk to a customer. I had to bite my tongue. Twelve months of salary and training investment before a single dollar of new revenue! That is not a sales strategy — that is an infrastructure problem wearing a training budget as a disguise.

The solution is the right person and proper infrastructure to support them.

HOW I AM DIFFERENT

People sometimes ask what makes working with me different. The answer has a few layers.

My background

I am an electrical engineer who spent 29 years selling technically complex solutions to technical decision makers. When I sit across from a founder of a custom solution company, I am not learning their world — I already live in it. That shared perspective creates a level of trust and alignment that is difficult to replicate.

How I work

There is no shortage of consultants who will assess your sales function, identify the gaps, and hand you a detailed plan for fixing them. What happens next is almost always the same. The owner reads the plan, agrees with the diagnosis, and thinks: as soon as I get past this quarter, this hiring crisis, this customer situation — then I will find the time to tackle this. Of course that moment never comes. The priorities keep arriving. The plan sits on a shelf. The gaps remain.

I did not build BlueWater Sales Advisors to be another voice telling you what you should do. Owners are already overloaded — sacrificing family time, juggling competing priorities, and running on empty. The last thing they need is more work on their plate.

So I do the work. I build the job descriptions, the commission structures, the CRM stage-gate processes, the sales playbooks, the hiring systems. Not recommendations. Not a binder. A functioning sales infrastructure that is ready to run when I hand it over.

Fix it now and you arrive at the exit with sophisticated buyers willing to pay a premium — the right people, right processes, and systems that make it all run without you.

A word about people

Building sales infrastructure almost always involves hard conversations and people challenges. People in the wrong roles. Processes that need to be dismantled. Change that feels threatening to people who have been doing things a certain way for years.

I have a philosophy I share with every client when we get to those moments: everyone deserves a measure of grace. But it is not extending grace to keep someone in a role where they cannot be successful. In my experience, when you move someone out of the wrong role, they almost always feel relief — they have known for a long time something was not right, and you are helping them find their right place.

"Glenn brings a level of clarity and objectivity from his decades of practical experience structuring and scaling sales teams across a host of industries. When sales teams get stuck, Glenn is the person you bring in to get them unstuck."

— Dave Feidner, Certified EOS Implementer

These values — the genuine care, the grace in difficult moments, the commitment to doing the work rather than just advising — are not a methodology. They are who I am. They are shaped by my faith and they are non-negotiable in how I work.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Everything I built in my corporate career, I built inside complex, technical selling environments with enterprise-scale customers. ANSYS, Siemens, AVL — these are not simple businesses. They sell engineered solutions to technical buyers through long consultative sales cycles. These organizations had established infrastructure, deep resources, and institutional support. My mid-market clients are building it for the first time. What I bring is the ability to take what I learned building infrastructure at enterprise companies and compress it into a 3-4 month engagement — without the bureaucracy.

  • A consultant assesses your situation and gives you recommendations. An operator builds the solution. When I engage with a client, I am not producing a report or a deck with a 90-day plan for your team to execute. I am doing the work. I sit with your leadership team, get into the details of your sales function, design the infrastructure your business needs, and build it alongside your people. The deliverable is not a strategy. It is a functioning sales organization with the processes, systems, and roles in place to run without me or the owner.

  • I work the engagement personally. I do not hand off client work to associates or subcontractors. When you engage with me, you get 35 years of sales leadership experience applied directly to your business — not delegated to someone else. That is a deliberate decision. The kind of infrastructure work I do requires continuity, trust, and genuine understanding of a client's specific situation. When problems come up that fall outside of sales infrastructure, I tap into a broad network of trusted professionals I can bring to the table.

  • Yes. I apply engineering precision to designing and building sales systems — systematic, measurable, repeatable, and optimized for performance. Your buyers are engineers and technical decision makers. They evaluate solutions systematically. They ask questions most salespeople cannot and should not attempt to answer. They have a finely tuned instinct for when they are being sold rather than educated or guided. I understand the sales process from both sides. I have spent my career with technical buyers — first as the salesperson who had to earn their trust, then as the sales leader who had to teach others how to do it. That background shapes everything about how I design sales infrastructure for technical companies.

THE NUMBERS

Twenty-nine years of corporate experience and seven years building BlueWater Sales Advisors means you are working with someone who has seen these problems in dozens of cases — and solved them every time.

26 clients served since 2019 across manufacturing, industrial equipment, technical services, and B2B engineered solutions.

29 years sales leadership including at ANSYS, Siemens, and AVL.

An Engineer’s systematic approach to sales infrastructure.

When I am not working with clients, you will find me on the water. BlueWater Sales Advisors was not a random name — it came from a genuine love of being out on the water. And there is something in that image that captures what I am trying to do for every founder I work with: get them out of the engine room and back on the bridge, where they belong.