About

About Me

My name is Ralph Burns and I am a guy who loves to teach people how to be hugely successful. I am President and CEO of Antares Enterprises, Inc. where in our online properties, the goal is to generate tons of useful content help sales managers get the best out of their salespeople. We also have a membership site which members gain access to premium content and is paid for by a monthly fee. This model has allowed us to scale our growth exponentially in just a few years time and allows us to continue to provide you with access to great free tips, techniques and strategies to assist you in becoming a major sales management success.

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My History

My First Teaching Experience

Ever since I was a young kid, I have always loved to teach. Maybe its because Mom was (and still is) a teacher, I’m not sure. But even at an early age, I loved to help the other kids in the neighborhood be successful too. Even building the neighborhood soapbox derby car, I read up in Encyclopedia Britannica (no Internet back then!) how to figure out how to build it, then I’d teach the other kids how to do it next (of course this meant I could then have someone to race against too!)

My First Sales Job

After I graduated college, the only job I wanted to get was a sales job, I always knew that “nothing happens unless someone sells something” – its cliched now, but I knew that sales was the foundation to all business. So I took my first sales job selling health club memberships. It was a crappy job, but I realized that although I wasn’t as smooth as the other sales guys, I worked a lot harder than they did – and I was actually pretty good at it.

Sales Management Aspirations…

Although I was a good sales person and making really good commissions, I had aspirations beyond “carrying the bag”. I felt that my teaching gene had to bust out – and the only way I could do it and make the same or even more money was to go into sales management. I knew that if I could teach other sales people the things that made me successful, then they too would become successful.

My First Sales Management Job…And Dismal Failure

In the late 90’s, I finally got my chance. I was finally promoted to sales manager and I man, was psyched!

The problem was that I had no earthly idea what I was doing. The even sadder part was that the sales team I had was actually a really good group, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to lead them to sales success. As a result, my first few quarters of sales were absolutely awful.

My philosophy back then was that since I was a pretty good sales guy, all I needed to do was to tell my sales reps to do things exactly the way I did them and sales success would follow.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. I found that managing others was a lot harder than I had thought.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely over matched – swimming in administrative paperwork, sales rep complaints and everyone expecting me to fix everything for them.

The Turning Point

I desperately wanted personal success and to feel great about what I was doing every day. I knew I had to do something…and I had to do it fast.

Well, like building the soap box car above, one thing I had always been is a studier. I love to learn new stuff and I’m especially interested in how the human brain works and what makes some people successful and others not. So I applied that love of learning and started studying the heck out of what made certain leaders successful – attending leadership seminars and two-day management “boot camps”.

If there was a book on leadership and management, I read it.

I then started incorporating these techniques I had learned into my daily sales management routines. I kept some things and I dumped the ones that didn’t suit my style.

And I noticed something…the techniques actually started to work!

Success At Last

My sales reps, slowly at first, began to actually respond to me, and then it grew more and more and more – as I grew more and more confident in my new found skills. Soon that confidence turned into some small sales wins, then it turned into some even bigger sales wins, then it grew into some enormous trend-setting wins…

So much so that in my first full year as a sales manager, I got my very first #1 national ranking as the top sales manger in the company. In fact, three of my sales people won the highest sales award in my company.

It seemed the more I learned and applied, the better a sales manager I became. And I consider myself extremely fortunate that I continuing to achieve top sales results for the next ten-plus years.

The Blog…And Then…A Business

For years and years, I witnessed other sales manager colleagues always struggling the same way that I once did. I saw them making the same simple mistakes that I had once made – and getting really frustrated.

It was then that I realized: what if I wrote down all that I know about sales management and put it up on the internet?

I looked around online and I found that there was no one else doing it in the way that I knew sales mangers could really be successful…I knew if I could do it, then surely other sales managers could do it too – if they just learned a few of the things that I had learned.

My first blog really caught on, and after readership started to go through the roof, I decided to create what turned out to be the first online course of its kind in the world dedicated to fully teaching the concepts of top sales management. One thing I love is MEATY tips that can be immediately applied to something I’m trying to get better at – that’s how I learn and I knew other sales managers would get a lot out of it.

So here we are today…

Regardless of whether you like me or this blog, my hopes are to inspire sales managers to learn to lead a little better and journal my own real-world sales manager experiences.

Personal

I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world…hands down. My wife is my best friend and the love of my life! She and I had been married for 10+ years and have two wonderful little boys, who I love to spend a ton of time with. They still actually think their Dad is still cool – (not sure how long that will last though!)

I play guitar, exercise a lot, do a bunch of online marketing and have a ton of fun with friends, family, neighbors and my wife and kids.

As for me personally, I am not overly religious but I just love to help others – there is no better feeling in the world. I firmly believe that if you help others succeed…then, you will in turn be successful in equal proportion.

To your success!