Todd Herman, an international performance coaching and training expert from Edmonton, Canada, was voted the World’s Greatest Salesperson yesterday. Using real-time SMS voting, a live audience selected the winner during the OgilvyOne “Can you sell, or else?” seminar at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
Herman and the runners-up – Eric Polins, managing partner of a marketing consulting firm from Tampa, USA, and Lee Abbas, a former Panasonic marketing executive and most recently an English teacher in Hokkaido, Japan – all presented live on stage their pitch for selling the Motorola Milestone (Droid in the USA) phone.
In addition to receiving the title of World’s Greatest Salesperson, Mr Herman receives a three month fellowship at OgilvyOne Worldwide to help craft a sales guide to the 21st century.
OgilvyOne launched a global search to find the World’s Greatest Salesperson through an online video competition on YouTube where contestants were asked to submit a two minute pitch on how they would sell a red brick. The multi-platform contest generated over 230 submissions on YouTube from 12 countries, more than 100,000 visits to the YouTube brand channel.
A new reality show inspired by contest was also announced by OgilvyOne Worldwide and OgilvyEntertainment, in collaboration with Generate and MSN. The half-hour, episodic broadband series developed by OgilvyEntertainment and Generate will take the form of a “makeover” show that will celebrate the "salesperson" inside all of us. Casting for the series will be conducted through video submissions.
