Peter M. Thomas Founder & President

How I started with Hillspoint

I started Hillspoint in 2003 after many years of running large, high-powered global sales and marketing teams, building new businesses from scratch in a multitude of different industries, and opening new country (and continent) markets by arriving with nothing more than an Amex card, a used one-way plane ticket and two suitcases – one for clothes and one for product samples and a few brochures. I was, and am, committed in the extreme!

I’ve known from the day I started in my first sales role, that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to winning a new customer’s business. If every customer was the same, had the same set of needs, perceived value in the same way, and processed information the same – then I was going to be little more than a trained – and well-dressed – robot, and it wouldn’t be too long before someone realized I was “superfluous to requirements”! That’s fancy talk for dismissable and unmissable!

As a sales rep, sales manager and in many roles with much fancier titles, I excelled – blew past every objective ever given to me – by realizing every customer was different, every one had different needs, saw value in completely different ways, and processed and absorbed information totally differently. So why did others insist on creating go-to-market strategies that were geared around the entire premise that a cookie-cutter approach to the marketplace would work in a business environment that changed faster than a politicians convictions!? And then get bent out of shape when the numbers stunk!

The scary part? — 30 years later, and little has changed. Stagnating sales results and falling profits are the scorecard that proves the point. The majority of companies need to change – quickly.

My message is simple, and said frequently and loudly – Markets don’t write checks. Customers do!

My mission is a little more complicated – to work with you and every one of our clients to re-engineer your revenue supply chain so that your entire enterprise becomes customer-obsessed. And to evangelize the core belief into your team that every customer interaction, no matter how small, no matter with whom, impacts revenue, future opportunity and long-term profits.