Lisa Canning: Assisting Early-Stage Businesses to Grow
The 10 Most Influential People to Follow, 2022
With a love for the arts, entrepreneurship,
creativity, and innovation, Lisa Canning, CEO and Founder of Sales
Maven LLC, has developed and helped others develop, ventures at the intersection
of their creativity and business ideas for over 30 years. Lisa Canning is a
trailblazing female entrepreneur who started her first business at the age of
17 from her Northwestern University dorm room.
Getting past 1to 5 million is a really hard
thing to do without an affordable village of savvy support that is
sophisticated and agile. According to Lisa, most small businesses don’t have
the necessary people or processes to continue to grow. Her vision is to help
more companies be able to create greater traction and grow more quickly with a
dedicated team that, while outsourced, fits within their company culture and
provides them with exactly what they need to create predictable growth. She
says, “Nothing feels better as a founder than knowing you are in
control of your dream and on the right path to success.”
Sales Maven
Lisa’s Clarinet Shop, another of Lisa’s
businesses, was used to bootstrap Sales Maven. She is a trained professional
clarinetist who has spent the last 40 years assisting others in the music
industry in turning their ideas into viable enterprises.
Sales Maven provides sales and marketing
consulting services to small firms in the United States with less than 20
employees that have one or more established niches and require a cost-effective
sales and marketing plan. The team combines people, processes, and sales and
marketing activities to produce predictable income in 6-12 months at a low
cost, allowing owners to scale, exit, or simply sleep better at night.
The company’s service offerings are a blend
of digital marketing and traditional sales support. SEO, video, webinars,
written and social content strategy and development, email marketing, cold list
building, inside and outside sales support, sales script writing, video
letters, and management services are all available with its staff of over 100
experts.
Practical Work Experience and Learning
Through It
Lisa was groomed to be a professional
clarinetist, a soloist who performs with orchestras, but she realized she was
far more interested in assisting people than in putting herself in the
spotlight. She started her first business from her dorm room at Northwestern
University when she was 17 years old, and she rapidly realized that the musical
abilities she was honing taught her almost all she needed to know about
business. She says, “The parts I didn’t know—reading a profit and loss
statement and managing money—I learned from my father, who was a successful
criminal attorney turned businessman. What I discovered early on was that it takes
an incredible amount of tenacity, perseverance, willingness to fall down seven
times and stand back up eight, organizational skills, and ability to assess
risk to play the clarinet well or grow a business.
Performing in real time, while not a direct
comparison to the daily challenges of building a business, has taught Lisa how
to accomplish more in far less time by using the knowledge to communicate and
act in an organized way to achieve results faster. She sees that the pressure
one faces to perform in ‘real time’ teaches him or her a lot about delivering
excellence efficiently, as she has discovered. She feels grateful for the
discipline she gained from her journey as a musician and what it brings to her
creative problem-solving abilities and communication style in business.
Sales Maven’s CEO
Lisa strives to offer a friendly,
supportive atmosphere for her staff so that they are inspired to go above and
beyond to meet the requirements of consumers in any situation. Her role is to
continue to improve the organization’s and team’s skills in order to provide
even more value to consumers. She says, “I work hard at building an
open, communicative virtual work environment that offers enough structure and
equally enough opportunity for advancement, creativity, and new ideas to be
shared.” She believes that when employees can tell you have their
best interests at heart, your customers will know it too.
Updating during the Pandemic
It’s not simple to run an established
company and a startup at the same time. After building up all of its service
offerings with a much smaller clientele, Sales Maven was at a crossroads and
ready to shift to a bigger customer base just before COVID-19 began. As a
result, in 2020, it renamed itself Sales Maven.
Sales Maven’s staff has always dealt with
customers with revenue of 0-500K, but most of them couldn’t afford to
accomplish what they wanted to do with the company since they were so young. As
a result, when contracts expired, Sales Maven let those clients go and didn’t
seek additional potential clients. Lisa says, “At the time, we didn’t
realize that COVID-19 was literally right around the corner.”
When COVID hit the US, it brought both
businesses to a standstill. Lisa built Sales Maven to help businesses like her
clarinet shop (1M+ in revenue with less than 20 employees operating in the US
who have 1 or more proven niches and need an efficient growth strategy). “So,
while the music industry was down 50-75% overall, the SEO strategy we
implemented for Lisa’s Clarinet Shop helped us end 2020 with only a 10% decline
in business because of the marketing and sales support we received from Sales
Maven. The synergy of both companies got us through a tough period, frankly, “ Lisa
says.
Greatest Achievement
Lisa is extremely proud of her Sales Maven
team. The team’s goal, from Sana Umer, her co-founder, to Heather McNeice, her
chief operating officer, was to hire the best and brightest digital marketers
from around the world who could bring a fresh perspective, agility, and
affordability to the marketplace so that more companies could afford to build
robust sales and marketing engines that would significantly improve their
bottom lines. The firm’s workforce is curious, takes initiative, works
extremely hard, and proves their capacity to lead on a regular basis. She
asserts, “I am so proud of them. We truly have a remarkable team
committed to our client’s success. In the music industry, it has always been
really challenging to build this kind of team. While we have it now at the
clarinet shop, it was so much easier to cultivate with Sales Maven. “ She
further adds, “It also means a lot to me that we are building this kind
of culture with a global workforce of women, many of whom are moms. Our staff
of both men and women works for us from Kenya, Pakistan, India, Belize,
Honduras, Venezuela, Nigeria, and the USA. ”
Enjoy Work Everyday
Lisa says when defining her work-life
balance, “I love the work I do.” It may be troublesome, she says, since if it
doesn’t seem like work, it’s easy to spend all of your time doing it. She is
continually striving for more balance in her life for the sake of gaining a new
viewpoint.
Lisa swims in the pool most mornings and
goes for daily walks with her dog Fiona, when she has the opportunity, she
likes preparing meals for her family and generally has 1-2 individuals under
her wing who she mentors. “Fortunately, my husband is very supportive
and is a decent cook when he applies himself. It’s great to be married to a man
who values the investments I have made and encourages me daily,” Lisa
says.
Future Plans
Lisa’s goal is to help companies realize
their value potential while also reaching their ultimate purpose via
creativity. She says, “Our goals are to see how many companies we can
help achieve their goals.” There is nothing more satisfying than seeing the
value you can bring to a company that is excellent at delivering a product or
service but simply needs skill sets they don’t have in sales and marketing to
achieve the results they most want. “ She believes that we all
need to use our gifts in life to their highest and best use. When we work with
others who do the same, we exponentially multiply their impact. Synergies- when
combined with excellent strategy and execution- create momentum, which in turn
creates success.