About

When not outside or hiking or cooking or remodeling my house, I’m the Chair of the Western Oregon University Foundation and the General Manager of sales and marketing at CTL, a Portland, Oregon based technology solutions company. We make and market TVs, PCs, Laptops, Servers and Netbooks under our CTL, Nexus and 2GoPC brands. I love technology and everyday I get to work on really fun stuff like: website development; brand strategy and product and package design (there’s also some stuff that’s not so fun… like budgeting and working on contracts, but we’ll focus on the positives here).

I went to the University of Oregon, took classes that were the most interesting to me and ended up with a double major in Economics and Psychology.  For the last 17 years I’ve gotten the chance to learn and grow in various sales and marketing roles both in consumer products and high tech.

My first job out of college was selling boxed chocolates door-to-door to mom and pop pharmacies and groceries, drug store chains and mass merchandisers. Let me tell you something about interrupting a busy pharmacist owner of an independent drug store with a walk-in cold call sales pitch to invest in an end-cap of thousands of dollars of perishable, non-returnable and relatively expensive luxury food items for his struggling store… you figure out very quickly what works and what doesn’t.

I learned a lot and ended up managing national accounts and sales teams. I learned how to effectively recruit, train, manage and motivate teams of sales people and how to sell to cautious buyers at HQs of national and international corporations.

My career in high tech is different in many ways from when I was selling boxed chocolates, but the core lessens learned still apply. Empathize with the customer. Put yourself in their shoes. Develop a relationship with them and respect them. Understand their wants and needs and provide them information about how your product can satisfy these wants and needs and something magical happens: you have created value. Then you’re no longer selling to the customer, you’re helping them.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about boxed chocolates or $20,000 servers. It doesn’t matter if your walking in off the street cold calling a drug store owner or building a website or working on your social media outreach strategy… despite the title of this page, I’ve learned that it’s not ‘About Me’…the single most important thing that I’ve learned is very simple: It’s that successful sales and marketing is always just about the customer.

You can connect with me on Twitter (@mahanay), on Facebook (facebook.com/mahanay), on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/mahanay) or on my non-work alter-ego website at www.MichaelMahanay.com