Our Circle event, Closing Sales: The Crucial Skills to Nail those Sales, will be held on Tuesday, 14th November 2017.
Meet our mentors:
Stella Abraham, JLL
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Stella Abraham’s love of the city is matched by her expertise in its residential real estate market. As Regional Director, Head of Residential Leasing & Relocation Services for JLL, Stella is responsible for driving new business development in the residential leasing sector and ensures that JLL’s a ctivities are tailored to the needs of key corporate, institutional and individual clients and landlords.
Stella returned to Hong Kong in 2010 to continue her extremely successful real estate career. Her highly regarded international experience and knowledge of Hong Kong, coupled with her exceptional client skills, are just some of Stella’s strengths. Her passion lies in both people and property and she counts being proactive and tenacious amongst her personality traits.
Stella has always played an active role championing women leaders within the Hong Kong business community, and has recently taken on the role as Chair of the JLL Diversity & Inclusion Committee at a local level.
Veronica Modesti, Far East Media Ltd.
Veronica has a wealth of sales and retail experience having worked for large international luxury companies including Jan Logan and Mauboussin. Her specialty is in retail focusing on luxury and fine jewelry. During her time at Mauboussin, she lead a sales team to hit record- setting sales numbers for the company, increased the average clients’ sales expenditure by 10 fold and set a record for the highest single sale on company records.
Veronica runs her own consultancy company ‘Flick” where she has facilitated the expansion of local distributor companies including Made of Paper, including more than 100 point of sales throughout HK. Her focus was on both supplier acquisition and retention and market share expansion, sales optimization and product placement strategies as well as helping online companies set up sales strategy from inception.
Veronica currently works as Group General Manager at Far East Media Ltd., a local company group under whose umbrella are a total of 12 retail stores between Bookazine, Partytime and Sweet World.
Liz Search, Mud Pies Education Limited
Liz is an experienced managing director who started out in a corporate environment before starting her own education business ten years ago. Her first dip into sales came as a hard up student where she accepted a job to sell photo shoots for babies and without any training absolutely nailed it.
While Liz worked for Barclays in the UK, she was responsible for sales and service in the retail sector, managing teams of sales staff through training and support to achieve their sales targets. Liz won a prestigious “Gold” award from Barclays for her performance in her role. Her dedication in training, product and service knowledge and to have her teams at the top, meant that Liz and her teams consistently performed well. Thanks to Liz’s performance and reputation, she was often sent in to trouble shoot poor performing areas and to work with teams to turn sales and service performance around.
For ten years, Liz has run her own business and has used the skills she learned during her days in a corporate environment and applied them to business. Liz believes that customer service and sales =$$$ and that is an important part of what is needed to run a company. Liz is delighted to share some tips for securing sales helping entrepreneurs to close sales and ramp up $$$.
Samar Shaheryar, Baby Hero
Samar Shaheryar is the Co-Founder of Baby Hero, a Hong-Kong based ethical children’s clothing company dedicated to reducing infant mortality while maintaining a sustainable supply chain.
After studying International Relations at Tufts University, Samar was an investment banker at JPMorgan for 10 years in New York City.
Concurrent to her job, she co-founded and ran the youth arm of the charity Developments in Literacy, which educates girls in Pakistan. In Japan and Hong Kong she founded Tokyo Helps and Hong Kong Helps, fundraising organizations dedicated to raising money for emergency disaster relief.
She is a passionate entrepreneur, interested in finding business solutions to the world’s most pressing social problems, especially those affecting marginalized populations.
Elizabeth Loennborn, Digerati.Asia
It all started with a Walkman. When Elizabeth was only 9 years old, she learned that if she sold just 200 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, it could be hers. A shock to all, she earned not just the Walkman, but almost every prize in the catalogue. Selling door-to-door, she sold more than 600 boxes of cookies – more than any Girl Scout ever in the history of Texas. She was subsequently nicknamed, ‘the smart cookie’!
Since then, Elizabeth has pursued a prolific career in Sales. She has over 15 years’ experience in sales and management in Luxury Goods followed by 12 years in digital publishing, ad sales, and product development. She’s been responsible for managing a business group with over US$20m in annual receipts, and grown a publishing startup from US$300k to US$1.2m in annual sales in under 30 months. As a Key territory manager for Reed Elsevier, she more than doubled sales in under a year, setting a company-wide sales record, selling more than US$1m – exceeding her annual target by 25% in the first quarter, alone.
For the past 4 years, she has been bringing her unique skillset to small businesses and entrepreneurs in Asia and the Middle East. Clients include restaurateurs, therapists, executive coaches, race car drivers, jewelry designers, digital publishers, app developers, and professional associations.
