About David Craig White

B2B Sales Trainer, Coach & Consultant

David Craig White is a British B2B sales trainer, coach, consultant, author and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in B2B sales.

His career has taken him from frontline B2B sales through sales leadership, training, coaching, consulting, entrepreneurship and commercial growth roles within SaaS and technology companies.

Over that time, David has trained and coached more than 10,000 salespeople across more than 120 countries.

He has worked with salespeople, sales managers, senior leaders, founders and businesses at almost every stage of the sales journey, from developing fundamental selling skills to building sales organisations, developing managers as coaches, entering new markets and helping companies move towards enterprise sales.

David is also a qualified Master Coach and NLP Master Practitioner, giving him a professional coaching foundation that extends well beyond sales techniques and methodologies.

He is the creator of The Bold Sales Methodology^TM and author of Stop Talking Start Selling^TM.

Today, David works with B2B companies through sales training, sales performance coaching, sales leadership coaching and B2B sales consulting.

Few B2B sales trainers combine this breadth of hands-on commercial, leadership, training and coaching experience.

Based in Denmark, David works with companies in the UK, across Europe and internationally.

Jump to a Section

• Background
• Career & Experience
• Building & Growing Businesses
• B2B Sales Training
• Sales Performance Coaching
• Sales Leadership Coaching
• B2B Sales Consulting
• David’s Sales Methodology
• David’s Book
• David’s Approach
• David’s Sales Philosophy
• Work With David

Background

David grew up in Salford, Greater Manchester, and began his sales career at the age of 19.

His first roles were in consumer sales, including financial services and insurance, before he moved into business-to-business sales and was introduced to cold calling.

The transition was not an immediate success.

His first experience of B2B selling was difficult enough that he left the role after six months.

Rather than deciding sales was not for him, David returned with a determination to understand why some salespeople succeeded while others struggled.

That decision became an important turning point in his career.

What followed was more than two decades spent learning sales from almost every possible angle.

David moved from prospecting and selling into sales leadership, training, coaching, consulting and eventually building and running businesses himself.

In 2006, his career moved into B2B software and technology in the SaaS industry.

It was there that sales became much more than simply a job.

David became increasingly interested in how people sell, why certain behaviours produce better results, how sales organisations should be structured and how good salespeople can be developed rather than simply recruited.

That interest would eventually become a central part of his career.

Many of the fundamentals David learned through experience now form part of his guide to B2B Sales for Beginners, which explains how modern B2B sales works and what people entering the profession need to understand.

Career & Experience

David learned sales by selling.

He has prospected, made thousands of cold calls, beaten gatekeepers, run discovery meetings, delivered presentations, negotiated deals, managed pipelines, opened new markets, closed business, lost business and carried responsibility for producing revenue.

Over time, those responsibilities expanded.

David moved into sales management and eventually into executive leadership, becoming responsible not only for his own results but for building teams, developing people, improving processes and creating the conditions required for other salespeople to perform.

His career has included positions such as VP Sales, Chief Commercial Officer, Managing Director and Head of Training & Leadership Development.

His in-house career has included roles with fast-growing SaaS and technology companies such as Zmags, eMagCreator (Papeer), Waimea Digital, Trustpilot, Ocean.io and Dreamdata.

Alongside those roles, David has spent significant periods working independently as a sales trainer, coach and consultant.

His client work has included projects with companies such as Siteimprove, Falcon.io (Brandwatch), Clerk.io, SDL, Xebia and Mitek Systems, alongside many other B2B organisations and individual sales professionals.

He has also successfully founded, built and sold his own businesses.

This has allowed David to see sales from several different perspectives.

He understands what it feels like to carry the number, and what it takes to manage the people carrying the number.

He understands the importance of having a clear and repeatable B2B sales process around the people responsible for generating revenue.

And as an entrepreneur, he understands what it means to build a business where sales performance can determine whether the company succeeds or fails.

That combination has shaped the way David now approaches sales training, coaching and consulting.

Returning to the Sales Floor

After years spent in sales leadership, training, coaching and consulting, David made a deliberate decision to return to frontline B2B sales.

He wanted to find out how much selling had really changed.

That opportunity came through Dreamdata.

What began as a sales consulting engagement developed into David joining the company as an Enterprise Account Executive, where he spent almost two years carrying a target and selling directly again.

The challenge was not simply to inherit an established enterprise sales motion.

David helped develop the internal sales playbook and infrastructure required to take the company into enterprise accounts and then put that approach into practice himself.

Cold outbound became a central part of the strategy.

Rather than relying solely on inbound demand, David used targeted outbound prospecting to create enterprise opportunities, open larger accounts and help establish Dreamdata in the enterprise sales space.

The experience reinforced something David had believed for years.

The tools change.

Technology changes.

Buyers become better informed.

But the fundamentals of good B2B selling remain remarkably consistent.

Understanding people, creating relevant conversations, asking good questions, qualifying properly, communicating value and having the confidence to lead a commercial conversation still matter.

Returning to direct selling also meant David was not teaching sales from memories of something he had done many years earlier.

He was testing his own principles in a modern B2B SaaS environment.

And they still worked.

Building & Growing Businesses

Much of David’s career has taken place inside fast-growing technology companies.

Rather than spending his career in one organisation or moving directly from sales into training, he has repeatedly worked inside businesses going through periods of growth, international expansion and commercial change.

At Zmags, David helped drive international expansion into multiple markets during a period in which the company raised its Series A and Series B funding rounds.

Later, as Chief Commercial Officer at eMagCreator, David was responsible for commercial growth during a period in which the company received the Børsen Gazelle Award for being one of the fastest growing companies in Denmark.

At Trustpilot, David became Head of Sales Training & Leadership Development during one of the company’s fastest periods of international growth.

He was responsible for sales training and development across the organisation, including onboarding more than 300 salespeople over approximately two years and helping build the frameworks used to develop both salespeople and sales managers as the organisation scaled.

David has also experienced business growth from the founder’s seat.

In 2009, he founded Advertiserbay, the first online marketplace where businesses could buy and sell online and offline advertising space.

He built the company from the ground up before it was acquired by a private investor in 2013.

A Track Record of Commercial Success

A clear pattern runs through David’s career.

It is no coincidence that the businesses he has helped have repeatedly gone on to achieve significant commercial milestones.

That includes international expansion, rapid revenue growth, major funding rounds and acquisitions.

This has not simply come from joining successful companies at the right time.

David has typically been involved in the work required to create that growth.

He has helped develop go-to-market strategies, build sales processes, sales playbooks, open new markets and restructure commercial teams.

He has also executed the work himself, from cold outbound prospecting through to enterprise sales.

At Zmags, he helped drive international expansion.

At eMagCreator, he led commercial growth during the period in which the company received a Børsen Gazelle Award.

He built Advertiserbay from scratch before successfully selling the business.

At Trustpilot, he helped build the sales training and leadership development infrastructure during a period of rapid international growth.

At Ocean.io, he restructured the commercial organisation, sales process and playbook ahead of the company’s Series A funding round.

And at Dreamdata, he helped establish the company’s enterprise sales motion and prove that targeted cold outbound could open larger accounts.

The companies have been different.

The pattern has been remarkably consistent.

Those experiences have reinforced one of David’s core beliefs:

Sales does not exist in isolation.

Positioning, pricing, product, management, marketing, recruitment, incentives, processes and the quality of the people surrounding a sales team can all influence whether revenue grows.

Sometimes a salesperson needs training.

Sometimes they need coaching.

And sometimes the salesperson is not the problem at all.

B2B Sales Training

David has been involved in sales training for more than two decades.

During that time, he has trained and coached more than 10,000 salespeople across more than 120 countries.

His experience ranges from onboarding salespeople at the beginning of their careers to developing experienced Account Executives, sales managers and senior commercial leaders.

David’s approach to sales training has been heavily shaped by what he has seen happen after traditional training sessions finish.

A good workshop can create energy.

It can introduce new ideas.

It can challenge the way somebody thinks.

But none of that matters very much if nothing changes when the salesperson gets back in front of a buyer.

For David, sales training is therefore about behaviour change and improved performance rather than simply delivering content.

That starts with understanding what is really preventing a sales team from performing before deciding what they need to be taught.

Sometimes the problem is skill.

Sometimes it is confidence.

Sometimes it is poor qualification, weak prospecting, inconsistent discovery, unclear positioning or a broken sales process.

And sometimes what initially appears to be a sales training problem is actually a management, coaching, cultural or go-to-market problem.

David therefore combines training with diagnosis, observation, coaching, reinforcement and practical application.

Training is connected to real conversations, real opportunities and real commercial challenges.

The aim is not simply to create better-trained salespeople.

It is to develop people who can sell.

David’s work is supported by more than 200 reviews and recommendations from salespeople and leaders he has worked with throughout his career.

Sales Performance Coaching

One of the biggest influences on David’s work is his understanding that sales performance is rarely just about sales technique.

David is a qualified NLP Master Coach and Practitioner with extensive experience in one-to-one coaching.

That coaching background allows him to work with the person behind the performance problem rather than correcting what they say during a sales call.

Two salespeople can understand exactly what they are supposed to do and still produce completely different results.

Very often, the difference is confidence.

It can also be fear of rejection, fear of failure, hesitation, self-doubt, limiting beliefs, poor habits or difficulty dealing with pressure.

These issues show up throughout sales.

They affect whether someone picks up the phone.

They affect how confidently they lead a discovery meeting.

They affect whether they challenge a buyer.

They affect how they respond to objections.

They affect negotiation.

And they affect whether somebody has enough confidence to walk away from a bad opportunity.

David’s sales performance coaching therefore goes beyond teaching sales techniques.

He works to understand the underlying barriers affecting someone’s behaviour and performance and helps them change the way they think, respond and act.

This matters because confidence is one of the foundations of good selling.

A salesperson does not need to be loud, aggressive or extroverted.

But they do need enough confidence to ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, hold their position and operate as an equal in a commercial conversation.

David’s combination of sales experience and professional coaching experience allows him to work on both sides of that equation.

The sales skill itself.

And the person responsible for applying it.

Sales Leadership Coaching

Having spent many years in sales leadership roles, David knows the pressure that comes with being responsible for people and performance.

Sales leaders have to hit targets, deal with underperformance and make difficult decisions on a daily basis.

They also have to motivate salespeople, build confidence and handle problems that rarely come with a simple answer.

Earlier in his career, David became frustrated with how much leadership development was built around models and theory. Those things can help, but they rarely prepare a manager for the reality of leading people day to day.

As David often puts it:

“Theory doesn’t help when the building is on fire.”

Leadership problems rarely arrive as neat case studies. They happen in real time, with real people, when a decision needs to be made.

That is why David’s sales leadership coaching is built around real situations.

He works one-to-one with sales managers and leaders on the challenges they are facing now.

The focus is practical: understand the problem, make a better decision and improve the way they lead.

Coaching is a major part of that approach.

David believes strongly in the manager as a coach principle, where managers should not become the person who always has the answer.

They should help the people around them think better, solve problems and become more independent.

That philosophy has shaped much of his leadership development work.

At Falcon.io (Brandwatch), part of David’s original brief was to help create a stronger coaching culture across the sales organisation.

His work developed into manager coaching, development planning, peer coaching, internal coach mentoring and train-the-trainer programmes.

At Trustpilot, David led Sales Training & Leadership Development during a major period of international growth where his role again included helping managers develop and coach the people around them as the sales organisation scaled.

He has also worked directly with managers and executives across organisations including Siteimprove, Xebia, Nashtech and other international B2B companies.

The goal is not to fill managers with more theory.

It is to help them become better leaders when it actually matters.

B2B Sales Consulting

Sales consulting quickly became a natural extension of David’s sales training and coaching work.

When companies brought him in to improve sales performance, the diagnosis often revealed a bigger problem: The salespeople were not always the issue.

Many organisations lacked a clear sales process, structure or sales playbook.

Others struggled with positioning, outbound sales, account-based selling and their go-to-market strategy as a whole.

Sometimes even the basic infrastructure was missing.

Having spent years inside fast-growing SaaS companies, David had taken much of this for granted.

Sales processes, playbooks, CRM structure and go-to-market strategy were simply part of building a functioning sales organisation.

Working independently changed that perspective.

David quickly realised that what felt like common knowledge inside experienced SaaS teams was far from common in many businesses.

Even today, companies often expect salespeople to perform without giving them the structure or systems they need to succeed.

That realisation became an important part of David’s B2B sales consulting.

His background as a sales leader had already given him deep experience in the operational side of sales. That included building processes and playbooks, structuring commercial teams and working extensively with CRM platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive.

Over time, that combination of sales leadership, training and operational experience became a major part of the way David worked with companies.

It also reinforced something he had seen repeatedly throughout his career.

Sometimes the people need developing.

Sometimes the system around them needs fixing.

David’s Sales Methodology

David developed the framework behind The Bold Sales Methodology after years spent observing the way salespeople invest their time and manage opportunities.

It grew from a simple belief.

Salespeople should not behave like desperate vendors chasing every possible deal.

They should think more like experienced consultants who understand that their time has value.

Too many salespeople chase prospects who have little intention of buying.

They confuse activity with progress.

They continue pursuing weak opportunities because they are frightened of losing pipeline.

They allow buyers to control every stage of the sales process.

And they become so focused on closing the customer that they stop asking whether the customer is worth closing.

The Bold Sales Methodology^TM takes a different approach.

It is built around five principles:

• Selective Prospecting
• Reverse Qualification
• Opportunity Engineering
• Tactical Positioning
• Assumptive Closing

At the centre of the methodology is a question David believes salespeople should continually ask themselves:

Is this still worth my selling time?

A bold salesperson is not an aggressive salesperson.

They are confident, consultative and commercially aware.

They respect the buyer, but they also respect themselves.

They ask difficult questions.

They challenge assumptions.

They are prepared to qualify opportunities out.

And they understand that successful B2B selling is not about convincing everybody to buy.

It is about identifying the right opportunities and helping the right customers make a good buying decision.

The methodology is designed to influence how a salesperson thinks and behaves throughout a sale, rather than simply giving them another rigid process to follow.

David’s Book

David is the author of Stop Talking Start Selling, first published in 2017.

The book brings together many of the ideas that have shaped his approach to selling, including sales prospecting, qualification, understanding buyer motives, presenting value, negotiation, closing and sales psychology.

Its central message remains relevant to David’s work today.

Good selling is not about talking more.

It is not about memorising clever closing techniques.

It is not about delivering a perfect script.

And it is certainly not about manipulating somebody into buying something they do not need.

Good selling is about understanding people.

It is about asking better questions.

Listening properly.

Understanding businesses.

Thinking commercially.

And helping buyers make good decisions.

Many of those principles later became part of David’s wider sales methodology, training programmes and coaching philosophy.

Understanding People Is Part of Understanding Sales

After more than two decades working with salespeople, David believes sales performance is as much a human subject as it is a commercial one.

Processes matter.

Methodologies matter.

Skills matter.

But people still have to execute them.

Every salesperson brings confidence, fear, habits, assumptions, motivation, personality and previous experiences into every sales conversation.

That is one reason David has spent so much of his career studying human behaviour, psychology and coaching alongside sales.

Understanding why somebody behaves in a particular way often makes it much easier to help them change it.

That can mean helping an experienced salesperson rebuild their confidence.

It can mean helping somebody stop avoiding difficult conversations.

It can mean challenging beliefs that have quietly limited someone’s performance for years.

Or it can simply mean helping somebody recognise that they are already far more capable than their current behaviour suggests.

Sometimes the salesperson already knows what to do.

The real coaching challenge is understanding why they are not doing it.

The commercial outcome still matters.

But sometimes improving that outcome starts somewhere much deeper than another sales technique.

David’s Approach

David’s style is straightforward.

There is very little interest in sales theatre, motivational slogans or complicated frameworks created to make simple ideas sound clever.

The work has to be useful.

A salesperson should be able to leave a training session and apply something.

Someone being coached should understand themselves better and behave differently.

A manager should become a better coach.

A sales leader should understand the problem more clearly.

And a company paying for consulting should be able to make better decisions because of it.

David is also comfortable challenging established thinking.

More than 20 years in B2B sales has taught him that companies can become very good at repeating processes that no longer work.

More activity does not always create more pipeline.

More pipeline does not always create more revenue.

More sales training does not automatically create better salespeople.

And adding another sales tool rarely fixes a problem caused by poor thinking, weak management or a broken process.

David will also not automatically assume that training is the answer simply because a company initially asks for sales training.

If the real problem sits somewhere else, he will say so.

The starting point is understanding the problem properly.

Everything else follows from there.

David’s Sales Philosophy

David believes great salespeople should have backbone.

They should be curious enough to understand the customer, confident enough to challenge them and commercially aware enough to recognise when an opportunity is not worth pursuing.

They should respect the buyer without letting them take control.

They should understand that their own time has value.

And they should know the difference between being persistent and simply chasing somebody who does not want to buy.

Confidence sits underneath much of this.

Not false confidence.

Not arrogance.

The quiet confidence to ask the question that needs asking.

To challenge when necessary.

To listen.

To admit when they do not know something.

To say no.

And to walk away when an opportunity makes no commercial sense.

David also believes there is no single personality type required to become a strong B2B salesperson.

Some successful salespeople are naturally outgoing.

Others are quiet.

Some are highly analytical.

Others are exceptional relationship builders.

David explores those differences in Sales Hunters, Farmers & Hybrids, where he looks at how different types of salespeople can be suited to different selling environments.

What matters more is developing the characteristics required to perform consistently.

• Resilience
• Curiosity
• People skills
• Authenticity
• Adaptability
• Confidence
• Humility
• Structure

And the ability to keep learning.

David explores those qualities in more detail in What Makes a Good B2B Salesperson.

The best sales organisations create an environment where those qualities can develop.

That requires more than sales techniques.

It requires good management, strong coaching, clear expectations, sensible processes and a sales culture where people are encouraged to think.

That is ultimately what connects David’s work across B2B sales training, coaching, leadership and consulting.

The objective is not to create people who can repeat a sales methodology.

It is to develop people who can sell.

Work With David

David Craig White provides sales training, performance coaching, sales leadership coaching and consulting to B2B companies across Europe and internationally.

His work combines more than 20 years of practical B2B sales experience with professional coaching qualifications, commercial leadership, entrepreneurship and experience gained from training and coaching more than 10,000 salespeople across more than 120 countries.

Engagements can range from one-to-one coaching and focused training workshops through to larger sales development programmes and B2B sales consulting projects.

Whether the challenge is an individual salesperson whose confidence is limiting their performance, a manager who needs to become a better coach, a sales team that needs to improve or a company trying to build a stronger commercial organisation, the starting point is the same:

Understand what is really happening.
Then fix the right problem.

Explore David’s B2B sales services or book a free consultation with David to discuss working together.

Page last updated: 16 September 2026