To millions of salespeople who graduated from the legendary Professional Selling Skills (PSS) course originally sold by Xerox, the name Gene Keluche doesn’t ring a bell. Sure, they know Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins or Brian Tracy. Yet Gene Keluche, who headed the team that created the most successful sales-training course in America, can claim that his efforts helped more salespeople’s careers than all of the above combined.

As a founder and CEO of International Conference Resorts Inc., Keluche operates five conference center resort properties with annual revenues of more than $100 million. What sets Keluche apart from traditional CEOs is his unusual management style and uncommon wisdom. While his background includes a Harvard MBA, a degree in engineering and five years as a naval aviator, Keluche suggests that we should be careful about what we want to pursue in life. He advises, “Choose those pursuits, which give you the greatest joy, and you will do them much better. Do not let somebody prescribe for you what should be your life. Wait and see; weigh and feel the flow. Then you will be fulfilled, and you will perform much better.” When people meet Keluche the first time, they are unprepared for the boundless curiosity driving his far-reaching pursuits. He has a heart as big as Colorado, where he makes his home. What surprises people most is his ability to instantly connect with everyone. While some interpret this ability as charisma, people close to Keluche know that it comes from his deep spirituality.

Keluche is a Native American from the Wintun tribe, a nation that made the Sacramento Valley of northern California their home for more than 8,000 years. Keluche says, “I was raised in a foster home and did not know until I was 12 that I was Indian. I tried to learn what that meant, and ever since then I’ve worked with Native American communities, trying to be helpful.”

He remembers how he would explore his Indian heritage as a schoolboy. “I’d take off with my little dog and stay all weekend in the woods, running trap lines during the week and learning about nature.” Over time, he discovered that nature offers spiritual healing because it allows us to reconnect with the essence of ourselves. “I discovered that we have little control over most things around us except our own selves,” he says. “Out in the woods I reinvented myself: I was small and insignificant and at the same time I became one with all that matters.”

The Start

Looking back on the evolution of his career, Keluche credits his insights into the sales process as one of the driving forces of his success in business. In the interview with Selling Power, he recalled how PSS came into being.

“The original sales-training course was developed for Pfizer,” says Keluche, “to prepare pharmaceutical salespeople for a three-minute sales call with a doctor or pharmacist.” His team did extensive research while traveling with pharmaceutical sales reps. One of the key design elements of the course were nondirective interviewing techniques discovered by the renowned psychologist Dr. Carl Rogers.

In 1966, right after finishing Harvard Business School, Keluche joined a research and training company called Basic Systems Inc., in New York. Basic Systems was applying the principles of behavioral science to the development of self-instructional education and training systems. The company’s 85 psychologists helped clients analyze the behavior patterns of high performers and understand barriers to performance. They examined the effectiveness of product lines and determined the best way to run efficient sales operations. The researchers found that a nondirective, consultative approach to selling also proved most effective for training salespeople.

In order to help Pfizer reps communicate more effectively with physicians, they were taught a number of different ways to probe for information, confirm their findings, summarize the information and lead the interaction in the direction they were instructed to pursue. It was the beginning of a consultative, needs-benefits sales approach where the salesperson followed a psychologically intelligent road map from the opening to the close.

“The other important factor,” says Keluche, “was that part of the program focused on effective listening. Salespeople learned how to selectively listen for information and covertly summarize the parts that would help them advance the persuasion process.” Keluche says that one of the key qualities of a successful salesperson is the ability to pay close attention and listen selectively to the customer’s story. “Successful salespeople are good at selective listening and effective at taking notes. Then they summarize the information, confirming their understanding before they present the benefits of their solution that satisfy the customers’ stated needs.

“The original course,” says Keluche, “was called Listening, Probing and Shaping, which was technically accurate, but by no means a catchy name; however, it was very successful for Pfizer.” When the company was sold to Xerox, Keluche stayed on to promote the course. Xerox renamed the program the Professional Selling Skills Course, or PSS, and within a short time, tens of thousands of salespeople enrolled to learn its innovative selling techniques. “It’s amazing that the original course continues to produce results,” says Keluche, who bought the most recent version to train his sales team. What’s astonishing is that salespeople who have graduated from the PSS course more than a decade ago still retain and apply the information. Xerox sold the sales-training course to Times Mirror, and it later changed hands and moved to Achieve Global, a privately held company that keeps a low profile and does not advertise the origins of the course.

If you build it, they will come

After leaving Xerox, Keluche went into the business of building executive conference centers and conference resorts. His company invested in big old estates and converted them into executive retreats with 100 to 150 rooms. Says Keluche, “My former partner was Steve Harrison, and the name of the original company was Harrison Conference Centers.” Keluche helped Harrison convert old mansions into small executive retreats and position them in the market as full-service dedicated learning environments.

The concept proved very successful and the market quickly expanded. In 1976 Keluche moved on to establish his existing company, International Conference Resorts Inc. (ICR) by developing a property called Scottsdale Conference Resort. The 325-room facility became very successful in a short time. While hotels provide corporations with meeting or function rooms, Keluche’s team specializes in running technologically advanced meetings while providing a full range of services specifically designed to satisfy corporate meeting needs.

He quickly learned what companies needed to run a successful corporate meeting and began to offer more services to suit their needs for recreation, recognition, motivation and learning. Over time, Keluche developed additional properties, and today ICR manages conference resort properties in Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey and North Carolina. “We bundle a variety of meeting services to sell a complete package to companies, he says. These services carry a price tag of upwards of $100,000 for the typical meeting. Selling the bundled services of a conference center is a complex undertaking that involves a long purchasing cycle, many decision makers and often a complex decision-making process. With the experience gained from developing PSS, Keluche mapped out a consultative sales process for his team of 60 salespeople and 60 conference coordinators who identify purchasing behavior, measure the progress of each sales opportunity and evaluate the meeting outcomes on a cost-benefit basis.

To focus his sales team on solving customer problems while at the same time keeping his service team focused, Keluche developed from scratch a CRM software program, with client/server architecture. Quick to take advantage of new technology, Keluche plans to move soon to a Web-based application.

The eagle’s eye

Looking back at the evolution of the profession of selling, Keluche says, “More than half of our clients are conducting marketing and sales programs at our facilities, so we get a chance to see many different approaches to training and motivating sales teams. We see that the world is moving toward team selling and relationship-focused selling. In many companies the salesperson assumes the role of a team leader who engages different players within the company to act in concert to deliver magic for the customer.” To Keluche, the behavioral aspects of selling have not changed. What has changed are the greater demands made on the salesperson to understand the clients’ needs and master the sales process.

While expanding the reach of ICR, Keluche maintains a keen interest in the arts, sports and sciences. He is the co-chairman of the Smithsonian’s International Founders’ Council for the National Museum of the American Indian. He is a director of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Foundation located in Boulder, CO. He is also director of several software companies and chairman of the Native American Sports Council, a community-based multi-sport member of the U.S. Olympic Committee. What draws organizations to Keluche is his capacity to digest a wealth of information, quickly sort out the essential issues and energize teams to aspire to lofty goals. In a recent speech at Penn State, Keluche acted as cultural ambassador when he shared the differences between European and Native American ethics. He explains that we are all compelled to act in concert with our core values, and major conflicts arise when we meet others who do not share or honor what we believe to be true.

For example, American settlers brought European legal systems to this continent that were based on the concept of ownership, while Native Americans’ belief system was based on the concept of stewardship. European values were based on materialism, competition and self-importance. Native Americans learned modesty, cooperation and nonmaterialistic thinking. Says Keluche, “In the past, cross-cultural conflicts were resolved with firepower; today a more enlightened generation works to integrate these differences and share what each culture has to offer for everyone’s benefit.”

Incubate success

Keluche’s goal: To enhance the image of the ICR brand as the best places to meet where companies can conduct business, introduce new products, generate more sales, initiate change, reward top performers and align work groups with mission-critical goals. ICR’s team provides customers with a delightful experience from the moment they check in until the moment they leave. Says Keluche, “A number of problems can come up during a meeting, and the key is to have your staff sufficiently trained and resilient.” For example, when a key speaker does not show up, ICR may bring in a substitute at a moment’s notice or set up a teleconference as a bridge between the group and the speaker. “We’re very sensitive to the challenges of meeting planners, and our goal is to make their job easier and ensure that they get the credit,” says Keluche. “The minute a problem begins to appear, we work on solving it. That’s the benefit of having all facilities and services on-site, so the show can go on and nobody will know what’s going on behind the curtain.”

Under Keluche’s leadership, International Conference Resorts has grown to one of the leading businesses in the industry. With high customer satisfaction, 90 percent repeat business and low employee turnover, Keluche has integrated the values of competition with the virtues of cooperation. He has been able to balance the quest for material success without sacrificing the spiritual values he has embraced as a youth. Says Keluche, “We are not a command-and-control type organization. We believe that people want to feel healthy, be productive and have a sense of belonging. We try to understand their beliefs and values, they begin to experience and trust what we’re doing, and they understand that we all can have a good future.”

When asked about the future of the meetings industry, Keluche says, “Today’s information technology leads to information overload, and it’s often overwhelming. More people are communicating via email. They never see each other, they travel constantly, and they often feel isolated and separated from their companies and co-workers. In these uncertain times, many people wonder about the value of their contribution. That’s where we can help companies reconnect – with meetings where people share their core values for the purpose of rebuilding a sense of community and purpose.”