What Salespeople Do You See Becoming CEO One Day?

A long time ago, when I was an integrator, I remember co-workers telling me about how good Matt Barnette was. I had no idea who he was at the time beyond that he was our salesperson at AMAG. I recalled it as being atypical since most salespeople, like almost everyone, are average, and we more commonly discussed salespeople who were bad or untrustworthy. Barnette has since become President of AMAG, President of Mercury, and now CEO of PSA.

I was reminded of this salesperson-to-CEO path recently when interviewing the CEO of Pavion who started as a field salesperson at JCI and worked himself up to run the integrator and is now the CEO of an integrator with close to a billion dollars in revenue.