Stephen Tierney, from Locks Heath, spent five years practising daily with former World Champion Stephen Hendry and was doubles partner to four-time World Champion John Higgins.

Now hes channelling his energy into something entirely different and he is making his mark with his Portsmouth-based firm Mindcell Sales Training

I started playing snooker at the age of four, said Stephen.

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Snooker was my obsession. I turned professional and mixed it with the very best in the world.

In my snooker career I had seen how the very elite professionals thought and operated.

I became hugely interested in what set them above the rest and so I studied and qualified as a sports psychologist and decided to apply my skills to sales training.

Stephen said that becoming an elite salesperson is similar to becoming an elite sportsperson.

The 46-year-old said: I have developed a specific program called The Profitable Sales System. Its based on psychology, emotional intelligence and trust-based consultative selling.

I help change the sales peoples current thinking and focus which is so important during this pandemic, coach the new acquired sales skills, then inspire and motivate them to get elite performance. Its how great coaches work.

And he said the world of sport had lots of practical lessons to teach business.

Stephen, who is originally from Glasgow, said: I took a truck worker who was working on the tools for Macs Trucks Ltd and wanted to get into sales.

He had great product knowledge from working on the tools but had never sold anything in his life before, so we were starting at ground zero.

I spent three days with him setting up and training everything from the fundamentals of selling, frameworks, phone work, face to face, persuasion, influencing and closing the deal.

After the three days onsite I worked with him for three months through online coaching. The result was, he became the top seller in month two and sold over 844,000 worth of truck sales in his first three months.

I worked with one chap in telecoms and in the first five months of the lockdown he closed over 600,000 worth of contract business.

As well as being a sports psychologist, Stephen also draws on his qualifications of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), executive coaching and hypnosis practitioner.

The married dad-of-three said: The mind is extremely powerful. Sometimes it takes time to unlearn bad habits.

Our training programs are usually six to 12 months because single training days simply dont work.

Firms that want to have elite performers on board understand that this investment leads to huge increases in sales and is well worth it.

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From snooker to sales how one world class player is taking the business world by storm - Portsmouth News