NICE TO MEET YOU

I'm Rebecca Gebhardt, President of Rise Up Consulting

I'm passionate about helping sales leaders get off on the right foot and find success early instead of figuring out things as they go and correcting bad habits.  I retired from the insurance business after building a top 1% sales team that brought in over $50 million of revenue.  We have helped Rise Up Consulting clients increase sales over $70 million in less than a year of working with us.

My story isn't much different than our clients.  I spent years learning through trial and error, finding success as a sales leader, but making it harder than it needed to be.  I didn't fully understand how to use my strengths and the strengths of my team and spent more time trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I should have just changed the shape of the container.  I thought everything had to fall on my shoulders and only if I worked "just a little bit harder" we could get the results we wanted. 

It's my mission to guide sales leadership teams to shorten the learning curve of leaders, find wins faster, and strengthen leadership pipelines.  It never gets old seeing the good guys win.  

We use data and research, combined with my 20+ years of top 1% sales and sales leadership experience to empower sales leaders. 

My Story

I never meant to be in sales.  I was recruited in college to sell educational books door to door during the summers.  After not only finishing, but succeeding my first summer, I began to love the sales process.  The love of sales turned into a passion for recruiting and developing salespeople, which in turn led to developing sales leaders. 

When I was a new sales leader I felt our world was too reactive.  Instead of getting good at helping our teams with problems, why didn't we create training programs proactively to help them help themselves?  

What I found is that most companies don't have formal and duplicatable programs for sales leaders that are personalized to their unique situations.  Most organizations do leadership development the way they do sales training: top producers share a few pointers that few people remember or can even apply a week later. 

After researching and listening to my clients, I created our Leaderboard to Leadership® program which has helped individual sales leaders and sales leadership teams alike get the results they craved.

Why I Do It

My first experience as a sales leader was atrocious.  I was focused on results over relationships.  Recognition instead of impact.  It was only when I focused on the impact I could make on the lives of my team that I found success as a sales leader. 

With that success brought questions.  I remember asking for more insight as to what the best sales leaders at my organization really do, but was told to just keep recruiting more people and work harder. 

I understand how frustrating and lonely it can be doing a new role for the first time.  I see how leaders at organizations don't want their new sales leaders to struggle the way they had to.  I know what its like to want to devote the time to creating a development program for sales leaders and not have the resources or bandwidth to do it. 

Whether its an individual sales leader who completes our on-demand Leaderboard to Leadership® program or a sales organization that hires us to create a customized leadership development program, seeing the impact made on the bottom line and in the lives of the leaders we serve never gets old.