Sales professional/educator/technologist
Joe Pops started his varied career as an X-ray technologist. For a large portion of this phase of his life, he worked as a clinical instructor at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg Manitoba.
Joe later moved to the east coast of Canada and was working as an x-ray technologist in Halifax, Nova Scotia when an opportunity to move to professional sales came up with the Philips corporation. He used his clinical, technical and teaching experience to help potential customers understand the benefits of the medical imaging equipment he was selling. In the beginning he often used his lecturing experience to give product presentations. What Joe would now refer to as “sales lectures.”
In 2007 Joe experienced one of the most boring sales presentations ever. But the problem wasn’t the presentation itself. The problem was the presenter. And that presenter was Joe. He came to the conclusion that, while he was confident giving lectures, he sucked at giving sales presentations. He had the revelation that there were major differences between the traditional lecture and the sales presentation. And he has been exploring those differences ever since.
At Philips for over 22 years, Joe gave hundreds of sales presentations, as well as dozens of lunch and learns and internal presentations. Joe and his sales team were very successful. In the 15 years he was responsible for the interventional imaging product line, Joe and his colleagues sold over a quarter of a billion dollars in products.
Joe says that the streak of sales success got rolling once he transformed his presentation style from the sales lecture to the modern sales presentation style.
While working at Philips, Joe also did a stint as a part-time sessional lecturer in the medical radiological technology program at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and contributed a chapter to a textbook on radiographic imaging called Textbook of Radiographic Positioning and Related Anatomy. It seems the teaching bug never left him.
Presentation consultant, coach, and creator
For the past decade, combining teaching with a successful sales presentation track record, Joe has been providing workshops, webinars and one-on-one coaching on modern presentation design, creation, and delivery. This work has taken him around the world, from Malaysia to the Netherlands and across North America.
He has supported many business and non-profit professionals in developing and constructing their presentations from idea to a deliverable audience experience. Encompassing everything from developing messaging and content to creating complete sets of presentation slides.
Self-taught graphic designer; homeless cat advocate
Joe learned graphic design skills from working on thousands of PowerPoint slides. Using PowerPoint, he has created hundreds of posters, brochures, programs – and even a few logos – for charities and nonprofits.
In particular he has used his design skills to support programs that spay/neuter and find homes for stray and abandoned cats in and around his home city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He lives with his wife, Cindy — and several cats.
Joe is a regular contributor to LinkedIn.