Episode 3: May 2021 – Discussing Community Leadership with Phil Krone
About Our Guest
Phil Krone founded Productive Strategies, Inc., a marketing and management consulting firm, in 1993 to help companies, nonprofit organizations, and professional services firms define and reach their growth objectives. His real-world selling and business development experiences, coupled with field research, led him to develop the proprietary consultative sales training course FOCIS®. The course teaches and reinforces the behaviors of the very best salespeople and business developers—the 20 percent who consistently bring in 80 percent of the business. The course also develops a customized sales process for individuals, companies, and professional services firms.
Before launching Productive Strategies, he was president of a manufacturing firm serving large corporations and Tier One suppliers to the federal government, including Ford, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Tellabs, Vought, United Technologies, and others. He is a founder of the Die Casting Development Council, a trade association dedicated to expanding the market for its process. Krone is the recipient of the Gullo and Trieber Award for marketing excellence and the Austin C. Lilligren Award for service to manufacturers. He has contributed to various trade publications and business magazines throughout his career.
A sought-after speaker, Krone has addressed many industry and professional groups, including the American Marketing Association, TEMSCON 2018 (an international engineering conference hosted by Northwestern University), the North American Recycling Institute, the Kellogg Alumni Entrepreneur Conference, the Chicago Coalition of Women’s Initiatives, the Commercial Development Association, and the Polyurethane Manufacturers Association. Among Krone’s popular, proprietary presentations are “Using Sales Representatives to Help You Market at Higher Levels,” “The Five Levels of Marketing,” “Increasing Referrals,” and “Collective Marketing Programs for Trade Groups.”
A graduate of Duke University with a BA in psychology, Krone holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Chicago Chapter of The Entrepreneurship Institute, the Illinois Council of Feed My Starving Children, and the Vestry of Christ Episcopal Church, Winnetka.