The TechRanch Board of Directors

IPG Consulting

She sees with her feelings. Reaches out, actually, and gets into the world of the person she is coaching, training or mentoring, sees things for what they are, and then knows what her proteges need to do to get extraordinary results. It is a visceral affinity for the real, as she puts it. Yoda would like this one. Not your usual approach to sales and leadership improvement. But Cindy Taylor is anything but usual. When it comes to sales and coaching, the force is strong with this one. Her results are almost supernatural. Cindy excelled as a salesperson. A quick look at her resume shows her regularly blowing through the 100 percent of sales quota barrier year after year. But her real skills lie in helping others climb the Everests of their dreams. One way to look at her career is as a wandering VP of sales on a journey that took her to some of the major stops on the monopoly board of high-tech companies: IBM, Oracle, Servio, RightNow Technologies. Her MO is to build startups, often within the walls of a large company, starting from nothing. Her education is not in marketing or business. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics. She chose math because at the time few schools had computer science degrees and math training helped her think clearly. But she also took a minor in art, which gave expression to her intuitive side and helped her combine technical competence with the creative impulse. Today Cindy lives near Bozeman, Mont. in a trout fishing heaven 50 feet from the West Gallatin River. She still reaches out with her feelings and still coaches and trains sales and marketing people who have dreams of success that haunt their waking hours. And after working with Cindy, they get such good results that their colleagues wonder if the force is not strong with them.