Kathleen J. Simonsen

Kathi Simonsen's background includes over 25 successful years in sales, management and training roles in the publishing industry. She owns a business that develops productive sales forces as they sell increasingly complicated multi-media packages that include print, the Internet and events. She offers remote learning, one-on-one coaching courses that focus on helping individual salespeople sell their major accounts. She also offers customized sales meeting workshops that focus on the challenges of today. Her results-oriented, highly interactive style, focused on current issues, has increased sales for many publishers.

Kathi serves on the board of the Western Publications Association. She does research on current trends in publishing and the results are published in industry magazines and her newsletter. She also conducts workshops for a wide variety of publishing conferences.

Before starting her own business, Kathi was Publisher/Advertising Sales Director of California Design Publications. There she spearheaded the start-up publication, Preferred Resources as well as managed Profiles. During this time she hired, trained, and directed a staff of fourteen. Her primary areas of focus were the training, motivation and development of both the outside sales and inside sales departments.

Prior to her management experience, Kathi sold advertising space for Penton Publishing and for The Chilton Company. At Penton she represented The Foodservice Distributor as well as Restaurant Hospitality and increased the billings by 38%. While at Chilton, she represented Iron Age Manufacturing Management and Automotive Industries, where the billings in her territory more than doubled during her employment.

Kathi has a BA degree from Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Illinois. Her major was education with an emphasis in speech communications. She has continued her education with numerous courses in sales and training. She has also focused on keeping-up on the ever changing Internet since the mid-1990s. She is involved in the National Speakers' Society, and the American Society for Training and Development.