Price Associates is pleased to announce that Holly Mitchell has joined the team at its Boise office.
Holly is a leadership coach, sales trainer, and speaker. She works to empower businesses and individuals to transform their sales strategies, leadership skills, and company cultures—and reach their highest potential. Her work focuses on training leaders to grow in confidence and influence; creating environments that enhance creativity, collaboration, and learning; developing a vision and strategy for success; building high-performing, cohesive teams; and increasing sales by identifying and optimizing strengths.
Holly spent 14 years working for large corporations, including a Fortune 500 company. As part of her corporate career, she facilitated strategic planning with executives to deliver strong financial results, gain market share, support futuristic buying patterns and align sales forces throughout the United States. She also pioneered new sales territories and built long-term relationships that resulted in more than $200 million in annual sales, and an increase of 16% in 2019 for the second largest livestock distributor in the United States.
Holly then started her own business, Window Coverings of Idaho, leading it into double-digit year-over-year growth through a focus on developing strong customer relationships that drive sales by referrals. She successfully sold the company and now invests in and shares her expertise with other start-ups.
Throughout her career, Holly has developed strategies around sales procedures and systems that increase efficiencies and deepen customer loyalties. She loves sharing these strategies and her passion for selling in her roles as coach, trainer, and speaker. Her work currently centers on leadership development and sales training, with an emphasis on helping women accelerate impact and influence for career and wealth advancement. Holly is dedicated to using the full scope of her talents to deliver solutions and through intentionality and zeroing in on strengths, helping others become the best version of themselves.
Holly holds a Master’s in Education from the University of Arizona.
Prior to joining Price Associates, Holly was a National Account Manager at Merck, where she was responsible for managing a $200 million portfolio and developing successful relationships between cross-functional teams.
We sat down with Holly to talk about magnetic leadership, teaching high school, the dairy industry, and her love of solo travel.
What drew you to be a leadership coach?
Over the years, I have consistently been drawn to certain people who seemed to have this magnetic energy that really set them apart from others. Not knowing exactly what they had that I didn’t see in others — I knew it was something I wanted. I’m a prolific reader, and over the past 20 years, I have read a number of insightful books on leadership and self-improvement. The lessons in these books, combined with many of my own impactful career experiences, revealed that this magnetism was natural leadership and authenticity. This energy was something I wanted to develop within myself and help others understand, develop, and cultivate.
What is your favorite part of being a coach?
During my career working for a large Fortune 500 company, I witnessed and experienced situations where leadership could have been strengthed. The result was employees feeling unfilled in their jobs and in effect, the productivity and culture was hurting. However, when people were lead by a leader who genuinely cared and cultivated an environment that accentuated team strengths, the energy was positive and people shared trust, empathy, and experienced greater success, inside and outside of work.
Some of my most fulfilling career moments were when I had the opportunity to lead and develop employees. This is why coaching is such a dream job for me. It allows me to influence people’s lives, both personally and professionally. If you have ever played any team sports, then you understand the value of having a coach—someone who is always encouraging you to grow, adapt to change and be the best version of yourself. I feel fortunate to encourage others through my own success story; however, I am even more grateful to play a role in helping others grow as leaders and make positive changes that enhance their lives.
You've had a successful career in sales, what have been some of your favorite career moments or highlights?
Coming out of college I had a Masters in Education and thought my career was going to be teaching high school students, which I pursued in Tucson, Arizona teaching Agriculture Education, grades 9-12. I loved this experience, but I discovered one of my greatest strengths was not being utilized, which was my internal passion and excitement around business development and generating sales.
I decided to pursue my passion for sales and started seeking work in the pharmaceutical industry. I found a small company to hire me, considering I was "green," and they moved me to Idaho where I was going to start calling on the dairymen in the southern part of he state, recognizing I didn’t know anything about the dairy industry, let alone Idaho. They gave me a list of local dairy farms in the area with an address and, if I was lucky, a phone number. This was a turning point for me because even though I lacked experience in the dairy industry, I realized it was up to me to make it happen and lean on my ability to relate and communicate with people to accelerate my sales success. I kept this attitude and sheer grit throughout my sales career. Basically, if you want it bad enough and you’re willing to work hard for it, it will happen. And when you put yourself into uncomfortable situations, that’s when you grow as a leader.
About 10 years into my career, I decided to buy a small business and give that a try to test my skills at not just selling but also running a business. This was another huge turning point for me because I always had a large company as a buffer between the customer and me. When you own and run your own business, everything you do and how you act has a direct impact on the success of the business. This is where I knew I had to lean into my leadership skills to help encourage and facilitate my employees’ success. I quickly learned that my sales team members were motivated by different values, and it was my role as a leader to understand what each team member needed to position them to sell, based on their behaviors and motivators.
Both of these experiences required me to be good at sales and understanding customer buying behaviors. Throughout my career I learned two valuable lessons:
- Both employees and customers need a connection to do business with you. People buy from people and we all crave human connection. To me, that is always the first step.
- Every successful selling process is built on building trust and authenticity. When you have built trust with your customer, it puts you in a great place to really listen and understand their needs. In sales, our success only comes from providing solutions based on what the customer needs.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
Anymore, life seems to be so hectic. I think we’re all suffering from more than we can handle without enough time for everything. I personally enjoy a slow-brewed cup of coffee in the morning and I always try to find time to start my day reading. I also make it a point each day to reach out and connect on a personal level with a friend. This small, daily routine has changed my life and helped me deepen relationships with the ones I love.
In my free time, I love to hike with my golden retriever “B” in the foothills of Boise. We often go to Sun Valley when the weather is nice to explore new trails and ski during the winter months.
Exploring the world is another passion of mine. Each year I make it a point to travel outside the United States allowing myself to explore without an agenda seeking local spots to practice new languages and explore new foods. This year, I’m looking at going to Portugal to visit a friend of mine in a small surfside town south of Lisbon.