Hunter Byington has spent nearly four decades turning one of corporate America’s most expensive headaches — hiring the wrong salespeople — into a punchline with a payoff.

As the founder of Closer Consulting since 1986, Hunter combines sharp, contrary humor with hard data to expose the gap between what HR directors, senior management, and Sales VPs *think* they’re hiring and what they actually get.

His secret weapon is a partnership forged since 1992 with Objective Management Group (OMG) of Boston, whose sales-specific assessment platform has now evaluated over 2.3 million salespeople across 200+ industries.

The numbers don’t lie — and Hunter delights in delivering them with a straight face: 75% of candidate companies hire *against* OMG’s recommendation fail within six months, while 92% of those recommended and hired reach the top half of their sales teams within 12 months.

Hunter’s presentations are equal parts comedy and consultation, using OMG’s 35+ years of sales data to diagnose why sales training so often fails, why gut-instinct hiring consistently backfires, and why coaching without a competency roadmap is like giving someone a map to nowhere.

He walks HR professionals, C-suite executives, and VP Sales audiences through the 21 measurable sales competencies — from Will to Sell and Sales DNA to tactical closing skills — that separate genuine producers from impressive-looking imposters.

With a BA in Journalism and Broadcasting from the University of Alabama and a career that began in national media sales at 13-30 Corporation (previous owners of Esquire magazine), Hunter brings storytelling instincts to data that most consultants would render unbearably dull.  The result is a talk that leaves audiences laughing at their last bad hire — and determined never to make another one.