As Group Vice President of Sales for The Brooks Group, Lee Richards helps organizations build and improve sales skills, processes, and resources to address their commercial challenges and meet their business goals. Through a thorough discovery process, Lee helps sales leaders build strategies to select and motivate sales reps, build the skills necessary for sales success, and coach their sales teams resulting in higher revenue, greater win rates, and increased margins.
Lee spent more than 20 years in sales roles with leading industrial manufacturers working with domestic and international clients. With experience as a field sales rep to progressive executive-level leadership roles, his time building, coaching, and leading sales teams, small and large, provides clients with perspective and practical applications.
After his tenure in corporate sales and leadership roles, including time as a Brooks Group client, Lee pivoted his career to training and consulting where he found his passion for helping sales professionals reach their potential.
At The Brooks Group, Lee has a focus on the industrial and energy markets with those who sell products directly to end users as well as those who sell through channel partners. Whether their products are low value with high volume or long sales cycles with complexity, his experience will benefit sales reps at the field level as well as sales leaders who provide coaching and strategy for their organization.
Career and Education
Lee graduated from the University of Houston with a Mechanical Engineering degree but soon found he was better suited for commercial roles. Leveraging his technical aptitude as a self-proclaimed gearhead, technical sales roles became a natural fit.
His career began with Cameron Corporation where he excelled at selling capital equipment and aftermarket services of industrial gas compressors in the upstream energy and petrochemical markets. This experience led to an expat assignment with a year in Shanghai and four years in Singapore managing a commercial team focused on the Asian industrial markets.
He later moved to Solar Turbines, a Caterpillar Company, selling gas turbine generator and compressor packages to international energy producers such as ConocoPhillips, BP, and Kinder Morgan along with supporting engineering and construction contractors such as Fluor, Bechtel, and Technip.
Lee also spent time with Gardner Denver where he led the international sales team for engineered vacuum solutions with responsibility for global sales to industrial manufacturers, energy producers, and power generation providers around the globe.
His most recent roles have been focused on helping others improve their sales performance. Prior to joining The Brooks Group in 2022, Lee was an Independent Sales Consultant for Miller Heiman Group where he leveraged his sales and leadership experience into consulting and training programs with an area of expertise in industrial and channel sales.
Along the way, he also earned an MBA from the University of Houston to complement his experience and earlier technical education.
Interests and Hobbies
Lee and his family live in Houston where he is a lifelong Houston sports fan. If he’s not attending his daughter’s athletic events, you can find him Saturday mornings teeing it up on a golf course. When time allows, he escapes the city to work from their home in the Florida panhandle.