Title: Senior Account Manager
Company: FORTÉ
Location: Austin, TX
Overtime: As a mother of three very young children, her free time is limited. But when she does get a break from a full-time career and parenthood, she takes to Lake Austin for kayaking and paddleboarding.
Why You Need to Know Her: As a senior account manager for Forté, Landkammer recently helped win a multimillion dollar contract for her company. But she doesn't take all the credit: “I think the win boiled down to relationships, trust, and really a team effort of selling,” she said.
Today, the Pro AV industry is evolving, and Sara Landkammer is keeping pace with this change. This is why she is helping with Forté’s push into IT convergence, Microsoft solutions, and managed services.
According to Landkammer, being fired from her first post-college job led to her highly successful sales career in Pro AV. "I can thank the partner at a firm in Dallas I worked for as an admin assistant for about a year for firing me from that position, because I would not be where I am today," she joked. "I quickly learned that sitting behind a desk was not the life I wanted to live.”
A wise family friend suggested that her outgoing personality would be a natural fit for sales. Landkammer took that advice to heart, applying it the hard way by beginning her sales career cold-selling T1 internet lines.
"I was out pounding the street, hitting doors of small businesses, collecting business cards, turning around and calling on those folks the next day to try and sell them a T1 for their dentist office on the corner," she recalled. "I did that for a few years and learned how to sell the hard way with a rotating ZIP code of an unlimited number of doors to hit every day from eight to five."
Surviving and thriving through such a grueling grassroots experience prepared Landkammer for selling a portfolio of IT services including phone systems, contact centers, and, finally, Pro AV products. It also gave her a deep appreciation for the fundamentals of sales, which remains a human-based profession.
"I'm very old-fashioned when it comes to my own selling technique," she said. "I still believe a handshake goes a long way. I think that the tools being developed through the usage of AI are going to be instrumental in our industry for those that learn how to embrace it and utilize it, but I also still think that looking someone in the eye and doing business across the table from another person goes a long way."
Today, Landkammer applies her sales expertise to generating new business for FORTÉ. But her focus has largely shifted to supporting clients after the initial sale while mentoring the next generation of AV professionals.
"There's not any point in climbing to the top if you don't bring others with you, right?" she said. "Bringing others with you along your journey is just prepping the way for the next future of AV sellers to become even better at what they do."
Looking ahead, Landkammer remains ambitious. "I'm hopeful that I will continue to climb the ladder here," she said. "Those that have guided me along my path today, hopefully, will be the ones that promote me in the future."
