James Heidema joins MaxGood.work as a Licensed Expert Author.
Over a career spanning decades, James Heidema has trained and coached more than 175,000 sales professionals, sales managers, and sales leaders across more than half the world’s countries. He began in financial services — rising to manager of training and development at one of Canada’s largest financial institutions — before spending years gathering best practices from top performers across industries worldwide.
The result of that work is 13 books. Not a single breakthrough framework that became the title, but 13 distinct bodies of work — covering sales fundamentals, sales management, high-performance team development, customer service, leadership, and change management. Eight of those titles are on Amazon.
His current focus is the first three years of a sales manager’s career: the window where habits form, where identity as a leader either takes root or doesn’t, and where the right coaching input compounds most dramatically. He works directly with sales directors because he knows that sustainable change in a sales team usually starts with the manager, not the rep.
“Everything I’ve written comes from watching the top performers in sales and management, and asking: what are they doing that others aren’t? My goal has always been to make that knowledge accessible — not just when someone can get to a workshop, but when they actually need it.”
— James Heidema
If you’d like to explore what an Enterprise Avatar looks like built on your expertise — strengthened by Foundation Content from authors like James Heidema — we’d like to talk.
What James’s expertise means inside an Avatar
James’s work joins our Foundation Content library — the curated layer of licensed expert knowledge that Avatar owners draw on to deepen their Avatar’s capabilities. You don’t need a body of written knowledge yourself!
Foundation Content isn’t just a chatbot knowledge base. It’s the conceptual infrastructure that helps an Avatar hold a rigorous coaching conversation on a specific domain — rather than defaulting to generic encouragement. When a sales manager is dealing with a rep who’s sandbagging their forecast, or a team that’s stopped prospecting, or a culture that celebrates activity but ignores results, James’s frameworks give the Avatar the vocabulary and the judgment to respond with something useful.
This is particularly valuable for:
- Coaches and consultants working with sales organizations — who want their Avatar to reflect genuine expertise in sales culture, not just general coaching principles
- Fractional sales leaders and Chief Revenue Officers — whose clients need coaching support between sessions on specifically sales-related challenges
- HR and L&D leaders inside companies with high sales management turnover — where the first-year manager problem is chronic
The foundation we’re building
James joins a growing library of Licensed Expert Authors whose work now lives inside the MaxGood.work platform — including Lyssa Adkins (Agile coaching), David J. Anderson (Kanban and flow management), Mary Poppendieck (Lean manufacturing), and Zuzana Sochova (Agile transformation and team-based learning).
Each author brings a distinct professional tradition. James brings something the library didn’t yet have: deep, field-tested expertise in the sales management domain — the layer of leadership that sits between individual contributors and the executives who set strategy, and where so much organizational performance is actually made or lost.
What this means if you’re a coach or fractional executive
If your clients are in sales leadership — or if you’re a fractional CRO, VP of Sales, or Chief Revenue Officer — James’s Foundation Content gives your Avatar a substantively stronger foundation for those conversations.
The Avatar won’t replace what you bring. But it will be better equipped to support your clients between your sessions — reinforcing the frameworks you use, asking the right questions at the right moments, and helping them apply the principles James has spent a career refining.
If you’d like to explore what an Enterprise Avatar looks like built on your expertise — strengthened by Foundation Content from authors like James Heidema — we’d like to talk.
Are you an expert with books, blogs, podcasts, training material? Learn about becoming a Licensed Expert Author for MaxGood.work.
This post was drafted with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by Mishkin Berteig. Factual details about James Heidema’s background were sourced from his author interview with MaxGood.work (April 10, 2026).