Michaël Aguilar

Michaël AGUILAR is an expert speaker in sales and motivation. It focuses on nine different conferences, all designed to motivate sales teams and entrepreneurs to be more efficient and sell more.

He has given more than 1,400 lectures around the world and has received the CSP in the United States, the highest honour for a professional speaker.

In addition to his career as a lecturer, Michael is also an accomplished author, with 12 books to his credit, including the best-sellers "Elite Seller" and "The Art of Motivating", which have been translated into 7 languages.

Michaël Aguilar shares his expert view on sales and how it has evolved in recent years against a backdrop of societal and technological changes.

Is the sale innate or, on the contrary, is it an apprenticeship and an acquisition to work on?

It is about selling like piano, foreign languages or swimming; for some, it seems that fairies have leaned over their cradles at birth. But for those who have not been so spoiled, with hard work and perseverance, we can catch up and even surpass those who had genius but did not work.

How have societal and digital changes changed sales techniques?

The advent of digital technology is a revolution that has definitely affected the commercial relationship. How? Simply by transferring the power to the customer. The customer benefits from infinite and free information. In the past, the seller had his power from his knowledge. Those days are gone forever. The future of those who are in business and whose power is based on knowledge is nothing but death.


On the other hand, sellers still have a magnificent card to play by going to the field where digital is weak: confronting the customer with respect to their choices, changing their needs, suggesting better leads, adapting their discourse to the customer’s challenges, Jean Fourastier, the father of the glorious 30, said in 1970, "The machine leads man to specialize in the human." Well here we are!

Sellers will never again be able to compete with the machine and its computing and memory capacity. On the other hand, the machine is unable to arouse emotions, make people laugh, negotiate, reassure, provoke or impact.

What impact do you want to have when speaking? Do you have any particular inspirations that you can share with us?

I am a “motivational speaker” and as such, I speak not to instruct, nor to make people think, but to obtain a transformation of behaviours, to give new energy, to stimulate passions, In short, I speak to increase the motivation of my audience but also to make them want to excel. The purpose of my interventions, I need to remind you, is to make teams and their companies successful. It’s not just my job, it’s a consuming passion. I dedicate my days and weekends to not only understand the drivers of motivation but also to know how to activate these drivers and make a lasting impact on my audiences during my conferences.


In 2017, I intervened for an industrialist who had lost his biggest customer and with him, 30% of sales. Social plan of 200 people and I gave my lecture "Sell when times are tough!" The teams started again boosted like never before to conquer new markets. The CEO wrote me an e-mail, 8 months after my conference to tell me that the sales force had conquered many new markets following my intervention and that they were going to end the year on a slight growth and that my conference had been the decisive starting point for their renewal.

What was the highlight of your speaking career?

Without a doubt, the moment I received, in July 2018, my CSP which is the supreme distinction of professional speakers in the USA. It was my ultimate goal, like a movie actor who dreams of getting an Oscar. It took me exactly 10 years to get it.


But to give you an original anecdote, this is a lecture I gave on a barge six years ago. When I arrived there, there was no screen, no sound system, no chairs, nothing. The owner said to me, “the organizer rented the houseboat and nothing else…” The organizer, a health insurance company, then arrived on the scene and realized with horror that there was nothing and that his 150 guests were arriving in 2 hours. I gave my lecture a cappella, with guests who stayed up for an hour, in an unstable barge that pitched when a boat passed nearby… I was seasick…