Jennifer Merritt

Ryze Development group was founded on the principle- do what you love, love what you do. I’m Jennifer Merritt. I’m the Chief Operations Officer and Co-Founder of Ryze Development Group. I’ve been selling for over 15 years but found my true passion in inspiring and coaching fellow sales professionals to be better and do better. In my eyes, hitting a quota is important- in fact it’s what drives most of us- but selling is about more than that. It’s about connecting. It’s about learning. It’s about building. It’s about improving.

I’ve had the opportunity to work at a $5B dollar company on multi-million-dollar deals and several smaller companies on $1K deals. I’ve found ways to negotiate higher margins on commodity products and have spent the last 15 years learning and taking in all the different, conflicting noise about how to sell in a crowded world full of competition. Everything I’ve learned from my past experiences has helped to build several actionable, measurable programs that will help your team connect with customers and ultimately win more deals.

My goal is never to push sales people to be the “best”. Being the best implies you’ve hit the top and completed the race. I believe in life-long learning and growth. I coach sales professionals to strive for “better”. Sending the message of striving for “better” sets up a culture of continuous learning. There’s always room for improvement.

Personally, I’ve been married to my husband for 7 years and we have two totally crazy, but also really fun boys. We like to spend our fun time traveling, lounging in the sun on our boat, waterskiing and wake surfing.

Troy Langenderfer

I am the Chief Commercial Officer and Co-Founder of Ryze Development Group. Throughout my years of experience and interaction with sales organizations, I have come to one realization, not all salespeople are alike. Some individuals are high performers, some have the potential to become high performers, others may be better suited to follow a different career path. This is also true for the managers that are training and leading these individuals. The disparity across organizations can be astounding at times and it is critical to align these individuals to “speak the same language” and drive value. If the only thing you have left to negotiate is price, then you haven’t done your job successfully. Our mission is not to create sales drones that have the same pitch and interaction. Instead, we are here to provide a foundation or roadmap. This roadmap is to be integrated and utilized in conjunction with their natural technique to enhance their interactions while honing their detection skills for subtle cues that can tilt the scales of favor to your side. 

From a personal standpoint, I am 49 years old, married for the past 24 years and the proud father of two daughters. With over 27 years of executive sales experience in the metal service center and manufacturing industry, I have led teams from small to large and successfully negotiated single opportunities exceeding $100M while managing a salesforce with annual revenues exceeding $400M. Servicing OEM and sub tier supply bases from the boardroom to the shop floor, I’ve had a career of customer interaction and negotiation expertise. Along with my most recent Vice President of Strategic Accounts role with a $5.5B dollar organization, I was also responsible for co-training over 400 salespeople, managers, directors and C suite executives in Insight Selling and Negotiation.