Googles geo-targetted results

OK so I am doing some SEO work for a client of mine who offers sales training courses. So obviously the first thing I do is a google search for 'sales training'. Now this is a pretty big term right? Yes, over 48,000,000 results. Now, I would have thought that #1 would be a huge company based in the USA or something like that (I live in New Zealand). But in fact, the first two results were New Zealand based companies. I did a quick check, the #1 position has an aged domain, 'sales training' in the title (so far so good), but a quick check of their backlinks revealed none of their backlinks had 'sales training' as the anchor text (and they only had 75 backlinks to their domain). Now obviously google is bumping up websites it thinks are close to you (I would have thought it would only do this if you entered something like 'sales training auckland' or something like that).

Do you reckon I might be able to get to the #1 position for searches within New Zealand with some smart backlinking with 'sales training' as the anchor text, and have it pointing to a page called mydomain.com/sales-training/ with all the onpage factors optimized as well?

Thanks