Steve Schrier - Build Your Sales Tribe

For Wendy, Olivia and Arthur, and my father, Chris.

This book will tell you how sales has changed and how to succeed with selling in the Information Age now and in the future. It will help your business deal with topics such as diversity and inclusion, ethics of selling, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. It will bring you practical advice from years of real-life experience to help you attract more business and look after your existing customers better through these disruptive times.

First, let me tell you a story

There was this kid who Ioved computers. So he went to college and he studied electronics and computing. When he graduated, in the early 1990s, he went to work for a small tech company in the UK whose global headquarters were in the Bay Area of San Francisco. It wasnt a large company, it made controllers for the big videotape machines used to make television programmes animation, special effects, post-production, that sort of thing. Sounds glamorous but the kid mainly did the crap stuff that no one else wanted to do technical support, fixing things, pulling cables, etc.

The kid quickly realised that if he learned how to sell the equipment and not just fix it, he would be able to travel regularly to various countries and see the world. So he convinced his boss to give him a shot and went into sales. He didnt even know that it existed as a job no one had even mentioned it as a possible career path at school, and the people around him pretty much looked down on it as a profession.

Recognising the value of the kid, and of contributing to his sales education, his boss worked with him and went on to do the same for another Bay Area company that floated on Nasdaq (US Stock Exchange) in 1994. With their help this company went through fourteen record consecutive quarters of earnings after going public and became a billion-dollar company.

The kid was twenty-three and running all over the world learning how to sell and run a distribution channel. He was in a different country/city every week and having the time of his life. He worked with some amazing people and loved it. He also found because he knew how the products worked, and why they were different from others that he was good at it.

He moved on, out of sales, into more product-oriented roles. But it wasnt the same.

After several entrepreneurial failures and bad choices, in different industries, he ended up losing all the money he had left and needed to get a job to support his wife, baby son and two-year-old daughter. He knew he could sell so he went back to sales this time selling direct to business customers on the management team of an Internet start-up, with a business model for a new age and only a handful of customers.

It was very different it wasnt as easy as before. He had to learn how the Information Age was transforming the world. Different customers with more diversity and new approaches. He looked around for books and advice but found none that fitted one or two with something on the basics but a lot which were no longer relevant. So he had to work it out himself.

That was me. This is the book that I wished I had been able to read then. It is here for you so that you dont have to work it out yourself. In a world that is changing enormously I hope this book will be the guide for your business for now and one that you will reach for in times to come.

The pace of change is increasing enormously, and commerce and business are being disrupted as never before. And it is not set to stop anytime soon.

A lot of entrepreneurs I have spoken to who have built successful businesses or management teams, and who belong to networks of high-growth, profitable companies say, Sales is a major problem We couldnt find anyone to do the sales function, so we had to do it ourselves.

On closer examination, what they are really saying is that the whole sales function for their organisation isnt something that is working well for them, because they dont know how to set up and manage a suitable sales function for the world of big data (commonly understood to mean the volumes of data captured in recent history regarding user behaviour) or artificial intelligence (AI).

Marketing connected to AI, technology and massive amounts of data is increasingly exploiting the Information Age to mean that most buyers are empowered as never before. Simple sales processes are disappearing. In this world sales people are no longer required in many business-to-consumer (B2C) and simple business-to-business (B2B) situations; they are simply order takers, if they are human at all.

But in more complex sales, typically those that involve more than one interaction with the customer, sales are becoming more important than ever before for success. What is sometimes referred to as consultative selling will have to be the basis of sales engagement along with an ethical approach.

Sales is at the forefront of diversity and inclusion strategies since it is imperative that any sales team is able to effectively connect with the people who work with their prospective customers.

As a result, an intelligent approach to sales is and will increasingly become a very significant differentiator for an organisation going forward.

Within this environment, there are thousands of inventive start-up companies whose aim is to take advantage of this period of uncertainty, create new business models and emerge as new leaders. In addition, there are large incumbent organisations that are grappling with modernising their position in the marketplace, in order to take advantage of these disruptive environments and maintain their dominant positions or try and find new ones.

But what is the use of having a terrific product or innovative new service if you cant engage in a proper way with potential customers? As we rapidly move further into the Information Age, many people are unable to keep up with the pace of change, making it difficult to find good people to hire for any business, including salespeople.

More importantly, it is not the function of selling that needs addressing, but the whole process of how the sales function works in, and with, the other elements of an organisation, since an organisation structured to pick the right deals with the right customers will maximise opportunities away from the disruption, and will make innovators successful more quickly, with the right relationships to propel them to the forefront of their markets.

If you get the sales structure system right for your company, then, with some energy and investment, hiring people to work within it shouldnt be so difficult. This book will show you how.

It is imperative that the sales function for an individual business or organisation is structured to differentiate effectively, especially in a world where staff will rely heavily on technology to do a lot of the work for them.

Others, like you, can take a more intelligent approach and follow a process that works for them to deliver the best for their customers and themselves alike. They will go back to some of the basics and think differently in order to enable sales to be a modern, organised growth engine, dovetailed with other organisational functions to be the basis on which to succeed. Their salespeople need to be well equipped to deliver the best results and that is where this book comes in.