Zach Selch compares a strong sales process to a pyramid: effective, robust, scalable, and reproducible. He turned a half-million-dollar territory into a $30 million operation in three years by building disciplined, teachable processes that let average reps perform well and new hires ramp fast.
Chapters
We've been making pyramids for about 6,000 years. There are pyramids on virtually every continent in the world aside from Antarctica. I've seen pyramids in Sudan made out of mud. I've seen pyramids in Latin America. There was a pyramid made out of dirt in Mississippi. I.M. Pei made a pyramid out of glass and steel in Paris in the 1990s. It's an extremely effective and robust design, but more importantly, pyramids are a scalable and reproducible design. Very robust. This pyramid has been standing here for more than 5,000 years. It's scalable. You can make A pyramid that's 2 inches tall out of clay and/or plastic, and the pyramid behind me was the tallest building in the world for about 4,000 years. Reproducible. You can explain to somebody basically how to make a pyramid, and they can make pyramids everywhere in the world. So it's effective, robust, scalable, and reproducible, and that's exactly what I'm looking for. A couple of weeks ago, somebody interviewed me for a magazine article and they asked me what my superpower was. And I had never thought about that. But you know what my superpower is? It's effectively building sales processes that are effective and robust, but more importantly, they're scalable and reproducible, right? Because how else do you grow? If you can't put together a sales process, no matter how good a salesperson you have, person you are, how good a sales performer you are, you become a leader. If you can't build a sales process that your team can take and go out and close deals, you can't grow. That's what growth is all about. If you want to get to the point where you're selling in 120 countries, or even if you just want to get to the point where you're selling in the 20 most important markets for you, you need a sales process that you can take with you wherever you're going. Right. About 20 years ago, I took over my first team, and I— it was a territory that had been really stagnant for about 7 or 8 years and had never been able to break about half a million dollars. I was able to take that market in about 3 years to about $30 million. And other managers had— what they had tried to do was they had brought in good sales performers who had tried to run around And close things themselves. And that's not the way to do it. What I was able to do was put in place the right processes that were scalable and reproducible and teach my people to follow them and then maintain discipline so that people followed those sales processes. And then mediocre salespeople were able to get fantastic results and, and new salespeople were able to learn things and go on to become fantastic salespeople. Both within my organization and then later on when they left. And, and over the years I've been able to use that skill to grow sales in 4 digits building sales processes. We always think of an effective sales process, but it also has to be robust. It has to be foolproof, right? You don't want people to mess it up. There's always going to be somebody in the chain who needs a little bit extra help or who tries to mess up with things or who doesn't do it exactly right. And if it's robust enough, it'll survive all of those things. You want it to be scalable. You want it to handle your smallest sales but also multi-million dollar projects. And you want it to be reproducible. You want to be able to teach people how to do it and have them take it, whether they're employees or sales reps or distributor salespeople, whoever's selling your product, you want them to be able to take that sales process and use it, reproduce it anywhere in the world that they're selling. Effective, robust, scalable, and reproducible, just like the pyramids behind me. And this is one of the keys to being able to grow internationally. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
