Don’t Let Your Team Show You a Potemkin Village - Global Sales Mentor | Zach Selch

5 Sept 2020 · 2 min

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2:03

In this brief talk, Zach Selch uses the historical Potemkin Village story—where fake, staged villages were presented to Catherine the Great to give the illusion of progress—to illustrate how sales teams can create a false sense of success by falsifying customer data and reports. He warns that without personally visiting the field, managers may never see the truth, leading to misleading funnels and stalled growth. Selch emphasizes that being on the ground gives better control over information flow, increasing the likelihood of genuine success when expanding international sales. The segment ends with a call to action, inviting listeners to contact his firm for help growing international sales.

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I'm in Moscow. I don't know if you've ever heard about Potemkin Village. Potemkin Village, the concept is that Catherine the Great was concerned or voiced concern about the quality of life of her peasants. And she wanted her minister, Potemkin, to go out and improve on the lifestyle of the peasants and help them with their living quarters and so on. But instead, what was much cheaper was to essentially build Fake villages, a couple of dozen fake villages that were more like movie sets with just fronts of colorful, clean buildings. And he would move them around so they would be in the pathway of Catherine the Great's carriage so she could see them from the carriage. She felt good about it and she was happy and everybody was happy except nothing actually got done. What she wanted to achieve or what she voiced that she wanted to achieve didn't happen. And we can fall victim to that too if we don't get out into the field. So Sometimes, and I'm not going to say very often, it really depends on the people, information can be falsified from the field. I've seen people falsify customers or falsify reports or make up things to put in their funnel because we're driving, say, the funnel, we're not necessarily seeing results, and sometimes what they're doing is they're saying, well, if Zach isn't actually out in the field, he's never actually going to see these people, he's never going to meet them, why can't I just fake this stuff? And people do it. The more you get out in the field, The better in control of the, of the flow of information, the better in control of the sources of information you are, and the better the likelihood of success by controlling that information and making sure that you know exactly the truth about what's going on in the field. 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.