Zach Selch compares ancient Greek rowers and hoplites to modern sales teams. Rowers trusted their leader and each other blindly; hoplites held shields to protect the person next to them. Sales works the same way: trust your team, work shoulder to shoulder, and pull together to close deals.
Chapters
There were essentially 3 ways to be a warrior in ancient Greece if you were a citizen. You could be a cavalryman if you were a nobleman, but essentially if you were a yeoman, if you were just a normal member of the civilian population, you essentially would either be a rower or a hoplite. And it's interesting When you think about those 2 things. So when you were a rower, what that meant was that you, um, when you were a rower, what that meant was you rowed in one of the large warships. And you'd sit down next to a couple of hundred of your citizen colleagues, and you couldn't really see anything. One or 2 people ran the ship, calling out what to do, and you did it. You rowed. And you had to trust that everybody was doing their job, and especially the leadership was doing their job. And if you failed, you would die very quickly and very unpleasantly. Essentially, the ship would be shattered and you would sink. But if you rammed an enemy, you would win. And so you were doing your part, sort of like being part of an aircrew or part of a tank. Required huge courage, but also huge trust and huge trust and respect for your fellow people and for your leadership. It was the same thing for being a hoplite. A hoplite was a heavy infantryman. And the interesting thing about the hoplite is you carried a long spear in your right hand and a large, heavy shield in your left hand. But the shield didn't protect you. The shield protected the person to your left. So essentially, everybody had to do what they were supposed to do. Everybody had to stand in line and do what they were supposed to do. And even the people in the rear might not even see the enemy as they approached. The people who were— who had been around for a few years, who were a little bit more respected, they would be the ones at the front and they would charge forward and hit the enemy as a mass. And the issue with being a hoplite was it wasn't about being an individual. It was about being a member of a team. It was about trusting your colleagues and your friends. And that was a huge part of being a citizen of a democracy in Athens or in the other parts of Greece. Greece, because everybody essentially fought like this. Now we think of people like in the Odyssey, Odysseus or Menelaus and all the other heroes fighting, and they were— that was a pre— that was a heroic period. And these people fought before they had hoplites. These were not people fighting as a team together shoulder to shoulder. They were fighting individually, showing off how heroic they were. But in the golden age of what we would think of as Hellenistic times, people fought as a team, shoulder to shoulder. And I always find that a very inspiring story for selling, especially for team selling. We have to work together. Sometimes we don't know what's going on. We don't know the whole picture. We might not believe in the whole picture. We have to trust that the team is doing what they're supposed to be doing and that the team leader knows what they're doing. But in the end, we have to stick together. We have to stick shoulder to shoulder, and we have to pull together to get the deal. That's part of team selling. So remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help.
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