Zach Selch reviews Selling the Wheel, a book that defines sales roles and how to build strategy when launching new technology. It's aimed at founders and early sales leaders who often fail at sales planning. The book covers hiring timing, resource allocation, and market entry.
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I'm in Cairo Airport today, and I'm talking about a book called Selling the Wheel by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens. It's an interesting book. It's written like one of those business memos, which I'm not sure I'm thrilled about, but I think it's probably the best way to convey what the author wants to convey in terms of information passes clearly on the storyline. And it's an interesting book. It's sort of hard to define who it's aimed for. It's not a sales technique book. It's not so much a management book in terms of— or productivity book. It's not so much a productivity book for selling. What it is, is really it's aimed at defining the different jobs in a sales organization and how you go about selling a brand new technology. So the very best people this would be aimed for would be something like a, something like the CEO or the head of sales of a startup that might have some sales experience, might not have any sales experience, but isn't really familiar with all the different jobs within sales organizations. And how to plan out your strategy in terms of who to hire at what point, where to invest your money. Enter a market, change things, and then carry that forward into growth and competition and normalization of the technology, etc. Because there's always this whole thing of, well, do you want an account manager? Do you want a farmer? Do you want a hunter? Do you want a builder? All these different things, and it's very hard for people to keep track of, especially when they're not necessarily salespeople or they're not coming from a sales management or a sales strategy background. So I'll tell you what, one thing I'm also going to say is nobody does this well. In my experience, very, very few people who are founders do this well. They all think they do it well. Everybody who founds a company, everybody who invents something, Thinks that they're the best person to come up with a sales strategy, and typically they fail. Sales— if you've never run the sales of a startup, of a small company, of a company with a new technology, of a company going into a new market, if you've never done that before, this would be a great book for you because it's going to help you with all the strategy issues and figuring out what resources you want and where to invest your money. Early on. So again, the book is called Selling the Wheel by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens, and I'd recommend it especially for anybody who is a starting-out sales manager, VP of sales, or CEO of a startup company, a small high-tech company, or a company that's working with a new technology. Or a new type of solution and trying to figure out how to sell it. 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.
