Tribe - The Many-to-Many Sales Coaching Playbook

By Alistair McQuade

For decades the sales profession has been fixated on individual sales performance and leadership. Sales methodologies like the Challenger Sale, Sandler Selling, and SPIN selling all focus on the individual seller. But B2B customers have complex problems that require a diverse team effort to solve. That's the first reason why sales methodologies are not working for most companies.

Not only do we promote selling as individuals, but we manage this way too. One-to-many hierarchical sales coaching methods ensure sales managers are a bottleneck and will never have the capacity to coach their teams and deals effectively. That's the second reason why sales methodologies are not working for most companies.

Tribe is a many-to-many sales coaching system leveraging the power of teams in the sales process. Tribe reduces the current bottleneck of manager coaching as salespeople coach each other. You can add Tribe to any sales methodology to make it work. Why?

Because we're all hard-wired to be tribal, it's not optional but a matter of survival. Our brains experience tribal connection as a matter of life or death. It drives the way we think, what we believe, and the way we act. Tribe is the power behind all successful teams through human history. The Tribe Playbook shows how to use this power to motivate and grow sales organizations and get your sales playbook or sales methodology working. Learn more at https://simu.ly/tribe/

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simu.ly
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393272779

Book preview

Preface

Preface

Some definitions before we start:

Dependency (n) [ dih-pen-duhn-see ] the job that needs to be done before the job that really needs doing can actually be done.

Frustration (n) [ fruh-strey-shuhn ] the feeling you have when the job you need to do has a dependency hanging over it that’s not very easy.

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I want to thank Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for ignoring my letters on creating a new word for a frustrating dependency. I suggested that we needed a word that combined the frustration of undertaking a job only to find that another job needs to be done first. We all experience these. Someone else’s laundry left in the washing machine before you can launder your clothes or the dog’s blankets. The no.5 masonry drill bit missing from the set that needs to be purchased before you can hang the picture that’s been waiting to be hung for over a year. I’m sure you have your own examples. I just felt that dependency didn’t cut it. So, I suggested: frepend, preffort and prejob. I was not charging for my ideas and time, this was pro bono work, for the good of the English-speaking world (360 million people acc. google). Having not responded, the OED had inadvertently proved my point by becoming the very frustrating dependency I was asking them to define. So, to get the ball rolling, I’ve decided the word will be:

Preffort (n) [ preh-fort ]

As in, OMG! I’ve got a massive preffort to do before I can write my book.

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The reason the search for this illusive word is close to my heart is the reason for this book. My role is to enable salespeople to succeed, to scale sales capability, and to grow companies. My experience from two decades of doing this has led me to find two ubiquitous and frustrating dependencies, or prefforts, needing to be exorcized before I can do my job. The first preffort is an entire sales organization that can learn, and want to learn. The second is sales managers who can coach the programs I design and roll out. OK, there are pockets of these; it’s not all crying into your beer in my job. There are fun times too. But the bright folks over at Gartner hit the nail on the head when they found that 76% of salespeople think that sales enablement sucks ‘big style.’ My words, not theirs. So, I’ve done what anyone has to do when they have two massive prefforts in the way. I got out my pen, and I’ve written a book on how to get us out of this mess.

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The aim of Tribe is to shift the thinking of the sales profession from individual contribution to group contribution. I personally believe this to be the root cause of a number of challenges we have in the sales profession. In particular, the failure of many salespeople to hit target, the failure to adhere to sales methodologies, the failure of salespeople moving from the seller role to the manager role, and the failure of sales managers to coach. We’ve approached all of these problems from an individual perspective and not a group perspective. As you’ll see in the book, honey does not come from a bee, it comes from a hive. Honey is made through a collective effort and sales are made through a collective effort too. We know this already, but we’re blind to this fact when it comes to scaling sales performance. The sales profession is obsessed with how to make individual salespeople perform. The part we’re missing is that improving the individual will never happen without the systems to improve the group.

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If anyone asks you what Tribe is, Tribe is a coaching system. It’s a many-to-many coaching system, where everyone has a hand in closing deals. In Tribe gatherings, salespeople challenge and support each other and each other’s deals. This re-boots their interest in learning and drives the 76% number down. Tribe can do this because learning is no longer about skills gaps and abstract academic selling topics, it’s about sharing the real experiences of dragging real deals over the line. It’s about sharing the stuff salespeople need to learn and want to learn. If you work in a sales organization you’ve probably already got many of the tools in place to set up Tribe. Tribe is a mindset shift, not a new piece of software. Because it is a mindset shift, I ask you to read the book with an open mind and I’ll be happy to receive your thoughts and questions on Tribe. Who knows maybe a Tribe of sales enablement and sales operations people will form from this.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this book. If you have any suggestions on the new word I’m looking for, please keep it to yourself. The book has already been printed, which means there is now a massive preffort in the way of making any changes.

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Alistair McQuade

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Lockdown 2021

Introduction

If you mix drops of oil in water, they disperse if the water is moving. But at rest, as if by magic, the droplets find a way of coming back together. People and tribes are like oil in water. They have always and will always find a way to form into tribes. Tribes will form whether you want them to or not. And these tribes will either work for you or against you. This book is about the power of tribes; how to make that power work for you, and not against you.

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If we look at the most significant achievements in human history, different tribes were behind them all. Recently, the creation of COVID19 vaccines, the invention of the i-phone, the internet, mapping the human genome and walking on the moon, to name just a few. Imagine being part of those tribes. The badge of honor. The immense feeling of pride. Like Mastercard, if you were lucky enough to be in these tribes, it is priceless.

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Successful tribes are built on trusted relationships that are reciprocal, and those relationships are diverse and many-to-many. Look at any book on sales performance or sales leadership on your bookshelf. How many are about team selling or collective leadership? How many are about diversity in sales? What has been written about sales leadership and sales performance defaults to individual contribution and individual performance. Imagine a person who wants to increase the production of honey from a hive of bees. It does not matter how long they spend looking at an individual bee; they will never achieve their aim. Only when they stand back and look at the hive will they see how the individuals combine to collectively make an effective system. Focusing on individual leadership and individual sales performance is a significant blindspot of the sales profession. The impact of which is systematic under-performance and an expensive opportunity cost.

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The power of Tribes lies within the many-to-many relationships that allow tribe members to challenge and support each other.