The Sales Delusion (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781036988838)

You are not sure your sales number is real. The forecast lands somewhere near the figure, or it does not, and either way you cannot say why. Most of the revenue comes from two or three people. When a deal is won, the relationship gets the credit; when one is lost, the reason is price. Growth has flattened, and the plan to fix it is to hire more people like the few who already carry it.

Most chief executives are told that sales is different from the rest of the business: that it runs on instinct, relationships and rare talent, and that the answer to a missed number is to find more stars and stay out of their way. That is the sales delusion. It is comfortable, and it is expensive.

In The Sales Delusion, Rob McGinn argues that sales can be inspected, managed and improved as rigorously as finance or operations, and that building the structure to do so is the chief executive's job, not the sales leader's alone. The companies that grow year after year do not depend on heroic sellers or hopeful forecasts. They are built on a commercial spine: a frame that decides what you sell, to whom and at what price; a system that turns effort into results the same way each time; and a sightline that lets the chief executive see the number before it lands rather than explain it afterwards.

The book turns that argument into a tool. It sets out what good looks like at each stage, what a sales leader should be held accountable for, and the questions to ask in a review, with a sound answer and an excuse placed side by side so a chief executive can tell the difference without ever having sold. Drawing on more than twenty-five years building and repairing commercial organisations across global business-to-business markets, McGinn shows how to stop accepting excuses and start building revenue that stands up without heroes.

The Sales Delusion is written for chief executives, founders, investors and board members of growth-stage and mid-market companies who suspect their commercial engine is weaker than it looks, and who would rather know than hope.

A business that stands on a few people falls with them.