A step-by-step guide to building and sustaining a powerful sales force. Silver medal award-winner, 2009 Axiom Awards for excellence in American Business Writing.
Maximum Horsepower is what I do, how I do it, and why. I wrote it because it seemed like everywhere I went, domestically or abroad, I kept running into the same sales leadership frustrations.
There is a right way and a wrong way to build a self-sustaining, high performance sales culture. It seems like everyone wants to do it but very few know how. I wrote Maximum Horsepower to explain the smartest way to do it quickly.
I was lucky enough to work for Xerox during the company’s heydays, when Xerox and IBM were the top two sales organizations in American business. The company made me a successful salesman. I had a large measure of success and was selected to be a senior sales instructor at the company’s prestigious world training center in Leesburg, Virginia. There I learned how the company did it; how they transformed motivated greenhorns like me into polished, professional, listen first problem solvers.
I left Xerox to go out on my own after reaching a strong belief that the company was great at teaching us how to sell, but not so good at developing human performance. Companies are nothing more than a collection of people theoretically chasing a common goal. That’s not always the case. If you neglect the human part of people—the life skills part—you miss a huge opportunity. I witnessed some great sales talent leave by choice or necessity. They either got burnt out, couldn’t manage their “real life” as well as they handled their customers, or developed bad habits due to pressure and stress.
“Preventable,” I thought. “Totally preventable.”
I left to pursue a single-minded research passion. My goal was to learn how to make the personstronger, to develop a learning logic and matching curriculum that uses valuable life skills to create a high performance person who is then free to chase his or her chosen profession in a self-motivating world of Maximum Horsepower.
As with everything I do in business, I tested my work globally for relevance and effectiveness. The objective was maximuming the “stick rate” [gaining the most possible retention and application of vital learning principles]. In order to do that, I use life skills as a Trojan horse. Make something relevant to a person’s “real life” and they are much more likely to use it in business.
The global demand for value creators far exceeds its existing supply. There are reasons for this (which I explain). Faced with these challenges, companies are forced to make a choice: pay full retail plus to steal away good talent and hope to hang onto it, or develop their own stable of superb professionals.
My work is targeted toward the latter, toward companies who view their sales force as a valuable resource, not a line item expense. Maximum Horsepower is a step-by-step leader’s guide on how best to build the organization he or she dreams of running.
I was honored when the book was selected as a benchmark of American business writing excellence.