Alistair McQuade has written three books, all of which are available FREE on this website https://simu.ly. This is Tribe the many to many coaching sales playbook. This is the audio version.
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 organisations and get your sales playbook or sales methodology working.
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.
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.
INTRODUCTION TO TRIBE
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.
The power of Tribes lies within the many-to-many rela- tionships that allow tribe members to challenge and support each other. The Tribe is a diverse collective of individuals that are bound together by a common purpose and common values. The Tribe is a system where the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the diverse individual parts. No one individual has a monopoly of knowledge or creativity in modern teams. In the knowledge economy, the flattening of organizational structures can elevate our colleagues’ levels of responsibility, accountability, improve communication, coordination and speed. We know all these points intellectually, but in the sales profession, we pay lip-service to them and systematically fail to capitalize on them. When
we create teams in sales organizations, we fall into three well-known rusty old bear traps:
1) Creating non-diverse teams from people who think and look like us. This reduces the ability to innovate and challenge; two critical capabilities required to solve the complex problems our customers have. This, in turn, reduces the ability create customer value.
2) Relying on a single leader to coach the whole team, a one-to-many hierarchical management method, failing to capitalize on the team’s resources and creating a coaching bottleneck.
3) Failing to support salespeople who want to make the leap into management. We identify potential from their ability to sell well, but they then fail as managers because the skills for selling are not the same as those required to scale and manage sales capability.
This approach and the subsequent failures has resulted in the power of tribes working against us. This point is important to understand. The power of tribes will be at play all of the time in our organizations. The question is, do we make it work for us or against us? And you’ve guessed it. If we’re not actively making it work for us, it will default to working against us. Doing nothing about tribes is not an option because toxic Tribes will emerge. The lack of diversity and the hierarchical way of working is creating toxicity. Research tells us that 76% of tribes are toxic and not aligned with their organi- zations. We’ve all been on the receiving end of toxic tribes. It’s not pleasant, and it’s not good for business. Leaders and members of toxic tribes put themselves first at others’ expense and strip value from organizations.
Like you, I have experienced constructive and toxic tribes. On my journey, I’ve found that to solve the challenge I had, making people more effective in their roles, I had to solve another challenge first. I’ve had to develop a scalable way to build Tribes that work constructively for each other and the organization. In doing so, the Tribes can build value rather than consume it. Five critical success factors need to be in place to create Tribes that build value to organizations:
1) Tribe First – the tribe members build mutual trust by putting the tribe first. They have a ‘Tribe First Mindset’ and place their own needs behind that of the tribe. This trust creates:
2) Relationships – the relationships are many- to-many as opposed to one-to-many. The relationships in the Tribe are diverse and open, not exclusive. Tribe members have earned the right to challenge and support each other, what you could all coaching. This creates scalability, but can only happen if they have an:
3) Inspirational Leader – an individual must pull the tribe together and set the vision around which the tribe members can form. You know the tribe exists when you can see physical evidence of it, including a:
4) Brand Identity – the tribe becomes an entity of its own, which can be seen through the identifiable artefacts and rituals. These can only happen if the leader has created an:
5) Environment – an environment that
operationally supports tribal meetings, including space, communication, and tools. An environment that is socially safe for members to challenge and support each other.
In this book, I make sure you know how to achieve these five critical success factors. Then I give you tools and the design of a playbook to build and scale constructive tribes in sales and customer success environments. The book is written about how to do this and drive revenue performance because I’m a sales enablement practitioner. But the learnings can be applied to all different types of corporate teams. I wish you and your Tribes luck on your journey.