Driven: A how-to Strategy for Unlocking your Greatest Potential

Chapter 14. AMERICA DELIVERS

What happened next was kismet. I was working for a company where I became involved with manufacturing operations. This involvement compelled me to read about Henry Ford's breakthrough at the dawn of the twentieth century—the mass production of automobiles. Ford's genius lay in his ability to embed the intelligence of mass auto production within the process itself, and to put to rest the craftsman model. In effect, Ford made the leap out of the craftsman model of making the horse and buggy to a revolutionary production method. That's when I experienced "pure inspiration!" and wondered to myself, why couldn't Ford's mass-production process be applied to sales? As I reflected on his initiative, I saw a commonality between Ford's situation and the one that contemporary companies were facing. The genius of top salespeople was that they followed a sales process without fail.

The craftsman model dictated that each piece of work be treated as a solitary event that presents one-of-a-kind challenges, an approach that lacks an overall guidance system. Continuity doesn't exist between one piece of work and another in this kind of system. The craftsman—or in my case, the salesperson—labors intensively without an overall game plan that links one selling event to the next. This model fails to provide a process for companies to give them a multiplier effect in sales, because traditionally, the intelligence of sales work lies not in a process but in the individual brain ...