Zach Selch

SUMMARY

Why did Zach Selch write a book called Global Sales?

Zach Selch wrote the book Global Sales because he saw that people were bad at it and that there was no institutional knowledge or places to learn it in companies.

How should someone use Zach Selch's book Global Sales?

The book Global Sales is a practical textbook that can be used as a reference when international sales challenges come up. It's meant to be read quickly once and then put away to use as a reference when needed. It talks about things like auditing the systems that are already in place, building up and finding new distributors, doing market research, and running a trade show. It is suggested that the book be read along with other books on international sales and channel sales to get a full picture of the topic.

What is the best mistake that Zach Selch has ever made?

Zach Selch says that the best mistake he made in his career was when he was in his early twenties and decided to close his business at the end of the year without thinking about how it would affect his distributors. He learned that growth comes from getting the product to the end user and making sure everyone in the value chain is happy.

What is the best mistake that Zach Selch has ever made?

Zach Selch says that the best mistake he made in his career was when he was in his early twenties and decided to close his business at the end of the year without thinking about how it would affect his distributors. He learned that growth comes from getting the product to the end user and making sure everyone in the value chain is happy.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00]

Marcus Cauchi: Hello and welcome back once again to the Inquisitor Podcast with me, Marcus Cauchi. Today I have one of my favorite return guests, Zach Selch. Zach and I have become firm friends over the years because of love of Chinese food, we're both bomb vivant. And Zach has, over the last 30 years, built over a thousand global partnerships in over 130 countries, worth billions and billions of dollars, and he is still working with partners that he established 30 years ago.

Zack has a motto, which is the only way out of his network is in a box, and he has recently released a fabulous book called Global Sales, which is really a blueprint on how to drive profitable global sales. Zach, welcome.

Zach Selch: Thank you very much for having me again, Marcus. This is my favorite podcast to listen to and I love being a guest here.

60 second rundown on your rather long and illustrious career

[00:01:00]

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. It's my favorite podcast to produce, so we're in good company. So Zach, for those who haven't heard you before, could you give us a quick 60 second rundown on your rather long and, uh, illustrious career?

Zach Selch: Well, yeah, I've been doing essentially international sales for about 32 years, and I did for the beginning, I was a regional manager in a bunch of different territories moving horizontally so that I could get a lot of experience that way.

And for about 15 or 18 years now, I've been the head of sales for different companies. For a 500 million dollar company and for startups. And uh, basically that's what I've been doing. My whole career has been built around driving international sales growth. And what I've started to do recently is instead of doing that serial, instead of building up a company and then getting bored and moving on, working with multiple [00:02:00] companies at the same time to help them grow their international sales.

So that's, that's what I knew do now with my new company, Global Sales Mentor.

Why did you write the book Global Sales?

Marcus Cauchi: Why did you write the book Global Sales?

Zach Selch: Well, very simply, people suck at this, right? This is like for the this is a subject that people are really bad. And what I've found is, typically, you know, there, there are lots and lots of global sales managers out there and, and there are a lot of people who are really good at it, but a lot of them, what happens is you are a good domestic regional sales manager, and then one day somebody says, Hey, would you like to be our international sales manager?

And they toss you into it. Nobody gives you any training. There's nobody around to tell you what to do. You do it for about three years. It's a really, really hard job. You barely figure out the basics and [00:03:00] then you say, wow, this was so hard. My wife hates me because I'm never home. My, I haven't seen my kids in three years.

And somebody offers you a job as, as VP of sales or head of sales. Now that you have domestic and international experience and you take it, so then you leave and then the next guy gets put in the same position. And I found that they're just, it was really, really hard for people to get this institutional knowledge within their company.

There's no course that teaches this. There's no place you can learn this. So, um, having looked at that, I was like, well, I probably, somebody should write a book about this and I figured I knew what I was talking about. I might as well write the book. So there you go. That's, that's what sort of drove it.

How should one use the book?

Marcus Cauchi: Okay. And how should one use the book?

Zach Selch: Well, the book is written, I think it's an interesting enough book, but it's a 400 page book, right? So I'm not sure people are gonna sit down and read it as, you know, [00:04:00] as one might read a, um, you know, one of these books of like the, the 13 Rules of Life or something like that, that, that's a quick easy read.

On the other hand, it's divided up. It's, it's a very, very practical textbook, right? So it talks about how you would go about, auditing an existing system, uh, structure that isn't working very well. How you would go about building up and recruiting new distributors. How you would go about hiring regional sales managers, uh, how you would go about doing your market research, how you'd go about running a trade show, how you'd go about building your sales enablement tools.

So it's really designed, you know, maybe if you're new to this, to, to read through it once quickly, but then keep it on your shelf and use it as you are facing challenges to, to use it like a textbook, open it up, read that chapter, pull out, you know, tools from it. What, what I say in this, again, you don't necessarily have to do everything in the [00:05:00] book, but it really is designed.

It's full of things that are difficult to do, right? That's the bottom line. None of it is, is really easy. On the other hand, I've driven thousand percent growth using the tools from this book over and over again. So if you use it and you stick to it and you do these hard things, you're gonna grow. I highly recommend not reading it and saying, wow, this is just, uh, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm gonna do a little piece of this, or I'm gonna do something very similar to this.

You know, I, I'd highly recommend looking at it as this is a blueprint for how I'm going to get growth and growth in this. If you are new to international sales and you, you bring a thousand percent growth to your company, your company's international sales, that's gonna set your career, that's gonna do very well for you.

It's gonna do very well for your company, right? So it's worth that extra little bit of work to get this right.

Marcus Cauchi: So I would strongly urge people to read this book. I would read it in conjunction [00:06:00] with Building Successful Partner Channels by Hans Peter Beck. And at the risk of being self-serving, I would also read Making Channel Sales Work by myself and David,

Zach Selch: Which is, which is a great book. Which is a great book.

Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. And all three of them will give you a fully rounded perspective because between us, we've got just shy of, uh, probably a 120 150 of, of experience. Yeah. And we've screwed up. I mean, there, there is. Let's make no bones about this. Zach and I have spent our careers developing a lot of scar tissue and both books, and Hans Peter's book as well, is built on a blood, sweat and an awful lot of tears.

It's not plain sailing, and you can learn from our mistakes. Now without any shadow of a doubt, channel sales is [00:07:00] the hardest job in sales bar none. Well, I lied. International channel sales is the hardest job in sales bar none because not only do you have no power directly, but now you have to be culturally aware and flexible and you have to adapt because if you're dealing with a partner in Zaire or Cambodia or Ulaanbaatar, I can guarantee you haven't got a clue how business is done in those regions and you need to find the right partners.

So fundamentals, let's start with getting your head in the right place.

If you've been gifted this potentially poisoned chalice of being a global head of sales and you're trying to build your channel, what mindset do you need to come with?

Marcus Cauchi: So Zach, your thoughts in terms of if you are, if you've been gifted this potentially poisoned chalice of being a global head of sales and you're trying to build your channel, what mindset do you need to come with?

Zach Selch: Oh, well, that's a great question, Marcus.

The first thing you have to [00:08:00] realize is that there are differences in business culture and it's going to impact every element of the sales process. A a and let me, let me use a, a very basic example. So what's the first thing we like to do is discovery, right? And there are books written about discovery. I love the concept of discovery.

Discovery is something we talk about, you know, us uh, sales nerds, people who are really into sales details and stuff. We talk about discovery a lot. Now you go to Nigeria, and you get, you know, so, so what do you do? Let, let's say with you're trying to figure out if you can sell your pro product in Cleveland.

You sh you can show up at, at somebody, you know, an end user or somebody, a key opinion leader who you've never met before, and you can boom, start asking them questions because that's perfectly acceptable. You go to Nigeria and [00:09:00] you, you know, introduce yourself and you start say, so what are some of the problems that keep you up at night?

Right? You can't do that, right? You're gonna get completely shut down. And that's the type of thing that people don't get is from the very beginning, every single element of that, uh, you have to be culturally aware of who you're dealing with. So if you say, well, this is pretty simple, I'm going to go and I'll, I'll talk to a customer and I'll figure out what their problems are, and then we'll figure out how we design our marketing materials and our deck and everything based around that.

Well, you can't even start that way, right? So first you have to establish trust before you can even ask somebody what their problems are, right? So, so that's just a little bit of this. Now here's the other thing. I was, I was in a, um, I was in a talk a while back by this guy who had spent 30 years working in Latin America, most of it in Columbia.

[00:10:00] And he wrote this book about doing business internationally. And, uh, I, I was invited to the book launch and, and I was listening to him talk and he kept talking about like, foreigners do this and foreigners do that. And I realized everything he was talking about, he was talking about Colombians. And this guy had spent his career doing business in Colombia.

And from his perspective, you were either American or you were Colombian. And this is what Colombians did. So this is what foreigners did. So he was talking about, you know, how foreigners did this and foreigners did that. And I thought, you know, he's essentially a domestic salesperson in Columbia. That's his experience.

Right. You have to look at it like, you know, I can tell you the difference between business culture and Columbia and business culture and Guatemala, right? And you have to be able to look at things like that with that resolution. You can't lump everybody in the EU together. You [00:11:00] can't lump everybody, frankly, in England together.

Right? But you certainly can't lump everybody in South America or Latin America. You can't. So if you're dealing with this, you have to be willing. To do a little bit of research on the business cultures of all the different countries you're working in, and you have to be able to know how to apply that to your process.

Marcus Cauchi: A really good example of people falling foul in Nigeria, if you don't understand the centers of power and influence, chances are you're gonna get nowhere in Nigeria. If you don't have church leaders on your side, chances are you are gonna get nowhere. Now, if you don't recognize this and you don't have people who locally on the ground understand these centers of power and influence, odds are you're gonna throw a lot of money, a lot of effort.

And then you're gonna say, you know, Nigeria's a terrible market, but it has [00:12:00] a massive population, it has oil, there is a lot of welfare, and if you miss out on the Nigerian market more fool you.

Zach Selch: That's exactly right. You know, people look at it, it, it's a difficult market and I, I like to use Nigeria as an example because it is a difficult market, but it's a giant market.

There's a percentage of the population that's affluent. So even if you're selling something like BMW aftermarket components, it's still a market, right? There are, you know, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of very affluent people in Nigeria. It, it's not a bad market, but if you're selling things to say growing middle class, Nigeria's a fantastic market, but it is a very, very difficult market to get into.

You know, again, one of these funny things you get, I, I like to call it the, the sort of, the, the magic genie type of, of thinking is people have this idea that international markets are [00:13:00] exotic and they know they work differently from America, from England. And the idea is, well, there's going to be this guy, this magic guy, and if I can just meet this magic guy, he's going to get me deals.

And I, I can't tell you when, when, when I wrote my book, my editor called me up one day and she goes, I, I think you should change this, this a few paragraphs. She goes, you talk about this mistake people make as being pretty common and how even intelligent people make. I think you'd have to be an idiot to make this mistake.

So I don't know how you, you, how come You can say this is intelligent. And I say, well, I know people who have MBAs from Wharton and people who have been to Harvard who make this mistake on a regular basis. Right? A and, and what was the mistake is again, let's say you're in America and your taxi driver says to you, Hey, I know the president [00:14:00] of the Cleveland Clinic Hospital and I can sell.

If I tell him to buy your product, he'll buy a million dollars worth of your product. You'll say, but why are you driving a taxi? You know, if you, if you can do that, why are you driving a taxi right now? If that same taxi driver says, Hey, I'm from Lagos, Nigeria, and my brother-in-law is the president, and if you sign me up, I will make sure that everybody in Nigeria buys your widget.

right? People will do that, right? Because they think, oh, I, I'm, I'm really lucky I have found the Magic Genie that's going to get me into Saudi Arabia or Nigeria or Ethiopia, and he happens to be driving an Uber in Denver. This is fantastic what luck I have, right? And this, this is not, I mean, I'm making this sound silly, but I can't tell [00:15:00] you how common this is.

You know, somebody will send me a website and they'll say, look at this guy. This guy seems to know everybody. And I'll go on his website and it hasn't been, you know, it hasn't been renewed in four years. It's full of spelling mistakes. And the guy is saying that he can, you know, he knows how to sell to the king of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates of the in, in the Gulf and, and all of this.

And I say, but there's no proof here. There's no, he, he doesn't have a process down. He's just claiming. And what he wants us to do is give him 7% of all future deals. And they're like, yes. Isn't this a fantastic deal? Sign 'em up. Sign 'em up.

Marcus Cauchi: And only 7%

Zach Selch: People do this all the time. Right? Because it's magical thinking.

They think these markets are exotic. This guy is going to get us into these markets. He's our magical genie.

Marcus Cauchi: Well, one of the other mistakes that I see is people [00:16:00] assume things will happen way faster than they actually. It's unrealistic to think that you're going to generate any revenues of significance in what, 18 months.

Zach Selch: If everything goes smoothly.

And typically what I say to people is, what you have is a year to 18 months of activity with no revenue, and then suddenly stuff will start coming in. And it depends on the product, and it depends on the buying cycle. If it's, if it's synced to the calendar in some way, because some things are only purchased a certain month out of the year or a certain, you know, quarter of the year.

So it might even be a little bit longer than that. But what happens, again, and this is a, a very common mistake, is people, you, you put together a plan. You say, this is gonna take 18 months in, you know, July of 2022, we are going to see a bump in revenue. Until then, we're [00:17:00] not. But what's going to happen will, there will be milestones and we can follow those monthly milestones.

And if we see those milestones, we can be very confident that the sales will come in and then people panic after about a year and they say we should change everything. And you're like, no, no. We are six months from having results. We can't change everything now. And that's a huge mistake people do.

Marcus Cauchi: This requires therefore for whoever the head of global sales is to have a very clear agreement with the executive leadership and for leadership to be patient.

Now, the wrong reasons for trying to grow internationally is cuz you fancy a trip overseas and to see exotic places.

Zach Selch: Exactly.

Marcus Cauchi: Um, making the mistake of trying to quantify activity with revenue, um, [00:18:00] before. The foundations have been put in place, you can drive up the value of your company significantly because you're demonstrating that you have international growth potential.

If you're patient, you will drive revenue. And one point that you make in the book, which I think is really very smart, is it allows you to attack foreign competition and keep them out of your home market.

Zach Selch: Yes. Yeah.

Marcus Cauchi: But you have to have the agreement with the executive team and this requires that they understand channel.

How do you make sure that before they launch on this great adventure, that they understand that going international via partners is a very different setup to peddling your product locally in Cleveland?

Marcus Cauchi: So how do you make sure that before they launch on this great adventure, that they understand that going international via partners is a very different setup to peddling your product locally in Cleveland?

Zach Selch: I was sort of hoping you could tell me that Marcus

Marcus Cauchi: No, I'll tell you. I have opinions, but I was hoping to hear yours.

Zach Selch: I literally have never had that part go smoothly. Right. I've done [00:19:00] it, but I'll tell you what, there's always this panic of, oh my God, are we really doing the right thing into the project? And I'll tell you the, the, the most stressful time of my life is usually at that one year point with a company where everything is going according to plan.

Everything is developing the way it should. I am delivering exactly the milestones I promised. And somebody says, maybe we should start making changes. Now at this point, I'm doing everything I can to tap dance around and say, stick to the plan, stick to the plan. Look, we're staying to the milestones. Now, it really depends on how disciplined the leadership is, because if I can come and say, look, I I'm going to do these milestones.

We can talk about these [00:20:00] milestones. You'll, you'll see what's going on. And if I've, if I follow these milestones that at the 18 month point we should see revenue, if they believe that, and if they're disciplined enough, we're gonna get to the end and have results. If in the middle they say, but you know, I, I just saw a shiny object, we should run and change everything and follow that, you know, everything's going to go to hell, essentially.

So what I'm trying to do with people is show them a plan, get them to buy in on the plan. And with that, make sure that they're gonna stick to it. But, but I, I can tell you now that that hasn't worked for me a hundred percent of the time. I've had situations where people have panicked and then, you know, we've lost a year because they wanted to make changes in the middle to what we were doing, even though everything was hitting the milestones.

Marcus Cauchi: Right. One, one of [00:21:00] the best bits of advice, um, I ever received was from John DeLucie who grew a via channel, and he's currently at eight by eight. And before he took the job, he had a prenup with the CEO and the CEO agreed to spend a month on the road with him speaking to partners. And that was a fundamental requirement and non-negotiable.

And I think if the CEO actually gets to speak to partners and they see how well versed they are in their local business culture, and you're speaking to the right partners, and they understand that the moving parts are different. The expectations of timeframes, the priorities are different. Then you can refer back to that prenup.

Zach Selch: Right.

Marcus Cauchi: And you can refer back to the [00:22:00] experience they had. And I think it's important also that you have these agreements in writing with the executive team that these are the milestones and they will not deviate from the plan, right? Unless you give them good reason to do so. And that's a difficult negotiation, but it's a crucial one because if

Zach Selch: I, I agree.

Marcus Cauchi: I If you don't do this upfront, then their expectations that the world, the frame of reference is their domestic market. And we, we see so many US and British corporations trying to sell internationally direct, and how badly wrong that goes, right? Where you don't have control and you're going through, uh, partners, that's even harder.

So one of the other aspects of that negotiation has to be making sure they understand that they have to seed [00:23:00] control because partners are in business for their reasons, not your reasons. And this is where, uh, and I I know this is something that you are very, very passionate about, about creating mind share and stickiness with the partners.

Zach Selch: Right?

Marcus Cauchi: So starting out by helping the partners understand that you are going to invest in their business and help them set themselves up for success.

What is it that you have to do in order to set that partnership up before the lawyers have screwed it up?

Marcus Cauchi: So let's start out with the fundamentals right at the beginning. What is it that you have to do in order to set that partnership up before the lawyers have screwed it up?

Zach Selch: So it comes down in that, I think you nailed it exactly. Your interest and the partner's interests are not a hundred percent in alignment. They are similar but not in a hundred percent in alignment. So you have to understand what the partner wants from it. You have to make sure that you can live with that.

You [00:24:00] have to understand what that partner's resources are. You have to have mapped out exactly what you want from that partner. And, and, and let's take a quick step backwards. So let's say I take a look at my sales process and my sales process has 10 components, right. And maybe, uh, three of them. I want my regional sales manager to do five of 'em.

I want my partner to do, one of them I'm going to do, and one of them, somebody in my headquarters is going to do, for instance. So I know those components that I want from the partner. Uh, that's what I need the partner to be good at. Right. And that's what I need the partner to be focused on. And this is really an important thing because no partner is perfect.

No partner has everything. And very often, you know, if I go in, you know, I, I can give you an example. Somebody I know got very, very excited. They were selling a [00:25:00] medical capital equipment device to the government, and they found this partner that had fantastic bandwidth, a lot of money, a lot of success, all of this.

But they were selling essentially consumables to to pharmacies, right? That was their skillset. So what they were really good at was selling things like soap and vitamins to pharmacy chains across Asia. They were completely the wrong partner in terms of what was needed to make this work, right? And there was nothing you could do to, to make this work with this partner because they just didn't have the people or the skills for this, and they had no real interest in doing this, right?

So, so once you've identified what you want from that partner, what you need that partner to do, then you're basically coming in and you're saying, okay, this is how we're gonna support you and so on. Now, going back to what you're saying, what, what you were asking Marcus about, well, how do you build this up from the beginning?[00:26:00]

From the very beginning, it's really hard if they have no history with you. So what I always end up doing is sort of pulling in, you know, uh, you've never worked with me. This is a new thing. But if you talk to your friend Bob, Bob knows me, and Bob will tell you that you can trust me, right? And I'll talk about how I'm gonna go about, you know, uh, doing, giving them tools, how I'm gonna go about sporting them.

But in the beginning, this is almost slideware. This is almost, I'll tell you why you should trust me because other people have trusted me and it's worked out pretty well, and hopefully this is gonna work out well. And then once you get a few of them up and running and, and hopefully moving forward and selling, and, and they see that you're giving them good support, you're giving them good tools.

I give fantastic training and coaching tools to my, my distributor salespeople and my distributors, and they see this. Then it's easier to add on other people. [00:27:00] And once they start bringing in revenue, And they see how much you've helped them bring in revenue, then you, then it's much easier to become sticky.

And then the whole process starts of really developing this culture of wanting to be your partner and, and you want everybody to wanna be your partner and you want everybody to wanna stay being your partner forever, basically.

Marcus Cauchi: I think there's something else that one has to address very early on.

There's the fears and concerns that your employer has, right? But there's also the fears and concerns that the distributor has because they will have been burnt many times. So that foundation work is really crucial. So talk to me about that first hundred and 20 days. In fact, the recruit, the courtship process, and then the first 120 days.

Zach Selch: So that's, that's it. The, I love those questions, Marcus. So the recruitment process, you know, [00:28:00] and a lot of people who talk about sales talk about this as dating type of thing, right? And it's like that with channels. It's exactly like that. You are essentially showing that you are a good suitor for the distributor.

And what, what do they want? They wanna be able to make money easily, and they want to be able to trust you. Now, pardon my crudeness here, but why is there a distrust in the dating process, right? Because women, you know, have a fear that you are going to get them pregnant and run away, basically, right? That you're gonna get what you want out of this and leave them damaged.

And that's what the distributors are worried about. They're worried that you're gonna screw them over. And the damage to a distributor, if the, if a distributor takes on your product. Tells the market that they're representing you, puts effort into selling your product and then you decide to change [00:29:00] distributors.

You decide to pull outta the market, you decide to go direct. It hurts that distributor's reputation and face. It costs them the money they've invested in this. They might now have contracts to supply that they can't supply. They might have an installed base that they can't service. The damage to that distributor is huge and they can't af and they, and they've all had it happen to them.

They can't afford to, to let it happen to them easily. So they're gonna be very, very careful about this. Now, let's say your distributor sells 10 products, right. There are gonna be products that are easier for them to sell, and there are gonna be products that are more difficult for them to sell, and there are gonna be products that are more profitable and products that are left less profitable.

The salespeople are going to sell the ones that are easiest to sell with the most, most revenue for them. So you are facing now convincing [00:30:00] people within the organization, both the management or the owners of the distributor and the salespeople, that they should sell your product because it's going to be easy to sell and that it's, it's profitable.

And that means you have to be able to show. , you know, so basically I come in and I say, here is why people buy my product. Here is why it's a good fit for your market. And that can co, that can basically be like, okay, the people buy your my product because there's a growing middle class and that triggers them buying it as an example. And then I say, and what we see with your market is that your market has a growing middle class. It's one of the 10 countries in the world with the fastest growing middle class. And I said, it can compare to this other market, right? So that your market compares very closely to this other economic model.

And I can tell you we sell very well there. Okay? So what I'm basically doing is I'm saying, why do I think we're [00:31:00] gonna sell well in your market, be because of, of, of facts, which I can quantify. And also because your market is similar to a market where I am selling well, for instance. And I can quantify that.

And I say, and now why will this be easy to sell? Well, because there are X million people in this market who want a product like this, right? This is why they want it. And I'm going to give you these tools to support selling. So it will be easy for you to sell this product to these people who want this product.

And I can, I can walk them through why this is going to be more or less easy and profitable. And then lastly, and, and this is not the least, the, the, the, the least important thing. But usually I say this for last because I also have to make sure that I've peaked their interest. I'll say, and now I'm going to prove to you why you can trust, not that I'm not gonna screw [00:32:00] you over, right.

And I can go through why we're committed to working with a single channel partner in this market. Why we, and, and I like to be able to say, look, we don't sell direct anywhere in the world. Right? That's a very powerful statement. Now, some country companies can't say that, but if that isn't true, you can at least say, look, we have a policy, we only sell direct in countries where English is the primary language and we have a subsidiary set up.

So we sell direct in America, the UK and Australia. We don't sell direct anyplace else, for instance, or we only sell direct in countries with a population of over a hundred million people or with a a, uh, per capita G of over 40 K or something like that. If you can come out and say, this is our policy, and you can see why.

We have no plans of selling direct in your country. For instance, you can say, look, we've been working, we work with [00:33:00] 25 distributors right now, and the average tenure with a distributor is over eight years. So, you know, we did, I, I used to, in my last company, I said, look, I haven't fired a distributor in seven years.

Right? Something like that. If you can make statements like that, then people, people really, what you're trying to do is give them a reason to trust you.

Marcus Cauchi: You, you're giving them peace of mind and reassurance. And I, I think to summarize, the first thing is you are looking to put a ring on the finger of a special forces partner.

You're not trying to hire an army of conscripts, right? So you're giving them the peace of mind that they will have that market to themselves, which means that. There is a genuine partnership where you are collaborative, where you train them as if they are your own. You train them to be successful. You are [00:34:00] aligning with their business objectives.

So it means that you have to understand what they are trying to achieve in their business, who their customers are, what their customer's outcomes are that they are trying to achieve, and how you are going to furnish them with products and services that allow them to do more of what they do well and extend their reach within their existing customer base, or expand into new domestic markets.

You are reliable, that you are committed, and that you operate with a set of business values that give them peace of mind that the investment they make in terms of time, money, resource, opportunity, cost, makes good commercial sense for the long term. Is that a fair summary?

Zach Selch: That's a great summary, Marcus.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Marcus Cauchi: Okay, so then let's go a little bit deeper [00:35:00] into what comes next. You've spent time courting these people, you've recruited them, You've, um,

Zach Selch: Well, I, I'm sorry. Let's even slow down just a step. So typically I'm going to court three to five distributors in a territory. I will have identified the ones I could work with, the ones that fit what I'm looking for, and something that we've talked about and is really important to mention.

I haven't worked with a distributor that reached out to me in decades, right? This whole thing, you know, you talk to people and they say, oh, this guy reached out to me from Portugal. He wants to be my distributor. If he reached out to me, that's an indication that there must be a good market there. Even though I wasn't planning on going into Portugal, and even though he doesn't typically sell products and fit my distributor avatar, I think I'll work with him because he's [00:36:00] enthusiastic and that's a huge mistake.

And, but that's the, a very, very common mistake, right? We were talking about this a few days ago, Marcus, right? Where people say, I have 25 distributors. I met them all at a trade show because they randomly walked in.

Mm-hmm.

right? And that's like, yeah, I just hired salespeople because they randomly walked into my office and asked for a job, so I gave them a job.

Right. Nobody would do that. But they'll work with a distributor who they've never met before in a market they had no intention of going into. And, and I'm, I'm very passionate about this, so I'm gonna, I, I'm not gonna talk about this too long, but basically I've identified the people I wanna work with or who I could work with in the market I want to work in.

I've met three to five of them. I've courted them. Now it's the dating game. They're presenting to me why I should work with them. And I matrix this out. So if you take [00:37:00] a look at partners and you say they have to have competency, they have to have bandwidth, they have to have focus, right? What do I mean?

Bandwidth is how big they are. Do they have enough boots on the ground? Focus is how much are they going to give my product and my company. And competency-- do they have the things I need for them to fulfill their piece of the sales process, right? If what they really need are relationships with the Ministry of Health, do they have those?

If what they need are presentation skills, do they have those? If what they need are installation and support skills, do they have those? Right? And the thing about competency is you can buy competency, right? The thing about focus is you can say to somebody, look, if you really want to be my pro, my my partner, you have to give me focus.

Bandwidth is a set number essentially. [00:38:00] because unless they, they essentially go to a bank and borrow money, they can't change their bandwidth for it to make you happy. So you have to basically understand that if you're dealing talking to a small distributor or a big distributor, the issue of bandwidth isn't going to change over a two or three year period maybe.

Right? So, so those are the components. I'm looking at them. And then I'm gonna matrix this out on a chart with the X and Y axises being competency and focus. And then typically what I do is the size of the dot will be the bandwidth of that company. So I look at this and I'm looking for the co, the distributors that are going to have the best combination of focus, bandwidth, and competency.

And I'll choose the one I most wanna work with. And then I will essentially see if, if they're willing to [00:39:00] work to the conditions that I need to get from them. Mm-hmm. Right? And then where that goes is I'm going to say, okay, this is what I want from you. These are my expectations. And we've, we've talked about this and any number of times as well, Marcus, where we say, here's what I want.

In the first 30 days, you will have named, you know, I, I'm asking you to work with three salespeople, each one at least 25% of their time in your market. So within 30 days, I want their names, I wanna have met them within 60 days. I want them trained. This is my training program, which means they have to commit 16 hours for this training within 90 days.

I want the first set of reports of them having spoken to customers, right. And what I want is monthly reports. Basically saying that they executed the activities that we have agreed [00:40:00] upon, right? And I'm setting milestones here at a resolution of about 30 days, going for the whole initial period of time before the expectation of revenue.

So what do I mean by that? Let's say it's unreasonable to expect them to put in an order in the first year, but by 18 months, I'm anticipating orders. So what I want is what activities will they be doing for those 18 months before that revenue comes in? Because I don't want to say, okay, yeah, a year from now you give me a check for a million bucks and we're good.

Right? Because that never works out well. What I want is to basically say, I wanna know what you're doing for the next 18 months. As long as you do that, we're good because there will be revenue if you follow those activities for 18 months, we're gonna get revenue. I trust that. Then we'll start talking numbers, right?

[00:41:00] And one thing else that, uh, I, I've been talking for a long time, non-stop, but this is the, this is sort of the meat of the issue here. I also put this, what I've found is this can take, signing an agreement can take three to six months. Honestly, lawyers really suck when it comes to this, right? And usually it's completely unnecessary.

But what I like to do is an is an LOI a letter of intent, where I basically say it's our intention to work together. It's my intent to make you my partner. I'm not talking to anybody else for the next 30 days. over the next 30 days, we're trying to get this agreement closed. These are our expectations from one another.

And when that document is in their hand, and I, I very often am sending this LOI to people before I leave the country. Right? So, so as an example, picture a situation where, [00:42:00] you know, the first week of May, I'm reaching out to people. Second week of May, I'm visiting people in market. I'm there for two days.

I meet six companies, and by Tuesday afternoon I'm ready to leave the country. Having met six companies I know which one I wanna work with. I may send them that L LOI on my way to the airport, right? So that I know that they're going to get moving immediately and they're not gonna waste two weeks or a month.

And go back

Marcus Cauchi: Just for clarification, by that time you've had your six meetings and that L LOI only goes to one distributor.

Zach Selch: Exactly. Right. By that time, yeah. I've, I've looked at, let's say I've met with six people, I've matrixed out who I wanna work with. I've made a decision The LOI will only go to one.

Exactly. Because again, that, that's a matter of trust. Right. You're basically saying, I am not gonna talk to anybody else for the next 30 days because it's [00:43:00] my intent to close an agreement with you,

Marcus Cauchi: What is it that you have to do in order to set that partnership up before the lawyers have screwed it up? and they have to meet those requirements over the next 30 days to qualify for that exclusive arrangement.

Correct? Correct. Which means that you are al already building pipeline and you, you're advancing the relationship. You're establishing that they are an organization and people who do what they say they're going to do, presume. Right. That is all discussed at the end of that meeting, or in a te in a phone call or a meeting, a second meeting.

Before you get into the taxi to the echo.

Zach Selch: That's exactly right. Now, let's go back to the dating analogy here for a second, right? Imagine you go out on a date with somebody and you hit it off. You have fantastic chemistry, everything's great, [00:44:00] and then you say, okay, why don't we do this? Let's get together in 90 days again to have sex, right?

Imagine how effective that would be, right? But what we're doing is we're meeting with a partner. Everybody's excited, there's great chemistry. You are now at the peak of excitement that that distributor is going to have. And then you say, okay, let's have our lawyers talk to each other for 90 days and then we'll start work together.

Marcus Cauchi: If that isn't a passion killer, I dunno what would be that.

Zach Selch: That's exactly it, right? By giving them the L, the l o I. They're now, they're like, wow, I just met Zach. Zack has the best product. Zach is gonna, I love Zach, this is great. I want to go out and sell Zach's product. And boom, Zach gave me a letter of intent, so I'm covered.

I don't have to worry about the legal aspects. Right. And you're getting that momentum from that meeting and [00:45:00] territory.

Marcus Cauchi: Right. Excellent. Okay. I mean, that, that's just a wealth of, uh, useful insight. So one, one of the things I really loved about the book was it's granular, practical detail in terms of how you go about organizing a sales trip, how you go about building a sales organization.

The difference is between distributors, agents, consultants and I, I think it's really important that if you are going to grow internationally, that you put the heavy lifting in. Upfront that you plan. Do not turn up in the expectation that you can wing this. If you do, you will sync a lot of money and time, be deeply disappointed and probably damage your reputation irreparably, so you cannot reenter that market.

Zach Selch: I would agree. Two things. There was a, a [00:46:00] Harvard Business Review article and a UCLA doctorate thesis that came out, uh, over the past decade or so that talked about the damage to a company that tries to expand internationally and fails is huge. Because you can, like you said, you can sink millions of dollars into this.

You can damage your reputation. You can poke your international competitors and have them decide they, you know, if, if you, you might have a, a competitor in Australia who's never seen your product and then you come in and you fail in Australia and they could say, Hey, I beat them in Australia. I bet I could beat them in America.

Right? And then they come and they start competing with you in your home market. There are lots of things that can go wrong if you don't do this well. Right. And people don't think about that. They think, okay, so, so I'm gonna, I'll, I'll earmark a hundred k if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

You can sync your company [00:47:00] by a failed attempt to grow internationally if you don't wanna do this. Right. Right. And you can't wing it. This is, you know, like you mentioned before, this is the hardest job in the company. It's the hardest job in the company. It's the loneliest job in the company. It, it could be the most important job in the company.

You can't wing it. You have to plan every minute of your time, every step of what you're doing. You have to plan it out well.

Marcus Cauchi: Which then brings us to the makeup of a great Channel Chief. Talk to me about the qualities and the capabilities of, and the habits of a great Channel Chief. Because if you're gonna recruit a head of international sales, you really don't wanna make a bad hire.

Zach Selch: Yeah. So I'd say one of the biggest mistake, here's the thing, what are you really looking for? You're looking for a guy. This is a very, very hard job. So you're looking for a person who can do a hard job. [00:48:00] The key to it is channel sales. The key to it is being flexible in multiple markets, right? So what you're looking for is really somebody with experience in multiple markets who knows how to sell, who knows how to sell through channels, and is a hard worker, and everything else is fluff.

Now, you noticed I didn't say, you know, speaks Spanish or speaks Mandarin or something like that, right? I would say what, what we very often do is we say, I'm gonna hire this guy because he speaks Spanish or he speaks Italian, and it's almost irrelevant right? Now, the cultural aspect of that, you know, we have a concept which is called third, third culture kids, right?

Which is somebody who grew up as an immigrant child or living in a new culture, right? So they weren't quite part of that culture. Third culture kids. I myself was a third [00:49:00] culture kid, right? I moved around different countries a lot as a kid because of my dad's work. But when you grow up like that and you're culturally flexible, that is a really good indicator for this type of job.

And a lot of the people I know in this job do that. But somebody who let's say, was a diplomat in Kenya for 12 years, well, there, there's no real reason to think that that person is gonna do this job any better than anybody else, right? But if somebody has done business in Africa and Mexico, right? They've done business in a couple of different markets, they've done them both successfully.

That's a really good indicator, right? So what what I'm looking for is somebody with channel experience, who's worked in multiple markets, and who's a hard worker, cuz this is really the hardest job in the company, right? You're getting up at 5:00 AM sometimes you're going to sleep at one, one in the morning, you're traveling on the weekends, all of that.

So you have to have an indication from this person that you believe that they're gonna be a hard worker. Th those are the things I'd be [00:50:00] looking for. I really would put aside the language because you know, there, there's a, an old saying that if, uh, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?

If, if you speak Japanese, the best market for you to go into is Japan. If you speak, if you speak Spanish, the best, best market for you to go into is Latin America, right? If you are, if you've worked in multiple markets, you're gonna follow the money and you want somebody who's gonna follow the money and go to whatever market has the money for your product.

Marcus Cauchi: I'd expand on this as well. I think, um, you need to have a strategic approach, right? Uh, you've got to be very good at addressing conflict. You need to have strong business and financial acumen. I think you've gotta be a planner. It fundamental to making this work is you've gotta be able to plan your activity, the activity of others, and manage those [00:51:00] resources and do so in such a way that the partners do not feel like you're dictating to them.

So you have to be very collaborative and you have to be a great listener, a great observer of the human condition. I don't think it works if you are somebody who's very directive or dictatorial, that's very likely to just piss people off. Those

Zach Selch: Are all very good points, Marcus. You're right.

Marcus Cauchi: And I, I think the other piece is you have to be very process orientated as well as having those interpersonal skills.

You know, without that, chances are things will start to turn to mush very, very quickly. Right. And it requires that discipline, but having that allows you to then communicate to your own executive team very clearly what it is that you're doing and keep them appraised of what's happening. I think one of the big mistakes I see in business is people don't communicate [00:52:00] often enough.

I would rather someone over-communicated right, and told me what progress or lack of progress was happening. And if there is a problem, I want to know about it. But hiding mistakes, hiding problems is the kiss of death.

Zach Selch: I agree with you a hundred percent. You can't try and hide a problem and I'll, I'll elaborate on that.

I, I think you're exactly right, but I think also it's really important to structure that internal communication correctly and very often we layer those things and we, you know, we say, well, if you're communicating with this, you should use this report communicating. So you might have five or six or eight internal reports giving in essentially the same information.

Right. So having a good structure where you say, okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use my CRM to do internal [00:53:00] communications, or for that matter, I'm gonna send my boss a daily text, or I'm gonna send my boss a text every time something urgent comes up. Or I'm gonna send the board some type of a thing.

But there should be a process in place to keep that information flowing in an effective and efficient way without wasting everybody's time. Right. So, so I think that's exactly right. I think getting that information, you don't want surprises. You don't want anything to, to, to fester. You wanna deal with it immediately, right?

All these things are important. It's a very complicated situation to get right, and there are a lot of little moving pieces you gotta fit together

Marcus Cauchi: To add to the level of complexity. As the channel chief, you have to be ready to train your partner's salespeople. But there is also the cultural nuance that needs to be built into the training because if you're [00:54:00] training your French distributor, it's gonna be very different from training your Cambodian.

Zach Selch: That that's exactly right.

Marcus Cauchi: Even though there is probably quite a lot of French influence.

Zach Selch: Um, yeah, that's exactly right. And I'll tell you, this goes back close to 20 years. I did on the same trip, I did a training in the Middle East and a training in Thailand. So the training in Thailand for was for seven or eight distributors from Southeast Asia, and the training in the Middle East was for seven or eight a uh, Arab distributors and nobody in the Asian meeting asked any questions.

They all sat there with blank faces listening, taking notes. Absolutely zero feedback. In the Middle East, everybody argued about everything constantly, right? So literally it took about twice as long to do the training in the Middle East. Now, both groups had good [00:55:00] people. It was just a totally different way of learning, right?

So what I learned from that was how to better engage the people from the ar, from the Asian countries because they did not feel comfortable arguing. They did not feel comfortable asking questions, which might be considered rude, right? So you, you have to really pull that out of them to engage them. And it's like that with everything you, you have to understand how your people are going to learn how they need to be coached and what you'll find, for instance, one thing that I like to do, and I have to be careful with, is sometimes I'll have distributor salespeople present to a group and then have people give criticism. right now.

Different cultures take and give criticism differently and you could devastate somebody because sudden suddenly there's a culture that's much more direct and you have a German guy just picking [00:56:00] apart because he's trying to be helpful. Right. That's the way they do things in his culture, he is picking apart somebody's presentation and that person might be in tears because nobody's ever, you know, his, his parents never spoke to him quite like that.

Right. . So, you know, you, you, you can get that and you have to understand how that works and Yeah. You know, these are things you pick up over over 30 years. Right. They're nobody, you know, you can't learn this in, in college, unfortunately. Right. It's, it's really difficult to pick these little nuances up.

Marcus Cauchi: Again, this keeps coming back to being culturally aware, right. That having the humility to turn up and say, you know, I'm an American. I really don't understand how your culture works, so I am gonna make some mistakes along the way.

Right?

It's not intentional, right? I need you to be ready to forgive me and correct me.

I

Zach Selch: used to have a guy I worked, or I have, I [00:57:00] have a, a good friend who I worked with for years who now Egyptians, Arabs in general, but especially Egyptians, are very, very much, their communication is not necessarily completely verbal. It's a lot about context. It's a lot about the eyes, it's a lot about, and they anticipate the, it's sort of like we anticipate if you are an adult, there's things you should understand from the context of a conversation.

For Arabs, that's a hundred percent more, right? Even a thousand percent more. So when I was working with him in the beginning, I said to him, you have to understand, I am like a little child. I do not understand. , anything that you don't vocalize, I'm not gonna understand. So I need for you to, to imagine that I'm a little child and tell me what you're trying to tell me with your eyes.

Just, just put it in words. [00:58:00] And after a few years, I got to understand most of what it was. But in the beginning I had to literally tell him, I said, treat me like I'm a little child and just tell me the things that I'm not getting, you know, the

Marcus Cauchi: Intelligent idiot. Exactly. Right. I'll, I'll pick it up, but I don't know it right from the office.

Zach, this has been really very, very insightful. So what, what I'd like to do is really wrap up in terms of building the team because we, we touched on recruiting a channel chief. But I'd like to talk about how you build your channel managers, uh, who are then going to be responsible for taking the learning, recruiting, onboarding, facilitating midwife in deals, holding people to account.

Talk to me about how you recruit a good team of channel managers.

Zach Selch: Ooh. So again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make [00:59:00] a little pitch for my book because there's no possible way I can cover this in a short amount of time. And this is something that you will get a lot of value out. You know, I probably have 50 pages on this in the book, but here, here's the thing.

First of all, the, the very, very first most important thing is the, there's a saying I wanna say by Seth, uh, Goodwin maybe, which says, recruit for culture. And not for a task. And what he means by that is you want somebody who's gonna fit into your company and everybody's gonna like, and you're gonna wanna take him to your company barbecue and just forget that, right?

For a regional sales manager, you do not want somebody who you want to hang out with and take to to the company barbecue. You want somebody who fits in and can sell to their local market. So if you basically say, I need somebody who can sell in the Middle [01:00:00] East, I need somebody who can sell in Southeast Asia.

I need somebody who can sell in Central Africa. I need somebody who can sell in Western Europe. You want somebody who fits into those cultures, even if you hate him or you, you, you don't wanna leave him around your family or you don't want him, you know, to come to your, to your company. Barbecue, right? You want somebody who's gonna fit into those cultures, and that's really important.

And I can't tell you how many times. I've had somebody on my team and I've had somebody from headquarters say, you have to fire him. He, he's never gonna fit in. And I always defend it and say, look, you have to understand this person isn't gonna fit in with our company, but he's a perfect fit for his territory.

So that's the first thing. Right.

Marcus Cauchi: Um, so you're recruiting for outcome.

Zach Selch: I'm recruiting for outcome. And that outcome is directly related to, is can he sell in his [01:01:00] territory? That's all I care about, right. Now of course, I'm gonna give a caveat to that. I don't want him to do anything that's illegal, right? I don't want him to break any rules.

And I'll be very frank, I am very, very flex. I've dealt with racists, I've dealt with anti-Semites, I've dealt with misogynists, et cetera. And I basically say, , if you can't control this, don't come to headquarters. Right? But if you wanna find somebody who you know is based in the Middle East and isn't homophobic, you're probably not gonna find a person like that, right?

So either you live with that and you say, just don't come to headquarters or you're not gonna sell, right? But you're not gonna find somebody who, who, who you know, doesn't fit in, who, who, who, who, who you know is gonna fit in with that cultural aspect. You're not gonna find an American who can sell. And [01:02:00] yes, the way we used to do this was we would find, you know, five Yale graduates who wore khakis and boat shoes, and we'd send them off to sell around the world.

And frankly, if, if that hadn't been the case 20 years ago or 30 years ago, I wouldn't have gotten my experience right. But nowadays, you can find good local people and you're gonna do much, much better hiring a local guy than sending some American out to be your regional manager someplace, right? So I always hire local people to be my regional managers.

And I'm looking, now, I could go into depth on this because, for instance, in Africa, You're dealing with multiple tribes, right? You're dealing with multiple religions. If you're selling to, to Nigeria, you're dealing with 30 some tribes and three, three groups of religions, right? So what do you do? Now, very often if you're dealing with West Africa, [01:03:00] you might hire a Lebanese guy.

If you're dealing with East Africa, you might hire an Indian guy just because then you're not dealing with one tribe. But that's getting a little isoteric. And again, I would, I would go into the book and, and take a look at that. But you have to think, is this person going to be able to sell in the territory I'm hiring him for?

Right. So, so that's the, the, the big, the big thing. I don't know if we have time to go on, but you know, what I'm gonna do is I, I usually, the last few times I've hired people, I've gotten 300 resumes when I, when I advertise, and then what I do is I cut through, I, I'm a big proponent of online testing. Right.

I try and figure out, uh, if they fit the experience set that I'm looking for. I try and figure out if they have the sales skills I'm looking for. And then, um, typically I'll end up interviewing 10 or 12 people for a job like this, right? Because I wanna make sure I have chemistry with them. I wanna make sure they, they strike me [01:04:00] as having the right energy.

I don't want to hire them just based on, you know, what I, what I read about them. Their, their CV and their, well,

Marcus Cauchi: their, their CV is basically a marketing document. It's selling them print, right? And I, I'm very, very reluctant to trust the CV anyway, right? I wanna see that they can sell. Um, my first interview is basically, Zach really been looking forward to meeting you over to you, right?

I wanna know, have they done a plan, right? Are they prepared? How do they cope under pressure, right? Um, can they do a good discovery? , are they asking insightful questions? Do they bother to try and understand what I want from the role and the outcomes that I'm looking for? If they can't do that, then odds are they're not gonna be successful in territory.

Now, obviously, you know, if they've already got the, uh, the local connections with the Nigerian church or you know, they are connected through family in, uh, the United Arab [01:05:00] Emirates, then you know that, that's great, but I need to know that they can sell.

Zach Selch: Right. Okay. Exactly. And I like to pull together. I'll typically hire three people at the same time because I like to train them together and I like them to feel that they have a team, a cohort.

Right, that they have a family, they're not going to make good relationships with headquarters typically. I've never seen a situation really where the, the people, the rms, the regional sales managers I've had, have had great relationships with headquarters. Cuz typically the, you know, time zones, they're far out.

They might have some, some friendly relationships, but they're gonna develop peers with the other regional sales managers, right? And I want them to have that, I want them to get along to have, you know, friendly competition to, to support each other, et cetera.

Marcus Cauchi: So this really requires you as the head of international sales to make sure [01:06:00] that there is budget available, that the executive team is ready to recruit a team of people and that they understand that this investment, cuz people are an investment.

Unfortunately because of the way accounts, uh, work, uh, they appear on the cost side of the balance sheet, but people are in investment. Yes, we've all made bad investments, but it's really important that you understand that they do need to have support. You know, human beings are social primates. You cannot get away from the fact that if they're operating in isolation without somebody that they can reference, without somebody that they can speak to, without somebody that will challenge them, then chances are you are setting them up to fail despite your best interest.

Cuz you might be 11 hours time deference

Zach Selch: and, and salespeople, virtually all of them. You can't say all of them, but [01:07:00] virtually all of them are extroverted. They have powerful personalities. Good salespeople virtually all of them require some type of external, they love, they love medals, they love rewards, they love being patted on the back, right?

It it, you know, 95% of good salespeople love that external validation. They love to be part of a group and they love people to say, wow, Zach, you're, you're the best salesperson this month. Right? And if you're not, and, and for these regional managers out in the field who might never, you know, they might go months without face-to-face seeing an employee of the company, that's a hard job for that personality type.

So you have to give them what they need with that support. You're right, it's really important.

Marcus Cauchi: And again, that comes down to regular communication, regular cadence of accountability, [01:08:00] regular coaching, regular training, regular support. And ensuring that they know that they have someone who's got their back.

Zach Selch: Exactly right. So I'm communicating with my, my team and I, I typically end up referring to them as my guys. Even though at this point in history, I've already, you know, you get ju maybe not quite exactly as many women, but you get, you know, women on the team as well. But I, I typically, in my mind, I'm thinking of them as my guys and I'm communicating with them pretty much every day.

I have a cadence. I get up in the morning early, walk the dog, and I call all my team check how they're doing. And then we have weekly meetings where we formally sit down using the CRM and go over what's going on. And then periodically we'll have meetings with other people in the company to go over things like shipping or payments or marketing materials or stuff like that.

And what I try and do is get everybody together once or twice a [01:09:00] year. Right. Which is very important.

If you look back at your long career, what was the best mistake you made?

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Zach, we've hit our time. So tell me this, if you look back at your long career, what was the best mistake you made?

Zach Selch: The best mistake. Wow. The best mistake. I think there have been a few mistakes that I've really learned from where, you know, especially when you're in small, smaller companies, you do stupid things to get purchase orders and then you look back at it and, and look, I was talking to somebody last week who basically said, oh, I have this fantastic strategy.

I just hired 120 distributors and I made the me buy a demo kit. So I hit my number for the year. Right. And she was really, really proud of this strategy. [01:10:00] Now, and, and she was in her early twenties, but there was no way I could convince her that this was a stupid thing to do. And I thought about it. I was like, you know, in my twenties, I did things to close business at the end of the year because I was working for a small company.

And it was important for us to show our investors that we closed a certain amount of business knowing that the distributors were gonna have trouble selling that product. Right. And that it was gonna be, you know, the following year was then going to be a hassle. And I did that when I was in my early twenties.

Right. And I learned from that because what I realized from that was, it's not about my, it's not about my selling the product to the distributor, right. And I, I, and that I'm using that sentence cor, you know, the right way. I don't sell my product to the distributor. My distributor is part of my sales process to the end user.

But if I [01:11:00] think of it as, oh boy, I just sold a million bucks worth of product to my distributor. I'm, this is great. And I'm not worried about what happens between the time the distributor gets it and the time it gets to the, the end user. I'm making a huge mistake, and I made that mistake multiple times in my twenties and I learned from it.

And that's if you, if you say, what's the mistake? You know, I think your question was essentially, what's the mistake I learned the most from? It's those mistakes. It, it isn't about getting it out my factory door and getting paid for. It's about getting that product to the end user and making sure everybody in that value chain is happy, because that's how growth happens.

How can people get hold of you?

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. So on that, no, let's wrap up. How can people get hold of you?

Zach Selch: I have a website, it's Global Sales Mentor. You can reach out there and once you reach out there, it's very easy to set up a, a, a call with me and I will talk to anybody. And if you wanna chat for a [01:12:00] while and see if I can help you, feel free.

Uh, I have a podcast, I have a vlog. I have a lot of content out on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. You can buy my book on Amazon. But you know, there I work with companies in a variety of different ways from coaching to basically fractional sales leadership or interim sales leadership, or what I call turnkey.

I can build an organization and hand you the keys. So those are the type of things I do. And if it's a good fit, reach out. We can chat and see if this works for you.

Marcus Cauchi: And definitely check out Zach's cultural videos where he talks about the difference of selling in France or Israel or Japan. Really very, very interesting.

And his book is called Global Sales, A Practical Playbook on How to Drive Profitable Growth for International Sales and Marketing Leaders. Zach Selch, thank you so much.

Zach Selch: Thanks a lot. Take care.

Marcus Cauchi: [01:13:00] Excellent. So this is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from the Inquisitor Podcast. If you found this conversation insightful and useful, then please like, comment, and share.

If you feel the urge, go to either Apple or Google Podcast and please do leave an honest review. Now if you are the owner or CEO of a tech company in the 10 to 50 million turnover mark, and your objective is to grow your business and achieve real, sustainable, profitable hyper growth without the wings and wheels coming off, without having to sacrifice

all of your equity to vultures and um, uh, speculators dressed up as investors, and you want to create a highly engaged and highly productive revenue operation, marketing, sales, customer success account, growth channel, and you want customers to come back year after year, decade after decade. Let's schedule [01:14:00] time for a brief chat.

My email is marcus@laughs-last.com. That's marcus laughs hyphen last.com, and you can DM me on LinkedIn. Zach and I are founders of a group called Sales of Force for good. We are a global community. There are about 70 of us at the moment, at the time of publication on the 27th of April, 2021. We're aiming to grow to at least 10,000 members over the next two years, and our mission is to turn sales back into a service business.

We exist because of, not in spite of the customer. We wanna raise the standards of selling and make sales an aspirational career choice, create the conditions for the next generation of salespeople so that they can tell their mothers that they sell for a living without shame. So if you're interested in that, check out the hashtags Pro customer.

Hashtag [01:15:00] buyer safety and hashtag S A F F G. We've got videos, we've got community, uh, we've got, uh, different work streams. We meet every two weeks to tackle the hardest problems there are in sales today. So in the meantime, stay safe and happy selling. Bye-bye.

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