The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function

A silent revolution in sales

In The Machine, Justin Roff-Marsh shows readers how to follow the intrepid executives on three continents who have implemented his ideas over the last 15 years, building ridiculously efficient sales functions—and market-dominating enterprises—as a consequence.

Roff-Marsh calls these executives his silent revolutionaries.

This revolution has been brewing for a long time. For the last 20 years, organizations’ ability to produce has overtaken their ability to sell, and, for at least as long, customers have unfailingly embraced every opportunity to avoid interacting with traditional field salespeople.

Applying the division of labor to sales might not seem controversial, but this innocent-sounding idea decimates the sales management orthodoxy and replaces it with a strange new world where sales is primarily an inside activity, where salespeople earn fixed salaries and focus their attention exclusively on selling conversations, where regional sales offices become redundant, and where marketing and engineering become seamlessly integrated with sales.

The Machine is a field guide for the executive who’s prepared to wrestle sales away from autonomous field-based artisans in favor of a tightly synchronized team of specialists. Readers will embrace The Machine either to exploit the new sales order or to avoid falling victim to it.