Just as The Goal and Zapp were gathering momentum, I was contacted by an editor at Amacom Books, the publishing arm of the American Management Association. The editor, Eva Weiss, steered me to a firm in Dayton, Ohio, called the Chally Group, and headed by Howard Stevens. Over the years, Chally had gathered a lot of data on salespeople and marketing, and the data showed patterns with respect to salespeople’s psychological traits and their effectiveness in certain selling situations.
For instance, the slick, hot-shot closer was excellent at selling the high-end, cutting edge stuff. But if the product / service required customization, technical alterations, special delivery follow-through, etc., the closer was pretty much the wrong guy for the job. Managing complexity and delivering a customized system tailored to each customer was the forte of a salesperson with very different skills and personality traits. Meanwhile, she (I’m using gender arbitrarily here) would be lousy at the kind of repetitive, year in, year out, selling that requires a high degree of trust between salesperson and client, the kind of thing where loyalty and follow-through are paramount. And then, finally, there is the sales guy who is kind of anonymous, efficient, universally courteious, and has little if any relationship with the customer - but is a very essential cog in the corporate machine. He’s known as the order-taker, and for him to succeed requires an entirely different mindset from the others.
Put them together, and you have the basis for The Quadrand Solution. This was a novel, published in 1990, in which a character named David Kepler solves the mystery of why fictional company Elemenco, which has very good products, is getting beat handily by the competition. Kepler figures this out, and one of the things he learns - courtesy of the Chally findings - is that no corporation, however large, can be all things to all customers. The culture required to be successful in one marketing/sales quadrant conflicts with the all the others - and the effects ripple through in terms of accounting, compensation, R&D, strategic investment and so on. It’s a lesson often learned the hard way, as any number of big corporations and conglomerates have found out the hard way.
A corporation can be successful in two of the four quadrants, as long as they are adjacent, but not three or four.
Quadrant is long out of print, although you can probably score a used copy if you’re interested. But in 2000, we published Selling the Wheel, which was an update of the Chally concepts rendered in a shorter and more humorous style.