Jeff Cox

Selling the Wheel is outwardly a book about sales people, but it’s really about adapting to the evolution of the market and creating sales strategies that work with the realities of the market at any given time. As such, it’s a book that every entrepreneur and every executive running a company could stand to read.

The story is about the guy who invented the wheel. Right, the wheel, back in ancient times. So he’s invented the wheel, but then comes the problem, how does he sell it? This a new technology, and as with all new technologies, the early market is rather limited. At first, no one can see much potential for the wheel. No one except Cassius the Closer, who has exactly the selling style to get things rolling (pun intended).

Ah, but then the wheel evolves, the market expands, and the primary customer changes - over and over and over again. And each time the market changes, so must the sales and marketing strategy. So must the sales force itself.

Wheel is based on an updated version of the concepts in The Quadrant Solution written some ten years earlier, but by the late 1990’s, Quadrant was out of print. I had felt strongly for years that the material in Quadrant, created by Howard Stevens and his firm, was important and deserved a longer run than what it had received. Then one day, into my head popped this idea of the wheel, the evolution of products, and the need to know what you had to do at each phase of the market cycle to sell successfully. So I put together a proposal, my agent sold it to Simon & Schuster, and the result was Selling the Wheel. I continue to believe that the concepts in this one are essential to anyone who needs or wants to run a business with a sales force.