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The Sales Delusion: Why your sales team's performance starts at the top
Paperback
Business GeneralManagementMarketing
ISBN13: 9781036988845
Publisher: McGinn Advisory Partners
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 116
Weight: 0.27
Height: 0.24 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
You are not sure your sales number is real.
The forecast lands somewhere near the figure, or it does not, and either way you cannot say why. Most of the revenue comes from two or three people. When a deal is won, the relationship gets the credit; when one is lost, the reason is price. Growth has flattened, and the plan to fix it is to hire more people like the few who already carry it.
Most chief executives are told that sales is different from the rest of the business: that it runs on instinct, relationships and rare talent, and that the answer to a missed number is to find more stars and stay out of their way. That is the sales delusion. It is comfortable, and it is expensive.
In The Sales Delusion, Rob McGinn argues that sales can be inspected, managed and improved as rigorously as finance or operations, and that building the structure to do so is the chief executive's job, not the sales leader's alone. The companies that grow year after year do not depend on heroic sellers or hopeful forecasts. They are built on a commercial spine:
a frame that decides what you sell, to whom and at what price;
a system that turns effort into results the same way each time;
and a sightline that lets you see the number before it lands rather than explain it afterwards.
The book turns that argument into a tool you can use on your own company. It sets out what good looks like at each stage, what a sales leader should be held accountable for, and the questions to ask in a review, with a sound answer and an excuse placed side by side so you can tell the difference without ever having sold. It closes with an audit you can run in an afternoon and a full set of the questions to take into your next review.
Rob McGinn has spent more than twenty-five years building and repairing commercial organisations, at BT Global Services, Verizon and Addison Lee, and as the leader of the commercial turnaround at Pod Point, part of the EDF group. The turnarounds described in the book are his own work, and the spine is the model he built doing them.
The Sales Delusion is written for chief executives, founders, investors and board members of growth-stage and mid-market companies who suspect their commercial engine is weaker than it looks, and who would rather know than hope.
A business that stands on a few people falls with them.
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