Stefan Herbert
"If Selling is about winning a game, Disruption Selling is all about winning the endgame”
Stefan Herbert, Founder, Disruption Selling
I started my sales career in 1987 as a Sales Trainee at NCR, a company founded already in 1884 as a manufacturer of mechanical cash registers. Since the 1950s NCR manufactured computers and by the time I joined they sold proprietary HW/SW solutions to SMBs in the final stage of the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle and open systems (UNIX and Intel/Microsoft) to large enterprises just entering the Early Majority. I clearly preferred the interaction with Early Majority customers and when I joined EDS in 1994 to sell full-scope outsourcing contracts the market had just moved into this stage. My next job in 1997 took me into open systems-based Enterprise SW (ERP) for a pre-IPO start up (QAD) straight into the tornado fanned by the Y2K issue everybody was facing across industries and company size before I took over leadership positions in two pre-IPO start-ups selling to Innovators and Early Adopters.
At EDS I was trained by Holden Corporation in “Power Base Selling” (see 3rd Party Content Review: Power Base Selling) and at QAD I came across Adizes’ “Corporate Lifecycles” and Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”. Suddenly, the ambiguity I was struggling with in complex sales cycles cleared and these three concepts laid the foundation for my approach to Disruption Selling I honed during my 7.5-year stint as a co-founder of a partnership specialized in consulting for business development and recruiting. The model provides a holistic view of the organizations of the vendor, the customer and the competitors and helps translating it into actionable items driving a disruptive innovation through the adoption lifecycle.
Over almost 10 years I practiced the model at Amazon Web Services starting as a one-man show as the first Enterprise Account Manager in Germany with 30 accounts and ending with just one of them as a Global Account Director leading a global team of more than 30 members and with revenues in the triple digit millions.
In 2023 I founded Disruption Selling and since then support individuals, start-ups and well-established IT market leaders in taking their innovation selling capabilities to the next level.
Books that Changed my Life
Some books I came across made a lasting impression on me by either changing my entire perspective or by pulling the curtain of ambiguity away on something I already had sensed but was not able to grasp.
This is a collection of the most important ones.
