“What is wrong with salespeople?” This is a question many CEOs often ask, yet few leaders stop to consider if their actions might play a role. The truth is CEOs make fundamental decisions every day that can impact sales, and the way they approach sales has a major impact on the success of the company. Leaders who are uncomfortable with sales themselves tend to push the function off on others. They hire salespeople believing that others are better equipped to make a deal, and already have the skills they need to be successful. They often find themselves later firing their sales team for non-performance and trying again. On the flip side, a charismatic leader who is a natural salesperson can struggle to grow their company, because other salespeople cannot replicate their success. What many leaders fail to realize is that the sales department is a team that needs to be coached to succeed. Developing Your Sales Team: The Essential Sales Playbook for Founders and Entrepreneurial CEOs provides leaders with a guide to creating a selling system that can be consistently executed by the entire team. Steve Kraner is NOT a natural salesman.He describes himself as an engineer who crossed over to the darkside. A military officer and engineer by training, Steve found himselfleading a sales team as part of a start-up. He had to sell to survive. Steve has built successful high-tech divisions within two major U.S.corporations. Along with David Sandler and GuruGanesha Khalsa, Steveco-developed the Sandler High-Tech Selling System and the SandlerNegotiating program.  He then spent 25 years as one of the mostin-demand Sandler sales trainers. Through continuous experimenting, Steve and his clients continue toadvance our understanding of the optimum approach to selling and how toincrease sales. Now operating independently from the Sandler network,Steve has updated his programs to address today's environment. Steve is a frequent guest lecturer at the MIT Sloan School ofBusiness, speaking on the history of B2B selling systems from John Henry Patterson's first sales process, the advent of traditional consultative and solution selling methodologies and the latest innovations in thescience of selling and negotiating. He holds a Bachelor's Degree inEngineering from West Point and an MBA from Loyola College.