Another summary of things you should know about Hyper Sales Growth according to Jack Daly: Introduction In this episode well-known sales expert Jack Daly joins us for a second timeRead More
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]]>In this episode well-known sales expert Jack Daly joins us for a second time to reveal more insights behind his career and book, Hyper Sales Growth. Jack brings 20 plus years of field proven experience from a starting base with the CPA firm Arthur Andersen to the CEO level of several national companies. Jack has participated at the senior executive level on six de novo businesses, two of which he has subsequently sold to the Wall Street firms of Solomon Brothers and First Boston. As the head of sales, Jack has led sales forces numbering in the thousands, operating out of hundreds of offices nationwide. The goal of this interview is to provide you with more insights into the lessons Jack teaches from his book, speeches, and experience.
A: I am a serial entrepreneur, started selling at the age of seven, built my first company when I was 12 years old, and by 13 I had five employees and kept 70% of the money. This is when I realized I wanted to be an entrepreneur when I grew up. I went to school and got formally educated in understanding how the numbers worked because one of the failings that entrepreneurs make is they are good at bringing business in and developing business but they are not as good with the number side. I then went on a journey that included taking a blank sheet of paper, six different times and sketching out a business and built six companies into national firms. About 20 years ago I was tired of doing what I was doing and was financially capable of early retirement. After retirement I got into a speaking business and fell in love with helping sales people, sales managers, business owners, and entrepreneurs scale their business and their income.
A: My first business was a newspaper route and I took it over from a kid that lived in the neighborhood. After a few days of running the business I began to realize that if only 32 people were getting the service, the rest of the neighborhood probably wasn’t, and I knew I could do something about it. I ended up in a single year taking those 32 customers to 275. I quickly realized that delivering the paper in the freezing cold was not were the fun was and I enjoyed the selling process a lot more. So I convinced five kids that were 11 years old to do on the job training and told them at the end of the year I’d give them a letter of recommendation so that they could get their own route. That year I was named newspaper boy of the year, making $25 an hour and making 70% of the money on 275 papers that I never had to deliver myself.
A: I probably didn’t even know what the word culture meant back then when I was 12 and 13. But I will tell you that I did know something and that was that if I could find a way for these kids to have fun while they were doing the job, to learn while they were doing it, and to have contests amongst the five of them, they would actually look forward to going to work. I believe that we leaders should strive to make it fun to work for our company.
A: It depends on the client. Some of my clients will hire me specifically to just teach their sales team how to sell. Other companies engage me to teach their sales managers how to recruit, train, coach, and build a sales force because if you want to grow your sales, in most businesses, the way to do that is to grow your sales force in quantity and quality. So it really just depends on what the client is looking for.
A: There are four legs to a strong culture. The first leg to a strong culture is Recognition Systems – what systems do you have in place to ensure regular ongoing recognition? Second leg is Communication Systems – what are the systems that you have for regular ongoing communication in your company? The third leg is Personal and Professional Development Processes – Why should I come to work for your company and once there why should I stay? And the fourth leg is Empowerment Processes – Creating an environment where the people who work in our business actually take action as if they were the owner.
A: I’ll start with one question that is always asked of me by business owners and sales managers. They all want to know what the single most important characteristic of top performing sales people are. The answer to that question is four letters and it’s GRIT. They get up earlier, they work later, they take on obstacles as if they are a personal challenge, they view the whole thing as a game to be won, there isn’t enough no’s in the world to stop them, and they will do whatever they need to do to be the victor.
Sales people should be asking me what the systems and processes are that will enable them to be a top performing sales person. The reason that that question is not asked is because the majority of people that come into the sales role think that the position is one of personal magnetism and that it is something that they are born with and they each have their own style. The reality is that there aren’t twenty-six hundred best ways to sell this product or service. So you need to figure out the best way and have systems and processes that you follow consistently across the board in your organization. One of the thing that we found in studying top 10% sales people is that they say the same thing the same way each time they encounter a certain situation and the beauty of it is they sound like it’s the first time they’ve ever said it.
A: There are three types of calls that a sales manager should be making in the field with their sales people. There’s a join call where they equally participate in the call. There’s a training call where the sales manager actually demonstrates and handles the call 100% on their own and then debrief about what went right and wrong. And there is a coaching call which is where the sales person does the call and the sales manager is silent. If you were to take these three calls I would tell you that the minimum criteria where a sales manager should be is a minimum of four hours per sales person each month.
The second thing I would tell the sales manager to do to help the sales people are something that I call Role Practices. Role Practice is where we take three sales people and we have them wear three different hats, they wear a prospect hat, a sales person hat, and they wear an observer hat. We let them wear each hat individually and then we have another debrief after each call. These three cycles typically take about 45 minutes to an hour and at the end of that hour the common thing we see is that the sales person was way better the third time than they were the first.
The third thing we tell the sales manager to do to help the sales people is building what we call a Success Guide. In the book we go through great detail but the essence of the success guide is there is hardly anything that goes on in a sales call that you couldn’t anticipate before you arrive and as a result there is no reason to not be better prepared. So a sales manager should work with their team and identify if they can find ten objections and then come up with the best ten responses to those ten objections. This will prepare your sales team with confidence without having to go and make things up on spot while on a call.
A: If you grabbed my Kindle you’d find hundreds of books in there and half of them on sales, sales management, and entrepreneurial topics. I have been one for 50 years and I am still sucking down that knowledge and learning along the way. Lifelong learning is one of the messages I would give the readers and the book Scaling Up is the number one book I’d recommend to everyone that is in business. Another thing I would tell you is that I have been involved with mentoring peer groups most of my life and they have a significant impact in my life. I would tell any entrepreneur that if they don’t have a coach they should find one who will show them the way, helping them with resources, and hold them accountable. There are resources all around us and I don’t understand why so few people are making use of them.
Preview Hyper Sales Growth with Jack Daly himself
Buy Hyper Sales Growth by Jack Daly
Visit JackDaly.net to learn more about Jack, his book, newsletter, and coaching
Follow Jack Daly on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
High Profit Selling by Mark Hunter
Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Reasons Why Your Sales Skills Suck
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Best Place To Work according to Ron Friedman: Introduction In this episode Ron Friedman shares his book, The Best Place toRead More
The post A Preview of The Best Place To Work with Ron Friedman appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Ron Friedman shares his book, The Best Place to Work, where he offers game-changing advice for working smarter and turning any organization into an extraordinary workplace.
In his book, Friedman explains how to effectively diffuse a workplace argument, elevate your thinking, and reach smarter decisions. The goal of the book is to provide you with scientifically-proven techniques to help you promote smarter thinking, greater innovation, and stronger performance.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs or business executives who are looking to turn an average, low performing work atmosphere into an effective and extraordinary environment.
I recognize what it’s like to be an entrepreneur because I’m an entrepreneur myself and I wanted to write a user’s guide for someone who is busy. I realize entrepreneurs need action items and this book is really stocked with action items both for managers and for employees.
Every chapter in the book is focused on a different aspect of the workplace. It’s a variety of different topics and not one that you have to read in a linear fashion.
One of the takeaways is that psychological needs are at the heart of employee engagement. If you are looking to create an engaged workforce you need to provide people with psychologically fulfilling experiences.
The second takeaway is that organizations are a lot more successful when they address rather than ignore the limits of both the mind and the body.
The third key takeaway is that rather than encouraging employees to find work life balance, organizations can be a lot more successful by allowing employees to integrate the two aspects of their life in an active way.
This book is a journey of different topics of the psychology of the workplace and summarizing all of this in a short amount of time can be a little bit of a challenge. I am going to explain the top three gaps that I saw in the workplace.
The first gap was how organizations hire. If you are looking to grow a business you are going to be during some hiring and regardless of how well you structure your workplace if you don’t get the right people in your organization it won’t be affective. One of the critical pieces of hiring is the in person interview. As it turns out there is plenty of research showing that these interviewers are not a very effective tool for predicting how good someone is going to be in a particular position. The reason is because we have all of these cognitive biases that prevent us from actually measuring someone’s effectiveness for the role we are looking to fill. I talk in the book about research showing that we tend to favor good looking people because we assume that they are also competent. Another biased is tall people because tall people tend to be viewed as having greater leadership potential. Deep voice candidates are viewed as more trustworthy. All of these impressions affect not just the way that we view that candidate but also the questions that we ask as a result. I talk about all the biases and then I talk about ways that entrepreneurs can correct those biases.
The second gap is how managers motivate. In the book I present a completely different frame for thinking about engagement in a section on what videogames teach us about creating an extraordinary workplace. If you think about your own experience playing videogames you get sucked in doing a whole host of behaviors that you would normally avoid. What’s fascinating about videogames is we spend so much of our personal time doing these activities that we aren’t getting paid for. I think the reason we find these games as enjoyable as we do is because they deliver the very experiences that we seek in our workplace. For examples we have a clear set of goals and we get recognized and rewarded for our work. The key takeaway here is that engagement is not about the actual job; it’s about the conditions that we build around it.
The third gap that I wanted to highlight is the gap in workplace design. Within the book I survey all the research on office design and the psychology of how our minds react differently to different environments and what I argue is that there is a connection between space and innovation. What I mean by that is where we are affects the way we think. There is research that I cover in the book looking at how the ceiling height of a room affects our ability to think abstractly. The rooms’ layout communicates the type of interaction that is expected. I discuss all the ways that companies can leverage a lot of these insights to deliver a better working environment.
“When your attempt rate is high each individual failure becomes a lot less significant.” – Ron Friedman
I am a social psychologist and I specialize in human motivation. I have taught at the University of Rochester, Nazareth College, Hobart and William Smith, and I write for the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Forbes. I’ve also founded a company called ignite80 that helps smart leaders build extraordinary work places and the way we do that is via speaking, workshops and occasionally consulting. If you are wondering about the name of that company it’s because 80% of employees worldwide have been found to be disengaged at work so we look to correct that.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that the book really happened by accident. I spent years in academics studying human motivation and teaching human psychology courses and my goal was to become a full-time professor. Eventually I achieved that goal and I got a full-time teaching job and when I got there I found myself itching for a new challenge. If you got in to academics for the reasons I did, it was to learn new things and as a professor you are covering the same material again and again.
I wanted that new challenge so I decided to go off into the corporate world where I was hired to work as a pollster. When I got to the corporate world I noticed a lot of the things that I took for granted as a professor. But when I got to the corporate world I witnessed a real disconnect from everything from the way that companies hire and the ways that managers motivate to the design and layout of the modern office. I got to meet a lot of these business owners and a lot of entrepreneurs who are really interested in building great workplaces but just don’t have the tools for doing that.
Getting Things Done by David Allen
The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry
Buy The Best Place to Work by Ron Friedman on Amazon today
Visit Ignite80.com to learn more about Ron’s research and sign up for his mailing list
Follow Ron Friedman on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Leaders Open Doors by Bill Treasurer | Scrum – The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | The Front-Line Leader by Chris Van Gorder
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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