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 Strategy Rules according to David Yoffie: Introduction In this episode David Yoffie takes a deep dive into his book, Strategy Rules, whereRead More
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]]>In this episode David Yoffie takes a deep dive into his book, Strategy Rules, where he unveils 5 five timeless lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs.
In their book Yoffie and his co-author, Michael Cusumano, share the successes, failures, commonalities, and differences of world famous leaders like Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. The goal of the book is to teach you 5 new strategic rules for doing business, the best practices that come with high-tech entrepreneurship, and how to take your leadership to the next level.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who own or plan on owning a high-tech company and want to learn strategy techniques from the best leaders in the business.
The thing that makes this book different from others is most people write biographies on these particular individuals or they write histories of the companies. There is no book, that I am aware of, that dives deep into looking at three CEO’s, comparing and contrasting them, and trying to understand what they were able to do in similar ways that produced such extraordinary performance. We think that by looking across companies and across great leaders you get a deeper insight. It’s not about the individual personality traits; it’s about the ways they think and the ways they deliver performance.
Like many books we have an introduction and concluding chapter which gives you the high level overview of everything you might want to know. Then we go into and talk about each of the five rules in great depth. For each rule we have a single chapter so you can jump in where needed if you want.
The idea of what we call Look Forward Reason Back is the critical idea that ultimately determines what makes a great strategist. It’s that ability to look ahead, to have a vision, and then figure out what you need to do today to get to that particular end game. It’s also about anticipating what customers are going to need tomorrow, not what customers are needing today and then figuring out what they capabilities are that you have in your organization today that will deliver those customer needs of tomorrow.
The way we begin the book is by trying to first understand how these individuals were different and how they were similar. At a very basic level they could not be more different as individuals. Bill Gates was the classic nerd but grew up in a wealthy family, Andy Groves was a holocaust survivor and made his way to get a PhD in the United States, and we all know about Steve Jobs. But beyond that these individuals had some incredibly important similarities which we think are important for any entrepreneur who wants to be successful. Number one they were incredibly ambitious not just to make money but to build great companies and to change the world. Number two they worked incredibly hard and they also provoked incredible debates inside the company. Finally, they were all slightly paranoid and never took success for granted even when they were doing extraordinarily well.
All three of these individuals were able to build the most valuable companies in the world and the question is how did they do it and this is where the five rules come in. The five rules are what we call Look Forward, Reason Back, Make Big Bets Without Beating the Company, Build Platforms and Ecosystem not Just Products, Exploit Leverage and Power, and Shape the Organization Around Your Personal Anchor.
The first three deals with strategy and the last two deal with tactics and execution. If you want to be a great strategist you have got to be able to do things at a high-level as well as at a much more micro level and ultimately be able to execute. The idea of Look Forward Reason Back is that you got to be able to think several steps ahead into the future and then think about what you have to do today in order to reach that position.
We then break that down into a number of different activities that a great CEO is going to do if they follow these rules. The first one is that you have to start with some vision of where you want to go. This vision becomes critical in driving the success of all of these organizations which we define in great detail.
The second idea is that you got to be able to think big and make big bold bets that could potentially change the game but you have to do it without beating the company.
The third big idea is that you have to build platforms and ecosystems not just products. This is the notion that ultimately its great platforms that win, not great products that always win. The fourth idea is about the tactics and this is the notion that when you’re an entrepreneur you’ve got to be clever, you’ve got to stay under the radar, and you’ve got to employ tactics.
The last critical idea is the idea of how you execute when you have an organization that’s trying to do all these things. Ultimately this is about the CEO figuring out what they really do that is special, what it is that they have in their own capability set that enables them to do things that give them a comparative advantage to help their organization understand what will be successful. The notion here is that if you are going to be a successful CEO or entrepreneur first you have to know yourself and exactly what you can do well and don’t do well. All of these rules were quite similar across all three CEO’s and helped them start as entrepreneurs and ultimately build three of the most valuable companies in the history of the world.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:27
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” – Andy Grove
“Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to teach you electronics, you’re going to teach me retail. Let’s go walk the mall.” – Ron Johnson
I have been a professor at Harvard for 34 years and my co-author, Michael Cusumano, has been a professor at MIT for about 30 years. I have been involved in trying to understand the world of strategy and specifically the world of strategy and technology since the mid 1980’s. I had the fortunate experience of joining the Intel board of directors in 1989 which gave me an opportunity to meet Andy Grove and then Andy introduced me to Billy Gates and Steve Jobs. Today I continue to work broadly in this field and it has been the core of my research for most of my career.
I wanted to try to understand how an entrepreneur could develop into a leader of a great company and also think about what would lead to great performance. Ultimately when you think about companies that have done extraordinary well, the leaders who have done it better than anybody else have been Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. And all three of them we know their history from beginning to end and know they have done a really great job. This was an opportunity to dive deep into three extraordinary individuals.
Judo Strategy by David Yoffie
Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter
Buy Strategy Rules by David Yoffie and Michael Cusumano on Amazon today
Visit HBS.edu to learn more about David, his book, and his profession
Follow David Yoffie on LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Winning the Long Game by Steve Krupp
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 Metronome Effect according to Shannon Susko: Introduction In this episode Shannon Susko takes a deep dive into her book, The MetronomeRead More
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]]>In this episode Shannon Susko takes a deep dive into her book, The Metronome Effect, where she reveals many effective ways to turbo charge the growth of any business.
In her book Susko provides a customized step-by-step action plan based on the best practices and tools that helped scale some of the most successful businesses today as well as ones she helped grow herself. The goal of the book is to teach you how to operate a company, how to scale a company dramatically, how to hold employees accountable, and how to organize a business into a smooth process.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a solid understanding of the best business practices and are in need of an easy, systematic way to tie them all into one cohesive framework.
The biggest difference I wanted to make was to be prescriptive. This book will give the entrepreneur a step by step, here is what you should do, and when.
Readers can definitely read it from front to back but they can also jump in and out where needed most.
The one thing that I would recommend that the entrepreneur and leader look at within what they are living today is coming up with what I call setting your metronome. The leader is the metronome of the business and it’s important to set some expected habits that are going to happen every day.
There is a picture in the beginning of the book that I call The House. Every entrepreneur is focused on building a great house so that their organization can grow, scale, and really set out on the success that they are looking to achieve within the business. And at the very foundation of the house is the entrepreneur and the leader of the organization and that leader needs to be absolutely in tune with their own core values and their own purpose. And that then drives to ensuring there is clarity both for the leader and the rest of the organization around the core purpose of the organization. What follows that are the core values of the organization which is absolutely in tune with the core values of the entrepreneur and the leader of that organization. From there is knowing what your big goal is for the organization. This is a 10 to 30 year goal that will guide the organization and the leader to where they need to drive to. The other piece of the strategic thinking process is the execution plan and really creating a way for an organization to have a collaborative brain, peer accountability, as well as setting up a rhythm within the organization that will beat daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually. This creates the habits needed for an entrepreneur to think less about the next thing that we need to do and think more about what we need to do within our business.
With every chapter we step through, starting with the leader, works through every piece that I go through. At the end of every chapter are actions that are recommended, books to read, as well as things you can do if you are challenged in a particular area.
The goal was to bring forth a way that the entrepreneurs and the leaders can easily and practically execute and grow their business within a time where they usually feel they don’t have another minute.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:04
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
I’ve been building high growth technology companies for the past 20 years and within that time I have very much found a great framework that I think others can learn from. Since the time of leaving my last organization I have been working with entrepreneurs and helping them scale up their own organizations.
The inspiration was to support other entrepreneurs in their journey in growing their company. While developing my first company I was looking for a silver bullet for myself to overcome that growth and sadly enough I came across many great tools but not one great framework that could pull it all together. This book allows an entrepreneur to understand that there is a framework available that you can bring in all the different tools that we learn along the way. I wanted to show entrepreneurs that there is a way that you can put this into play practically and grow your business at the same time.
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Buy The Metronome Effect by Shannon Susko on Amazon today
Visit ShannonSusko.com to learn more about Shannon and her book
Follow Shannon Susko on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Building Your Booming Business by David Mitchell
Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure
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 Lean Enterprise according to Jez Humble: Introduction In this episode Jez Humble takes a deep dive into his book, Lean Enterprise whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Jez Humble takes a deep dive into his book, Lean Enterprise where he uncovers how high performing organizations are able to innovate at scale.
In his book Humble sifts through case studies, principles, and patterns of very successful well-known companies providing you with an action guide to help you rethink how to run your business. The goal of the book is to teach you what it takes to implement the methodologies he presents, manage large-scale projects, create a non-traditional management style, and accelerate innovation.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who run a well-established organization that is having trouble adapting to changing market conditions and need a fast, innovative approach to scaling up.
I don’t think anyone has written a book that talk about how to transform enterprises that need to be able to win creating digital products in this environment where you have short product cycles. There are books about how to change culture, there are books about leadership, but there is no book that really ties all these things together in the context of building digital products for large enterprises.
This book is very dense and the first two chapters need to be read straight through. The rest of the book you can dip in and out where needed.
For me the real epiphany of the book is this idea of taking a scientific method and adopting it for product development and for process improvement.
We start off by talking about the fact that lean enterprise is the result of culture. Even though the book is about how to work in a domain of technology the point of technology is really to enable humans to collaborate more effectively and more rapidly. In an enterprise context it becomes really difficult because you got a large number of people with a wide variety of backgrounds who all have to work together in order to achieve a common purpose. And the question is how do we do that rapidly at scale? The answer to that comes from military doctrine. The book is primarily about how you create alignment at scale, how you enable everyone in the organization to make the best decision from the organizational point of view despite their limited knowledge.
The second chapter dives into the product cycle and the product development cycle and there are a number of well named models for the enterprise portfolio. This is increasingly important in the modern world where product development cycles are so short.
Part two of the book describes how to work in the explore domain where exploring a number of ideas knowing that most of them won’t be successful. This explores how to adopt the lean startup methodology in an enterprise context.
Part three of the book describes how to work in the domain where you have validated products and you need to actually exploit it and develop it at scale. The key part of exploiting is actually around driving down cost, improving quality, and improving value to customers and that demands a completely different approach. For that we need to pursue process improvement which means enabling the people doing the work to actually try out new ideas to experiment new ideas in terms of how to increase quality.
There is a piece on engineering practices because engineering practices are poorly understood. Most people are going into management in large companies not necessarily to really understanding how to work in the digital domain and how to build products where software is a competitive advantage. And so we spend a bunch of time discussing how to do that and how to take an experimental approach through product development.
The last part of the book is about how to create a culture of innovation. As an enterprise you can’t afford to hire the top of market people who have exactly the skills and behaviors that you want. You have to invest in developing your people so there is a whole section on growing a culture of innovation rather than taking shortcuts. We talk about financial management and how you can do budgeting, how to do IT in a way that creates a competitive advantage rather than being a cost center, and how to get started using a case study from the UK government digital service.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:19
“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at the given time is a function of power and not truth.” –Unknown
I am a Vice President at Chef, a lecturer at UC Berkeley, and before Lean Enterprise I wrote Continuous Delivery. My background is in software engineering and I’ve worked in multiple industries, in multiple companies, helping organizations get better at delivering high quality valuable software products.
Lean Enterprise is about how you create organizations that are able to work in short development cycles, build products rapidly, and get feedback. And that requires us to change the way we think about portfolio management, financial management, culture, and pretty much everything else. All these things need to be a bit different in order to compete in this world where we have these very short product cycles.
Toyota Kata by Mike Rother
Buy Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble on Amazon today
Visit ContinuousDelivery.com to learn more about Jez and his books
Follow Jez Humble on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Exponential Organization by Salim Ismail
Fail Fast or Win Big by Bernhard Schroeder
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 Scaling Up according to Verne Harnish: Introduction In this episode Verne Harnish takes a deep dive into his book, Scaling Up whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Verne Harnish takes a deep dive into his book, Scaling Up where he shares practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business.
In his book, Harnish focuses on 4 major decision areas that every company must get right and provides you with a series of one-page tools such as the One-Page Strategic Plan and Rockefeller Habits Checklist. The goal of the book is to help you create a company where the team is engaged, the customers are doing your marketing, and everyone is making money.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs and other business leaders who are looking for a strategic reference guide to help navigate the difficulties that come with scaling a business.
This book is really practical and we get right to the point.
It’s divided into four different sections so you can jump into whatever section fits you best. In the very beginning we wrote a summary that can be read in 20 minutes so that the reader can get an idea of what section they want to go to first.
No one has ever achieved peak performance without a coach.
We start with a chapter called The Barriers and there are three barriers that we have discovered that are common after working with 40 thousand plus companies over 32 years. Very simply it’s the development of the next levels of leadership, if you don’t get some people helping you than you will be stuck as that home base business. We have a hard enough time as entrepreneurs getting our functions running well but the reality is most of our real work cuts across those functions. There are a handful of processes that drive a company and most entrepreneurs don’t focus on it. They don’t focus on how to scale up their processes and infrastructure to handle more customers, more employees, and more people. The third barrier is of all the functions the one that tends to be the bottleneck is the marketing function and it needs to be separate from sales. A lot of our companies are stuck because they just can’t hire enough of the right people to take care of business.
Given those three barriers we then add these four decisions that you absolutely have to get right. The four decisions are people, strategy, execution, and cash. And we created a set of one page tools to help you with that. We have a 40 question assessment that entrepreneurs can take to figure out where to start. And then we end the whole thing with next steps and the five very concrete things a CEO and their leadership team must do next if they are going to get the organization unstuck.
When you’re faced with any opportunity or challenge “your first question should always be a who question.” – Jim Collins
I founded a group called The Entrepreneurs Organization which is worldwide today, about 11,000 members. I started an executive program that we hosted at MIT and I ran it for 15 years and am still teaching it. From there I launched a company called Gazelles in 97. I am enjoying life with my wife and four children in Barcelona, Spain.
It was after 12 years of having my book, Mastering The Rockefeller Habits, out there. With about 40,000 companies using our one page strategic plan, we learned a few tricks so this was a chance to bring it all together in a book.
Magic Of Thinking Big by David Schwartz
Great by Choice by Jim Collins
How to Win at the Sport of Business by Mark Cuban
Buy Scaling Up by Verne Harnish on Amazon today
Visit ScalingUp.com to learn more about the book and the free resources that Verne mentioned
Follow Verne Harnish on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
Aligning Sales and Strategy by Frank Cespedes
How To Ruin A Business Without Really Trying by MJ Gottlieb
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Peter Thiel
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 Hyper Sales Growth according to Jack Daly: Introduction In this episode Jack Daly gives a deep dive of his book, Hyper SalesRead More
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]]>In this episode Jack Daly gives a deep dive of his book, Hyper Sales Growth where he shares his street-proven secrets to achieving rapid sales growth and profitability.
In his book, Daly walks you through his step-by-step process showing you how to build a winning culture in your business, effectively manage salespeople, and maximize the speed of sales growth. The goal of this book is to create the best sales organizations in the industry with unprecedented growth and a lot of very happy customers.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need help taking a sales organization to the next level by helping employees sell more effectively and profitably.
What makes this book unique is it covers how to create a winning culture, how to build and grow a sales force, and how to sell. If you want to grow your business Hyper Sales Growth is the book for you.
If you are a sales person you can jump to the 3rd section in the book which is all about sales. If you are a business owner or an entrepreneur you should start from the very beginning. If you are a sales manager you should read the 2nd and 3rd part of the book.
If you are a CEO, Entrepreneur or owner I would tell you that the biggest takeaway is to understand you have the job of getting the vision right, putting key people in key spots, and then spending the lion share of their time in building a winning culture.
The big takeaway from a sales manager’s standpoint is to spend a whole heck of a lot less time in selling and rather spend your time in building your sales force in quantity and quality.
The biggest takeaway for sales is the playbook I present in the book. There isn’t a sports team out there that would have any shot at winning their game without a playbook and without being prepared and yet the majority of sales people are without a system and a process.
The first section of the book is about culture. I tell every business owners and entrepreneur that if you get the culture right everything else that goes on in your company will be a lot easier but if you don’t get the culture right than everything is hard. Culture for me is creating an environment were people who work in the company don’t get up begrudgingly about going to work but rather get up excited about work. As a business owner and entrepreneur, if you can create this environment, you will have a competitive and sustainable advantage. The majority of companies out there have a culture by default rather than a culture by design. The four key ingredients to building a culture are recognition systems, communication systems, personal and professional development processes, and empowerment processes.
The second part of the book covers sales management. I believe that a sales manager’s job is not to grow sales; it’s to grow sales people in quantity and quality. If you grow sales people in quantity and quality they in turn will grow your sales. This section is the playbook that a successful sales manager should use in scaling their sales force in quantity and quality. It’s about minimum standards, tracking performance, getting rid of the non-performers and recruiting the best sales people that are out in the marketing place.
The third section of the book is sales and that is winning new customers, growing the ones you have, and differentiating yourself from the competition. We need to figure out the system in process that will give you the greatest competitive edge. In this section we discuss backward thinking which is all about putting goals in writing, having a system of measurement, a system of accountability and identifying the key activities that you need to do each day before you go home in order to be affective. I also discuss the importance of having your head on right because 50% or more of success at sales is a head case. And lastly I talk about proactive pipeline management which is all about taking prospects and converting them in to customers and then converting them from customers in to clients. And we do this by virtue of a touch system.
The next section of the book we discuss building an affective touch system. It takes nine touches before the prospect even knows you exist as a sales person. Most people quit at five or less and if your touches are all about you, your computer, product or service, you will blow it because people do not want to be sold. So we need to design our touch system with a variety of different ways we touch someone. Once we have decided the mechanisms with which we are going to touch our prospects, customers and clients, then we need to decide the frequency with which we are going to do that. From there we teach how to create perceived value. In the book we discuss not only the need to create perceived value but also how to go about creating that perceived value.
“If you get the culture right everything else that goes on in your firm will be easy.” – Jack Daly
I am a serial entrepreneur. I started selling at the age of seven, owned my market and charged twice the price of everyone I competed with. At age 12 I built my first company, age 13 I had five employees and that’s when it came to me that I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up which was be an entrepreneur. I built six companies in to national firms, sold two to wall street and all were fast growing and highly profitable. For the last 20 years I have been teaching companies and people in sales how to higher grow their business.
For years I have been asked when I was going to write a book and I just never got around to it due to time. I finally decided to sit down and write it with the great help of my publisher.
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
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
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail Introduction In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations whereRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail
In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations where he shows you how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become exponential.
In his book, Ismail unveils years of research learning how organizations can accelerate growth through the use of technology. The goal of the book is to provide you with the knowledge to leverage assets such as big data, communities, algorithms, and new technology to achieve performance ten times better than your competition.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a guide for harnessing and strategizing the hyper growth of a company that feeds off of modern technology in the 21st century and beyond.
Because we focus on accelerating technologies and the future we identified an inflection point in how we build businesses that has never noticed before.
You can jump in as needed but I would suggest reading the first two chapters first because it lays the premise and basis of the book.
As we finish the book the core economic basis of these new exponential organizations kind of bubbled up. When you are building and running a business you are worried about money and cost of supply and worried about cost of demand. The internet allowed us to drop our cost of demand exponentially.
We open chapter one basically by saying the world is moving exponentially quicker. As we digitize things we hop onto what we call Moore’s Law and the pace of change moves very, very quickly at an accelerating pace. Where we saw computers move at this pace over the last 50 to 60 years based on Moore’s Law we’re not seeing six, seven or eight technologies hop onto that same curb. The first chapter is to give a hard reality check that the world is moving more quickly than we’ve ever seen it before and we give some specifics on how that works.
The second chapter talks about our organizational structures and the fact that how we organize ourselves is very linear and has been for a long time. All of our businesses have inherited a local and linear characteristic where if you had twice as big of a farm you need twice as many people to farm it. We are seeing today that an information based environment actually accelerates and doesn’t just stay linear. We are seeing new organizations that are scaling at an accelerating rate and not just as a multiplier. In this chapter we teach you how to make your organization adapt to this new accelerated pace.
Chapter three looks at the five externalities of these organizations and I open this chapter by saying all these exponential organizations have one single visionary mission statement characteristic. Each has what I call an MTP (Massive transformative purpose). Chapter three continues to describe five externalities and map onto the acronym SCALE. S stands for Staff on Demand. C stands for Community and Crowd. The A stands for Algorithms. The L stands for leveraged Assets. And the E stands for Engagement.
Chapter four dives into the five internal control mechanisms that these organizations are using to manage and track themselves. This maps on to the word IDEAS. The I stands for Interface Processes. The D stands for Dashboards. The E stands for Experimentation. The A stands for Autonomy. And the S stands for Social Technologies. What we found is if you implement four out of the 10 attributes that we described in chapter three and four you will get to the 10x level.
Chapter five summarizes all of it and explains the implications of this new model. This chapter goes through a whole set of implications about how to think about the future.
The second half of the book, chapter six to chapter ten, explains how to apply it. Chapter six is about how to apply this to a startup. And when you are starting a company from scratch what sequence to go in. This chapter will give you the specific steps to take to launch a startup with these principles in mind.
Chapter seven is about how to apply this to a midmarket company. There are a lot of midmarket family style businesses that have grown early on but have now plateaued and this is about taking that and blowing it open.
Chapter eight is about how to organize a big company because you can’t take a big organization and turn it in to one of these new animals, it’s too disruptive of a change. What you need to do is take a disruptive set of changes agents that exist in all organizations and build one of these exponential organizations off the edge of your own attacking in another marketplace.
Chapter nine is a set of nine success stories of what big companies are doing.
In the final chapter we talk about the role of the executive in the future.
“Any organization built for success in the 20th century is doomed for failure in the 21st century.” – David Ross
I am the founding executive director and currently global ambassador for Singularity University. Our mission statement at Singularity University is to create a new generation of leadership that can leverage accelerating technologies to solve major global problems. I have been doing this for about six years and was the head of innovation at Yahoo and Tech Entrepreneurship before that.
As we launched Singularity six years ago we noticed at the same time that a very different model has become of how we build organizations. We’ve learned how to scale technology really well but scaling the organization and building that is painfully incrementally and linear. In the last five years or so we are seeing a new breed of organizational structure that can scale in the same seamless way that we scale technology. I noticed that as a weak signal five years ago, started tracking it, and over the last three years we have found over 60 organizations that are scaling at an average 10 times better, faster and cheaper compared to their peers. We started documenting those 60 organizations and tracking them and decided to write a book on the model.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin
Buy Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail on Amazon today
Visit ExponentialOrgs.com take the diagnostic survey and learn more about the book
Visit SingularityU.org to learn more about Singularity University
Follow Salim Ismail on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization by Nathan Furr
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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