The best piece of advice sales coach and keynote speaker Jack Daly says he has delivered in the last 18-plus months, is this: Focus on what you have control over and don’t worry so much about the rest.
Daly shared his thoughts on being successful in sales while the country and its sales force are grappling with how to do business during a pandemic in the February 2022 episode of the 21st Century Business Forum. The webcast that features monthly one-on-one interviews with some of the nation’s most prominent business minds and thought leaders. Click here to see the webcast with Jack Daly.
“Fifty percent or more of success at selling has nothing to do with COVID,” Daly says. “Half of selling is believing that you can be successful, and then taking the initiative to do what you can do, irrespective of what the environment is.”
For Daly, that means looking at how the world has changed, and embracing those changes to reap the benefits. There is still a tremendous amount of networking going on—it’s just virtual, Daly says.
Within 60 days of being in COVID lockdown, Daly says he brought in a team to build a professional video studio in his home. In fact, post-COVID, Daly says he won’t be going back to open to the public, live events because people who are attending his virtual sessions find them easier to attend.
While he used to have people commute by car and a few by plane to attend his seminars, “today, I have them from five to 10 different countries and all throughout the 50 states attending because it’s so much easier to access,” Daly says.
Daly also addressed the challenge of finding great salespeople in the current economy. One of the key aspects, he shares, is building a list of great salespeople that you would like to work for your company, and that list does not have to be specific to your industry. “A great salesperson can learn the industry better than a poor salesperson that knows the industry,” he adds.
Once you make a list, you have to nurture it, just as a salesperson would nurture his or her sales prospects. For Daly, that means two touches per month for each person on his list, with “a touch” consisting of a personal visit, a phone call, a voicemail, an email or a snail mail. “If you do that with enough people on your list, you’re going to find that you’re not having a hard time finding good salespeople,” Daly says.
Daly says the key attribute he looks for in a salesperson is grit. “Never, ever, ever give up,” Daly says. “You’re going to have a lot of people not returning your phone calls, not responding to your emails, not returning your LinkedIn request. Those who respond, you’re going to hear ‘no’ more than you hear ‘yes.’ You have to have that grit, that tenacity.”
As a CEO, Daly says he boasted a team of 2,600 salespeople operating out of 100 locations in the United States, and he always had a similar presentation when making a visit to one of those locations: There aren’t 2,600 best ways to sell something. Find the best way, build the systems and processes to reflect that, and then practice those systems and processes, he advises. “And then I bet you we annihilate the competition,” Daly says.
The Business Forum is presented by BizTimes Media and sponsored by Johnson Financial Group.
