Jack Dalyis in making that money. The clearer we get about that, the better our
company has an opportunity to excel.
WRIGHT
Key p eople in key spots was ne xt. Would y ou explain your fervor for
sales in this regard?
DALY
I’ve spent decades building businesses and today I run into literally
hundreds of entrepreneurs and hundreds of CEOs who are aspiring to
grow their business. When they’re growing their business and they
have that aspiration, I want to know what they mean by “growing their
business.” The feedback I get is they want to grow their revenues.
Another term for that is growing your sales; in most b usiness, if you
want to grow your sales, a very simple answer is to grow your sales
fo rce in quantity and in quality. If you grow your sales fo rce in quantity
and in quality, they, in turn, will grow your sales.
I look at the key roles of an organization—the key people in key
spots—who are reporting to the entrepreneur/owner of a business. In
my opinion, if the mission is to grow your business, then the person
who is in charge of growing your sales force is a vital key player.
I’ve witnessed three sins of sales management that cause businesses to
not be all they could b e.
One is where the CEO/owner/entrepreneur is wearing the hat of the
sales manager. By definition you are basically r elegating both the CEO
job and the sales management job to a part-time role a nd, in effect,
you’re saying “I’m going to gr ow my business part-time.” That just
makes no sense to me because if you have a business that has an
opportunity to grow, the way to grow it is to grow your sales force. The
person who should be doing that should be full-time.
The second sin of sales management, committed regularly out there,
is to take the best salesperson and then make him or her the sales
manager. Now, have I ever seen that work? The answer is yes, but not
very often. What often happens is we lose our best salesperson and we
get a mediocre sales manager as the tradeoff; the role and the
responsibilities are entirely different.