Mastering The Art Of Success

Jack Daly

The third item in s ales management is coaching, training, and pre-
call preparation. It’s all about being out in the field with other
salespeople doing joint calls, training calls, coaching calls, and role
practic e. Pre-call preparation has to do with the concept that there is
hardly anything that goes on in a sales call that you couldn’t anticipate
before you get there. As a result, when we have studied the top ten
percenters of sales we found that their responses are canned—they say
the same thing, the same way, each time they encounter a ce rtain
si tuati on. The beauty is that it doesn’t sound canned, it sounds as if it’s
the very first time they’ve ever said it, but they have figured out what
works.
So there is no excuse for a salesperson in the field to not be better
prepared for any objection that they’re going to encounter because the
majority of objections are less than fifteen. There is no reason to not
know why customers should do business with your company and how
to make it unique from the competition.
So, as sales managers, we could sit down with our salespeople and
discover what we need to be prepared for before we go out on a call and
th en coach, train, and practice with our salespeople. A guideline I
recommend is for each salesperson on your team to have a minimum of
four hours a month one-on-one time in the field.
So in summary on sales management, it was minimum standards of
performance, recruiting the top best people, and then coaching and
training them to be better at what they do.

WRIGHT
You’ve given us your top three areas of sales management; how
about your top three areas for sales excellenc e?

DALY
Now I’m going to put on the hat of salesperson. Wearing that hat, I
lo ok at the three items. The first item is the game-maker and it’s also
the game-breaker. Salespeople who are looking to enjoy success have to
have goals and the goal-setting process has four key component parts.
First, their goals must b e in writing. If your goals are not in writing,
they’re dreams, and dreams don’t often come true; written goals do.