Mastering the Art of Success
business standpoint, specific things that are about them that are unique
to their person, and things that are just fun. If salespeople were to
develop a contact management system where they were regularly
to uching base with their customers, prospects, and clients in a
differentiated way, then I think that would spell success.
In summary, my three things are: g oal setting, proactive pipeline
management, and then differentiating yourself from the competition.
WRIGHT
How about one word that is all important to the successful
entrepreneur and would you tell our readers why?
DALY
My favorite word for entrepreneurs is leverage. I got into sale s when
I was seven years old. I owned the market and charged twice the price
th at every kid I competed with charged. By the age of twelve, I built my
fir st company and at thirteen I had five employees.
That first company was my initial entrepreneurial venture and it
was a newspaper route. I had thirty- two customers initially, but a year
later I had 275. Now, 275 customers was a lot of work after school in
the dark, cold, wet, and snow. I didn’t like the work but I sure liked the
money. I needed to figure out how to get back into selling because I was
so busy delivering papers that it stunted the growth of my newspaper
business. So I found eleven-year-old kids to deliver the papers and that
freed me to go out and grow my business. In effect, I was leveraging
th ose f olks.
When I think of entrepreneurs, I think of some key initiatives, key
words, key areas that an entrepreneur can leverage.
The first is systems and processes, systems and processes, systems
and processes, systems and processes. My area of specialty is sales. I go
into organizations and I see a tremendous amount of progress made
throughout the organization with systems and processes—until I get to
the sales area. It looks like the wild, w ild West with every individual
doing his or her own thing. The largest sales force I ever had
responsibility for leading was twenty-six hundred salespeople. I’m
infamous for sharing this: there aren’t twenty-six hundred best ways to