What I learned this February

Beyond Business – This is Personal

Spend some time thinking, communicating and publishing both your personal and business goals each year.  Post them where they are visible and will act as a reminder to you about why and what you do every day.  This simple exercise, along with measuring your activities linked to the above, has been proven to increase the likelihood of achieving what you define as success.  A great example can be found on Jack Daly’s website ( https://jackdalysales.com/about-jack/ ) where he boldly publishes both his goals and performance for each year.

Specific to Business

As the leader of your business, speak about your vision – where you see the organization will be in 5 years: its revenue, margins, locations, products, etc… Speak of it all the time so you pull the organization along with you!

Strong leaders invest and surround themselves with other leaders who are better and more focused than themselves as it relates to specific roles.

A WINNING Sport Team can teach you a lot about how you run your organization.

• Do you know of any successful sports team that simply goes out there to play without developing a playbook on how to win? Every business needs a playbook that sets out their goals, strategies and responses to the changing market conditions.  The playbook allows a team to execute with purpose around a plan designed to win.
• You cannot avoid preparation. Whether it be individually or in combination with your team.  Hours need to be set aside to learn and train in order to execute with excellence.  Model the masters.
• Measure, Measure, Measure. Reflect, Adjust, Reload, Execute. I call this RARE because very few individuals can do this in a sustainable manner.
• Culture eats strategy for breakfast. We’ve seen teams stacked with incredible players who simply can’t pull it together because they’re unwilling to play as a team versus being recognized as individuals.
• Hire people with GRIT! Those willing to take rejection, fall down and then get up stronger than where they started.  Attitude is everything!
• Recruiting is a process not an EVENT! People come and go.  No professional sports team and/or NCAA team can operate with excellence without having a prospect list that runs far deeper than their current team.  Look within and outside your industry where the competition doesn’t venture.  Develop a courting process that allows you to build that list.

The Lesson Topping My Chart this month:

If you are going to scale your organization, the most important person will be the Head of Sales.  Jack Daly talked about the 3 sins of sales management:

1. The CEO is also wearing the hat of the sales manager.  Every moment he/she spends working on the management of the business they are NOT selling.
2. You take your best sales person and make them the sales manager not understanding they operate with very different skill sets. Hire a sales manager if your aspiration is hyper growth.
3. Culture needs to be designed not happen by default. If you’re looking for hyper growth you need to have a sales playbook.  Everyone is working the same way – you build the systems and processes, you practice those processes and as Jack put it is so succinctly – you then go out and annihilate the competition.