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Today’s show featured an interview with Jack Daly, the Institute for Excellence in Sales Sales Speaker of the Year. Find out more about the 15th Annual Sales Excellence Awards here.
Find Jack on LinkedIn.
JACK’S TIP: “Lifelong learning fuels my journey. From paper books to Kindle—and now Audible—I average over 100 books a year by learning on the go. Your degree isn’t the end; it’s just the beginning.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re talking today with Jack Daly. Jack, congratulations. You are the IES Sales Speaker of the Year. I think you’re the fourth IES Sales Speaker of the Year. We had some of our mutual friends, Lee Salz, Sam Richter, have received that award in the past, but I’m really excited to give it to you. You’ve changed so many lives with your sales training, your sales classes. You’ve been a huge influence in places like YPO and EO. Of course, your book, Life by Design, we’ll touch on that for a little bit.
First off, how you doing? Introduce yourself to the audience, and it’s great to see you. By the way, for our listeners, if you haven’t figured it out by now, Jack and I are both from Philly. Philadelphia, that is, so we both talk when we talk to each other in Philadelphian. Jack, I live in DC now. When I cross Wilmington, Delaware, I shift back to how I used to talk when I was 16. I know you’re a Philly guy too. We’ve talked about that many, many times. Go Eagles. Introduce yourself to the audience here.
Jack Daly: I’ve been living in California now for 40 years, and people immediately say, “You’re not from around here. Are you from Philly or Pennsylvania?” It’s like, you can take Jack out of Philly, but you can’t take Philly out of Jack. We’re still on a high of over our Eagles Super Bowl win. That’s great stuff.
Listen Fred, this award is amazing to me. Not only am I looking forward to being there and being honored, when I was aware of all the other people that the organization is honoring and the caliber of these people, I’m going to be the guy running around with the autograph book saying, “Hey, could I get your autograph here? Can I get your autograph there?” You’ve really put together a really terrific group for that event. Thank you.
Fred Diamond: You’re welcome. You’ll be doing the keynote. We have a large committee of people who decided on who should be our award recipients. I’ve seen you speak in front of a dozen people, and I’ve seen you speak in front of close to a thousand. The impact that you’ve brought to sales professionals about the diligence, about the detail, about the focus, the playbooks, things that are necessary for being successful. Those things, even with AI and a lot of stuff we’re going to be talking about here, a lot of it still holds so true. I’m looking forward to people listening to this show and people coming to see you do the keynote. Let’s get started here.
Jack Daly: Just a real quick summary for those who aren’t familiar with me. Between 26 and 46 years old, I took a blank sheet of paper six times and sketched a business on it, convinced other people to come and join me. All six companies grew very, very fast on the revenue/sales line and on the profit side, all went nationwide. Two of them I sold to First Boston and Salomon Brothers Wall Street firms. At 46 years old, I lost my passion for what I was doing. I’m a firm believer, if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, I don’t think you can be successful. I called my board and I called my investors and said, “Listen, I’ve lost my passion, and I just don’t have it anymore, where I want to get up and do what I’m doing right now. In the best interest of everyone, let’s get me out.”
At 46 years old, and three months later, I was unemployed and the phone started ringing and people said, “Hey, I hear you’re not working. Could you come and speak to my company? Could you speak to my trade group? Could you speak here? Could you speak there?” After about three months of that, I turned to my wife and I said, “I’m making a significant difference in people’s lives, and I don’t have employees that are dragging me down like I was before when I lost my passion for what I was doing.” I said, “I’m thinking I’m going to do some more of this.” Bonnie turned to me and said, “God bless. Just do something and get the heck out of this house.”
That was 30 years ago. A typical month in those last 30 years has been 200,000 air miles and over 20 to 30 countries each year. The impact has been people in the millions now. One of the fruits, one of the joys is the emails, the handwritten cards, the notes that come in daily saying, “You don’t know me, but I was in your room, and let me tell you what’s taken place since then.” Here today on the podcast, I hope that we can impact a few more people.
Fred Diamond: We’re going to. Let’s get started here. What are some of the most significant shifts you’ve observed in sales, and let’s just say the past couple of years, especially post-pandemic? We’re doing today’s interview in February of 2025. What are some of the big shifts that you’ve observed?
Jack Daly: For me, the biggest one is the word technology. If you’re not leveraging technology, then we’re going to leave you behind as a salesperson. You can have all of the soft skills that are out there in terms of building relationships and having the gift of gab and being a good listener and those types of things. But in today’s world, we are very much in the sales arena being enhanced in our ability to do the job for our clients with technology.
The second thing I would tell you is you need to be comfortable living in a virtual world. I do CEO coaching besides my speaking business, and we’re all dealing with virtual workforces and communicating in a virtual way. Salespeople during the pandemic had no choice but to go there. How do I build relationships on a Zoom or on a Teams or what have you? Over that period of time, I think a good number of salespeople got pretty comfortable doing that. There’s a danger there.
The danger is that we stopped calling on people face-to-face. To me, if I can get you face-to-face as opposed to the Zoom, but that might require a little bit more effort on my part to leave the house, leave the office, get in a car, get on a plane. I have a client in Atlanta that when I said, “Get you and your leadership team out face-to-face with your customers,” we saw a significant increase in business. The customer said, “Gosh, we’re loving seeing you in the flesh.” I’m giving a mixed message there. Got to leverage technology, but don’t forget about face-to-face.
Fred Diamond: A lot of the people listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast with Jack Daly, a lot of them are junior sales professionals, mid-career. They’re actually pretty good with using technology. They could always improve. We hear all day long about how they are in Zoom. I’ve told this story before, I spoke to a VP of sales at a top technology company, and she said that her junior people are great at using technology. They’re great at picture me working on the phone, but they have no idea how to interface with human beings. A lot of people who started sales during the pandemic didn’t have to do that. They had to get used to the Zoom and all the CRM-ish and marketing automation type technologies. Tell sales professionals who may be in their first or second job, why they need to be interfacing with humans in-person.
Jack Daly: I’m going to give it to you in two foundational pieces. One foundational piece, people do business with people they trust. I think that face-to-face enhances and accelerates the increase in trust. The second is, people do business with people they like, and they tend to like people that they get to know better. No matter how good I am at doing something here virtually, there isn’t anything like breaking bread, going to a game, or doing something with someone and opening up your personal life to them along with the business.
As an example, I’m an endurance athlete. I’ve done lots of marathons, I’ve done Ironmans. I’m an insatiable golfer. If I have somebody that I can get to know at that level, it just transcendent everything else about the product, the price, the service. It’s, “Wow, this is my friend,” and as long as the product is reasonably close to what I’m looking for, or the service is in the ballpark, I want to do business with Jack. I want to do business with Fred, because we have these commonalities. That’s difficult to do in a virtual setting.
Fred Diamond: We were talking about this the other day. A lot of us have been working together for years, and we talked about events where we went to together and a trade show from 1997 that was impactful. Nobody said, “Hey, you remember that Zoom call that we did four years ago?” Maybe they’ll remember a message, et cetera. Jack, what is the biggest challenge sales professionals face today, and how can they overcome it?
Jack Daly: I’m going to give it to you in one word, time. Time management is it. We’re being pulled in so many different ways. One of the things that I tell my clients is this, everybody starts every week equal. It’s called 168, 168 hours. Some of us do better with our 168 than others. If I were to distill it down, and I had two coach calls yesterday on this topic, why are our salespeople not generating the business at the level that we were anticipating? The answer is that they were not focused on high payoff activities, HPAs. There’s a lot of things that we could be using our 168 for. By the way, 168 is just 24 hours times 7, but we don’t get all that because we have to sleep, eat, commute, and all that. We got 40 to 60 hours to play with in our business.
I don’t want to be distracted as a salesperson from things that will cost me more opportunities. One of my favorite sayings is, if you don’t have an assistant, you are one. There are things that need to be done in sales, but not necessarily done by the salesperson. Let me transfer it over to my business as a professional speaker. I travel extensively and the plans are always changing. If I were booking my own travel, that would be a piece of my 168. Well, I’d be one-finger Jack on a computer doing something that I really don’t have an expertise in. Wouldn’t it be better to have somebody that really knows their way around that world do that for me? They’ll allow me to make a couple more calls to allow me to go a little bit deeper with.
I’m a prolific reader, and I would encourage people to read Essentialism. It’s written by Mckeown. It really anchors this topic. My CEO coach clients have come back to me and said, “That might be one of the more important books you’ve given to us in order to get more out of my day of a high-quality nature.” It’s time. That’s the answer.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about customers for a little bit. We’re doing today’s interview in February 2025. We talk about sales professionals having to go out of the virtual world, optimizing themselves in a virtual role, but also getting out as well. Customer behavior has changed, where it’s harder to get into places, people are also working from home. There’s a lot of that type of a challenge going on. What are some of your insights? How has buyer behavior evolved and what should salespeople be doing to adapt to that?
Jack Daly: There’s a lot that I can put under that umbrella. The first thing that I would tell you is the more that we quit selling, the more sales we will have. People don’t want to be sold. If I go back to our first question about leveraging technology, in today’s world, a salesperson who hasn’t done their homework before engagement with a customer or prospect is somebody that shouldn’t be in the business any longer. I ought to know not just the company that I’m calling on, but I ought to know the person, because of the social media aspect and all that’s available.
It’s appalling to me that salespeople are calling on me regularly. Now, they don’t get to me, but they’re bombarding me in a lot of different mechanisms. But I’m not responding because it is a generic type of approach. I could see they sent the same LinkedIn message to a thousand other people. They didn’t take a moment to look at my LinkedIn profile. They didn’t see if I was on Facebook, and they didn’t go to my website. An expression that I picked up from a good friend of mine, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” If you haven’t done that basic thing before engagement with me, why should I trust you thinking that you’re going to do the job for me in a quality way?
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit about mindset and emotional intelligence. That comes up from a lot of sales leaders that we talk to. I hate to use words soft skills, I don’t think they’re really soft skills at all. They’re so critical right now. During the pandemic, we did a search on all the words we used on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Empathy was the number one word, right behind value, that came up most, and mindset as well. I’m just curious, can mindset and emotional intelligence be taught? Have you had to teach people how to have the right mindset and how to be emotionally intelligent over your career?
Jack Daly: The number one book that I would recommend to people is exactly that, Mindset. It was written about 17 years ago by Carol Dweck. When you ask the question, can you teach people? Here’s what I want to do, is I want to raise the level of awareness of people. That is, according to Carol, and I’m in alignment with her, we humans come into two categories, just two, growth mindset or fixed mindset. The beauty of this is we aren’t born as one. We get to choose, and we can get to choose growth mindset or fixed mindset at any point in time.
Very simply, a fixed mindset salesperson has a vernacular that sounds like this, “I’m not putting my numbers up on the board because the economy is in the toilet. I’m not putting my numbers up on the board because the customer has a product that we’re not able to match. I’m not getting my numbers because the interest rates are high. I’m not getting my numbers because of recession. I’m not getting my numbers because of the pandemic,” and the fingers are pointing this way. That is a fixed mindset person.
A growth mindset person dealing in the same environment says, “We’re all confronted with the same issues. How can I make this an opportunity? How can I make this something that I can take advantage of?”
As an example, in April of 2020, when we all went into lockdown, I hired a crew to come into my house and transform a room into a virtual studio. By June, I set a Guinness World Record for the largest virtual conference of 21,261 people. I no longer could get on airplanes and no longer could get in ballrooms with people. But what’s interesting is that in the pre-pandemic, I was a maximum of a hundred speaking gigs a year, because I didn’t want to be in a hotel any more than that. During the pandemic and the year that followed, I averaged 17 gigs a month. I doubled my business as a result of having a growth mindset. I said, “I can’t get there on the traditional way. Figure it out.” For me, if you don’t have a growth mindset as a salesperson, find another job. That’s what I would tell you. That’s how important it is. You get to choose.
Fred Diamond: What’s the most valuable sales lesson you’ve learned in your career? You’ve taught so many people, sales leaders, business owners, sales professionals in so many different industries, if you will. I’m just curious, what’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned in the course of your career?
Jack Daly: I’m going to give you two. One of them is be a good listener. The second one is something I mentioned earlier to a question, and that was move away from trying to sell people. I am a very hard worker. It’s not work to me. I love what I do. But as much as I’m driven and hardworking, I don’t want my prospect or customer to feel that intensity, to feel that pressure. I want them to feel partnership with me. I want them to realize that I’m going to work on their behalf in the best way that I can, even if it means sending them to a competitor. 30% of all of the leads that come into me as a speaker, 30% where they want to hire me, I’m sending to other people that I think will do a better job given what they’re dealing with.
As an example, I get a lot of calls to speak to companies about customer service. Well, there are people that I think are better at customer service. I’m more the sales guy. Go use that guy on customer service, because if I were in your shoes, that’s exactly what I would do. What too many salespeople are trying to do is finding a way to sell their product or service, even if it’s not the best choice for the customer. But if you can adopt that mindset, I think you differentiate yourself from the competition, you increase trust, and it’s a game changer. That’s my biggest takeaway.
Fred Diamond: We got a lot of junior sales professionals, B2B, B2G, business to government. What would be your one bit of advice? I’m going to ask you for your final action step that people listening should take today to ensure their continued success right after this. But first, brand new sales professional, someone just got a job with a great company in tech, or some type of enterprise software or selling, if you will, what would be your one bit of advice for them to help them ensure that they get their career off to the right start?
Jack Daly: I’m going to give you two. Model the masters. Find people that have already figured things out and model them. Get your ego out of the way. The second thing is practice. No matter what discipline in life, sports, the arts, music, the very best people in any discipline in life got to be that good through practice. If I go back into the sales world, how often does the salesperson practice? Where are they practicing? If you’re not practicing before you get to the prospect, that means you’re practicing on the prospect.
Fred Diamond: When you say practice, what should they be practicing specifically?
Jack Daly: I would tell you that if you put yourself into a group of three people, one person is the prospect, one person is the salesperson, and one person is the observer. I’m practicing the questions I’m going to ask on the call. I’m practicing how to deal with the objections that I’m going to encounter. When I go out in the field and I model the masters, what we really find is they’re canned. They have the same answer to whatever those situations are, they figured out what works. I’m going to find out from modeling the masters, what are the best answers to the objections? What are the best questions to ask?
I’m going to take you back to when I was 13. I was a caddy at a country club, and the people that were there were way more successful than my parents. I said, “I have them for four hours while I’m walking the course, I’m going to ask them how they became successful, what they would tell a 13-year-old to do and to not do,” et cetera. I put those questions together, and then in my family’s bathroom at home, I practiced in front of the mirror asking the questions. It’s all about practicing. Quite frankly, as a golfer, for example, you don’t want to go to the range and practice and practice and practice a bad swing. You want to understand modeling the masters and get the good swing down and practice the good swing so that when you’re on a sales call, you’re with the good swing.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Jack Daly for being on today’s show. Give us one final action step, people listening to the show or reading the transcript, something specific they should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Jack Daly: Lifelong learning. I started reading when I was just a young kid and had a passion for it. It was the traditional paper books. Technology moved us to Kindle. I didn’t have to load up my suitcases for a three-week trip with six books. They could all be in the Kindle. Three years ago, I made the conversion to Audible. What that has done is remarkable for me. My bucket list said I wanted to read 50 books in a year. Before the Audible, the closest I could get was about 30. But in the car, I can be listening to the book. In the plane, I can be listening to the book. At the gate to the plane, I can be listening to the book. When I’m exercising and running, I can be listening to the book.
Most narrators of the books are talking too slow, so you can adjust the speed. I’m typically a one-point-fiver. My wife, Karen, and I are both voracious readers and we share the same Audible library and we tell each other which ones we’re reading at that moment so we could have conversations over dinner and things, what was our takeaways and so forth. Get this, the last three years, I’ve averaged over 100 books a year. 85% of them are business. I don’t have a business, but I’m enthralled with business. I’m so knowledgeable now because this lifelong learning is transportable. It goes with me everywhere. Don’t stop learning because you got a degree or got out of school and think that’s the end. I think that’s the beginning.
Fred Diamond: Once again, we’re going to be honoring Jack Daly with the IES Sales Speaker of the Year on May 1st. I want to thank him for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo