Tom Digan

I learned sales watching my dad.

It's not something he told me.

It was something that just being with him.

So we commuted to school for years, two different private schools, or it was like an hour commute and could be longer with traffic.

And this is early 90s, mid 90s.

You got those old Zack Morris cell phones.

And my dad was a mortgage originator, so he was always on the phone.

And he was basically a traveling salesman, but on the phone in the car the entire time.

He's a lefty, so he would have his phone on his shoulder and he would have his notebook on his left hand taking notes and the map and he'd be driving with his knees.

And my brother and I would be listening to my dad selling basically every day.

The three things that he taught me about sales are one,

To be effective in sales, you need people to like you.

Ideally, they want to root for you.

And if you're really good, you can get them to potentially quit what they're doing and want to join you.

That would be like the best thing.

But then second thing is they need to trust you because that's kind of all you have.

Integrity is everything when it comes to sales.

And the third thing is you need to be relentless, but not in an annoying way, just deeply persistent.

That's just carried me well through two very different careers to date.

And he's just been an awesome role model and someone I think about trying to teach my own kids lessons like that.