#22 - Playbook: How to be a machine

Foreign.

Everybody. And welcome to this. It's a playbook. We had a first playbook after episode 10. It was cold calling. Everything you need to know about your cold calling, and it lit the world on fire. People were interviewing and using that cold call script when they came to us. And we decided every 10 episodes, it's going to be a playbook episode.

And.

And this is playbook number two. Number two is called how to be a Machine. And so we can talk cold call tactics all day. We can talk the best subject header of your email all day, the best LinkedIn video of your life. But if you can't get done, then that doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter how smooth your cold call opener is. If you can't get stuff done and organize your time and plan your attack and then attack your plan, you're going to be bottom of the board. And so, Nick, why should people listen?

Well, look, we don't talk about mindset or work ethic on this show because those things are basically table stakes. Today's episode, we structured in four ways to help you execute on everything you've learned in the past 20 episodes. We structured it in four sections. Morning routine. Planning your attack, attacking your plan, and then shutting it down so you're able to hit it hard the next day.

All right, let's do it. Number one, we start every episode with a good morning. What better way to start than with your morning routine? All righty. Nick, you know I wake up early in the morning. Here's the deal. For your morning routine, everybody starts their day willingly at the latest possible minute so that they don't get their kids in trouble at school, so that they're not late for that meeting, so that their boss isn't yelling at them, so that. That they make that first dial. Everybody starts their day at the last possible minute. And the moment you hit snooze, you are willingly repeating the worst part of the day over and over and over again. And so you've got to start your day on your terms. Not on your boss's terms, not on your wife's terms, not on your husband's terms, not on your kids terms, on your terms. And so what that includes is, number one, when you wake up, wake up with some Runway. I like to have at least, at least two to two and a half hours of Runway before my day starts. You wake up on the first news. You get up, you're groggy, it's okay.

You.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, lift. Off you go. Wash your face first. Thing I do is I wash my face, freshen up, and I pour my pre workout. I'm getting ready for my morning workout. Then I, I make my bed. I get that first win of the day. I'm going to get a very small first win of the day. I'm going to sit on the bed, not in the bed, read for 15 minutes. Something that's owning my professional development and just gets me in a good head space. And then after that, I'm going to work out every single morning. I rarely, rarely, rarely miss a morning workout. And I get it. Everybody's got a situation in their lives. It's if the president of the United States, not trump Obama, can find a way to work out, you can find a way to work out. All right, that's your morning routine. What did I miss, Nick?

Well, the idea is you've got to flip your normal morning routine on its head. Most people, and I've been guilty of this before, they wake up and the first thing that they do before they even get out of the bed is they look at their cell phone and you check your text messages and you check your emails. And the problem with that is those things are dictating an agenda on you, and so you're instantly starting your day off on a reactive note. Instead of being proactive, I kind of take a different approach. Armand. I like to work out right in the middle of the day during my lunch break. But I have a similar philosophy where you want to start the day with a win. I immediately get out of bed and I don't look at the phone at all. You can wait 15, 20, 30 minutes before you look at the phone and I actually start. I don't make my bed, but I do empty the dishwasher. That's like how I start my day. I literally straighten up the apartment for 25, 30 minutes while I have some coffee and the act of moving around starts to get some blood flowing and, and the fact that I'm like, cleaning up, it starts the day on a win. So avoid the phone. Do something that moves your life forward and doesn't start with someone else's agenda to hit your day off. Right?

But Nick, what if I know there's a prospect in my inbox and he wants me to send him a contract? What do I do then?

I think you got to have some respect for yourself, man. Like, you work a lot as salespeople. We work a lot. And you've got to be able to have clear lines of when your workday starts and when your workday ends. The fact is, if you're working in the B2B space, there's typically defined working hours. And that's not to say sometimes you won't go outside of those hours. But have some respect for yourself, man. Treat yourself like a professional. The customer's not going to say, oh, I'm not signing the deal because you didn't send me the contract at 6:30am get it to them at 8 when you open up your inbox. And hold some respect for yourself. You and the prospect are on a peer level. If you're the subservient, like, oh, yes, Armand, of course we'll get you the contract at 5am like, you've already gotten off on the wrong foot. So respect yourself, respect your time, and use that time to move yourself forward.

All right, Nick, so we beat the morning routine to death. Let's go into section number two. It's all about planning your attack. Before you attack your plan, you got to sharpen the ax before you chop down the tree. Let's talk about how you plan your day. 8am to 3pm for 80% of sales teams is going to be your golden hours. And what that means is all you are doing is you are in front of customers or you are working to get in front of customers, meaning live dials. Objection. Handling. Picking up the phone when somebody sends you an email or an objection, whatever that might be. Those are your golden hours. We'll go through that in a second. 3 to 6pm Sorry, I broke the 9 to 5 schedule. Those are your admin hours. You're going to send your recap emails, your contracts, confirmations then. And then afterwards, you're going to. You're going to find accounts, you're going to research accounts, you're going to find the contacts, you're going to find the phone numbers, you're going to do all that stuff afterwards. Right, let's. Before we go right in there, Nick, you have some tips around how you block your calendar. Could you go through some of those things quick?

Yeah. So I think the idea is you want to. There's a philosophy we call eat the frog. Which is. The idea is if you had something on your to do list, which was you have to eat a live frog, which is disgusting. I know if you put that thing off to later and later in the day, it only creates more dread and anxiety and concern. And you're sitting there, like, looking at this frog and it's becoming slimier and grosser and cold. Calling and getting in front of customers is kind of Similar. It can be really difficult as a salesperson to start the day with your hard thing, but what you've got to do is front load the day with your toughest tasks so that by the end of the day. I don't know about you, Armand, but account research is a really low energy thing. I can put on some music and just do it almost with 2/3 of my brain instead of my full focus. So what you want to do is stack your day in a way that matches your energy level, put your toughest stuff up front, and then the easier things you want to stack your day on. So what I do to start every single day when I get into the office is I look at what do I have to get done that day on my to do list, and then I look at the white space on my calendar because I usually have a bunch of different meetings and calls peppered in. And what I actually do is I create calendar blocks on my calendar to fill in those to do items I'm not thinking about. Oh, what do I have to do next? It's 2:30. My meeting just got out early. What am I going to do? I know exactly what I'm doing next. What else are you doing with your calendar?

All righty. So 8 to 3pm Again, your golden hours. I'm blocking out at least two hours to dial, depending on if you're an AE or or an SDR. The moment I see a day that starts getting heavy and it starts getting crowded, I'm going to block those dial blitzes on my calendar. Okay. It's very unrealistic to have the same dial blitz time every single day because you don't know when a customer is going to want to meet with you. But if you have the eight to three golden hours and you see it getting crowded, then you can start blocking out those times.

Let me give you something about the busy calendar too, because this is a philosophy I think you and I have. You've got to eliminate things from your calendar that don't serve you. Cut the fluff. If there's a random sales ops meeting or a marketing webinar that you want to join, ask to have those things recorded. Your job as a salesperson is to make an impact and bring in revenue for the organization. And it doesn't involve sitting on random trainings or brainstorm sessions with other SDRs. Don't get me wrong, those things can be important. But if you feel like you have meetings that are internal getting in the way of you talking with customers, you. You need to find a Way to restructure your day.

There we go. And so you guys got the golden hours down. There are going to be some hot takes here in the admin hours. Okay, you think you got to send out that recap email right away after that meeting. If you got two or three meetings during the day and you have to spend 30 minutes or 15 minutes writing that recap email every single time after one of those meetings, congratulations. The lag in the attention switching is now going to burn at least another one to two hours in your day. And then you're going to be one of those whiny reps who is still a middle performer. And you're saying you have so many deals and you don't have the time to prospect. So here's what you do. At the end of the day, you think prospects are thinking about you. The moment after they met you, they're back into their next meeting. They've got back to backs like you. And so from 3 to 4pm you're sending out those recap emails, you're sending out the proposals, you're sending out the next steps, and you let them know up front that you're going to do that in the meeting. And it'll be at top of the inbox once they decide to clear their calendar at the end of the day or clear their inbox at the end of the day.

Armand, what you're talking about here is a philosophy called batching, where you stack similar tasks to each other. And this applies to everything that you do from a productivity perspective. We're talking about recap emails, we're talking about internal meetings, we're talking about cold calls. Can you imagine a day, let's say you've got to make 50 cold calls in a day where you make 5 cold calls at 8am, 5 cold calls at 9am, 5 cold calls At 10am It's a complete distraction and you're jumping from thing to thing to thing. Most people don't do it that extreme. But what you have to do is pick your task and block your time around that. Do all three recap emails back to back to back because you're in that headspace. Don't do them one off peppered throughout the day.

Exactly. And when you choose to take these one hour sprints throughout your day, you can get 10 times more done because you get momentum. Your first five dials are always your worst five dials. Okay, not to humble brag here, but Nick and I were both the number one reps at our companies carrying more meetings a day than any other reps on the sales floor. And we were still able to never drop 200 dials a week. With a full book of business. You guys can totally do it. Don't make the excuses, make it happen.

Did you do anything special armon to help yourself hit that number? Other than the time blocking? No.

I'm. I'm really not that intelligent of a person, frankly. I made sure that I closed my slack, I closed my email. All I did. And this will go into attacking your plan. All I did is I made sure I had the time planned and then I attacked the heck out of my plan and I eliminated every distraction possible. People would be doing floor chatter and I'd be like, dude, get out of here. I gotta hit my number here.

So I did one thing that was kind of interesting and I call it setting the board or putting artificial constraints around things that you have to do in order to force yourself to take action. This goes in line with the eat the frog philosophy. I would get into the office and most people would take 30, 40 an hour to get like into making their dials to start the day. Everybody had excuses for, oh, I want to check my email first, or you know, let me, let me go redo some account research to start the day and get my head warmed up. And I recognize that I just wanted to get my dials out of the way. I wanted to hit it really, really hard. When I would get into the office at 8 o', clock, I would not let myself go to the bathroom until I had made 10 cold calls. And so I'd be there at my desk, like, phone in hand, headset on. I'd be like, man, I have to go to the bathroom. But I wouldn't let myself do it until I dialed 10 people. And that forced me to create an artificial constraint around that task and get it done quicker.

All righty, everybody hold your breath, hold your pee. Now we're going to go through the second piece of planning your attack. And that is standardizing steps for everything you do. Nick and I are not very intelligent people. So what you need to do for yourself, because you're a lot smarter than us, is not rely on your brain, is know the path for everything that you do. And so for example, if I know I need to work 50 accounts, I can break that in the chronological steps. And so that might be, I need to find 50 accounts. I need to research 50 accounts along the way, I need to find the contacts on those accounts, and then I need to tailor the emails on those accounts and what People will do is they'll find one account, they'll find the contacts on the account which is on Zoom Info, but the accounts were in Salesforce or in Crunchbase or Pitchbook. And then they'll go into outreach and they'll try to go into an email and try to tailor that thing and they're going to context switch four times to work one account and by the end of two hours, they've worked five accounts. So another hot take for you. When I was prospecting, first thing you would do is you'd pull a report. I'm going to find 50 accounts in a row, or depending on your sales cycle, that might be 25. If they're bigger accounts, I'm going to find those accounts in a row. I'm not going to do any email writing, I'm not going to find the contacts on those accounts, I'm going to write what I see. Then on the next day, I've got those 25 accounts in my name. Now I'm going to find the contacts and all I'm doing is I got two tabs, I got Salesforce and I got my Zoom info open and I and I'm going to go bam, bam, bam, bam. And I'm going to hit every single one of those. And then on Wednesday I'm going to pull up that same research that I got on Monday. And now I'm going to tailor the emails and I already have the research done and I'm going to get in momentum of tailoring the emails and that's.

How you get 50 accounts a week. This actually really hurt me when I was in SDR doing the opposite of this, because I would go into this rabbit hole of research and learning about an account that I found. So you're talking about focused in on just getting 50 accounts. What I used to do is I'd find an account and then I'd be looking up the CFO of that account and I'd say, oh, they went to USC or oh, wow, this is actually a really interesting startup. And I'd go down this rabbit hole of learning about a random account for an hour and then you finish an hour and all you have to show for it is that you know a lot about Carta and its backstory. Well, that doesn't really do you any good.

Exactly. And so let's talk about drawing 8020 lines. So I've mapped out the steps and the idea is, similar to Ryan Reissert's episode on Buckets, is I'm going to DQ as much as possible upfront. And so I'm going to stack my clicks in order of what's going to help me call the most accounts up front. And so if you're researching accounts, the first thing you might need to find is are they in the US or are they international? And you might know that that's going to be on their LinkedIn. And you might also need to know their employee count. And so the first thing I'm going to do is for every account that I open, I'm going to click on LinkedIn before I start researching it or anything like that. I'm going to look at the location and then I'm going to look at the employee count and I'm going to do 75% of my disqualification upfront. And so stack rank your disqualifiers first and then stack rank your research points. So get your top two or three or four buying triggers and know exactly where you're going to need to look for them. And then optimize your click path so you're switching tabs as few times as possible. And then once you find two or three research points, stop. Draw 80, 20 lines everywhere you go.

If it's taking you more than your normal amount of time to find any of this information, like you're having to research and research and research and research and research to find these three points. Or you, you know, you're supposed to call the cfo, but you can't find the CFO and you're looking and you've looked at four or different data sources, just give up on that account and move on. And that is in direct opposition to some of our work culture today, where it's like you got to do the thing to completion, you got to work really hard. Look 80, 20. If you can't find it, use that time to research for other accounts. Don't spend an hour and a half trying to find the CFO of a random manufacturing company in Nebraska. Move on to a different account. You got to draw some lines there. Now, one of the other things we talked about, again that goes in line with the 8020 is when you're researching the contacts at these accounts, is 8020 this too. You might have five different buying Personas, but if 90% of your business comes from just the CIO, you should just be looking for CIOs and only going after those people. Yes, you're going to miss out on some deals by not calling the CFO and the VP of Sales at these random accounts. But, but for each CFO that you don't call. That's another CIO that you could call. And you recognize there's a better return on those people.

So we've planned our attack. You've drawn your 80, 20 lines. You know, step by step. What you need to do now, you have rules for everything. You have 80, 20 lines everywhere, and you need to execute it.

Okay?

The first step of this is crank the wheel. So we talked about time blocking your admin earlier. We talked about your golden hours time block your inbox. And when your inbox or your slack isn't open, close it. The second thing is do one thing at a time. Do one thing at a time, okay? Find the 10 accounts, find the 30 contacts, whatever it might be.

So I shut off all notifications on my phone. My phone does not beep. It does not buzz. It does not notify me of anything unless it's a phone call. That means, Armand, when you text me at 2 o' clock in the afternoon and say, hey, man, you want to go get a cheeseburger later, I don't see that message until I choose to look at my phone. I also, and this is a controversial one for you salespeople out there, I don't answer my phone if I don't recognize the number. If I get a random call from marketing or sales ops or a number that I don't know, I let it go to voicemail. And then I immediately listen to that voicemail after receiving it and I figure out, is this something I need to respond to right now or we're acting like trained monkeys too much? Where we respond to every ding and text and LinkedIn message we get. Batch those things, hammer them all out at once. Don't let distraction get in the way of you cranking the wheel.

Other quick tips right here is you're going to come across things that are going to try to pull away your distractions or they're going to be things you need to dig into more. Here's a rule of thumb for you. I've actually learned this one from Nick. If it takes less than two minutes, knock it out right there. If it doesn't, put it on a post it note or make a task for it. Live your life out of tasks and events. If an email is going to be taken longer than 10 minutes to send or you got a tough objection, pick up the freaking phone or send them a video, okay?

If you need something done internally, stop sending these emails, pick up the phone and call people. You get things done faster. You're showing you actually respect their time by not sending them a Moby Dick email novel. And you're seen as somebody who gets things done because guess what? You are. Use the phone for everything. It's the fastest way to be effective.

And then the last piece of attacking your plan is eliminate decision fatigue. And the way you do this in sales is you must, you must live your life out of tasks and events. I have two places as a rep that I look. I look at my outreach tasks or your sales loft tasks, or your salesforce tasks, whatever you need. And then I have a separate sticky note that I use or a reminders list that I use for, for anything that doesn't fit inside of outreach. Okay? And so here are a couple examples. If you handled an objection that you want to follow up with next week, make sure you have a follow up sequence or you make a follow up task. If you sent out a proposal and you know in three days, you're going to need to follow up with it, don't force yourself to remember that. Make a task for three days later to follow up. And then the last piece is you're going to have all these tasks together. And again, the beauty of this is you can time block it, task blast for two times a day, 30 minutes a day, and you can knock all these little things out at once and you never have to force yourself to remember anything again.

Your brain is really good at strategic thinking. Your brain is not designed to hold a to do list in it.

Alrighty. Breathe, section number four. We gotta breathe. You gotta relax, guys. Sometimes we get a little bit too hyphy over here and we gotta have a little bit of broccoli to calm ourselves down. Nick, can you talk about. You're the master of this, man. What do you do to cut the noise out of your life?

You can't be on unless you've spent some time off. And there's a lot of different things you need to do to take care of yourself, both from a physical and mental perspective. So one of the big ones, Armand, it starts with the way that your brain processes your life and its perspective on your life. And they've done some research that the beginning of your day and the end of your day are more impactful in your brain than any other times of your day. And so if you start your day looking at email, you're going to live in this world of like, work consumes your life. And if you end your day, most people before they go to bed, decide to look at their email one last time. And I don't care if it's an angry email from your boss, a message from a customer saying, yeah, we're looking for this. Can we set a meeting tomorrow? Or customer signing a contract, those things usually require you to take action. And if you're not going to answer emails and respond to things at 11 at night, why are you even looking? A rule that I have for myself is if I'm not in a work block, I'm not looking at email.

I don't have email or Slack on my phone because I am working from home and my office has become my home. And so you have to put those boundaries up.

There's this philosophy called the any benefit fallacy, which is the idea is if you do something and there's any benefit to it whatsoever, your brain perceives as something that's good and something, you should spend more time on it. And the best example of this, I think, is Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and whatever the kids are using on social media nowadays. I went on an unfollow spree on Facebook and a mute spree on Instagram and I know some of my friends are going to hate me for this, but when I open up Facebook, there's literally nothing in my newsfeed. I have muted every single person that I'm connected with. That doesn't mean I can't send them a message or go to their page or like look at them and see their life events. But the idea here is I'm switching social media from a push thing where I go on it and it's pushing content at me to a pull thing. So now when I go on Facebook, I'm seeing things that I want to see because I'm going out and searching for what's new in Armand's life instead of being pushed an angry Facebook rant that someone from my high school that I haven't Talked to in 12 years is on. So the next thing, Armand, is being able to work at a really sustainable level. This is something you taught me. It's not about being able to put in an 18 hour day on Monday and then being completely drunk dragged the rest of the week. You've got to work at the highest sustainable output for your life. And so you have some strategies around that that I think are helpful.

Yeah, there are way too many hustle warriors around here where they're like, I got three hours of sleep and I'm hustling and I'm grinding. I'm selling stuff on ebay. Guys, Nick and I work extremely hard. We have full time jobs we have to carry a number. We need to blow that number out of the park, do the podcast, invest in real estate, all these other things. Both of us probably sleep at like 9:30pm every day and that helps you get in the morning routine. And we also both probably shut off at 7pm mandatory every single day. And then lastly, you gotta look back at it all. You ever have a day where you finish up the day and you feel like you've been put through a whirlwind and your house has been put in a tornado and you don't know where your toilet paper is? You and you look back on the day and you have nothing to show for it. You know it was a tough day. You know it was an exhausting day, but you have no idea what you actually did. So when you have that sticky note task list, when you have all of those tasks, you can look at the tasks that you've done for that day and drag them down and just say, hey, if I look back, here's what I actually got done today. And that'll give you a sense of where your values are at. If you ended up spending most of your day putting out fires or in an unnecessary sales ops meeting, then you need to reassess your values. Nick, what else should we be doing at the end of the day?

So you've got to celebrate your accomplishments and recognize the work that you've put in, that you've been in a position of adversity before and that you've worked through it, and that helps propel you to the next thing. There's something. I'm a big yoga guy. And when you're in a really tough pose, one of the things the instructor says is, hey, you've been here before. You've been in a tough situation before. You can make it through this.

Guys, let's run through a wall and a recap email. And so we talked about four things. First, we talked about the morning routine. Wake up on the first news, read for a bit, do some exercise, make your bed, clean some dishes, do what you got to do. Start the day on your terms. Number one, rule number two, plan your attack. Plan your sales week, your eight to three golden hours, your three to six admin hours. Make sure that you have a step by step breakdown and 80, 20 lines and predefined that decision criteria before you even research one account. Then number three, we talked about attacking your plan. Crank the wheel, close your email, close your slack. You got to make sure that you eliminate decision fatigue. Live your life out of tasks and events. Everything you do, make sure you have a task for it. Never remember anything. And then, number four, you got to cut the noise out of your life. You got to breathe. You got to unsubscribe from all the unnecessary mailing lists and the Facebooks and the Instagram. And you got to delete email and slack off your phone. You got to shut off at some point, and you got to work at the highest sustainable output. Nick, how can people help us out?

I don't want anything this week. Close your slack, shut off the text messages, put the blinders on and crank the wheel. We'll see you guys next week on 30 minutes of President's Club.