Melissa Gaglione, an account executive at LivePerson, explains how routines boost energy and sales performance. She draws parallels between classroom structure and sales discipline, and argues that morning and evening routines don't limit flexibility during the day, they enable it.
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Oftentimes, routines make people think of something boring or a habit or a checklist. But oftentimes we drastically overlook the power a positive morning and evening routine can have on far more than just our personal health.
Right?
If you do these things, you can have more energy, you can have more focus, which then carry over into our professional lives and ideally into our sales lives. Which is why I'm so pumped to have Melissa Gaglione on the call today. She's an AE at live person, former SDR, and you know how I feel about my former SDRs, but also a former teacher, first grade of all things. And she's here to talk to us about routine but how it makes her a better seller, better teacher, and going to guess, just a better overall person. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Hi Kevin, nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me today.
I am pumped. You came highly recommended and then when I pinged you for the topic, you nailed some things that I love to talk about. So we're going to dive in here. Now I'm Going to break my own rule. I told you this recording, like I don't really g bastard. I don't normally go backwards. I'm always about tactics. But I love the fact you were a former teacher. And so what I'm going to open with here, what are things that you think salespeople could learn from elementary school teachers?
Absolutely. Surprisingly a lot.
Oh, I know.
You can even ask a first grader and I'm sure that they will tell you to be positive, to smile and probably to have a routine. And that's because routines allow people to actually focus on what's important to them. And when you focus on what's important or if you just focus on something specific, that specific thing is going to grow. So whether that's a relationship or maybe it's your sales process or maybe it's, you know, maintaining a house or training your dog, whatever you put focus on is going to grow. So being a former teacher, everything was a routine, right? You wake up, you have you go to work and right away the kids come in. My kids used to come in at 7:15 screaming super loud. Kids. I had to take a power energy drink every morning just so I could be just as loud because I want them excited about the day. And from 7:15 to 2:30, you're on a strict routine. You need to make sure that you're teaching the right subjects at the right time, making sure that you're staying to schedule because if you're not, the kids are going to suffer. So having that responsibility so early on in a career influenced me to make sure that, hey, morning routines, even afternoon routines and even night routines are really important because it allows you to stay consistent but also achieve all the other things that you want to do. So for example, if I didn't have the morning routine that I had then or that I have then would I be able to randomly go meet one of my friends out for drinks after work or something like that. It just allows me to actually have more freedom rather than feel like I'm all over the place doing this and that and oh man, I forgot to change the laundry out or oh, I can't go meet up with my friend because I have X amount of things that I need to do. So having those routines literally allows you just to have more freedom. It's not to constrain you, is to allow you to have more fun and do more things and be around the people that you want to be around.
And that's something I think people miss all the time, is they hear structure and they think restricting when actually structure provides the flexibility to be free to have more free time because you're actually structured in it. And funny enough, and I've talked about this a lot, I think this is why a lot of people struggle when they first get into their work life because things have been so structured for so long. All through grade school, showed up at a certain time, class was taught at a certain time, you knew what you had to learn, you went and did it. You get to high school classes a certain time, you're told what to do, you do it college. And then all of a sudden you get into the real world and it's like, hey, so like show up and get your job done. And we're like, wait, but when and how? So like I love this idea of structure for students that how it plays over. So I guess how do you structure your day as well? Like as a salesperson, do you structure your day also?
It has, it has to be really fluid just because the days can often change. So you just, you have to be fluid with it. And a lot of these tactics, a lot of these things that I've learned is from my mentor, Brandon Fluharty. And these are a lot of the things that he preaches, practices. And really all that I did was just take his suggestions and tweak them for ways that they could help me. Because we're not the same, but we do similar things and we want to live a similar life. But at the end of the day, like, you know, I have different responsibilities so I need to make sure that those things get done. So you definitely want to be fluid throughout your days and adjust accordingly. But just under even just understanding that you can't control everything. And so there are certain times of the day where it's going to be structured, like my mornings and other times of the day where I have to be fluid and I have to, you know, sometimes take a meeting that just got thrown on my calendar or oh man, I just got assigned this new account and it's really exciting. So I do want to prioritize that one today or maybe, you know, prospect calls me back and you know, they want to move faster in the deal so I have to adjust. So it really does. You just have to be open minded. Right? You have to understand, look, I'm going to try my best to have structure during these times of the days. For me it's before work and after work because I can control those times. During work you can control the most that you can. But let's be real, like just as if I was teaching. If I needed to go to PE And I had a student who was having a mental breakdown and they were losing it, then I had to adjust. You have to make these quick moments of going, okay, this might not work today. Let me take a step back. Let me see what I need to do. Evaluate the situation, prioritize the situation, and then execute. And that's really what I learned a lot when I was teaching was, you don't have time to say, wait, this isn't according to plan. I have to adjust. And so understanding that you're going to have to adjust during the day is also important. And it's not a failure either if it doesn't go according to plan.
