Be Different To Be Memorable with Mandi Graziano

Foreign. Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head over to patreon.com inside sales excellence. Now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're going to talk about differentiation. We're going to talk about how to stand out, how to be different. Because so often in life, sometimes doing the opposite of what everyone is telling you to do is actually the key to success. When they zig, you zag. If they're the yin, you become the yang. Because if everyone's doing it and it's still not working, you really have to question why everyone is doing it. And so that is why I'm so excited to have Mandy Graziano on the show today with me. She is an industry vet. She has built teams, led teams, been a rep herself, also a best selling author of a great looking book. I'm excited to pick it up on Sales Tales. Actually did a post a while, number one. So Mandy, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, kd. This is going to be fun. I might steal your idea. Do I have to pay you royalties if my next book is Sales Fails?

You know, no, probably not. People already take enough of my stuff at this point. It's like, whatever, who cares? But we also have enough sales sales to write our own books. That's what's always so fun. So actually, let's just start right there. When you think about your career, what is one of your biggest sales fails? Like one of your biggest, like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that or that happened.

When you say that, something instantly just comes to mind. It makes me sweat a little bit. And it was years ago, I would say almost 20 years ago. And it was right after September 11th and I was a salesperson at a hotel. I probably should have been fired because they laid off everyone else and I was the lowest person on the totem pole. So there was only a couple salespeople left and it was gosh the first or second quarter of 2002. And I had somehow kept my job by working with government groups and working with the military, because those are the only people that were actually using hotels and traveling at that time. No one else was allowed to travel, or they were, but they were on all the different terror alerts. And I aligned with the people that were coming home from deployment. I got wind that there was an aircraft carrier that was coming back into town. And I was like, well, our hotel needs to be a part of that. We need to be visible. We need to show we support the community. So I started attending all these meetings with all these military spouses for the homecoming day. And I was an a hole. Like, all of these people, their whole worlds, right? Like, they've gained weight, they've lost weight, they've fallen out of love with their partner. Some of them had kids while their partners were gone. The world had changed. Our country was at war, and these people were coming back. And there I was, like, here, let me tell you about my hotel. And they looked at me like I was crazy. I was obsessed with the placement of the table, obsessed with where the signage would be, all that stupid stuff. And then I couldn't figure out why they thought I was crazy until the day of. And I arrived at that dock with my perfectly placed table and my casual corner suit. I think it was like a lavender casual corner suit, my super cheap pumps. And I had my, you know, I was ready to go with my little pastries, my business cards. And I just looked around and people were having a moment. And that moment wasn't about my hotel. And so, you know, the ship pulled in, and it was a thousand or so service people saluting, and they were staring in the distance. And It's a Beautiful Day by U2 was playing. So as the ship got closer and closer, I felt that energy of like, okay, Mandy, you were a jerk, and this isn't about you, and you technically don't belong there. So you're just going to hand out some pastries. And people might think that you work for the bake shop on the.

On the.

On the Navy base. And that's fine. You know, they ask for a business card, give you one. But that was like, what? I realized the value of a good business bedside manner. And I didn't have one in that moment. And I think ever since then, and this was almost 20 years ago, but ever since then, I feel like I'm catching up and trying to repair that and trying to never do that again. I would say that was. And I still regret that. Like, I still regret how I made those people feel. Feel in that moment, because I just had blind ambition. And we've all done that before. But I would think that's probably one of my bigger fails that I keep trying to gain my. Regain my footing on, for sure.

And what I love at the end of that, right? Because what do they say, like, technically, it's not a failure as long as you've learned something, right? And it sounds like you've learned from it, right? Which is the key to growth and the key to really improvement in life in general, which is what I think is fun to dive into. The topic today is around, like, being different, right? Of, like. And how to be different. How to stand out in a good way, right? Not just the lavender suit at, you know, like, a coming home party, but, like, how to stand out in a good way. Because we know in sales, attention is everything, and it's getting harder and harder to get people's attention. They're getting bombarded through everything. So when I pinged you and said, what topic? And you mentioned differentiation, why, like, why was that, like, ooh, this is what I want to talk about today.

You know, a couple things. So, one, I have a lifetime of selling, so after a while, you get bored and you just want to try something different. And I want to hear what other people are doing. But on the other side, I'm a buyer now, and I've been in the buying role for about 12 years. And so I interact with a ton of salespeople who are just. They're doing the same thing over and over. They're regurgitating the same questions over and over and over again. And I think the salespeople that try something different, they go out on a limb, they get clever. They're just a little more interesting. I remember those people, and I think being memorable is way more important right now. Because, you know, as, you know, you may work with a person at that company, but they may leave and go to another company. And a lot of times that relationship travels with the person. It doesn't travel with the company. So you want to be a memorable business person no matter what you do. You know, I mean, I think about during COVID I put, how are you? Away. I threw that question in the drawer, and I replaced it. I swapped it out with what made you laugh this week. Because we all know how we were back then, right? We were tired, fearful, confused, all these things. So let's put the boring stuff away and replace it. So I really want to challenge people to think about what are you currently doing and what can you swap it out with something more clever and more memorable?

And I love that I wrote this down as you were talking. I was like, if before every or at this point, for every salesperson afterwards, if you ask the question, why was I memorable? It might change your entire demo. Because I bet by the end of it, if you asked, why am I memorable? And you go, oh, geez. Because I showed the deck, right? Like, there's nothing there. And so I love this as a premise of, like, you know, being memorable. So let's go a layer deeper here, right? Because, like, the real juice of this show and I think why people tune in is because we get into the how of things, right? Of, like, so how. How do you become memorable? And this is almost like a split question, right? How? But also, how do you do it the right way? Because there's a lot of ways to be memorable that maybe aren't the right ways to be memorable.

So talk about, like, I was memorable at the shift docks that day.

Someone probably still remembers that to this day. Like, yo, you remember that girl in the lavender power suit? You remember her? Yeah, Right? So someone still remembers. But, like, how do we. Like, let's get into this a little bit. How do we become memorable? But how do we do it the right way?

I'll give you an example. So a client ghosts you. And what do most salespeople do? They just keep sending emails, they keep placing calls, they keep bumping people on LinkedIn or over social media channels, right? But why not create a choose your own adventure email and send that email to the customer and say, and you have to know a little bit about the customer, right? You have to know maybe where they went to college or if they have any kids or what professional stalking. Just a little bit and ask them. You know, here. I haven't spoken with you a while. I assume you're on an adventure. Were you attending the UNC alumni barbecue? Were you on vacation with your kids? Or have you been thinking and it's A, B or C, multiple choice or C, you've been thinking about my proposal. I'm on the back burner for now, but you'll get to me as soon as you come up for air. Whichever the option, let me know and I'm here for you when you need me. That return ratio on that is so awesome. I would say 85% of the people that you haven't hurt from choose your own adventure. Email is a great memorable way to Get a customer to call you back or email you back. And the thing is, they may email you back saying, who are you? And I don't want to work with you. But then that's an opportunity for a no and an opportunity to ask why or how you can improve or who they're working with. So I think if somebody ghosts you, send a choose your own adventure email. I think video. I know, I think Vidyard is a sponsor or whatever, but any video powerful. I know. When I was interviewing publishers for the book, I talked to all these different people and one publisher, after we hung up, sent me a video on Loom after. And I hadn't used Loom yet. And I thought, well, that's kind of cool. Like it was a hey, Mandy, great to talk to you. Here are two or three things I picked up from our conversation. Have a great day. A follow up video is awesome. And then take that a step further. For holidays this past year, Omicron had kind of hit us, right. I didn't want to send my customers a whole bunch of stuff because none of them were at their offices anymore. And so I wrote a holiday haiku. And a haiku is so easy. It's a 5, 7, 5 rhyme scheme and it related to their industry. And I put a Santa hat on with a super fun zoom background and I recorded myself and I blasted it out to my customers and I blasted it out to people that don't work with me because they were all going through that. So, you know, write a haiku, choose your own adventure email. Use video. There's so many ways you can be different. And people now I really believe this and this, this may sound crazy, but I think now people are more open to creativity and clever antics than they ever have before because they can't remember how it used to be done, right? So a lot of people would say, well, that's just not how we do it. It's like, cool story, bro. But we're in a situation where we're all doing things differently. So like, use this window, capitalize on this window now to be creative.

And I think that's such a great call out because it is like anytime I feel like anytime someone has actually shown some like an ounce of creativity in reaching out, they've gotten a response. Yeah, you need to, you know, like. And it's not that hard to do. It's just taking the time and effort to do it. And what I liked about what you mentioned with the choose your own adventure because like in tech and like SaaS, this idea of a breakup email has been around for a minute, and now people, like, breakup emails don't work. They're the worst. Stop sending them. What I love about yours is that it's a personalized, right? It's to them, their world, things that they would resonate with. And I think that's a much stronger way to go about it. So. But, like, where I. Where does this confidence come from to be different, right? Because I'm sure there's some people where it's, like, funny enough, right? They're like, well, but I couldn't do that. I. That's not me. I couldn't stand out. So, like, have you always, like, kind of been, like, willing to go, like, that extra mile? Or, like, is this something you developed over time?

I've always been a bit of a weirdo, Katie. I mean, I really have. I grew up in a big family in Cleveland, Ohio, and we, you know, we wrote songs, we rhymed rhymes. We just did fun things growing up. But. So I think that piece is in me, right? I think that's just. I'm wired that way. But I will say this. When I was younger in sales, I was afraid to bring that piece out. And I think a little regret I have is that I didn't bring the creative, clever piece out sooner. So if you're sitting there in your office right now and you're thinking, well, that's not me. You know, I'm very vanilla. I'm very vanilla, Vince. Like, that's just not me. Just think about doing one thing a little bit different, and it doesn't have to be. You don't have to write a haiku. But just think about doing one thing different. Because that is probably one of my big sales regrets is that I didn't hone in on the creativity sooner. I mean, I always sent creative proposals, but they weren't always in my own voice. And it took me a really long time to develop my own voice and regroup with my roots and say, hey, we're kind of a wacky bunch of people. Let's just be that person in a professional way and see how it serves us and most importantly, serve my customers. And it did. So I think when people say, oh, I'm not creative, I think people are more creative than they realize. It just takes, like, one little smidgen of an effort to do. And the results are amazing because it is.

And it's back to memorable. It's back to, like, people remember that. This is why I'm such a fan of video, such A fan of direct mail. Like, it just seems like it's memorable, right? Like, you're like, oh, that's different. And that's something I got stress to a lot of the teams I lead and the companies I'm consulting with is, like, if you're doing the same thing as everybody else, why would they pick you? Why? Like, if you're sending the same type of email, the same types of call, like, why would they ever respond back to you? It's all the same. And so I actually wanted to go super different route here super fast, just because it's popped in my head through it. Like, you're in hospitality, right? Like, in, like, hotels and things of that nature. How did you persevere? Through Covid. Because, like, I can speak to this person. My brother was the director of events at the Grand Yla in Maui. Right. Hospitality got crushed.

Yeah, right, Crushed. I feel like we'll have to talk after. I feel like I might know your brother.

Okay. All right. We might have. We'll have to talk about this. Right. So he was the director of events there. Right. And so this came to my head, like, how did you persevere? Like, how did you get through that? How did you adapt when the market completely changed and shifted?

Yeah, it was hard. And I will never forget, it was the first Sunday in March. I posted up at a bar. I was by myself. I was having lunch. And I will never forget looking at my phone within an hour, the cdc. I just kept refreshing. The CDC changed its guidelines five times in one hour. It changed its guidelines. And conferences and gathering people are reliant upon gathering guidelines. So I think at first it was just a mad scramble. I had over 200 contracts. So your brothers and events. I personally had over 200 conferences and events that I had to lift and shift and cancel and move. That were for 2020. 2021. Right. So I was busy. And then at some point, I decided, you know what? I'm just going to be a student of the crisis. I'm going to learn everything there is to know about virtual meetings. I'm going to learn everything there is to know about how to do a safe meeting in the bubble. And then I'm going to learn everything there is to know about city, state, county, federal guidelines of gatherings. And then when we come out of this, my clients are then going to look at me as a trusted advisor, and they're going to come to me and say, hey, how do I do a meeting, Mandy? And, hey, how do I get people to come to this conference? Or how do I make it safe? And that's exactly what happened. So I was really overwhelmed at first. I had a long April of drinking a lot of gin and taking a lot of baths and being really frustrated. And then a switch just flipped in me where I'm like, you know what? This is an opportunity. And I did remember back to the 2008 auto crisis, and I remember what that felt like. And then I thought back to that casual corner suit, you know, right after September 11th. So it wasn't the first time we had been here in this business crisis. And there's. This is a time where, you know, the difference between the warriors and the wimps. Right. So I didn't want to be a wimp. I wanted to be a warrior. And I just hosted virtual online meetings every other month, some for my hotel partners. Right. That I'm a client of to find out, like, what's going on in your world? And then the opposite month than it was for clients and prospective clients just to say, hey, have you left the house and are you going back to the office? Have you been furloughed and sharing with them market conditions, what's going on in the world? So then when the tides turned, I was a trusted resource. So I really spent time being a student of the crisis after I spent my April drinking gin.

Yes. I mean, yeah, I got to know the bottom of the bottle quite well many a times during all that. And I love, love where you took that, because that is such unfortunate. I don't even know if this is a lost art or just not an art that many people embrace, but this art of, like, learning so you can become a trusted advisor. Like, I hate it when people talk about, like, oh, become a trusted advisor, but then they take no time to study their industry, no time to study the prospect, no time to figure out what to teach the prospect. Right. Like, this is where everyone got the Challenger sale wrong. And it really frustrates me because I wish the book should have been called the Teacher seller or the educator seller, but they called it the Challenger seller. And, like, everyone thinks to challenge means to challenge. If you've actually read the book, you understand that it's not to challenge, it's to educate what you could you teach them. So could you talk just a little bit more about that? Like how you kind of get in the mind of your prospect? How do you learn about an industry, things like that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's participating in webinars. It's, you know, and during COVID there was a Ton of webinars. But I normally don't have a whole bunch of time to go on webinars. But I was seeking them out, and I was seeking things out that I didn't know. So, for example, I love contracts, and I'm a person. I cringe when salespeople are like, they said, yes, the deal's done. It's like, oh, no, no, we gotta do the contract. The fund's just beginning. And that's phase two, right? And that's where a deeper level of sales happens. And I think that's what happened during COVID People realized the value of those terms of a contract. And so I hopped on any webinar I could with any lawyer that was on the horn talking about contract terms. And what does this mean from the hotel perspective? And what does this mean from the client perspective? And then I was having conversations with my client's general counsel about, like, hey, this is how you interpret this, but this is how the hotel interpret it. So that took me to a deeper, meaningful relationship, not just with my client, but with other leaders within their companies. And that's just one little example of a webinar, right? So you hop on webinars. And I also think, like, during a crisis, like, this is find out what you're not doing. Right? I think at that point, the end of 2019 was so busy, and 2020 was going to be the best year ever. And so I will say, at the end of 19, I don't think I was as an effective of a client manager as I am now. And I think 2020, I learned that I was watching what a lot of other people were doing to be good, you know, stewards of that relationship. And I started doing some of that stuff and then making some of my own stuff up, too.

Nice. And that sounds like kind of a theme of your. Your being a little bit is like recognizing the patterns and then making it your own, recognizing the pattern, making it your own. So, like, how. Because this is something that, again, all the fluff advice that gets given in sales, I was like, this, make it your own. Whenever it talks about how to make it your own, it's like, what does that even mean? Like, how do I make this my own? So how do you do that? Right? So, like, you see something like, ah, that's interesting. I like that. How do you then craft it? How do you make it your own so you feel good, you feel comfortable delivering it?

I think I have a good example of this. So when the publisher, the illustrator for the publishing company that did my book. They kept sending me cover art for the book, and in everything they had done up to this point was awesome, but I hated the COVID they were sending me. It just. It felt very swarmy to. It felt like what everybody says sales is, and my book is not. Whatever. I didn't.

Was there a handshake? Was there a handshake? Was there smiling faces, Handshake?

There was an arrow, There was a graph. Everything, There's a dotted line. Everything you could think of was there. And I was like, this isn't me. I think you had somebody on a podcast recently, and they said the sales industry was stale, pale, and male or something like that. Yeah, all those things. And that's just not who I am. Well, obviously, that's not who I am. And so my publisher said, mandy, close your eyes, take a deep breath. And when you think of sales, what do you think of? Like, when you. For yourself. For you. And I said, I feel like I'm just running all the time. I am hustling, I'm moving, and just everything's a blur. And then within 20 minutes, the COVID came out of my book where it's this girl running. And the crazy thing is she's wearing red shoes, which I always wear red shoes, tennis shoes with my business suits. But they didn't know that, so that was serendipitous. And so I think I encourage people. How do you make it your own? When you see something you like, and I steal stuff from people all the time, right? You see something you like, close your eyes, take a deep breath. How does that feel rolling off your tongue? How does that email feel in your own voice? And then try it, you know, and keep trying. Iteration, I think, is one of the best ways to find your own voice. Just try a whole bunch of different ways. But I think closing your eyes, taking a deep breath, and making. Thinking about what it is that makes it your own is really important.

I love that. And also, too, like, the. The red. The red shoes, again, being memorable, right? If everyone is wearing the same outfit with the same vest, with the same hairdo, no one remembers that, right? Like, it just. No one cares. We used to. For a lot of my. My teams, we talk about in the training, right? The old movie, the Brad Pitt movie, Achilles, right? Where at one point he goes, this is why no one will remember your name. Like, we used to, like, joke about that. Of, like, no one's going to remember this. No one's going to remember you for this. Like, what would be memorable? But you did. You Mentioned something they're good, too, that I want to call it, like, iteration and testing, because salespeople love the number one, right? Where if it works once and early, they'll just do it forever. Even if it never works again, they still have that one example where it worked or the opposite. They try it once, it doesn't work right away, and they just give up on the idea completely. So talk to me a little bit about this idea of iteration, testing, evolving. Not just, oh, I tried. I listened to this podcast. I wore red shoes. I didn't book the deal. So therefore red shoes don't work. Let's talk about iteration and testing a little bit.

Yeah, you have to test. You have to be afraid. You can't be afraid to fail. You have to accept you're going to fail and you're going to learn massive lessons from it. I actually, in the book, I have an old prospecting email and I put it in there on purpose. It is awful. It's too long. There's too many words. It's awful. And then I put the iteration of it, like the six years later version of it that actually has a call to action and it has an attack. You know, it has the right things in it. So I think I would challenge everybody, go back to what you're. What you've done, right? And see if you can tweak it. Can you make it shorter? Can you make it poppier? Can you add something more relevant? The data is different now than it might have been five years ago. Can you make it different? So you have to keep trying things and you have to be open to failing because the magic is in the fail. It really, really is. So you have to try that. I would never send that prospecting email that's in my book today, ever. And if somebody. Well, people send me those types of things all the time, I cringe. But don't just throw it away. Go back to it. How can you cut it, slice it, and just make it a little bit more effective?

So let's keep going down this path, though, because I think there's an underlying theme with a lot of what you're talking about where there's almost like this innate, like, I don't want to say, like, no fear, but it's like not fear of failure, right? Like, I'm willing to be there, stand out. Like, how do you develop some of that resiliency, right? Because again, it's one of those things you could talk. People talk about, like, don't take it personal. Don't. Don't be afraid to fail. But how do you actually develop that muscle? Right? Like, how do you actually, you know, go. What. What was the quote? Right? Like, enthusiast or no success is going failure to failure with no drop in enthusiasm. It's something along those lines. I think Churchill said it, but it's like, shoot. But like, talk a little bit about, like, how to recover from failure.

I mean, I. I just think so. First of all, when people say, don't take it personally, I think say to salespeople, we're high beta, low beta. We take a lot of things personally, and that's okay because we're passionate and we care, and we'd be dead inside if we didn't, you know, And I. So I think that's all right. I think it's okay to take it personally, but don't let it hit you so hard that it keeps you down. You know, like, that's the thing. You can make a choice. Do you want to stay down there? Because if you stay down there, your competitors are coming behind you, and they're not pulling you up. They are trampling over you and running past you. So you have to think about, who do you want to be? You want to be the person that fails and stays down there, where people are trampling over you like a herd of buffalo? Or do you want to be the person that, you know, maybe you dropped the fly ball, right? And maybe you fell because you tripped over a base, and this literally happened to me when I was a kid. But you can stay down there, or you can bounce right back up and finish the play. And there's always an opportunity to finish the play. And I think you. You know, I don't know where that resiliency comes from, but I think we all have it in us. I don't think people are resilient or not resilient. I think resiliency is a repetitive action that you build by doing it over and over again.

Yeah. This is why I'm such a hound on practice, because that's where you hone your craft. That's where you get better at what you do. You know, like, you don't get better in the game. You get better outside the game than you get to show it off in the game. And a lot of salespeople don't practice their craft. And so back to the original theme here a little bit. So we've talked. We opened up with, like, differentiation, Right. Different ways to stand out. What else? Right. Like, kind of talked about being a little bit different when someone ghosts you. Like where else do you try to implement some of this be different mindset in the sales process?

I mean I think it depends on where. So for example, networking, right? I love sweat working. Like go and we. I've done some sweat working events with customers where it's like let's go to a seven, eight, we're at a trade show, let's go, let's go to a 6am sweat working spin class and let's do some juice after, right? Or let's have some coffee after. Then we go back every showers and you hit the trade show floor, you hit the conference. Not everybody wants to go to a happy hour and have a bunch of cocktails. You know, some people are not drinking anymore, some people have developed allergies. You don't know what everybody's situation is. But I think this was a while ago, like 2012 or 2013. I think Stanford did a study on walking and the power of walking and creativity and how you know when you walk and you pace and you're trying to get a thought out. There's the science behind that, that we are way more creative and clever and better with ideation overall when we're moving. So why not incorporate moving into networking, right? So I think like instead of networking try sweat working. And that's not for everybody but it's just an idea and an option. Instead of sweat working, you know, if you do start your own business book club, start it with prospects, start it with thought leaders, do it at 7am on a Friday and make sure it's no more than one hour. You know, like there's so many rules you can put into place that, that are your own and if you don't like something, I'll give you another example. You know, if you don't like a situation, start your own. Like so I copied off of a client of mine. She invited me to this group called Swirl at Smart Women I really Like. And it was created from the I am Remarkable movement that Google had created. And I thought, well, I kind of like that. I got a batch of girls I'm going to start this with. So I just had a swirl last night. Like we brought swirl juniors, everybody 25 and under and ask the question, what would, what would you advice would you give your younger self? So I think like building your network and building relationships is more than just sitting behind the screen or being on the phones physically. How are you getting out into the community and how are you building your network that's outside of what you already know. So I mean there's I could go on all day long, but there's, you know, networking, I think, building relationships. Just don't ask for the business on the first date. Like, you wouldn't propose on the first date. So just slow your roll and drop some crumbs. You know, the crumbs make the cookie eventually.

I mean, you would if you had a quota though, right? If you have a quota, you gotta ask on that first date. But that's a whole, Whole nother thing we can dive into. So. No, but that's why I was excited for this conversation is because also too, like, you have, you have experience testing different things and trying different things. And I really hope that people listening, like, can lean into that a little bit more. Like, just try it. Just test it, right? Like, create your own. As you were mentioning, just like, you like something, try it, you don't like it, then do the opposite. Like, my managers, they probably loved it and hated it often, but like, a lot of times, like, what if we did the complete opposite? Okay, this isn't working. What we're trying to do isn't working. We can't get people to make as many calls as they need to make. What if we did the complete opposite? What would it. What if we did zero calls? What would we do? How would you approach. If I said you couldn't pick up the phone, what would you do? And like, taking that opposite approach works well in so many places. So I got two questions left for you here before we wrap. Before we wrap up here. So the first is just. Let's go a little bit. You've hinted at it a little bit. I just want to know more about it. What's in the book? Right? So, like this, you know, sales tales, like, what's the. What's the premise? Like, what's the juice in there?

It's a collection of funny business stories from the last 20 plus years in sales. But it follows the standard sales cycle. So it goes in the order of prospecting, networking, building relationships, making presentations, closing business, and then disaster selling, which was a chapter that Covid gave me. Thank you, Covid. But it's a collection of funny stories from me as a salesperson, a sales leader, of observations I've made from people that I adore and admire in the industry or outside the industry, and then me as a sales coach. So there's hospitality stories, but there's also stories from manufacturing and beauty and technology, all sorts of industries. And then, you know, different stories and that are funny. They're funny. So my thing is, I love Love reading sales books, but I didn't want to write a boring sales book because I wanted people to laugh and I wanted people to have practical takeaway nuggets that they could immediately use. Like, you close the book, you don't even finish reading it. You just. You start taking action on it right away. So there's a ton of takeaways I think somebody quoted. It's a digestible sales snacks that are in there. So there's a lot of digestible sales snacks. And it's for all, you know, the all processes of the sales. And so that came out at the end of October, and then the audiobook just came out. It just got out of the studio, and that came out a couple weeks ago. And if sales tells muscle human lessons of the life and sales. So it's humorous, it's hustle, there's all sorts of fun stuff in it.

And I'm glad that it brings in the humor side, too, because, like, this can be fun, y'. All. Like, you can have fun, you can goof around, you can make the joke, you can make fun of yourself. Like, we need to be having more fun in sales. We just do. I feel like all the fun in sales that we preach is always, like, after you close the deal, then you get to have fun. Then you can go press club or this. Like, how about you have fun? And you might be shocked how many more deals you actually close throughout that process. And so, oh, man, I love it. And this might set up our last question here, which is, you know, the name of this podcast is Live better, Sell Better, because I have this weird idea. What if we took better care of ourselves? What if we had more energy, were happier, were more fulfilled, had more joy in life, whatever. Wow. What would happen to the sales? So what would your live, better advice be for people listening?

Well, set your day up in the morning. Start your day the way you want the rest of your day to be. So, and this is a practice. I practice, and it's a struggle, but it's a practice. Wake up. Do not look at your phone until you pee and meditate and drink a glass of water. And then even after that, like, how you start your day and how you immediately do that when it first thing, you're going to either be in a race or you're going to be in control of your day. And so I really believe you have to figure out. And it doesn't have to be an hour thing, it could be 15 minutes. But how you start your day and how you set your pace is meaningful because it really, it really sets the tone for the rest of the day. And then I think, you know, I have calendar appointments every 90 minutes to take a 10 minute break, whether that's to, you know, drink a glass of water, get up and walk around, but get off your phone, get out of your office, and just look around. Because I think salespeople in general, you know, high beta, low beta, we. We are anxious people, and it's not healthy to live the way we live sometimes. So I really believe in just using that calendar, putting your time into buckets on the calendar and scheduling breaks and setting the tone for your day in the right way.

I love that. Right? It's like how you start is how you finish. And if you start running, if you start hectic, and then you're gonna end hectic too, right? Like, I got my little. Every day, I've got my list of 10 things written out. I know exactly what I'm going for. I can keep a look at it and go through it. So, Mandy, this was phenomenal. Where can people get more of you? Where can they get the book? Where are you putting out more content? Where can people get more Mandy Graziano in their life?

All the places.