Scott Ingram on finding your circle of high performers or building one yourself. He covers plugging revenue leaks, forcing action through short bursts and cold plunges, and becoming the connector who hosts dinners and brings ambitious people together.
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Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet beat or miss on revenue? 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 on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. How do you do despite right. How do you do despite feeling low energy or despite, you know, not getting the results right? You wake up that day or you just got a deal, you knew I was going to close and it doesn't and then you got to still do again. Do you have any tips on like how to do when you don't feel like doing?
Yeah, yeah. So I think it really comes down to action drives the mindset, right? So a lot of times again we get in our head and it's another blocker to the doing, right? We're all in our head, we're thinking about or we're not in the mood or whatever it is and we'll wait till tomorrow because tomorrow or next week or the start of next month or next quarter, I'm going to do this or you know, whatever the delay tactic is, you're going to feel better by taking the action. So recognizing and this was kind of a personal learning for me, like Q3, I was just, just down, you know, and I think I've under. I now understand A lot of the reasons for why that was. And one of the things that I changed is I started walking more instead of getting on my peloton. Well, turns out that's just not enough activity for me. I need to have my heart rate higher. I need to be punishing myself just a little bit harder than just walking around the neighborhood. Right. To get my mind and my mindset to fully engage. Right. And again, the more that you just start the activity that you need to get done, you're going to get into it. I love this countdown thing too. I'm going to start playing with that. I hadn't, I hadn't gotten into that. I haven't read the book I just heard Michelle talking about. It was like, okay, it just, it makes it intuitive sense. Right. I've seen that too many times in myself and my own behaviors.
Yeah. And there's, it's also too. If you don't want to read the book, there's a TED Talk, Mel Robbins second rule. TED Talk, 20 minutes. Watch it. You'll get the most books. Could probably be a 20 minute talk. But that's, that's the gist of it there. And it does. It's true. It's like momentum, right. Just action builds momentum. Tony Robbins is a big one of that.
Right.
Like motion creates emotion.
That's right.
Get yourself moving. Whether it's one call or one email, one step, right? Go do one minute on the peloton. You're probably not going to step off after that one minute. Like the past month I've gotten into cold plunging. I built a cold plunge in my garage.
Oh, dude, I'm coming over. I didn't know.
Dude, you were only a couple miles away. Swing by, right. 38 degrees, right? And you get into that. And literally right before it still every single time. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go. Right. Like, and you just have to step in because you know it's going to suck, you know it's going to hurt. But you get to those first 30 seconds and then you're just in this Zen place for five, seven, ten minutes. Right. And so, but taking that first step, even when you don't feel like doing it, is I think also a big thing that separates the doers from the rest. It's easy to do when things are easy.
Yeah, anyone can do it. And the key is start, right? That's the hard part. The keep going. That's not that hard once you've started, once you're in motion. Right. And like now momentum and all of the laws of Physics take over.
Yeah. And that's where to wrap on this. Before we go to the next part is, like, why the countdown works well for things you don't enjoy doing. Because the brain science behind it is like, say something like cold calling. The vast majority of people do not like cold calling. It is what it is. When you're counting up, your brain feels this could go on forever. So every dial feels bigger than it is. Whereas if you go in bursts of 10, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. You're like, okay, six. All right, five, four, three. You are building momentum. It's almost like going downhill through it. And then you take a break, right? And then you gear up to do it again. So we've talked a lot about how to be a doer, right? Like, how to take action, actually get started and make things happen for yourself. Let's talk about the other part of this, which is how to surround yourself with doers, right? Because I think it's funny where there are pieces of advice that have been said for so long that I think people start to discount them. They hear it, right? They hear the phrase, like, oh, you are the company you keep, or, oh, you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. And people hear it, but they've heard it so many times, they don't actually give it the weight that it should be. Right? So let's talk about this a little bit, like, first, like, from a personal standpoint, like, have you seen a difference in your life when you've changed who you surrounded yourself with?
Yeah, a thousand percent. So when I started sales success stories, was I the number one person in my company? No, I wasn't. And that's a little bit of the hack here, right? You were talking about in your opening about, are you the type of person that people would want to be in that group and to be that five. Here's how I've always cheated at that. If you bring together the other four and they're all not already connected to each other, you elevate yourself. You're bringing that value. You can do that right out of the gate. And I have used this in so many different ways. I was selling for another company, and I was targeting some local enterprise accounts here in Austin. And I called my CEO and I said, look, I need you to come to town. I'm going to host a dinner, right? And I reached out. I already had a friend at National Instruments, so I got him on board. That made it a lot easier to get the person that I was Thinking of from Dell. Once I had those two, it was all downhill, right? It was okay. Indeed's in. Garrison Lehrman Group is in. I mean, it just. It just kept going. It was so easy because I had found the others. It wasn't because of me. It wasn't because of my CEO. It was because, like, oh, my gosh, those are my peers, right? When you and I and Scott Leese get together because we all live in the same freaking zip code, right? Then it gets even easier to attract people that are playing at that level. And notice how I cheated by putting myself in the same category as Scott Leese and kdp.
Well, what's interesting there is you actually didn't put yourself in the same category. You became a connector, and that's how you get pulled in. Right? There's a book I read a while ago. I'm trying to remember the name of it, but what it talked about was the difference between networking and connecting. When you can shift from being a networker to a connector is when everything changes. Right? As I hope y' all did. I hope y' all picked up on this. I was going to ask all if you picked up on it. Like, this is a webinar as a podcast. I don't get to hear you say it back. But he connected. He got one person connected to another person. That made it easier to pull in another person and another person, and all of a sudden, you're the commonality between them all. That's where the value starts to come, right? Is that connection there? And so then, as you think through that, how do you do this then?
Right?
So, like, all right, cool, Scott. I'm going to be a doer. I don't know a lot of other doers. I don't know these 1% that you're talking about. I don't have a podcast. I don't get to invite people to these things. How can people start to really improve the people that they surround themselves with?
Yeah. So, I mean, the first piece is just paying attention to it and watching for it, right? If you're not. If you're not looking for it, you're not going to find it. Right? So there are other people in your organization, in every sales team, Guess what? There's a number one. It's just how it works. So think about that person now. Are they closely aligned enough to your style and your approach? Is there enough kind of relationship potential there? Right. It's what I built the whole sales success summit around, is connecting these other top performers with each other. But now also with my audience. So if you want access, pay a little bit of money and show up, right? Go where the top performers are, right? And then, I mean, it is networking, it is connecting. It's build some relationship. Ask, right? Ask for a little bit of time. Set up that lunch, set up that coffee. Maybe not one on one. That's kind of a big ask. And one that. I mean, Katie, I know you get asked this all the time. I get asked all the time. It's not a super scalable thing. It's just. It disrupts my day. But if I'm. If I'm putting together a coffee and I bring a few of these people together and again, I get to be that connector, and now I'm literally surrounding myself with the best, right? Kyle Gutsler, who was on my podcast forever ago, had this great story about how he just committed and doubled his income in one year. And part of what he did is he looked at the top performers across his company at that time, and he was the guy who brought them all together. And I think it was a couple of times a week they would get on a call, or maybe this was back in the day when we all got together in person and he would set up a breakfast or something and they all came together again. The value in that is so huge now. You make it scalable. It's not just about you, but you literally are surrounding yourself with the best and it rubs off again. I went into this podcast adventure not being number one, but now I have been for the last number of years, and it's. It's automatic. I don't think about it. It's just what I surround myself with, and it's who I've become and who I.
