Maximizing Sales Team Impact: Focused Capacity Strategies with Anthony Cessario

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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. 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 the difference between being busy and being productive. The difference between doing all the things and doing the right things. The difference between capacity planning and focused capacity. Because too often everyone is busy, but the right things aren't getting done. And that is why I'm so excited to have Anthony Cesario on the show with me today. He's the VP of Revenue of Strategic Industries over at Clary, and he has an incredibly unique perspective on how to do focused capacity. Right focusing on the right things, whether that's the territories you're working, the verticals you're going after, and how to hold reps accountable to it. Especially in a day where we have to do more with less, this is incredibly important. So I'm pumped to dive in. Anthony, my man, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, kd. Good to be here.

So I'm pumped for this, right? Because when I reach out to people, we're Doing like podcast, ask for topics, they almost all tend to be kind of the same things. And you respond back with focused capacity.

My man.

This gets me so fired up here because that's not something we've talked about. So I think where I'd love to start is when you say focused capacity, what do you mean? And then we can start talking about how we get into this.

Yeah, sure. Again, thanks for having me. Great to be here. Yeah. So I've been at CLARY for four years and I came here to get an MBA on how the greatest go to market teams operate by way of spending time with CROs and their teams every day from the top sales teams on the planet. And I think one of the most common things I see across most high growth companies, most venture backed companies, is that you don't have enough resources to do your job. If you work in go to market, you don't have enough salespeople, you don't have enough growth marketing, you don't have enough RDRs. There's not enough resources to do what you're being asked to do a lot of the time. And so the question becomes, how do we focus our calories on the highest impact outcomes knowing that we can't just build the perfect machine to go do everything we want to do? And so that's what I mean by focus capacity. Right. How do we. You hear a lot about sales effectiveness, sales efficiency these days, payback periods and all that. That's part of sales efficiency for me. Another part of sales efficiency is how are we maximizing our calories? How are we making sure that as a leadership team, we're putting our team in position to be as successful as possible? How do we make sure we're putting our managers in a position to be great coaches around the right things? How do we make sure we're putting our reps in the right positions to spend their time on the highest output? Accounts, deals, contacts, things like that. That's focus capacity for me.

Perfect. And like let's keep going down that funnel because you said something interesting there, right? It's like spending calories like I love that analogy. On the highest impact outcomes. Can you break down kind of like your process on like how do you determine those things? Because I'm sure you see this in a lot of the orgs you go and talk to and go through. It's like there's never clarity. Well, what is the highest impact outcomes? Everyone feels like what they're working on is the highest impact. So like how do you go through that with your Team, your managers, your leaders to really get alignment there. Because I feel like that's kind of where it has to start.

Yeah, good question. You know, I think it starts at the top of the business, right? If you go talk to any CRO or CEO, they're going to tell you what the charter is for that revenue org, right? There's something that, that you're being asked to go accomplish for the next 12, 18 months. And so I think if you're not starting with that, right, what is the charter for our org to go accomplish? Like that's, that's kind of where we have to start. And so like I'll give you an example, right? When I came to Clary and helped scale up the enterprise team, part of that charter was we need to go further market, we need to break into new revenue bands, right? And what most companies, I see that that's a normal charter for a lot of. We were serious c at the time, 100 employees, 120 employees or something. A lot of people are doing that, right? Okay, we're going to, we have a product market fit, we're going to go up market, get bigger deals. Normally where that kind of stops is like, okay, we will decide how much headcount we want to add in enterprise or whatever and then we'll go sell into enterprise. And so one of the things that I didn't have as many reps as I'd have liked. So one of the things we did was we said, okay, how do we put the reps that we have in a position to go accomplish this? To go command call million dollar plus deals just to pick a number. How do we do that and how do we make sure that. Do we even know that what a million dollar plus deal would look like for our company? How many accounts out there are worth a million dollars plus? That's such a simple question. When someone tells me we're going up market and I ask them, oh, okay, cool. How do you prioritize accounts by ARR potential? And they're like, we don't. That's where it starts, right? It's like, okay, you said you need to accomplish this, go up market into million dollar plus deals. Cool. What we did was we built a framework where we, we did two things. We tagged every account by addressable ARR to say, we had a formula and say, okay, if they have this many salespeople, the account's worth this much per user per year. Pricing, you know, easy formula. So we tagged every account. And then the other thing we did, which most companies don't do is is we built a prioritization framework as well. P1, P2, P3, where basically you look at ICP, right? Ideal customer profile and you really have to think deeply about what is your ICP for this business motion. In this case, what type of enterprise company would buy from us? Right. Maybe we start with enterprise software companies that have at least 12 month sales cycles or something like that. Really think deeply about your ICP and then think about what would a priority one be, what would a priority two be, what would a priority three be? And so the reason I talk you through this, most companies don't have that data. So they don't have like a framework to say these are the most important accounts for us to focus on. And because they don't have that data, they don't build territories in a way where they know that reps have an opportunity to go sell into those types of accounts. They're not building equitable territory. So maybe there are a bunch of accounts like this, but Maya has 25 of them in her account of 50 or her book of 50 accounts and Joe has five. And now so Joe's going to leave because Maya has a better territory. And so all of this comes together, right? It's do we know what we're asking our team to do? And then can we build a strategy around that? Right, so can we build a territory strategy where everyone has an equal amount of million dollar plus accounts? Right. Can we make sure the managers know how to inspect? Are we spending time on those accounts? Right. Can we make sure the reps know how much longer does it take us to sell a million dollar account than it does 100k account? Right. And are you building that into how you think about your deal strategy? And so it starts at the top and it trickles all the way down.

Yeah. And I love that process because I do think like so much of leadership really is about asking the right questions and so often those questions get skipped. Right? Oh, we need to go up market. I was like, yeah. No one asked like, well, how long does it take to close these deals? How many of these deals do we need to have in our pipeline in order to get there? That's always my favorite is when people are like, yeah, we're going to go up market. And I say, all right, great. So like how much are you projecting to do this year? Like we're going to do 5 million in upmarket deals this year. I was like, great, so what are you forecasting for like your close rate on this? And oh, by the way, it's June. You're not getting anything. Like, what are we talking about here? And so I love these questions that you're asking to kind of stress test, like the strategy around. There's also territories all the time. Like just like, there's no analysis. Just like, oh, same quota for everybody. Here are your territories and go through it. So let's go a layer deeper that. So like, all right, we establish what we're trying to do. We come up with that strategy. How do you roll that out? Like, how do you keep that momentum going to make sure that people again are spending calories in the right places?

Yeah, yeah, good question. I'll give you one to put in your pocket on the pipeline and coverage stuff too. By the way, it's almost a trick question I ask CROs or CMOs these days. I'll say, what is the pipeline coverage ratio that you guys operate in, you know, business? And they almost always like have it. They're like, oh, it's 4x. Like trick question. It's so much more nuanced than that. It's so much more nuanced, right? It's like the way your enterprise team sells versus your commercial versus your emerging or whatever. How is that international versus in the States? Right. First, different deal sizes, right? Like, it's so much more nuanced than that. Pipeline coverage ratios. If you're using one metric across the entire business, like, you're probably not thinking about it well enough. But anyway, different topic. So when you think about operationalizing that focus capacity now, right, you feel good about territories, right? You feel good about that. You put the teams, the territories in place to be successful. One of the really important things is I think it's important to communicate to the reps how you built these territories in life. Right? Again, there's so much speculation about territories with sales reps, you know, like, oh, this one's better, that one's better. When you talk them through and say, hey, here's how we build territories. We, you know, our charter is to go further up market. Here's what we did. We looked at every single account in your book. We prioritized it by way of P1, P2, P3. Here's the factors we used. Then we looked at how much adjustable ARR can you get out of this. You have a million dollar quota, right? We want to make sure everyone has a chance to hit their entire quota on one deal. The same chance. So one of the things we did at Clary, we blew up geos. We only went to Name to count territories because that was the only way we could get to equitable territories across the board as an output of this exercise. Right? And so like that transparency is really, really helpful because it takes all of the conversation off the table of why do they have a better territory than me or what have you. It's like everyone has a fair shot. Here's our strategy, right? So that's first it's a little thing, but it's an important one is transparency. Then you can't just assume it's easy for your managers to coach around this stuff. Like you have to instrument the business in a way where they can easily focus their coaching on the right things. And so whether you're using like Clary or Salesforce or whatever to like as a backdrop to your one on ones, as a manager you need to be able to say are we touching the accounts that we said we were going to touch that were most important? And so like a strategy that we use internally, even after you get your territory, we use a focus approach where we say first focus, next focus, last focus, and we tag the accounts at the beginning of the year. You know, the reps, their CEOs, their territories, they'll decide which ones are, you know, in each focus group and then the charter is for Q1. I don't want to talk about anything other than first focus. I'm not saying we're not going to do business on their accounts inbound and we don't want your BDRs like not prospecting other things. But you better have prospected into all of your first Focus accounts by the end of Q1. Q2 will, will open the aperture to more. So that way you know that at least to your point, especially in enterprise, at least at the end of Q1, you have put a thoughtful prospecting approach into the accounts that we know matter most. Right? And so to do that you need to like, you know, your managers need instrumentation. You need to make that easy for them. You can't just assume your managers know how to go find those accounts and report against them and all that. And so that's a big piece of the puzzle, right? Putting a managers in a place to coach around these things and then it's kind of inspect what you expect, right? If you can coach your reps around this stuff, most sales reps want to do the right thing. They want to go focus on the right accounts and they're going to go execute.

Nice. Oh man, there's so much we can unpack there because now we're getting into the Good stuff here. So, because I love that idea of like, you know, not only what we're going to do, but what we're not. So I loved that directive of like in Q1. I don't want to hear about anything else. Yes, we can do blah, blah, blah. But like in order to prioritize, you also have to deprioritize things. I think people miss that. Even the word priorities is actually funny. So the word priorities didn't show up in print I think until the late 1800s, because priority was the word singular. Priorities didn't show up until late into the industrial revolution and everything we've been going through, you only have a priority. And so the plural is actually where it all went wrong. And so go. You know, it's not like the full topic for today, but it's something that is very, I'm very passionate about. You brought up manager coaching a few times, right? Not rep, coach, manager coaching. Talk to the people about this a little bit. Because most managers don't get any coaching whatsoever, right? They're just told what to do and because they were a top rep, they're supposed to know how to do it. As a manager, what does that manager coaching look like in this process to keep people focused on the right things?

When I think about coaching managers, why does someone become a manager, right? They were making a crap ton of money as a rep and they decided to take on more bureaucracy and less money to go lead a team. And so first I think it's important to know why you're getting into leadership. Hopefully it's not just because it's like the next thing. Most good leaders I know, they wanted to make impact at scale. They wanted to be part of something bigger than just their territory, things like this. And so when you're coaching managers, I feel like you need to make sure that they don't forget that, right? It's so easy to get caught up in the minutia of pipeline management and deal inspection and all the stuff that comes with what I would argue is like probably the hardest job in the sales org is the frontline manager. There's a lot of minutiae there. But don't let them forget that the reason they signed up for this is because they wanted to help others grow, scale their careers and all this. And so when you focus on that, when you focus on coaching your managers around that, right? Like, what are the biggest opportunities for coaching right now? When you ask a question like that to a manager, where do you find yourself coaching the most? And you'd be surprised. People fall into a routine of not being intentional with their coaching.

Right.

And so just asking questions like that, you know, where do you find yourself coaching the most? If you had to put all your coaching calories into one topic, Right. What topic would it be? What are you doing to grow yourself around that topic? Right. What the things you've learned on that topic that you want to bring to your team? Right. Things like that, I think are really good questions to keep managers in that. Right. Mindset of like your job that is a major part of your job is coaching. Make sure they're still passionate about that.

No. 100%. Like, so I recently joined a new company and actually the very first dinner I had with one of my orgs sat down with a bunch of like the managers. We're getting to know each other, you know, a bit and we're talking. I was like, so y' all, like, I was like. Something that I can promise you is going to frustrate you about me in our time, I'm going to just get ahead of it from the get go is how often I'm going to pull you off of things. Like you're going to want to do all the things and I'm going to be pulling you off and say, no, that doesn't matter. If we don't fix this, yes, we can go, yeah, it's broken, but it doesn't matter until we fix this thing. And I'm going to keep pulling you back to the areas of focus that we need to be on because otherwise nothing gets done. But you're going to feel so busy. So like, how do you maintain this through the year? Right? Because a lot of times, right, like, all right, we did the strategy.

Nice.

We roll it out there. But yes, territory, planes, good. How do you keep people prioritized? Right. Like, how do you keep them focused on the places that they're supposed to as the year progresses? Right. Because when things get tight, people start to scramble. When things get hard, people start to, you know, go off like kilter a little bit. How do you manage that, you know, throughout a year through, like a regular cadence?

Yeah. I think you have to build that into your operating rhythm. Right. And really think deeply about it when you build your annual plan. So like when I sit down with reps at the beginning of the year, I genuinely believe, like, people say this in a cliche way, but I genuinely believe reps are CEOs of their businesses. If you're hiring world class reps, which hopefully most of your listeners are either one of those reps or are hiring world class reps, you're doing them into service. If you think that you're better at selling than they are, they're probably better than you put them in a position to think about their business as a CEO. And a CEO has to plan. They have to think through the year 12 months in advance. For instance, when I say building that into the operating rhythm, let's take qbrs for an example. In my opinion, there's no like set framework for a QBR. It's each quarter is a little different. Q1, my reps, they present their business plan. It is, here's how I'm going to go execute on the year. Here's how I'm going to hit my annual number. Here's what I need from cross functional departments. Like they're presenting like a CEO would in Q1. This is how my business is going to thrive this year. Now we will get this in deal coaching and stuff like that, you know, whatever. But it is, here's the strategy for the year. Q2 is, hey, I've executed on that strategy for a quarter now what needs to change based off of the time I've spent in my business and again, more deal stuff, all that, right? You probably start talking about pipeline a whole lot more than we did in Q1, especially if you're an enterprise because you know, if you have 200 plus day sales cycles, you don't have a whole lot of time at that point to bring revenue in for the year. And so you kind of have that, okay, adjustments to the annual plan, pipeline deals. Then you get to Q3, right? And it really becomes much more about deal execution at that point. And so now it's like how do we go execute, how do we reduce time to close time to revenue on these deals, how do we break down barriers, right? And so on and so forth. So I think you need to empower your reps to like actually believe they're a CEO of their business and to hold them accountable to think through that lens and your managers, right? Like and so on and so forth. If you set that kind of framework up, then the operating rhythm starts to reinforce the things that are most important. The things you're talking about in QBRs, the things you're talking about in one on ones, the things you're talking about in pipeline, all that stuff should be a bit self reinforcing based off of where you're at in the year and what you know needs to be done at that point.

So how do you balance call like structure and best practices versus autonomy. And the reason I ask this is because oftentimes when I hear, I know you don't. So I'm kind of setting you up for a good answer here. But when I hear some leaders like, yeah, like I want them to be the CEO of their, their territory, oftentimes that means there's actually like no support, there's no like you got to go figure it out, be the CEO of your territory. Even though you've never been taught how to be a CEO. So how do you balance that idea of like, yes, you're a business owner, you're a CEO of your territory, but with also like you know, structure, best practices, like here's what I expect to see in this territory because everyone forgets even CEOs have bosses, right? They're, they're reporting up to that, that board and investors and everything else too. So there's always a little bit of accountability. How do you balance that?

Yeah, good question. Let's flip it right, and say like, so if they're the CEO, you're on the board, right? Every board, right. You know Sequoia or Silver Lake or Bain or whoever, they work differently with each of their CEOs. If you're a first time founder versus a multi time founder, right. Everyone's a little bit different. So I think it's important as a leader, as a frontline leader to understand each of your individual reps, know where they're at, kind of at their journey, where their strengths and weaknesses are. And a lot of this comes down to some teams have the ability to truly hire world class reps, one of the best reps in the world. And again like you might have to put as much oversight on them. It might be more strategic thinking with them and partnership in that. Other teams, you know, might not have the comp packages to hire reps like that where they have to hire folks that they're going to develop. Right. And so you're obviously going to be much more hands on. You want to find opportunities for autonomy still, obviously, but you don't want to set them up for failure, right. You want to help bring them on the journey. Right. And so I don't think any team I've ever led has all of one a person that fits one profile, right. Like on my current team I have a handful of people that have been selling for a long time. I have someone that started at Clarion as a BDR and has worked her way up into like one of our top commercial reps. Like they're all on different journeys in their sales career. And I give a little bit more oversight or autonomy to each based on which kind of where they're at and where they need me most. And I think it's important to ask questions, right? To check in and ask questions, like, should I scale back? Right. I'll tell my reps, like, hey, look, you know me, I'm a problem solver. I'm going to lean in. Like, if you want me to lean in. And it's probably going to get to a point where, like, you're going to wish I wasn't leaning in so much. So do me a favor. Like, I'm giving you the red flag to say, like, hey, ac, scale back, dude. Like, you're leaning in too much. Like, that is 100% within your purview and I expect it from you. Like, so giving them that confidence that they can speak up if they feel like they want more autonomy and so.

Talk then of what kind of. We'll go one layer deeper throughout all this, right? Of like, you know, the creation of a business plan. Right? So is that something you hold your people to? Because, like, if I think about this funnel you've mapped out, right? Okay. High impact outcomes. Okay. Strategy. Okay. Like, focus, like calories right in the right places. Okay. Territory assignments and analysis, account mapping. So then, like, do you have your reps building, like a. A business plan for that year? Or is it like, once that's mapped out? And I was like, all right, y' all go and just do the things.

Yeah, they do. Yeah, for sure. So in Q1, and you know, the framework, QBRs are a really good forcing function. When I was a rep, I loved QBRs. I was like a nerd people. A lot of people hate QBRs. I loved it. It like my chance to think deeply about my business and get a bunch of people that were smarter than me to think deeply about my business. And they had to, like, literally stare at me for an hour and, like, answer my questions. Like, so I used it as an opportunity, even when I was a wreck, to, like, really think deeply about my business. And most people don't have that experience with QBRs. They're like a dreadful build a bunch of PowerPoint slides kind of thing. And so fortunately, little pitch for Clary, like, most Clarity customers hopefully aren't spending a lot of time building slides for QBRs. Like, a lot of what you see in Clary usually have to build in slides. And so when I'm asking my reps to build slides, I'm making sure I'm really, really intentional about it like that, that it's of super high value. It's things that they're going to think deeply about. It's going to make them think about their business deeply. So there'll be a few things that we put into the framework for a Q1 QBR where we call them QBPs quarterly business plans because it should be looking forward, not backwards. But we put a few things that are business plan focused in that Q1 framework that forces them to think about their business. So I'll give you a few examples. One, any good executive team, you go sit down with your E staff every quarter, probably, certainly every year, they're doing some kind of reflection where like at Clary we use something called O L D D Observations learnings do differently. And every executive staff member every quarter has to look back on the previous quarter and say what's the observation? What are the learnings and what should we start doing? Stop doing, double down on or change. Right. Every single executive member has to do that. And so I give that same framework to my reps and I tell them this is what your executive team is doing every quarter. You guys want to be executive someday. Get into this cadence of thinking and reflecting. And so that's like one slide, right? What are the old for the past year or quarter or whatever. Another one that's like gets them to think really deeply about their business is that whole pipeline coverage thing we talked about. So I will bring them the data and say for the types of accounts we're going after, for the segments we're going after, here were the pipeline coverage ratios that we needed last year. Here were our conversion rates that we needed over the last 12 months. And I want them to build that into their business plan to say, okay, for instance, if our conversion rate for million dollar plus deals was 30% last year, that means we needed whatever that MA or we'll do 25% to keep it easy. If it was 25%, that means we need for every one million dollar deal we've won, we needed four in pipeline. Okay, cool. So how many million dollar deals do you think you're going to close this year? One. Okay, cool. So you need four in pipeline. How many accounts do you think you need to prospect into to get four pipeline deals? So like we'll set up, I'll give them the data and then I'll give them some thoughtful questions about their business. And then the goal is I tell them you don't have to present all this data back. You decide what you present in the qbp. But I want you thinking deeply about these things as you think about your business for the year. And then it's. The time is yours in the QBP that hours for you to get the most value out of wherever you think that's best spent, you know, with the rest of the extended team.

No, I love this. And as we start to, like, lean into kind of, like, wrapping up here, like, how do you know if it's working or not? Right? Because I think some people are like, okay, yeah, like, I do those things. Like, how do you know if it's working or not? Like, just results or are there other things that you're looking at, you know, of? Like, all right, we're doing these things. How do I know it's working? Like, how do I actually know that this process is kind of getting the most out of. Right. The. How you describe it, the. Like, the mental calories that people are spending. How do you kind of measure this as it goes?

Yeah. I think the one thing I've learned. And I'm, like, overly analytical, so I have to be careful. The one thing I've learned is that building a really good framework like this doesn't mean that you follow it to a T throughout the entire year. Right. Like, it can become overly structured. For me, a big piece of this is the planning part of it. Like, when you set yourself up to think about the year in the right way and to check in on the right things throughout the year, it's not like you're holding yourself accountable to this really, like, structured plan. And if one thing goes off, you're screwing or something. So just. There's something there about that of, like, just going. It's like people who don't set annual goals, just setting annual goals, like, you're gonna accomplish 50% of them just by setting them. It doesn't mean you have to, like, hold yourself accountable every week or something. But that's one piece of the puzzle. Like, just the exercise of doing it, I am almost certain will influence behavior and put you in a step in the right direction without the results at the end being maybe exactly what you'd hoped. Other than that, I mean, look, I think it really depends on what success looks like for that team. Every sales team is at a different place on what they're trying to accomplish. You know, like, in my business, we just, you know, we stood up strategic industries for Clary. There's a lot more to success for us this year than just revenue. Obviously, revenue is important, but part of it is creating learning loops in these industries. Right. And how we created those learning loops to our product and our marketing team and things like this part of this. I made a promise to everyone who joined this team that there's a certain experience that they were going to have this year outside of just making money. Right. You know, you're going to be part of building X, Y and Z, and you're going to have a voice here.

And.

And so I think it's important to, like, understand and set when you set your targets at the beginning of the year, that it's not just revenue targets. Right. It's like one of the slides we put in that qbp deck in Q1. This is really fun. It's the first slide of the deck.

It's.

We set it. Our annual year starts on February 1st. And so this year it would have said February 1st, 2024 on it. And it's a letter to your shareholders. And it's literally a letter saying, if you were CEOs, have to write a letter to shareholders every year, if you were writing a letter to your shareholders a year from now, what would you want it to say about your business, about KD Inc. Right. What are the things that you would want them talking about 12 months from now if you had the year that you wanted to have? Right. And I don't want to just hear you close the 180% of your quota or whatever. What was the impact you made outside of that? What are the other things that happened? And so that's one of the exercises we go through as a team. And I think it's important to set goals that are broader than just revenue. It's, hey, I want to get better at this. We want to go learn this, whatever that looks like for you. That should help make it so it's not just revenue. Right. It's like, we actually made progress in the things that we wanted to make progress in.

I love that, like, future letter to self. We did something similar with, like, we had our reps actually record a video that's even better.

They probably hate writing it. So maybe I'll do a video next time.

Right? Like, I want Future you talking to you now. Right? And it was not only, like, about, like, what they've accomplished, but also, like, what to do when things get hard, you know, like, so when things get hard, what are you. What are you going to tell yourself? Like, you can hear from you. It's like, hey, remember why you're doing this. Remember you're trying to get that Mercedes, you know, for wifey, right? Like, just like there was that message to themselves. We did it through video because we did a lot of goal setting as well. And it was powerful. Like, because then if a rep was getting in a slump, it's like, hey, go listen yourself real quick.

That's cool.

Before I, before I step in to tell you, go, I want you to go listen to future you real quick. I'm pretty sure you recorded a message for this very moment right now. And so it's kind of a perfect way to kind of segue as we wrap, right? Because like, the name of this podcast is Live Better Selva. Right? Because I have that weird idea of like, yeah, if we took better care of ourselves, if we spoke to ourselves better, if we set better goals, if we had more energy and joy and fulfillment, that the sales would improve as well, what would your Live Better advice be for people listening?

Well, one thing I'd recommend in the scope of Live Better, I think it's really important to create a culture on your team where you talk about these things. And so like, one thing I make a point to do every one of my QBR is so every time my team has a qbr, I do the same qbr, I show up with the same date. I prepare everything and like, just to show them, like, this is just you, it's me. And so in my reflection and my old, I always have something in there that is on the Live Better side, right? I'll say something like a quarter or two ago, I want to read my kids a bedtime story every night. And so what does that mean? What do I have to sacrifice to do that? Well, if I work late and if I, you know, if I work till 6 o' clock and then I work out from 6:30 to 7:30 or something, I might miss my youngest bedtime and like not get that chance. I might tell myself I don't have enough time to do that or like, whatever. And so I think it's important to model those behaviors as a leader and be vulnerable on things you want to work on. Like, for me, some of the stuff we talked about earlier about scaling back and coaching, right, like, you know, I. I've shared examples with the team. Like, hey, like, sometimes the advice monster comes out from ac. I want to be better about that. Like, how do I be better? Like, I want you guys to hold me accountable. And so I think some of that vulnerability is really important around Live Better because people are kind of scared to talk about that stuff. My advice, like, I'll give you an easy one, one of the best things that happened to me was like transitioning into this job, whatever it was, six quarters ago. So I'll give you one. Anyone who's transitioning into a new role, use that transition point to reset habits. Anything that you wish you would have been doing differently, do it now. Like, start it fresh. And so, like, for me, I was transitioning into this role right when I was moving to San Diego. And I told myself, like, I want to surf a lot. Like, it's like, it makes me feel really good when I go surfing at 5:30 in the morning until 6:30. And so I set a goal. I was like, you know what? As part of this new thing, like, I'm gonna share my goal with my team. And like, I'm gonna like, surf most mornings, you know, at least three mornings a week from usually 6 to 7am or whatever. And I shared it with my team and they're probably like, why the hell are like, are you telling me this? But it's like just showing that there was perspective that was shared, that was there's no such thing as work life balance. It's a really dangerous concept because that means when you're working, you're not living, and if you're living, you're not working. And it's like this. I love my work, I love my life. It's all just life. We're just living, right? And so if that's the case, like, we should be more comfortable talking about life at work comprehensively and not just you see the lens of what you're selling every day. But I think it takes the managers to model that conscious business. Fred Kaufman. That's where that comes from.

There we go. Like, no, I full, full believer there too. For similar reasons of, like, the idea of work life balance treats it like they're on different ends of something. Well, the fulcrum in the middle is you. It's really hard to have a great like or like a horrible work life and have a great outer work life. And it's really hard to have a great work life if the outer work life is horrible. Like, you only got one, only one of you. It's not like these two versions and so how they connect.

You don't get to do either of them. When you die, both stop, right? So it's not a balance, right?

It's all just the same work life integration. I think I read somewhere, I was like, like, that's what it is. It's like, who are you being at work and who are you being outside of it? That's all we can can do and control here. And I shared this with my team. I love that idea of vulnerability. Like, this week, I was really sick on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. So remember last week I actually had to cancel because my daughter was sick. Right. Well, she actually. So I was sick, you know, really sick. Tuesday, Thursday. And I still worked, like, I worked through it. And I was actually very clear to, like, my leadership. And I was like, y', all, this is not the example I'm trying to set for you. This is not what I want you modeling right now. This is just situation of the week is requiring it on me. But it was like, I was like, I apologized for doing it. It's like, I do not want you to think this is what I expect from you. If you are sick, you are sick. Take that time. Because then otherwise, you can set that example the wrong way. Right where they see, they're like, oh, geez, like, we gotta work. Even though, like, we're sicker, it's like, no, no. Like, seriously, do not do this right now. This is not what I expect from y'. All. So, Anthony, man, this was phenomenal, dude. Like, I love this because if it is, if we can keep people focused, if we can keep them burning the right calories in the right places, the impact will be there. Where can people find out more about you? Where are you putting out content? Where can they learn more about kind of your philosophies around sales and leadership?

Yeah, I mean, hey, look, first off, I'd love to learn from your audience. So if you have thoughts on this topic, best place to get me is probably on LinkedIn. I try to respond to messages on there. So if you guys have any ideas you want to share that would strengthen any of this, please reach out to me. Yeah, best plus place to get me on LinkedIn. Look, Clary, a lot of smart people at Clary that are smarter in a lot of these topics than me. So go reach out to A lot of great content we're putting out across the Clary universe. Run Revenue Pro. Great website that we have where we take a lot of these concepts and bring them to life. Devin Reed runs that for us, so. And I know Devin's your boy, kd. So if you guys want to see how to operationalize some of this stuff in a lot more detail, reach out to me. Reach out through Run Revenue Pro. Lots of great content out there that we've already put out into the universe.

Love it. No, that's the key. Y' all make this easier. If you don't have the tooling to do this. If you're trying to do this manually. God bless you. Not gonna happen. You need to have the tooling in place to do so. So, ac man, this was phenomenal. Thank you so much for your time, energy and insights today.

You got it, man. Thank you, kd.

Hell, yeah.