INBOUND 2015 I&E: Jill Konrath "Optimize Me"

Where's Jill? She was here a minute ago. Where's. Where's Jill? Oh, dear. No, no, I'm running late. I'm on the phone right now and I'm trying to get to a meeting. I'm supposed to be speaking in just a few minutes, so I. I've really got to hang up. I know your sales meeting is real important. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. But honestly, I'm, like, walking up in this auditorium and I. Oh, my God, there's cameras on me and it's, like, disconcerting. And you expect me to think about your proposal right now? I mean, I can't. I promise you I will get back to you. This meeting is done. Good Lord. What time is it? It's time, Jill. It's time. Oh, God. 11:45 right now. I'll be done with this meeting at 12:30. I'll get right to my office then, okay? I promise I'll get right to my office and. And I will sit down and I will work on my proposal. Okay? Okay. Thank you. I'm so sorry. Sound familiar? Sound familiar at all? After my second book came out, which is called Snap Selling, I started to have a lot of people come to me with a question. You see, Snap Selling is all about how to sell to crazy busy people. The frazzled buyers that you're having to deal with all the time. The person who just walked up on stage who's very different from the normal person. You think of sitting behind his or her office making good decisions. Instead, the Frazzled Mind is really a bad decision maker. The Frazzled Mind takes great joy in deleting your emails. The Frazzled Mind doesn't like your PowerPoint presentations for the most part, and thinks it's really boring to hear about your company, even though you think it's really cool to share that information. So, anyway, when I wrote Snap Selling, I spent a couple years studying crazy busy people and how to sell to them. And I put it together, and after the book came out, I started getting tons of emails from people. And after I spoke, I was surrounded by people. And consistently I heard this message. Snap Selling has been a godsend. It's working. It's helping me get in to see these crazy busy people. It's helping me move the sales cycle faster because I know how to work with them. Now and then they'd look at me and they'd say, but I'm crazy busy, too. What do you have for me? That's what I was hearing. I'm crazy busy, too. What do you have for me. I would suspect that many of you are here today because you might feel that same frustration. So if I said to you, how many of you would like an extra hour in the day? How many of you would raise your hand? Okay, a few hands have gone up now. If you would like 2 hours more in the day, please raise your hand. Okay, I think more hands are going up. If you could use an extra day today to get everything done, that's what happens, I think. I read in my research on crazy busy people that the average person has 70 hours of work sitting in front of them. 70 hours, that's, like, insurmountable. And I think we're all facing that. So people said to me, jill, what do you have for me? I'm crazy busy. And I thought about it, and my first answer was to focus on a topic that I have become an expert in over time, which is rapid learning how to learn things really fast. Because if you can learn things fast, you're not quite so crazy busy if you have new products or going after new markets. And I actually wrote the book Agile Selling to address that particular challenge. But I kept hearing from people, jill, I'm crazy busy. What do you have for me? And I finally fessed up and I said this. Oh, my God, I'm crazy busy, too. I don't know what I have for you. In fact, I really suck at time management. And I'm drowning in everything that has to be done in my evenings. You know, my days go into my evenings and my weekends. I've got work to do, and I feel like my stomach is just, like, awful. And then I even wrote a blog post for HubSpot called I'm a closet Slug. And so you're probably thinking, what in the heck is she doing talking to us about how to optimize our time? And the reality is, I'm here talking to you because I'm like most of you. I am not one of those really wonderfully organized people. I am organized enough. I managed to get through my day. I'm reasonably productive, and I'm still drowning. But I am not the person who arranges my closet so that all the blue shirts are together and then the white shirts and then the pink shirts. Some of you are going, no, that's not me too. And I don't necessarily clean my desk at the end of the day. And my desktop on my computer is pretty ugly sometimes, and I'm just overwhelmed. So the good news is that when I'm in overwhelm, I actually take action. At some point when I realize it and I take intellectual action to learn some things at first, and then I actually start experimenting. That is my modus operandi. When I got stuck selling to big companies and nobody would answer the phone or nobody would return my calls, I spent a year researching how to get somebody to call me back or return my emails. And after the year of researching, I wrote the book Selling to Big Companies. So this is like, oh, God, I've got a problem to solve. But the worst thing is, it's a problem that's mine too, and I kind of hate it, but it is the reality. So I'm not coming to you as the super organizer. I'm coming to you as the average human being talking to you about what I've been learning. This is the first time I've given the talk because I honestly believe it's the most important thing of all time. We are here in a group where technology is running rampant and everybody's looking around at how we can use technology to accelerate cells. But we are the bottlenecks in this system. We as individuals have only a certain capacity, and what we bring to it is crucial. So how do we take this limited capsule of time that we've been given each day, each night, each weekend and get something done? This is the challenge that I've been working on, off and on, with the interruption of my rapid learning thing for five years. And I know a whole lot about it. And I am in the process of changing my life because I can't stand to live that way any longer. So I'm going to deal with it, tell you some of the facts about it. I'm going to tell you some of the strategies I'm using. Some of them you'll think are weird. That's okay. I am baring my soul because I am a closet slug and I am not going to live that way any longer. I'm going to show you how I'm transforming. So is it even possible to get everything done? Let me answer the question I get asked all the time, is it possible to get everything done? And the answer is, no, it is not humanly possible to get everything done today. And besides, even if you did, nature abhors a vacuum. And you have 30 minutes of free time, and guess what? Something whooshes in to fill it and. And it's gone just like that. So it's not possible to get everything done. But what is possible is to get what's most important done. And that's what we'll be focusing on. How can we do the things that help us get where we want to go the most? Okay, couple questions. This is a Q and A session. Actually, it's a pop quiz. So we'll see how many of you know the answers to this. Here's the first question. How many emails per week does the average person, average professional get? Anybody know? So we do know that the Average person gets 304 emails per week. How many do you get? Do you know? 600. Oh, my God, that's painful. The second question, how many times per hour does the average person glance at their email? 30, 10, 15. This is the answer. 30 to 40 times per hour. That's what we're doing. This is one of the first things that I was discovering as I was working with understanding time and a concept of time that we're living with. And you know what? As salespeople, I'm putting this up front because all of you are in here. It says the word sales in the thing. I suspect you're selling at some level. If we are checking email 30 to 40 times an hour, it is killing us. I'm going to talk more about it, but you need to know that this is a killer. Not only is it sucking your time away, but guess what else it's doing? It's. It's making you stupider. It is, and I will address that later. So if you don't want to be stupid and you want to get more done, you are going to have to address this addiction that you have. This is another one. How many hours per week does the average professional spend on email? The person who does 600 emails is clearly doing more. So I don't think that all those time management experts that grew up sorting their clothes properly and arranging their desks have. Have dealt with this. And there are tons of hacks out there, and hacks help, but hacks aren't enough. We are the bottleneck hacks. Hacks make it. You do it easier. They make it simpler to do something, but they don't deal with the major issue like checking email 30 to 40 times an hour. That's killing us, you guys. So we gotta do things differently. So this one, I want to talk about how to do some things differently. And I'm going to tell you what I've done. I am an immersion specialist. When I tackle a topic, I throw myself in wholeheartedly to learn everything I can about this topic so I can become not an expert, because I don't care to be like a neuroscientist and really get it. I'm a person who knows enough to be dangerous and knows enough to make the changes that have to be made. But I have been immersed in brain research for the last few years. My favorite book is called you'd Brain at Work. I've read books on learning, cognition, cognitive development, how to do rapid learning. I've read about all these psychology books. I mean, I barely read a sales book in the last couple years because this brain research stuff is fascinating to me and it's helping me understand why I suck and why I'm a closet slug and what do I need to do to change this behavior. So I'm going to take you into some of this brain research because I think it'll help you and I'm going to share with you some of the things that I'm learning myself. First of all, what we need to know is that cruise control is normal. The way we're working is how we're working. It is normal to go on cruise control. When I work with managers, sales managers, a lot of them say to me, I, my reps are on cruise control. Why don't they know they have to change? And the reason that people don't change, you, me, the reason we don't change is because of how our brain is actually developed. And it's fascinating that our brain is designed to recognize patterns and to create a routine out of the patterns. So you get up in the morning, you have a routine, it runs without thinking. Your brain wants to focus, free up cognitive power to run without thinking. So because by the way, your brain is the most energy hungry organ in your whole body. It takes up 30% of your energy. So it's trying to conserve energy in case that saber toothed tiger jumps out in front of you. You have to be ready and you have to be able to note the changes. That's your brain and it's designed to recognize patterns. So even a new sales rep within three weeks will have a here's how I make calls pattern. This is how patterns get ingrained and they get ingrained in us so early on. And then our brain goes, this is how it goes. This is how I'm supposed to do it. And if you listen to Brene Brown the other day, she tells us that we make up stories. Well, one of the stories we make up is this is the way to do it, because this is how I'm doing it. This is the right way and this is my way. But it's not necessarily our most effective way. But it's normal. It is so normal. That trying to change how we operate is probably one of the hardest things that we can do. Recently, I watched a scientist who explains things in normal terms talk about habit, the power of habits. And he was talking, he did an experiment about bike riding. And all of us know how to ride a bike. And we are on cruise control with the bike, right? We all know how to ride a bike. So his friend created a bike that went backwards. And so every time he turned right, the whole bike went left. I mean, so everything was totally backwards. This guy, this scientist, got on this bike every single day for five minutes to learn how to ride that bike. It took him eight months.