Do you hit your numbers? Are you afraid of hitting your numbers? Are you making the call volumes and the outreach attempts, or are you overwhelmed? Do you think you’re going to succeed when you arrive at work, or are you already looking forward to when you can check out and move on from the job? It’s all about your mindset.
Not in the mood to listen? No problem, you can read the transcriptions below.
Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: David Dulany, Tenbound
Darryl Praill: How you doing, folks? It’s Darryl Praill here. I am so excited about this next episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, because it’s all about, today, it’s about the mindset, man. It’s about the mindset when we approach sales. Do you have the mindset for success? ‘Cause you know, that will make or break how successful you are.
Darryl Praill: Do you hit your numbers? Are you afraid of hitting your numbers? Are you making the call volumes and the outreach attempts, or are you overwhelmed? Do you think you’re going to succeed when you come in in the morning, or are you already looking forward to when you can check out and move on from the job? It’s mindset.
Darryl Praill: Over and over again, I have seen so many raw talented individuals who have the tools and the capabilities to knock it out of the park, but they don’t. They don’t, because they’re locking the mindset for success.
Darryl Praill: Can you guess where we’re going today, folks? Today’s episode Mindset for Success. Who? Who would I bring in to talk about this? Because you know how we work here. We bring in the industry’s best. The most notable. The brightest. Way smarter than me, and that’s giving myself credit for even suggesting I’m smart.
Darryl Praill: Today, I am joined by David Dulany. And if you don’t know David, well you should. That’s the first part, because David is like the mover and the shaker in the whole sales development world. You might have heard of him from his organization Tenbound. You might have been recently at his killer smash mega-event, the sales development conference that they just had. It is 100% focused and dedicated solely to sales development, and you know, I just like this guy. He’s smart. Follow his stuff.
Darryl Praill: Now, with that all said, I’ve sucked up enough. David, man. I hear you on the phone there. How you doing? Welcome to the show.
David Dulany: Darryl, thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor, and I hope I can bring some value to your guests today.
Darryl Praill: Well, just by hanging out with us you’re gonna bring a lot of content. Not just from what you’re doing there at Tenbound, which is so cool, but also with the peeps you’re hanging out with in the industry, and the conversations that you are responsible for crafting and for bringing forth. I know we’re gonna have a good time.
Darryl Praill: If you don’t know David, he fancies himself a sales development specialist. It’s all about building programs from scratch for today’s hottest, biggest, most exciting technology companies. And I love what he says, that he himself sees sales development as a strategic imperative. He doesn’t see it as entry-level. He doesn’t see it as thought. It is strategic, and so I just love that.
Darryl Praill: Now, I’m gonna give you a heads up here, guys. If you like what David has to say today, he has got this killer podcast. I mean, it’s not as good as INSIDE Inside Sales, but it’s pretty good, and it’s called the Sales Development Podcast. Now yes, it might be number one on iTunes, but you know, I think he aspires to, you know, follow in my footsteps. That’s what I say.
Darryl Praill: Also, you can check him out on his blog and all the things he thinks about at daviddulany.com. All right? So check that out. And don’t spell it wrong. Dulany is D-U-L-A-N-Y. All right? I have made that mistake. He chastised me. I cried, and then we made up, and we’re friends again and here we are.
Darryl Praill: Okay. So David, when I talked to you, we had this conversation about mindset, and this was something you were passionate about. Let’s just start the conversation. Why was this so big and important to you? Like this is something you really want to talk about.
David Dulany: Yeah, absolutely. I mean the day and age that we live in, we are just absolutely inundated with negativity, and definitely, if you don’t take control over your mindset, you can really get down a spiral. Especially in sales and sales development, because you’re hearing a lot of nos, people are figuratively slamming the door in your face if they don’t need your product or your messaging needs help. So there’s a lot of negativity out there, so what I’ve found is not enough people are talking about what is the mindset for success, so you can control your attitude as much as you can, and control the things that are actually within your realm of control.
Darryl Praill: And why aren’t people talking about it? I mean, is it your experience … Is it a case of they don’t wanna talk about it, or is it a case of they’re not even aware that their mindset is impacting their ability to have success?
David Dulany: You know, I think people don’t think a lot about their thinking. They just kind of follow along with what’s going on on the latest news article, or what’s going on with their colleagues, or what’s going on with their fantasy football league, and they kind of get caught up in this distraction culture that we have, that we’ve created over the last five or ten years. And all of a sudden, they start to get into kind of a negativity spiral, and we’ve got some very quick tactical tips that we use here at Tenbound and I’d like to share with the audience on how to kind of take a step back and sort of think about your thinking, and try to gain some control over your mindset.
Darryl Praill: All right. So before we get into that, let’s do kind of a test. So for our audience who’s listening to this, they may think they have a good mindset, but you may suggest otherwise. Now, I know you’re all about generating the programs required for technology companies to have successful sales development and teams and programs. Are there symptoms that I might exhibit that would suggest I have a bad or I have a less than optimal mindset?
David Dulany: Yeah. You know, and we’re gonna talk about this, but the first thing I would do is take a look at your calendar. Are you intentional with your calendar? Because if you think about it your calendar is obviously a marker of where you’re spending your time. And are you being super intentional about working toward your goals and what’s going to make you successful and what’s going to push the needle forward on your sales results and your life, or are you letting other people put stuff on your calendar that’s not necessarily one of your top three priorities?
[bctt tweet=”Are you intentional with your calendar? 🗓 Because if you think about it your calendar is obviously a marker of where you’re spending your time. #Sales” username=”DKDINSF @VanillaSoft”]
David Dulany: So the first thing I would do is take a look at your calendar. How intentional are you there? And if not, that’s something we can talk about, but that’s a great place to start, because it’s all about, like I said, controlling what you can actually control versus giving that power away to the latest news article or your buddies and things like that.
Darryl Praill: All right, so the calendar can be the first indicator that I may have a mindset issue. I’m not in control, to your point. Now you also mentioned something about easily distracted. So explain that symptom to me. How would that manifest itself? How would I know I’m easily distracted?
David Dulany: Yeah, so this is a great one. So is your phone always on and right in your pocket? I mean is your phone right next to you while you go to bed at night and right when you wake up in the morning and with you 24/7 on and alerts coming in?
David Dulany: If you take a look at your browser, do you have more than one tab open? You know this is a tough one. We’ve got multiple screens, multiple tabs, multiple projects happening at the same time. These are all indicators that your attention is being scattered, and you’re not necessarily as focused, and your mindset is gonna be the same way, so we’ll talk about that as well.
[bctt tweet=”These are all indicators that your attention is being scattered, and you’re not necessarily as focused, and your mindset is gonna be the same way. #Sales #Mindset” username=”DKDINSF @VanillaSoft”]
Darryl Praill: All right, so we’ve got calendar, and being in control. We talked about distraction. What about … And before I even leave distraction, it’s funny. Right? Because for me, I have a couple of things. I like to be responsive on Slack, or on my text messages because it could be mission-critical, and of course, for me, that’s always taking me away from the task at hand – that’s the first part.
Darryl Praill: Second thing is I am a big fan of trying to get down to inbox zero, where I can leave the day, and I don’t really have any hanging over my head, so therefore I’m always maybe overly attentive to my inbox. Again, taking me away from delivering results. So when you talk about distraction, I’m gonna put my hand up and say I am so guilty of that.
Darryl Praill: So we got calendar, we got distractions. What about other things? You know, some people feel like they have to please everybody else at the expense of their own deliverables. Is that an issue? Is that something that I have the wrong mindset, or is that something different?
David Dulany: Yeah, absolutely. I mean we as a human species we want to get along with the herd and make sure that we aren’t ostracized, so we want people to like us. We want to fit in, and we don’t wanna be outside of the herd, because I mean if think about it, in … 10,000 years ago, if you were away from the group, you would probably die. Right? So that’s very much ingrained within the human psyche that we want to get along with people. We want to please people, and that comes with being ultimately responsive. And especially in sales, because you might be one deal away. So you wanna be ultimately responsive to people, but at the same time, all of a sudden you look and your core two or three priorities you haven’t even touched for a week, two weeks, or something like that. But you’ve been working your butt off 80 hours a week to keep everybody happy.
[bctt tweet=”You wanna be ultimately responsive, but at the same time, all of a sudden you look and your core 2 or 3 priorities you haven’t even touched for a week, two weeks, etc. #Sales” username=”DKDINSF @VanillaSoft”]
David Dulany: So you’re running like crazy super busy, but your two or three top priorities have been neglected, and then you start to get into that negative spiral like “Hey, I’m not making progress. I’m not doing what I need to be doing,” and it goes down that negativity rat hole, so that’s what we’re trying to get ahead of.
Darryl Praill: See now, because mindset is so critical and so important and so passionate for you, I gotta ask. Was this something you yourself had to deal with once upon a time?
David Dulany: Oh, absolutely. I mean that’s funny, because I’ve got kids, and I’ve got an eight-year-old, and I have to catch myself sometimes, because I’ve got a lot of years ahead of him, and I look at things through the eye of someone who has passed 40. I won’t go into too much detail about that. But I look at things from someone who has made all the trial and error mistakes out there, and I’ve gone down every rat hole, and I’ve had to challenge myself, and it’s a lot of hard-won experience. It’s personal development. Reading books. Going to seminars. Trying different things, and I finally have been able to really kind of get a grip on what mindset is and how to turn it from a negative one to a positive one.
David Dulany: But you know, I … Just bringing it back to my son, I look at things through my perspective. He’s looking at things being around for eight years. I mean, he’s got none of the same perspectives, and I gotta catch myself.
David Dulany: And then you know, when I’m doing training through Tenbound, we train sales development managers and sales development reps, and a lot of them are right at the beginning of their career, and all of this stuff is new, and they’re dealing with completely different things in life. They’re trying to pay off their student loans and have a social life and go to Coachella and do all these different things that I can’t. You know, I did a long time ago. And so I make it sound like this stuff is really simple and easy, but you know, it is because I’ve made so many mistakes and I’ve been working on this for so long that I’ve been able to boil it down and really be able to focus on it.
Darryl Praill: All right. Well then, with that as the set … Shall we say the setting of the stage? We’ve kind of shared everybody the importance that mindset counts. We’ve shared with you some obvious symptoms that you might be exhibiting that says “This is something you should pay attention to.” And we understand that if you don’t have the right mindset, it’s gonna affect how you perform in your sales development efforts. So with that, we’re actually totally ready now to get into David’s approach to having the right mindset. The tips and tricks and tactics he uses to ensure he is successful, and he knocks it out of the park every single time. And we’re gonna talk about it when we come back.
Darryl Praill: And we are back. It’s time to learn the secret sauce. David, I know you’ve got probably, approximately if I recall, you have three important points that you wanna hit us up with today, and you know, we may go off beyond that, but let’s start the discussion. As it comes to mindset for success, what’s the first point, the first piece of advice, the first piece of guidance that you can share with us?
David Dulany: Okay, so the first one, and you said that I knock it out of the park every day. Well, I get singles and doubles. Sometimes I strike out. So I’m, again, not saying that I do this perfectly every time, but when I do knock it out of the park, I follow a few of these things.
David Dulany: Number one is there’s a kind of a common refrain that I just don’t have enough time. There’s not enough time in the day, I’ve got all my responsibilities, I’ve got my boss, I’ve got my spouse, I’ve got my kids. All these different things, and there’s not enough time in the day to really be able to kind of reign this in and get control over your mindset. So the first resource that I wanna share with everybody is a great book called The Morning Miracle, by Hal Elrod. And this book has made a big impact in just bringing together a way to be able to find a time to be able to get some control over your mindset.
David Dulany: And you know, even if you’re not a morning person, I happen to be a morning person, but even if you’re not a morning person, you can put this into your routine to help you. And he basically talks about … He’s got an acronym called SAVERS, and SAVERS is a set of steps that you try to hit every morning to really level-set and get your mind in the right place to go out and crush your top three priorities.
David Dulany: And so he starts with Silence as the first part of the acronym. Affirmations, Visualizations, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing. Okay? And that just means writing. Writing down in your journal. And that’s a lot, and it sounds a little woo-woo. I’m from San Francisco, so give me a little bit of slack on it, but very, very quickly, you wanna start your day a little bit earlier each day than you have been. And I know that this is tough if you’ve been out the night before and things like that, but really try to start about an hour earlier than where you are today.
[bctt tweet=”SAVERS is a set of steps that you try to hit every morning to get in the right #mindset: 🤐 Silence, 👍 Affirmations, 👀 Visualizations, 🏃 Exercise, 📖 Reading, and 📝 Scribing. #SalesSuccess” username=”DKDINSF @VanillaSoft”]
David Dulany: And what it does is nobody else is awake. You beat the sun up. You’re getting more done than most people who are sleeping right until the bell rings, you just get a really great start and handle on your day. And so you start with a little bit of silence, and silence just to kind of calm your mind down. There’s a great app called Headspace, where someone will walk you through just like ten minutes of silence. Kind of calm things down, level-set for the day, get things going.
David Dulany: Then you wanna control what you’re thinking in your mind. So you just write down a few affirmations about how the day’s gonna go. I’m gonna crush my number. I’m gonna make a bunch of calls. And then you wanna visualize how that will feel when you actually do it. So say you need to make 100 calls that day. You visualize just going through that, learning, growing, get into the next one, hearing a yes at least once. About 100 calls. Visualize that success. So you really have control.
David Dulany: Then, go out and hit 30 minutes of exercise. Get your heart rate up. Lift some weights. Do some yoga. Whatever you need to do. Get the body moving, and so the blood starts to pump into your brain.
David Dulany: Then you get back, you do about just five minutes, ten minutes of reading in some kind of good book that’s about sales or about personal development, things like that. Could be a religious book if that’s what you’re into. Just something to kind of give you a little bit of knowledge, and then you just wanna write down at some point “What am I gonna do today? What am I gonna try to accomplish?” Write down two or three things that you really wanna accomplish that day, and you’re done.
David Dulany: Try to fit it in within an hour. And I know it’s tough. Sometimes I miss one or more of these. Sometimes I do the writing later in the day when I get into the office, but I tell you, if you can hit a majority of those SAVERS, you are going to be in good shape for the day. Your mind is in the right place, you’re feeling more positive than when you woke up, you got some new blood pumping in your veins, and you’ve got your top three priorities that you’re gonna knock out that day.
Darryl Praill: So it’s all but focus, right? It’s all about getting your mind right, so you’re not scattered, you’re not panicked, you’re not breathless, you’re not scrambling to … ‘Cause you’re all right running late or whatnot. You’re just … You’re focused, you’re in the zone, your body’s good, your mind’s good, you know what to do. You’re starting off on the right foot. To your point, you’re being intentional about your own success right away.
David Dulany: Exactly, and you’re right there with the top three priorities. Like you gotta sit down with your manager, sit down with your boss, sit down with yourself, you know, if you own your own company, and go “What are my … Really let me boil it down to my top three priorities. I need to be prospecting. I need to be asking for referrals, and I need to be managing my pipeline.” Those could be three major things.
David Dulany: And then, like we said, and we’ll talk about really organizing your day on those three things because you wrote them down, you got them going, you did everything you need to do in the morning, and you are ready to crush it. Right? So that’s step number one.
Darryl Praill: And the beauty of that is because I wrote them down because I thought about it, I was intentional and I wrote them down, every decision I make through the balance of the day will always be made in light of that. Right? Is this decision gonna honor my goal? And it biases your thinking to ensure that you make a decision to honor those objectives you set out, and that’s what I love about that.
Darryl Praill: All right, number two.
David Dulany: Number two. So we … You think about willpower. People are just like “I’m gonna grind it out. I’m gonna hustle. I’m gonna just put in like 12 hours of just monster determination.” And then right around 10:00, 10;30, especially if you got up early in the morning, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, or right after lunch, I mean you just crash, and you’re just like “I suck.” And you know, you go through this cycle all day, and it’s just like wait a minute.
David Dulany: I think we’re looking at things wrong. I mean human beings are not machines. We are not ones and zeroes. We’re not built like that. We’re, unfortunately, we’re organisms that go along with the sun and the circadian rhythms and all that stuff that you can look up.
David Dulany: So you gotta understand. You have a certain amount of willpower each day, and you have to understand that it’s like if you have an old phone, you know how that little battery goes down really, really quickly when you’re on two or three apps. It’s the same with this. So if you’re doing something that’s difficult, one of those three things is really difficult. Like you gotta call the really difficult prospects, or you gotta call a deal that’s going sideways. Understand that you only have a short amount of time to be able to do that when that battery is as full as possible.
David Dulany: So that’s how you wanna re-order those things on your list that you wrote down to say … Okay, Brian Tracy, great book called Eat That Frog. You wanna swallow that thing while you’re disciplined and your willpower is as high as possible, and then schedule the things that are more like administrative, non-reactive things for when that willpower battery is dead.
[bctt tweet=”Eat That 🐸. You wanna swallow that thing while you’re disciplined and your willpower is as high as possible. #Sales #Mindset” username=”DKDINSF @VanillaSoft”]
David Dulany: And one other quick thing, Darryl, is you’ll see at the end of the day, they always make happy hours at bars around four or five in the afternoon, because they know that everybody’s battery is at zero, and so you’re getting chicken wings and jalapeno poppers and drinking a couple of beers, because they know that you’re done. And so you gotta be able to understand that and control it.
Darryl Praill: I had this conversation with someone literally just yesterday. Talking about how to tackle your daily grind. Right? And they had said, “I wanna do this.” I said “That’s great. You wanna do that. I love that.” I said, you know, no different than a sales development coming in every day. “I wanna do this.” I said, “So what’s your plan?” And they looked at me and I said: “You gotta have a plan.” Right? And then you hit that up on you’re being intentional but what are your objectives. But that was the first part, they were like “Okay, I see.” If you gotta wanna do something, you gotta have a plan to get there. I said, “Now the next thing is, you gotta be honest with yourself about yourself.” In other words, if you’re easily distracted or if you’re a morning person or you’re an afternoon person, you have to schedule your plan around your strengths and don’t mislead yourself. So willpower, you’re right, it is, it’s like a cell phone battery. It’s charged for a period of time, and then it’s not, so do your hard stuff now. I love that analogy.
Darryl Praill: All right.
David Dulany: Do it.
Darryl Praill: One was be intentional, two was willpower, the last of your three steps. What is it, David?
David Dulany: Now it’s squashing out those negativity whack-a-mole things that are coming up all day. Squash them out, okay? And these things are gonna come up whether you like it or not. You are absolutely in no control over this, so you wanna understand “How can I control things that I’m actually allowing into my life?” Are there … And you gotta be kind of ruthless. Are there toxic people that you can reduce time with? Are you watching the news and addicted to all these things that are going on in the world that have nothing to do with these top three goals? Are there meetings that you don’t need to go to? I mean it’s somebody’s birthday. It’s not gonna necessarily get you there, and you can maybe miss something like that.
David Dulany: You gotta be really, really ruthless with your calendar because that’s the only way that you’re gonna have the time during that willpower section to be able to really knock out those difficult things. And so one of the hardest things to do, especially when you’re working for a company, is you know, your boss or your manager or your CEO puts something on your calendar during your sacred willpower time, and you’re going “Uh oh, what do I do?” And it takes a lot of guts to walk into their office, sit down and go “Look, these are my top three priorities. Cold calling, pipeline … This is what I really wanna work on. You wanna put this recurring thing right in the middle of that, and I just wanna ask you very respectfully can we put it out to later in the afternoon?” Or a time when you know that your willpower is a little bit lower and go for it then.
[bctt tweet=”You gotta be really, really ruthless with your 🗓 because that’s the only way that you’re gonna have the time during that willpower section to be able to really knock out those difficult things. #SalesSuccess” username=”DKDINSF @VanillaSoft”]
David Dulany: And having that conversation is really, really hard, especially when you’re new, but again, you have to control what you can’t control. They might say no. Fine, but at least give it a shot, because if you just let your calendar go willy-nilly and you got the news up and you’re arguing with your negative co-workers, you’re all over the place and we’re back to the having a negative mindset.
Darryl Praill: I so love this. You make the point. Ruthlessly prioritize your time, again, back when your willpower is the highest, and when you’re trying to achieve what you set out in the morning, because you were intentional about it, and have the courage to defend that. No matter it’s your boss or somebody else. And candidly, David, I think you know like I do, in the end, we’re being held accountable for results. So if I go in on my boss, 99 of 100 bosses and I said “This is why this is my rationale,” they’re gonna accommodate me, because if I hit my numbers, they’re gonna be happy. It’s a win-win.
Darryl Praill: So I so love that, and so many people don’t have the courage. So if you’re young in your career or you’re in a little bit insecure, uncertain, just try it, man. Just go out there and be respectful, and to David’s point, have the courage to defend and ruthlessly prioritize, and you’re doing it simply because you wanna hit your numbers. You wanna be successful. Because if you are successful, your company is successful, and who doesn’t want that?
Darryl Praill: So to recap, David said be intentional with your morning, know when your willpower is optimal and plan around that, and then ruthlessly prioritize. Any final thoughts? Any final takeaways, David?
David Dulany: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been a big disciple, if you will, of a guy named Darren Hardy, and he was formerly this publisher of SUCCESS Magazine. Anybody on the call, if you are interested in these ideas, a lot of them I picked up from him. He’s a tremendous resource. Wrote some great books, and definitely check it out. Learn from the masters. Implement it. See what works for you, and then throw away everything else that’s weighing you down.
David Dulany: So, Darryl, thank you so much for having me on the show, though.
Darryl Praill: Oh, man. It was my thrill to have this. And what I love about this, guys is that yeah, this is a maybe a more touchy-feely soft conversation, but it’s no less critical than knowing how to do social selling or knowing how to work a phone or knowing how to send a text message. I mean it sounds stupid, but it’s a skill, it’s a skill, it’s a skill, and they all work together. And that’s what we’re all about here at INSIDE Inside Sales, it’s about getting inside with the pros and the veterans, and make sure you take away key actionable items so you can succeed.
Darryl Praill: David, I had a lot of fun today, and hopefully, everybody on this episode, you enjoyed it. Check out David Dulany at tenbound.com, at daviddulany.com. Follow him on LinkedIn, and for goodness sake, if you haven’t done it this year, do it next year. Attend the Tenbound conference. David, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been fun.
Darryl Praill: All right, folks. We’re out of here. We’re gonna talk again real soon, but we’ll see you online at insideinsidesales.com. Take care. Bye-bye.