Do you get overwhelmed or struggle with anxiety when it comes to hitting your sales rep quota? I’m pretty sure we all do.
This week on INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl discusses all things quota with none other than best-selling author and sales consultant icon, Justin Michael. Darryl and Justin share some tangible steps that can help you increase your pipeline and hit your quota on a consistent basis. They offer tips such as streamlining your tech stack, smarter time management, as well as leveraging the processes that generate the most impact. Hear how you can reliably and regularly hit your quota on this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales!
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Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: Justin Michael, Justin Michael Consulting
Darryl Praill: You know what the toughest part about sales is? Now, of course, you’re all going to say X or Y, or prospecting, or getting lists, or having time, or what have you, and candidly it’s kind of an open-ended question but there’s really no right answer, is there? I will tell you, for those of you who don’t know and many of you who do know, I have been a sales rep. The regulars of the show know that my first sales job was selling photocopiers door to door. I have sold hardware, like a photocopier. I have sold software. I have sold services. I had my own agency for almost a decade where I only ate what I sold, and then I had the joy of having to implement it or manage the staff to implement it.
Darryl Praill: For me, the heart of selling was hitting my quota, and I guess you can reflect, right? You can say, “Okay, well, Praill, hitting quota is not hard. That’s just a numbers game. You just go through the activities. You just do it. Bam, bam, bam. And you do it right, you get the right data, you get the right script, you know your value prop, you know your ICP, you know your persona, you get some good content. Bam, you’re done, you’re in. What’s the problem, Praill?” Suck, you suck. And that’s a fair point. I probably do suck.
Darryl Praill: It wasn’t the mechanics of selling that I had a problem with as it relates to quota. For me, it was a multitude of other factors. Number one for me was the psychology, the mindset of hitting quota, right? I’m working all week. I’m working all month. I’m working all quarter to hit that milestone number, whatever it’s broken out to whatever, however you do yours, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever it might be. And you’re building, you’re building, and you’re building, and you’re building it and then you’re sweating and you’re stressing. And then as it gets closer and closer and you realize that you might not make it and then you’re going to need to be accountable and you’re going to defend all the decisions you did, and inside you, you know that, well, you could have done a lot more activity because you got distracted. The new video series of whatever just came out, Tiger King, right, and everybody’s watching that and you got to be hanging out and be social and be part of it. So of course, you had to binge on that and maybe you binged when you shouldn’t have binged, but you did that. And then of course there was social media. Oh my gosh, I’ve got to be on social media and that’s pulling on me away and I’m doing all this stuff.
Darryl Praill: And then there was the lists and the lists sucked and Marketing didn’t give me enough lists and what are we going to do now? And now, oh my gosh, I’m two-thirds through my quarter and now my average sales cycle is three months, so how can I get enough activity now to actually hit that number? I’m going to miss my number. I’m going to miss my number. Quota was a bitch. I hated quota. I hated it because of all the reasons I just said. I hated the psychology. I hated the activity. I hated the technology. I hated how insecure I felt at times when I was talking to somebody who was far wiser and more capable than I was on the phone. I hated it.
Darryl Praill: Now the irony, like any good drug, right, is that when you’re on your game when you get that adrenaline rush when you have a fantastic call, you forget all of that that just took place. And you say, “Keep me on this puppy. This is a rush. I’m having fun. Then slowly as you come down… It sounds like I know what I’m talking about when it comes to drugs. Sure, just what I’ve read. You start having the withdrawals and all of a sudden you’re freaking out and you’re just paranoid again.
Darryl Praill: That was what I disliked about selling. I loved the game. I hated all the processes to succeed at the game. Then for me, the worst part was when if I hit quota, it was like a high five. Yeah. Like you’ve just won the Super Bowl. You’re fist-bumping, you’re chest pumping, you’re praising Jesus. You’re thinking of your family, in style, and cashing that commission check. You’ve already got it spent. And then the very next day boom, down to zero. And so the game goes.
Darryl Praill: We live in a thankless world in a challenging profession, kids, and this whole quota thing is a pain in the ass, is it not? You know what I just gave you? I gave you something I hear from people all the time. It’s not just me. And I’m sure many of you can reflect upon that and say elements of what I just said really resonated with you and others are going to be completely oblivious. But what we do know is this: We do waste time. We do second guess our approach. Our mindset is often not what it should be. Often, we spend more time fricking working our systems than letting the systems help us work._
Welcome Justin Michael
Darryl Praill: So the question I ask myself, the question I struggle with, is how can I help you? How can I help you hit quota? I bring these amazing guests in. They talk about how to do discovery, how to do cold calling, how to objection handling, how to do prospecting. But at the end of the day you do this gig because you’ve got a quota to hit, so what can we do? Well, guess what I got? That’s right. If you’re wondering, let me tell you, man. I have the man himself. I have Justin Michael. Now, if you don’t know Justin Michael I’ve got to tell you right now, and I’m saying this with all sincerity and I’m saying this because I mean it, Justin Michael is just a machine. Whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter, this cat comes up with more comments and more posts that are both funny and provocative, and they push my buttons and they make me think this cat gets hitting quota. So I said, “Justin, dude, can you come on the show? Can you help me understand? Can you help the crew understand, the tribe, what do we need to do to hit quota? It’s causing us grief. How do we overcome that and what can we do better?”
Darryl Praill: Justin, sir, how you doing, my friend?
Justin Michael: Hey, I’m well. Coming in hot here from sunny southern California a little north of LA on the coast from a little town that’s really only known for Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis moving in, so…
Darryl Praill: That’s not a bad thing to be known for, right? You’re known for celebrity, so it’s ironic I’m talking to a celebrity who’s living in a little town known for celebrities. That’s kind of cool. Now you guys for those who don’t know because often we have on the show a lot of sales trainers and professionals, but Justin’s a man of… He’s in it. You’re the regional vice president of sales at YouAppi, and he’s also an acknowledged SaaS hypergrowth expert. So if you check him out on LinkedIn, check out what YouAppi does and bring it to the attention of your sales leadership and your marketing leadership because it’s a complete marketing and retargeting platform so that you can actually go and just get more visibility, more marketing or leads, all that stuff. I won’t go into it. I’d probably do it a disservice, but he’s the dude. Go ahead.
Justin Michael: Oh, you’re so kind. So yes, I have been in the trenches for 20 years, about 13 years in SaaS, so got lucky enough to work at Salesforce and LinkedIn and for Sean Parker, and then a dozen start-ups, and got to work and consult with about a hundred more all in cracking the top funnel. I got really involved in understanding where Tim Ferriss in the Four-Hour Workweek is, and what he based that on was the writings of Richard Koch; he wrote the original 80/20 principle. I think the biggest advice I could give today to the listeners as someone who started in inside sales nearly 20 years ago before the term SDR came out or Aaron Ross wrote the book is the concept of asymmetric warfare is the concept that no matter what you’re scheduled to do, 20% of your activity today will be valuable and 80% of it will be waste if you really look at the curve.
Justin Michael: Most of our society is looking at things in symmetrical proportions like it’s pleasant to see a symmetrical face or apple, but actually with the physics and effort, a lot of what we’re doing is juxtaposed. So what I’m always trying to figure out of the systems and processes that generated the most impact and I can break into the tactical on that, right? There’s something like 317 KPIs in Salesforce that Jason Jordan talks about in Cracking the Sales Management Code, but only under 20 of these are actually dynamic. The rest are static. So as revenue, revenue; MRR, MRR. That’s a static lagging indicator metric, right? We need to get into the smart activity on a daily basis and work in asymmetric ways with things like time blocking and things like how exactly the activity that you’re doing, and that’s what will make you a lot more effective. Pipeline cures all ills, and that’s how you will eventually roll back into hitting your number. I could talk about that for 200 hours.
Darryl Praill: All that’s going through my mind as I’m listening to you is one part pride, I’ll explain that in a second, and one part, for lack of a better word, awe. And the awe, let’s start with the awe, and the awe is that you just dropped so many names and every single one of those names, folks, genuinely go read the stuff. Remember, you’ve got to learn to earn, so this is huge. If you were sitting back there going well, how is MRR a static metric, right? Why isn’t it dynamic? If you don’t understand static versus dynamic in that context it’s not a negative, by the way.
Darryl Praill: Let’s be clear on this. This is not a negative. This is a provocative. He’s provoking you because he’s right. That’s a backward-looking stat. I mean, you do want to know what the numbers are. It’s not diminishing the stat, but it’s not a dynamic in real-time what-the-hell-is-going-on stat. You can map what’s going on. And then the other part pride was just that you’re on the show and you’re sharing this with the tribe and I love that, so that’s cool. So that’s my geek.
Multichannel engagement
Darryl Praill: So I’m curious because you have done this multiple times like you say you’ve been doing this for a long time, when I went through my little rant about the whole challenges of hitting quota, did any of that resonate with you personally as to what I was speaking about?
Justin Michael: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think in the beginning when I got involved in software and the service companies, I was pretty enamored with all these authors that I quote like Jill Konrath in SNAP Selling, and I was figuring out ways to optimize my cold-call scripts or send targeted emails, and there was also a doubt of the technology catching up. We had data.com. This was early primitive stuff, pre-outreach, pre-SalesLoft, and a lot of times it was studying the people actually hitting their quota and looking at patterns in the channels they were using. So even watching how my general manager made calls or followed up within Salesforce or some of the different channels that were used, and then much like I have become rather than a derivation but more of an amalgam, right, becoming a series of best practices from different authors, different mentors, and then taking on my own personal mentor.
Justin Michael: But yeah, it really resonated that there’s a ton of pressure there. There’s a ton of stress behind that. I know in the crisis, there’s a lot of compassionate management going on to rethink some of the hard KPIs because they’re such a moving target like Jeremy Donovan looked at six million emails at SalesLoft, and there’s a 36% decline in reply rate although calling has held strong. So one of the biggest things I decided early on is I’m going to use every channel, every single channel, right? I even worked in the Empire State Building selling Sales Navigator itself from LinkedIn and I still used a phone because I just didn’t want there to be any edge or any stone unturned, and that’s where I ran into a lot of research from TOPO and Jeb Blount with the triple touch just anecdotally managing SDRs then because I was always a player-coach, is that the folks that were using multiple channels in rapid succession were having a lot better success than simply a single channel. So such a huge pivotal part of being able to generate the numbers is exploring and AB testing and leveraging the channels together that I would just list it. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s directional for where you could go to be 5% better after this phone call.
Darryl Praill: I love that you’re an amalgam of best practices. I love that you’re an amalgam of best practices, and that’s what we want everybody to be. It’s what everybody should be. You don’t necessarily copy people, but take the best bits and pieces. You know, Justin was just talking about Jeb Blount as an example, and he was also talking about the phone. So let me bring two pieces together, right? If you talk to Jeb Blount about multichannel engagement in your playbooks, your cadences, or your sequences, he’ll tell you the first touch according to Jeb Blount should be the phone call. That’s your first touch, not an email or social touch or anything else because if you can get them on the phone right away they’ve just come, they’ve touched you, maybe they’ve downloaded a form. Why would you waste any other cycles, because what are you striving for? You’re striving for a live conversation so you can qualify them. So that’s a simple little best practice.
Darryl Praill: One of the things you may not know as listeners of the INSIDE Inside Sales show is that every single show has a transcription. So if you go to vanillasoft.com under resources/podcasts, if there was a show like today, like Justin’s show, you can go there and see a text version of everything he’s done, everything he said today. So you can read that, highlight it, and compile those nuggets that you can apply to you. I want you to use that, folks.
Darryl Praill: Now, it’s all about hitting quota today. We’ve got a number of topics we want to hit on, but we’ve got to do a commercial break and then we’ll be right back. And then, because there’s so many, I’m going to have Justin just go rapid fire. So if you’re listening to this, get your pen and paper out, take notes, because this is how it’s going to go today. Firehose time, folks. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.
Avoid the Frankenstack
Darryl Praill: Okay. So when we were talking, Justin, before we went live on the show, we talked about this topic and you just went like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. All these things you wanted to talk about that you could talk about and you also cautioned me that you could talk well beyond the time limit of the show, which is why we’re going to try to get as much in as possible. So I took notes. So why don’t I go through some of my notes and I’ll use it to spur you to be you and to share the knowledge, and if we go off on tangents, well, let me go off on a tangent. So that’s what we’re going to do. Work for you?
Justin Michael: Love it.
Darryl Praill: First thing you talked about here which you talked about… Before I even start, because the first topic is about a Frankenstack, his word, of systems. But what I didn’t talk about is that summer 2020, Justin’s got a book coming out called TQ, Q as in quotient, T as in technology, all right? So if you ping him, he’s going to get you a free copy. Okay? So follow him on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter, ping him, and he kind of used this as kind of the next step after what Aaron Ross was talking about with predictable revenue. How’s that for a little teaser? He’s aspiring for greatness with that analogy, and I don’t doubt he’s going to get there. Okay, here we go. Speaking of TQ, Frankenstack of systems. How is a Frankenstack of systems preventing me from hitting quota?
Justin Michael: Awesome question, and thank you. Thank you, Darryl. People like you and Aaron Ross have been huge influences, and I know Aaron has evolved his thinking and has really brought predictable revenue for it. And my book strives to be the J.A.R.V.I.S. Ironman suit wherever you are right now, field or inside, we’re all inside, we’re all remote for a minute, right, and we all have a tech stack. Think about it. Slack, Gmail, email, maybe you’re using VanillaSoft, a great sales engagement platform, a dialer. There’s some kind of tech, and in high-growth companies, 15% of them over a thousand dollars a month per rep is spent on your stack. So you’re sitting at home going, “Ah, avoidance of technology, procrastination. Maybe I’ll build a model ship or read the great American novel, Canadian novel, or European novel, whatever it is, and the problem is that some competitor somewhere is mastering that stack and they’re up-leveling.
Justin Michael: The problem with the stack is like LinkedIn has a closed API. Maybe Microsoft will change this, but you can’t really automate the full sales stack until all of the APIs, the application programming interfaces, the glue to send signals back and forth, allows it. So the big problem is you’ve got another login and another login, another piece, and you’re just all these windows are open and it’s so hard to manage all of it, right? So it kind of looks like a Frankenstein stack of tools. There’s so many vendors and I find I live in just a few. It’s important to pick a few. I’m sure Darryl will tell this. It’s just like social media. Pick a few mediums, master those, versus being an all 65 of them. I can keep going, but I want to hit the next topic.
Darryl Praill: All right. So your advice on this topic is that don’t try to be the master of a bazillion pieces of tech, just utilize the few key ones until you finally get your rhythm, you understand the tool, and then maybe you can branch out. But in the meantime, if you’re trying to do it all, it’s sucking available cycles that you need to go and prospect to hit quota. Is that the takeaway?
Justin Michael: Yes, and I would say the phone, of course, influences Sales Navigator, which is a requisite. We need some kind of a sales engagement platform so that you can automate the sending of emails so you can be superhuman, you can be 3-5x your output, you can still personalize. And then third, you do need some kind of BI system for triggers, for direct emails, for phone numbers. And on top of that, it’s really smart to have front side chat, like some kind of drift or some kind of chatbot on top of that and maybe conversational intelligence so if you’re coaching yourself, you can listen to your calls. So I’ve built out a lot of these different stacks from beginning to advanced in the book. The beauty is right now we’re in a potential recession environment where there’s tool cutting and consolidation, so work with your leadership to figure out the 80/20. These are the tooling and systems that are the most important. We’re going to double down in this area. And maybe this will be an inspiration for the kind of tech that you buy because you’ll be able to champion it and pilot it within the organization.
Darryl Praill: So there’s really two things we said in that and one that jumped out at me was, of course, we talked about the point about don’t master too many, but also that technology can, when used well, increase your efficiency. But again, the caveat is use well, and I can talk on that as well. I got lots of opinions. Okay. Next you talked about I heard you use the phrase you can have all this activity, but you’re not actually selling. Can you talk to me a bit about what you meant there?
Justin Michael: Yeah. So my mentor, Tony J. Hughes, wrote Combo Prospecting and The Joshua Principle. I was a featured case study in Combo Prospecting as sort of the cyborg rep, but I guess depending on the generation I just became a master of the automation. Busy fool syndrome is what he calls it. That’s why I went there. Right.
Justin Michael: This is the opposite of the 80/20 rule. This is just, okay, let’s raise the calling to a hundred. Let’s just make the personal message all COVID-19 is the first line. It’s just the more is more mentality, right? And I think actually if you apply the Pareto principles and the power laws, you should be able to take the 50 hours a week you’re doing right now, I don’t want to scare your manager, and do that same amount in 35 hours and get 5x more of the apple to your pipeline. If you are able to apply those principles first to see that these systems have ways to look for that waste and then to look at streaks. One is sales analysis, look at the people that are setting, create a Slack channel of the good scripts. Even with people you’re targeting, try to find targets that are similar to your best most successful customers. There’s a lot of ways to really apply this across the board. I haven’t seen a lot of people transposing 80/20 over the sales funnel, but that’s primarily how I do it.
Justin Michael: I just think like a management consultant, like Boston Consulting Group or Bain, where’s the fat in the system and how can I trim it and how can I be working on the harder things earlier? A great analogy I can put it is imagine your day as a jar with sand and rocks. You want to find those rocks first. You want to get up and before lunch do two or three things that scare you. Maybe it’s calling a board member. Maybe it’s writing that sequence, and you’re not that good at the sequence so you’re avoiding it. Work with enablement or ops. Actually, get cracking to that software that’s available to you. Maybe it’s just asking for a deal, asking for a commit, talking commercials early, doing a discovery call, or running a demo yourself as an SDR. These are some examples of really hard things. Do those first. You’ll be amazed. If you do two or three things that scare you and are hard every single day, within a couple of weeks you’ll jump forward a month. And all we’re doing is applying the power login.
Productivity and hitting your sales rep quota
Darryl Praill: Okay. So the next topic I want to hit on. You made a reference, and I love this reference because I so get it, that our life as sales professionals is often consumed not selling but instead doing admin, whether I am researching somebody, I’m writing up what just happened, I’m making a task to follow up manually, whatever it might be, it’s admin, admin, admin, admin, admin, and that recognizing the time suck admin is having on you and how that’s taking you away from prospecting is actually a large part of why you’re not hitting your quota. So I guess over to you to talk about that. I hope I didn’t steal too much of your thunder. And then how do we fix that?
Justin Michael: Yeah. So time blocking. Spending an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon, or when you can just do dedicated triples, like call, voicemail, email, just to do manual high personalization but faster. Just doing some calling is the key way to do that. What ideas do you have, Darryl? I’d love to hear a couple more of your ideas.
Darryl Praill: Well, time blocking. Yeah, time blocking. Actually, well, I have a couple. So time blocking is huge. In fact, it’s so huge that we actually did a previous podcast on this and I’ll put it in the show notes because I don’t remember who it was with. Again, I apologize. I’ve done way too many shows, folks, where that is a secret weapon for SDRs and AAEs. The thing about time blocking is you have to protect it like there’s no tomorrow. That time is sacred and no one can take you away from that, including your boss.
Darryl Praill: The other thing I look at is going back to exactly what Justin said about the Frankenstack of systems. So he’s talking about sales engagement. So let’s talk a bit about that and I know he wants to talk about Omnichannel as well as a tool, so maybe we can kill multiple birds with one stone here.
Darryl Praill: The thing about sales engagement says that I’m going to go and I’m going to have a playbook, a sequence, a cadence where I’m going to go and do like seven touches in seven days or 12 touches in 18 days or whatever it might be. You figure it out. And it’s that I don’t have to think about it. I know on day one this is what I do. I know on day two this is what I do. And therefore I can sequence the activity real fast and it just happens that the sales engagement systems give it to me.
Darryl Praill: Now where it breaks down is whether you’re using a sales engagement platform. Many of my competitors, not me, I’m full disclosure, it’s my one and only pitch on the show with VanillaSoft, like a Salesforce or a CRM, is they’re all list based. The problem with a list is that you have to go and look at the list, and then how many times have you sat and stared at that list and then you cherry-pick? That fifth one down on that list. That’s IBM. I’m going to call them. And then you don’t physically call those first four that you skipped over. And then you make an appointment. “Oh, I called IBM. I left a voicemail so I don’t have to make a task to do it.” And then the later comes by and your task pops up. You’re supposed to call IBM again and you stare at it and go, “Ah, they didn’t answer the phone last time. I’m not going to call them this time. Who else can I call?” All of that idle time. That list is killing you. Find tools that eliminate the list. Do the time blocking. That’s gold. That’s my opinion anyway.
Justin Michael: Yeah. Double click if that’s okay as I am working with a really talented AEU right now on my team who had been a top SDR who is very competent in programming sales engagement. There’s a ton of processes and systems that are defined all around our work that every day we just think about how many Zoom meetings can we set up? How many prospects can we touch in a personal way without sacrificing quality? What is the one thing we’re really trying to drive here? Tests that lead to scale that lead to revenue. So we think about quality problem. The 10x rule came out, the 10x moonshot. The problem is if you moonshot the waste, you just get more waste. So you’ve got to make sure it’s the 20% of the system that you’re 10x-ing on.
Justin Michael: So one of those things is just so laser-focused on how many discovery calls am I booking a week. It’s just like when you’re looking for a job and how many actual interviews are onsite interviews in the past you would get, so you need to come up with like a North star metric that’s gauging your level of activity. Break the system. Get so many of those that then you can’t even handle the admin load or the process of notes. Instead of staying there 70% of the time and doing all the admin, focus on the action of selling during the golden hours, and then do the admin when you have the problem. I’m not saying you shouldn’t fill it out. Fill out the minimum to keep the powers that be happy and make sure that the one thing is the one thing that is driving net new business. One of the things I used to do is write on a piece of paper “30 strangers a day”. Who are 30 people I’ve never talked to in my life that I’ve contacted today by some means? Usually, that’s going to be call and then a lot of digital signals too.
Darryl Praill: I love it. Okay. So what we’re doing here, folks is we’re taking out all of the excesses of your schedule and we’ll really laser focus things so you’re optimally working. And the more activity you can do and the less of everything else you can do, the more likely you are pure numbers game to hit your quota, right, because that’s what it’s all about.
Darryl Praill: You talk about batch processing. What do you mean by that, Justin?
Justin Michael: So batch processing is definitely a term that I learned from Tim Ferriss, but the real-time environment of always answering every social media, every alert. I have almost 30,000 people in a network, like 35,000 people. All of my social networks have all the alerts turned off. Everything on my phone is turned off. Everything I do I go in and find it and pull because if I don’t batch process my life would blow up. So I’m able to work at extreme high volumes of scale because nothing is bothering me because everything is shut off. So batch process is to have a time of day in the morning where you’re answering email and you have to mono task because your brain has certain limitations. One is the Dunbar theory. At your neocortex, you can process 150 ml. You can, as a human, without a computer, really maintain 150 people. All of us have thousands in our social network. So it goes beyond our mind. That’s why Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn created the first- and second-degree networks. So all this stuff is really a fascinating way to manage your time, right? And so having different times of the day that you do certain activities and having certain things that you go and pull toward instead of being a slave to the alerts I think is really important.
Darryl Praill: Okay. So now, and I will vouch for everything Justin just said. I am a slave to Slack, to WhatsApp, to LinkedIn, to Twitter, to email, and I just feel like it’s owning me and not me owning it. So what I’ve started to do is I put all my social media for the most part to the end of the day, exactly what Justin’s talking about, but then I feel guilty because it’s like well, it’s the end of the day which means on the European side they’re in bed so no one’s responding to that, and the West coast side they’re just banging doors and prospecting so no one’s looking at me and it’s not going to be the best time, and I just psychoanalyze myself. Don’t do that. Batch process.
Having better conversations
Darryl Praill: Last. You’ve got 30 seconds, and there’s one who we haven’t talked about. We’ve talked about so many systems and optimization. What we haven’t talked about is making the most of those conversations you are having, and so many of us do not feel like we’re equipped to have these conversations. If I could have better conversations, I bet you I’d close more. So how do I have better conversations?
Justin Michael: Yeah. At Salesforce, we called it speaking CMO. At the end of the day, if you become a subject matter expert in the thing you’re selling, you do have equal business stature to quote Sandler. To talk with someone at a C-level like Darryl, maybe there’s a specific thing you know about sales tools or marketing that’s really interesting. Well, on that subject, it’s really relevant to him and to you. So my mentors when I was younger in inside sales used to say, “Learn about business, learn about start-ups, read the Wall Street Journal. The more business acumen you have on the line, that’s going to add 10 years.” I’m an egalitarian, and I believe that we all can achieve, every generation, especially baby boomers can learn all the tech. Everyone has the access. My grandpa was 80 and he was using the internet perfectly. So yeah, the point being is a C-level conversation is about bravery and courage, but then having something to talk about, and so I think sitting with your client success team, your product folks, even learning to do a technical demo or some snapshots if your AEU support or your manager will let you do that, will give you that confidence to reach out and then just know that you have a value based on your specialty, based on your knowledge of solving things, and go top-down, middle out, bottom-up.
Justin Michael: Don’t limit yourself to just people you’re comfortable talking with. You’ll see. You’ll get delegated and have much better results. All this does funnel into hitting quota. The higher up you go, the bigger the deal size, the faster the mobilization of capital.
Darryl Praill: All right. So what did we do today? We talked about hitting quota, right? And we talked about all the fat that’s in your system that you can get rid of because it’s just pulling you away from the core of what you need to do. And then we talked about when you have those conversations, just how to really connect and make the most out of them. That combination of optimization and better engagement, and we touched briefly on multichannel. We didn’t even talk about things like additional channels like WhatsApp or any other kind of cool tech, but it’s all out there. It’s all about making sure you are just kicking ass as optimally as you can. This is an intentional thing. If you agree with that, and hopefully what you saw on this podcast was us literally doing that, I’m talking super-fast today because there’s so much to get through, that’s how you get the most out of a show. That’s how you hit quota. That, my friends, is the man himself, Justin Michael.
Darryl Praill: We are out of time. You need to follow him. He’s prolific on LinkedIn and on Twitter. My name is Darryl Praill and I think I hit my quota for talking. I’ll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye-bye.