How to Ensure That Admin Tasks Don't Overwhelm Your Day | Anthony Iannarino - 2018

Administrative tasks are part of every sales role, but they should never take priority over selling. I'm revisiting a conversation from the archive with Anthony Iannarino to share practical ways to keep admin work from taking over your day. While this conversation first aired in 2020, the principles are still relevant today, especially when AI can help streamline many everyday tasks. Busy Is Not the Same as Productive A full calendar does not always mean meaningful progress. As sales professionals become more successful, more requests, emails, client issues, and internal tasks naturally compete for their attention. The challenge is learning to separate work that creates opportunities from work that simply keeps you busy. Staying productive means focusing on the activities that move deals forward instead of constantly reacting to every request. Protect Your Most Important Work The best time and energy should be reserved for activities that directly contribute to sales. Instead of starting the day by checking emails or responding to client requests, block uninterrupted time for prospecting, nurturing relationships, and preparing for important sales conversations. Administrative work can be handled later without sacrificing the work that drives results. Create Boundaries Around Client Requests Being available for clients does not mean responding to every request immediately. Many transactional tasks, such as correcting invoices, retrieving reports, or resolving operational issues, belong to other departments. While it is important to make sure customers receive the help they need, those responsibilities should be delegated whenever possible so selling remains the priority. Use Time Blocks to Stay Focused Switching between emails, CRM updates, prospecting, and meetings throughout the day makes it difficult to stay focused. Working in dedicated time blocks helps eliminate distractions and improves productivity. Setting aside uninterrupted periods for prospecting, project work, and administrative tasks makes it easier to complete each activity without constantly changing focus. Batch Administrative Tasks Together Administrative work is unavoidable, but it does not have to interrupt the entire day. Grouping similar tasks together, such as updating the CRM, replying to emails, or completing reports, helps reduce time lost through constant task switching. Completing these activities during scheduled blocks keeps them from interfering with revenue-generating work. Let Your CRM Work for You A CRM should be used as a tool to support future conversations, not as another task to avoid. Recording important notes after meetings makes it easier to remember customer goals, previous discussions, and next steps. Instead of relying on memory, use the CRM to capture details that strengthen future interactions and improve follow-up. Confidence Matters More Than Endless Research Many sellers delay prospecting because they believe they need more research before making a call. Research has its place, but it should never replace meaningful outreach. A clear value proposition, confidence in the conversation, and consistent follow-up have a much greater impact than spending hours gathering information that may never be used. Prioritize Opportunity Creation Every Day Sales success comes down to creating opportunities and winning them. Administrative work supports the sales process, but it does not replace it. Protect time for prospecting, client conversations, and relationship building before tackling lower-value tasks. Consistently doing the most important work first creates better long-term results. "Do what's most important first every day without failure, and don't negotiate with yourself." — Anthony Iannarino Resources Keep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool https://prospectpro.io/. Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind https://thesalesevangelist.com/sales-mastermind/. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals. Visit Blue Mango Studios https://bluemangostudios.com/ for help in creating podcast production content. Sponsorship Offers This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot. With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn. Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/cx/20/09/sales-navigator-podcast?src=re-pod&trk=tse&veh=tse&mcid=6897323946090332160. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation. Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/UCMfjZbX. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey http://thesalesevangelist.com/survey. https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/lc5yAa8P We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-evangelist/id788738885, Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3RoZXNhbGVzZXZhbmdlbGlzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5kaXI3Pj2AhVKcjABHW5PDVwQ9sEGegQIARAC, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-sales-evangelist-sales-trainingspeakingbusiness-marketingdonald, or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1NjzsFjQwVrgboUfDvbzd5?si=LdQOJDc1T-WBPMxr1h3RsA. Audio provided by Free SFX, https://freesfx.co.uk/ Soundstripe https://soundstripe.com/, and Bensound http://www.bensound.com/. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

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• 1:53Speaker 00

  We all have them as sales professionals, and some of these will take up a significant amount of your time. With AI, we can help. But today, I'm going into archive. I'm pulling out this episode that ties into your admin task and how your admin task can kill you and some easy ways how you can get over them. Check this out.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist, and I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, I'm going to talk with Anthony Ian Arena. We're going into the archive and pulling out this episode. We ran it back in 2020, but the concept that Anthony shared back then is still relevant right now. We do have a lot of admin tasks, and some of those admin tasks take up our time. Some of that can be augmented right now with AI. But as you listen to Anthony's message and ideas and the principles that he share, see how you can apply that to your sales arena right now, but also add AI into it. I wanted to bring this back because some of these were practical things that we can do on a day to day basis. Now, if you're new to our podcast, please subscribe, and I'll make sure to notify

• 3:02Speaker 00

  you every time we drop a new piece of episode. If you've been listening for a long time, but you haven't done so already, please subscribe, as well as tell one more colleague how they can best benefit from the show. I'm going to go ahead and let Anthony take it away. We're going to dive into this episode. Check it out.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Welcome to the show, Anthony.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Hey, how are you? Good to see you again.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Man, I'm so super excited to have you on the show again. I'm super excited to pick your brains a little bit as we dive into this topic. I bragged about you there in a teaser a little bit and about how, you know, some of the great things that you're doing right now. And this topic, when we were decided to reach out and to invite you to come on a show, you mentioned that this is a topic that's near and dear to your heart. And I'm just curious if you don't mind telling us why you're so passionate about this topic, Anthony.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  As you get be more successful in sales, more non-sales related work finds its way to your desk. I mean, and it generally works that way because now you have clients and clients are reaching out to you. Now you have the challenges of execution. So you went out and you sold something to somebody, and now you're responsible for making sure that they actually get that outcome, because that's what you're accountable for when you sell. And so little problems start showing up in your inbox, and then bigger problems start showing up in your inbox. And all of a sudden, you're doing a lot of work that has nothing to do with what we do in sales. I find is that a lot of people end up feeling really busy and busy and productive are not the same thing. Those are two very, very different ideas.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Busy means that you're running from one thing to the next, trying to get things done. Productive means you're actually making progress towards your goals. So these are two very, very different ideas. So it's very easy when you have an email inbox for people to decide, Donald, you know what? I want you to talk about this or think about this. I want you to do something about this thing and I need you to call this person. And so the outside world, there's no barrier to just giving you things to do without you even deciding that you're accepting these things. Now, to be fair, some of them, when your client has a problem, you sold them, so they're going to call you. Yeah. Or they're going to email you and ask you for something.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And what happens is that people get tied up in what I would call the transactional work of selling. So the client sent me an email, so I need to email them back. And then they didn't get a report and somebody didn't give it to them. So I'm going to get the report for them to make sure they get the information that they need. And pretty soon that starts to dominate your day. And the more successful you are, the more of those things that show up. So the thing for salespeople to think about is what do we do? What is it that we do? We go out into the world and we find prospective clients or dream clients, I would call them, targets, people that are really going to benefit from what we do. And we sit down with them and we have a conversation about change.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  So we're the only part of the organization that does this work, that goes out and actually asks for a conversation to talk about what you should be doing different. And then we create an opportunity where there was none. And then we pursue that opportunity and we win it. So when you're retying the invoice that was wrong, no one's picking up the phone and making cold calls for you to make sure that you're going to create the opportunities. So that goes back to accounting. If the invoice is wrong, you send that to accounting and tell them to take care of it. Now, what happens now, particularly more than ever, is that people get tied up in the idea of, "I have to always be available for my clients."

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  So, first thing in the morning, I'm gonna open my inbox and check and see if anybody needs me to do anything. So, you're automatically passive and reactive. As soon as you open up the inbox, what you're saying is, "Let me see what other people want from me," instead of what I know I need to do to get the best results for me and for my company and for my clients right now. So, the thing is, is that you're responsible for the outcomes that you sell, but you are not responsible for the transactions. So, the transactions, they need a report, that's not yours. They need an invoice, that's not yours. They have a problem with operations, that's not yours. Now, you might take the call, but you gotta hand all that stuff off. And here's my favorite thing to see right now, Donald.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  "I can't block time in the morning because I have to be available for my clients. I have to be at the ready if they ever call." And it's like, well, if you were in a meeting, presenting to the buying committee on your solution, in the middle of that, would you go, "Oh, hang on just a second. I got another client right now. They need my help right now with an invoice that they didn't get, so hold tight, I'll be right back, and I'll take care of you." Like, you're not gonna do that. You're gonna have your phone turned off. Like, you're not taking that call. So, do you think that the client, when you don't answer the phone, they're like, "Oh, Donald's just ignoring me, because that's just the kind of guy he is. He sold me, and then he's gonna ignore me." No, they're like, "Oh, he must be busy right now. I'm gonna leave him a message and send him an email, and he'll get back with me."

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  So, the trick is to be able to say, "I have to put my first and best energy on the things that matter." And then, the transactional stuff, I'm willing to help any client. I'll talk to people for them on their behalf, whatever it is, after I do the work that I need to do.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  He already got me started. Like, this is, this is a near and dear. It's how you end up being in the bottom 50% is by not deciding what you're going to do with your time and prioritizing the only few things that matter: opportunity creation, opportunity capture.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I mean, you're just spitting straight fire here. I'm writing things down as you're talking. And one of the things that I liked, we said is a busy versus the, was it?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Productive.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Productive, right? Because I, I, I've been there. I mean, I was raising my hand in my head while you're talking because I remember those days. And unfortunately, every once in a while, that still creeps up and it's a nasty habit to break. It's like, you know, how can I own, one of my friends named Justin Sua, he came on our show a while back and he said, you need to own your morning. Like, how can you own that for yourself? And for me, it's like, you know, doing the workout or it's eating something because I know if I don't eat, then by midday, I have this killer headache and I didn't do the things that I took care, I need to take care of. When in actuality, those things that the clients needed, like you said, somebody else could have done that. Or it wasn't mission critical at that time. You know what I mean? But it just totally throws off my day and throws off your psyche and your mindset.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the things that, that we teach is that you need a minimum of three 90 minute blocks in the day. So I got one clean block at 90 minutes for prospecting in the morning. No, no inbox, not looking at that. I'm going to tell you the way that I process inboxes is sort of on my deathbed. I'm not going to say like, I can't die yet. I still have emails I have to reply to. Like, you're not going to say that. It's not the most important thing. I know it feels like it is, but it's not the most important thing. So you have to have a 90 minute block where you can say, I'm going to focus on opportunity creation. I've got a prospect, I got to nurture relationships, I've got to follow up with people I've talked to.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  If you do 90 minutes, at the end of the 90 minutes, if you want to pick up your inbox, take a look, see if anything interesting comes in. Check your voicemail, have at it. And then give yourself a second 90 minute block, whatever that block is for you. So maybe you've got a big client presentation, you need to put it together. You'll find out if you block 90 minutes, the first thing that happens is you're like, wow, when I didn't have my phone on and when I, I'm in do not disturb mode and I don't have my internet up, it only took me 38 minutes to do that. Now, what do I do with the rest of my time? Because you're not used to being focused. You're used to having email up and your phone beeping at you. And social media and all the other things. If you can get three of those in a day, three 90 minute blocks, that's four and a half hours.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  So four and a half hours of proactive work, just a little bit more than half of an eight hour day is proactive. And the rest of it, I understand you're going to have clients that need you, your operations team needs you, leadership needs you, whatever it is, you can give them three and a half. You just can't give them eight.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  You know, very interesting. And I, I think sometimes there's some stat that was done that said, salespeople on average, when it comes down to actual selling, it was less than half of the day that they actually spend in selling activity. So if you were to go with something like this, it sounds like this at any seller would be way more productive than their, the average approach.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the, the last number that I saw is there's about 16% of the time actually selling, which is a very, very small amount of time. And it's because we've added all these different things to our workload. So I've got to take care of the CRM. I've got to take care of email. There's a whole bunch of things. Email takes most people a couple of hours a day.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And I generally answer mine. I try to reply and I was, you had the experience of what it's like to wait for me to give you an email back. Right. Because you're important to me, but email sits, I try to respond to all of them on Wednesday and Saturday, and in between it gets full.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  But you have to decide, do I want my priorities and do I want my goals? Or do I want to be available to other people at all times? And you can't be available to all people at all times. You can get back with them though. You can be respectful. You can return their calls. And look, at 90 minutes, if you want to take the next 30 to do that work because it makes sense, then you do it. You know, and take 30 minutes and return those calls, respond to the emails, whatever it is. But you just can't put it first.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  You can't put small transactional work above your real work.

• 12:40Speaker 00

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• 13:22Speaker 00

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• 13:43Speaker 00

  And you know, there's a couple of things that come from that, too. When you did that, or let's go say we go through that process, right? When we were reaching out and, you know, it made me realize that when I do have time with you, that is precious, and that I need to, I need to embrace that time, and I need to use it. And I think sometimes where we seem too much like our, to our clients, or just to any random individual, that we are, like you said, at their beck and order, it just kind of takes away that, I guess, our importance, or our worth, if that makes sense. But if my client, if a prospect recognized that, I mean, you want to get back in touch with your prospects, you want to, in a certain period of time period. But I think what happens with that, if the client or prospect

• 14:27Speaker 00

  recognized that I'm not jumping right at their every beck and call, like you're saying, they see that Donald's important, that the sales evangelist must be doing pretty good for business. And that I, when I do get that time, I'm going to embrace it. I'm going to utilize it. And the other thing that I saw too, Anthony, with my personal time, when I finally started taking control of my, my own calendar was I saw that I would, when I went with the traditional approach, that I need to respond to everybody right now, I realized that I was still missing a whole bunch and a lot filtered or cracked and that made it, and I never got back to those people in a timely manner. And that made it seem that I was like, I guess, you know, that I didn't care. Well, in actuality, I did, but I thought I was being effective by responding to everybody as opposed

• 15:11Speaker 00

  to like what you're saying, set up times and respond in a reasonable time, but not just at every beck and moment, because you can't respond at every, you can't get everything done at every beck and moment.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I was in England with a client a couple of years ago and somebody reached out to me with an email and asked me to get back to them. Well, so now I have a time zone problem and I have, you know, time I'm giving with a client who's got a, a conference with 3,000 people there and I'm doing multiple things and I just wasn't, it wasn't possible for me to get back to that person. And when I finally reached out to this person, he said, I would never do business with someone that takes 48 hours to get back to me. And I said, I appreciate that. We won't be a good fit. And I, I want you to understand that when I'm with a client, whether it's you or some other client, I'm not working on other clients. Like it doesn't work that way. Like if you have

• 16:01Speaker 01

  my attention, you get my full and undivided attention. I'm not somewhere else. And we parted ways with that, but that's sort of like, that's how it has to be. Like if I'm, if you're doing something like I'm with you right now, I don't have email up. I don't have a phone. If the phone, it's on mute. I'm not going to take a phone call while we're doing this because I'm giving you my full undivided attention. And I think that's what you owe your clients. So when you're doing the work that you need to do, you owe that work, your best effort and your best energy. And when you are distracted by email and water cooler chatter, if you're, if you ever get to go back to an office at the time we're doing this, we'll see. Your dogs are barking, your children are trying to go to school, all the stuff that's going on when people are working from home.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  But you've got to give it, you owe that work your best effort and you owe your clients your best effort. But you have to decide that I'm going to be doing this particular thing right now and not try to spread your attention across all these things at the same time. So do what's most important and make sure that you take care of those first. So I like your guest who said, own your morning.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I want to own my morning and I want to own a good part of my afternoon, too. I want to own that because if you want to get results, you've got to put your time and your attention into the result you want. And nothing else will replace it. So you can be super great at email, you can be super responsive and not reach your goals because you're not willing to say, I have to turn all this stuff off.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  You know, a couple of questions for you, Anthony, as well with this. What are some suggestions you would give when it comes to the CRM? Because we know everybody needs to update Salesforce or whatever CRM you're using. And a lot of the sellers that I, you know, get with, they say, you see the both sides. The sales leaders are saying, update it. The sales reps are saying, I don't have time. How do you, any tips on that?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Any administrative tasks that you have to do, the first thing you want to do is aggregate them. You want to put them together. So if I'm going to get into the CRM, I'm going to do all the work in the CRM at that time. If I'm going to open my inbox and reply to everybody who needs a reply, I'm going to reply to everybody in that time. So you aggregate those and then you make time for it. So I would tell you my best recommendation, four thirty to five o'clock, do your CRM. Like put the notes in from the day so that you've got them. I don't know why people don't like their CRM. So first of all, your memory is not that good. What did you have for breakfast last Thursday? You have no idea. Like I have no idea what, like, I don't even know if I had breakfast. I have no clue, it was too long ago. But you're going to remember all the important things that a client said

• 18:34Speaker 01

  three weeks from now before you go back in for your presentation. You're not going to remember. You take good notes, you put the notes in the CRM because it's really good at remembering things.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  And if you know David Allen's work, Getting Things Done, David Allen would tell you, your brain is for thinking, not remembering things. And that's why when you walk past the batteries in the grocery store, you don't buy them because you don't know that your flashlight's dead until your electricity goes out. And then you're like, I wish I had batteries. Your brain isn't thinking about it at that time. But if you have a checklist, if you've got your tasks written down, if you've taken really good notes on what clients said, and they told you, you know, Donald, this is what's compelling us to change right now. These are the three problems we've had. I get to talk about that in every meeting with them because I captured it. And I put it in the CRM. So the CRM can remind me at any time what the the content of our conversation was, but aggregate it, put it all together.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Don't go back and forth from one thing's task switching. It takes too much time and energy. So you don't want to like do some prospecting, do some CRM work, then do some email, just aggregate them, put them all together. So if I'm in email, I'm in email. CRM, I'm in a CRM. Be clean.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Be clean, be focused. Another thought that I have too, want to get your insights on your, what about when it comes to breaking up those roles? Because you find, I mean, every team is different, but one of the things that I find that sellers who are getting busy, they think about the idea of pawning stuff off on and a BDR or someone like that to help them out, or even getting like an executive assistant, a VA to help thoughts, ideas on that.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  If you can have a VA help you, that's great. I don't know if I would take a person whose role is to create opportunities and have them do something else.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  And I'm more and more concerned, and I keep writing about it more and more about the SDR and the BDR role generally. And so first off, most people treat it like it's a qualifying conversation. So then the BDRs and SDRs send me notes like, why does everybody miss my meetings? Because when you ask them, are you the decision maker? Do you have a budget? Do you have a timeline? Why do you need this right now? They don't feel like it was a lot of value to them. So they don't want to come to your next meeting because you didn't create any value. And then they say, well, if I do discovery, then my AE is going to be mad when I hand it off and they need to do discovery because I've already done it. And it's like, yeah, it's hard. You have to do that, but I do think that there's, there's going to have to be an evolution of these roles.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Where BDRs and SDRs are going to have to become more part of the sales conversation. Instead of sort of like, well, we don't want to waste this AE's time. The AE is already wasting their time anyway. They're waiting for the FDR to hand them something like, you don't need to worry so much about that. And I'm afraid this tailorism, you know, where we pretend that the sales process is, is a machine. And I'm going to turn the wrench three times here and then I'm going to hand it over to Donald. He's going to weld something over here and then it's going to move down. Doesn't work that way. It's a conversation with a client, so you have to think about the value there. I wouldn't waste a BDR or SDR's team on transactional things either.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  I think that we have to do more to protect sales roles from things that are not sales related. And my best way to tell you this is if you want me to retype your invoice. Then I need you to make 80 outbound phone calls today to schedule my meetings for next week. Like if I'm doing your work, then you have to do mine, right? It doesn't work that way. We have specialists, those people take care of this, we take care of ours. But if you're not selling, then no one's selling. And if you're not working on creating and winning opportunities, I'll say it this way. Selling is opportunity creation and opportunity capture. Everything else that we do is commentary on that. It doesn't have anything to do with it. I know that you have to put notes in the CRM and you have to email and all that.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  But the only two things that you're going to ever get paid for is going out into the world and creating an opportunity where somebody's going to get a much better result because of the work that you help them with. And then you capture that opportunity and you help them execute it. That's the only thing you're ever going to get paid for. So that's our job. We got to start getting some barriers put around what are my responsibilities and what's the organization's responsibility?

• 22:58Speaker 00

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• 23:42Speaker 00

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• 24:03Speaker 00

  Since 2013, we launched this podcast. The goal of the podcast was to share a wealth of information, and I feel that we've successfully done so. As a natural byproduct, listeners like you would reach out and ask, "Could I coach them? Could I train their team? Could I come and speak in an S K O? Could I consult for them?" And that is how we gain the majority of our business, and still to this day. So in 2019, one of our clients saw what we did and asked, "Could we do that for them?" We experimented with it, and we started a podcast production agency. Now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world. And it's amazing. I would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source, but also educational and a lead generation.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  If you're interested, go to bluemangostudios.com. Again, bluemangostudios.com, and our team can show you exactly what we did. It's amazing.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  I come across sellers oftentimes and you see this on LinkedIn where they're like, "I have to do tons of research."

• 25:07Speaker 01

  On what?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  What are you, like, are you a graduate student in a PhD course or something? That you're a researcher? What do you need to research?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  I have to research before I make my calls. I need to know everything as I can. I need to sound important. I need to sound like I bring in value to the table.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  What that means is that you're afraid of the conversation because the only thing that you need to know is that this company is in a vertical that we have expertise in helping solve a certain set of problems and get a certain result. When you make a call, there's only two outcomes that are possible.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  You get a meeting or you don't get a meeting. And if I, if I call you and I'm like, "Donald, you know what? I was looking at you on LinkedIn and you went to the same school as my brother. I mean, we should be doing business together. We're practically family already." Like, how are you going to use that information in a cold call? You don't need it. All you're trying to do is get a meeting. You don't have to have a bunch of, you're not a researcher. You make the call and you're either, so there's three sort of variables for prospecting. Can I trade you enough value that you'll give me your time? That's the first thing. So if I say, "Love to talk about me and my company and all the cool things we do," that ain't a great value proposition. Yeah. But if I say, "I want to share with you the four trends that we believe are going

• 26:28Speaker 01

  to have the biggest impact in your vertical over the next 18 to 24 months and some of the things that we see working. What do you look like Thursday for an executive briefing? And even if there's not a next step, you're going to know how we think about this and you're probably going to want to challenge some of your management team to start thinking about how you might address some of these things. While we're together, I hope that you will inform me on what you guys are seeing too. What's Thursday look like? I mean, I got to have a value prop." So that's the first one. The second one is conviction. So when you call and you're like, "Donald, is now a good time?" And you're like, "For what? You called me. You must had something on your mind. Is now a good time?" Or they do it the other way. "Is now a bad time?"

• 27:11Speaker 01

  It is for you.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm doing invoices right now. It's a bad time.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm busy retying reports for my clients. It's if you don't believe what you're saying, and if you don't believe in your heart that you belong in the room with this person that you're calling because you have enough value to help them get a better result, they're going to hear that in your voice. I mean, you have to be somebody who's a peer. You can be respectful of people, but you also have to be respectful of yourself and be convicted about this, so they're not going to say yes. So no amount of research is going to cover up your lack of confidence or conviction. It's just not, it doesn't work that way. And then the third variable is you have to persist. When you say no, I have to ask you again. And if you say no again, I have to ask you another time. I'll probably

• 27:58Speaker 01

  let you off the hook on the third time because I'd rather have the relationship than get into a battle of wills with somebody who can say no, that I'm trying to develop a relationship with. But you do have to persist and you have to be professionally persistent over a long period of time, which means I may have to lose one round and then nurture the relationship and then try again in a few weeks. That's the thing that salespeople should be doing. They should not be worrying too much about research. They either are going to say yes to a meeting or no, no matter what you know. You can know what kind of car they drive and their home address.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  It's going to help you on a cold call.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  No, I'm 100% in agreeance with you on that. I think there's a that this is one of those things. I'm doing a training program right now on mindset and we're using partner with an organization called the specific institute. And it's kind of like looking back at neuroscience and why people do certain behaviors. And you hit the nail right on the head. It's not necessarily because you have to do any research. It's the simple fact that you just don't want to call, or it's a simple fact that you're, because it doesn't matter what you find out. I mean, I've seen people who spend all their time doing research and have all these insights, but when they they can't get a person on a phone. If I can't get you on the phone, then what's the use of all that insights in the first place? You know, if you have that one value prop, then it's going to be clean and not jumping from industry to industry, focusing on that industry that you're in and just killing it

• 29:16Speaker 00

  that way, blocking your time.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Right. That's, that's exactly. Yeah, I mean, and it really comes from in here. Like, if you're confident, people are going to say yes to you. If you're hedging, like Donna, I don't know, maybe you might be open to looking at, you know, for just like 15 minutes and like, that doesn't sound like you believe that you can create any value for me. And so that's the test. One of my favorite stories about the CEO, Jack Welch, who was at GE when GE was GE. And they were either buying or selling a company every day at that time. And somebody would come in to the boardroom and start pitching an idea of a company to buy.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  And Jack Welch would immediately just attack them. He'd be like, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. We would never do that. I don't even know why you brought it here. And if the person's like, I'm sorry, Mr. Welch, you know, then he wouldn't buy it. But if they're like, no, Jack, you're wrong. This is a good deal. We should be buying it. Then he was like, like, if they're convicted, I wrote the check. And the reason I wrote the check is I, I just wanted to know if they believed it and if they were going to execute on it if I bought it. The only way I could tell was how confident they were going to be about the defense. And that's the way they have to think about this. Like, if you aren't willing to push to say, this time that we spend together will be valuable for you. And even if there's not a next step, you are going to have new insights and you are going to have some other things that you're probably going to have

• 30:42Speaker 01

  concerns about in the future. You know, if you don't believe it, I can't believe it.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Anthony, this has been like straight money. And I know that many who are listening to this, they've maybe got a good sense of a refreshing of what they really need to focus on. If there's one major tip you would give them as we wrap everything all together, what's that one major piece of advice?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Well, because we were talking about what you do with your time, do what's most important first every day without failure. And don't negotiate with yourself. Don't ever negotiate with yourself. Get to the point where whatever the worst and most awful task is, you do it without any hesitation. And I promise you that you will become more successful faster than anybody you know.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Love it. If listeners want to get in touch with you, what's the best place for them to go to do so? Not to send a long email.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, thesalesblog.com.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Awesome. We'll put that back in our show notes, Anthony. We'll go ahead and send it out. And we'll also link back to your books as well, which are recommend phenomenal. So thank you again for your time. Appreciate you.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Good to see you again. Thanks for having me.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Hey, that was Anthony Iannarino, and if you enjoy that, please connect with Anthony on LinkedIn, tell him you heard him here on the Sales Evangelist Podcast, as well as please connect with me as well, Donald C. Kelly. I would love to hear from you, hear what's going on in your world, what's working, what's not working, and so forth. To find more information about me, go to LinkedIn.com/in/DonaldCKelly, or just search The Sales Evangelist or Donald C. Kelly on LinkedIn. Listen, I want you to thrive. I hope this was able to help you with some of your admin tasks, and I want you to succeed. But most importantly, I want you to raise your level of thinking, go out and do big things. See you on the next one.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSC Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is DeSarun Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristi Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galbraith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia, and I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Sales Podcast Network.