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Outside Sales Talk
Why Health is the Key to Unlocking Your Sales Potential - Outside Sales Talk with Brandon Fluharty
01:05:46
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- [00:00]
A
That's a simple concept we've all encountered in our life. We, it's, it's easier to do the bad stuff than the good stuff. So once we get in the cadence, the operating rhythm of tracking the things that are easy to track, then we've built the skill and a solid foundation to start expanding that into the more nuanced things. So when it comes to being, say, a more impactful seller versus just an activity driven seller, phone calls, number of meetings, number of emails sent, number of proposals sent, that's the easy stuff to track. But what does it mean really?
- [00:49]
B
This is Outside Sales Talk, the best podcast for outside salespeople. I'm your host, Steve Benson, and we're here to chat with the world's top sales experts so that you can get their best sales tactics to level up your game. Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today I've got Brandon Fluharty with me and we're going to talk about why health is the key to unlocking your sales potential. Brandon, welcome to the show.
- [01:20]
A
Thanks Steve, appreciate it. Glad to be here.
- [01:25]
B
So Brandon has over 20 years of experience in SMB, mid market and enterprise sales. In 2018, he became a strategic SaaS seller, selling over $50 million in new business for an AI company to some of the world's leading brands. In 2022, he retired from the corporate world to focus on content creation that can help salespeople take an integrated approach to work and life, enabling them to thrive in a more holistic manner. Super interesting. Really excited to hear your perspectives, Brandon.
- [02:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, I can't wait to dig in.
- [02:04]
B
So first question, salespeople are always striving for growth. Let's talk about how healthy that is to be always, you know, striving for, for, for that next level.
- [02:19]
A
Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to how you define growth. I think growth, when you're just looking for the hockey, you know, stick graph that is sort of a fallacy in business and in life. It's, it's hard to just continue that linear growth. But if we look at growth in a, I guess, more introspective way and sort of lead with, you know, a set of eyes from the human perspective, not just the seller's perspective or the professional perspective. We realize we can learn just as much if not more from, say, failures, from dips, embracing seasonality, knowing that, you know, the world around us goes through seasons, there are constant changes. So I think tapping into that and realizing that growth doesn't just mean, you know, quota attainment, quarter over quarter and doing that for the rest of your. Your career, that's. That's going to be a. A tall challenge. So realizing whether you're, you know, surpassing quota or not meeting it, there are all these learning opportunities. And those learning opportunities unlock, you know, real growth as a human being.
- [03:46]
B
Yeah. And, you know, it's so easily get. It's so easy to get overly focused on one type of growth, especially when. When we're in a sales role and everything seems to boil down to this one number. When really there's lots of areas that we're probably better off thinking about growing in. All of them.
- [04:07]
A
Yeah, for sure. I think it's more like Winding river that we experience when we sort of look back and reflect on our own experiences and our growth in sales. Sometimes you have to pivot in different environments. You take on different roles, you take on new challenges and get into new industries that maybe you don't have specific knowledge in, but all of those are growth opportunities. And you'll face things like imposter syndrome. And I look at that as maybe a beacon of growth. Right. The feeling of, I don't know if I'm ready for this. I think, you know, when. When sellers can embrace that as a guidepost, that you're actually putting yourself in a situation where, where you're challenging yourself, of course you're going to feel like an imposter. Right. It's. It's all net new experiences, knowledge that you don't yet have, skills that you don't yet have mastered. Embrace that. Dig into that. Otherwise, if we run away from that discomfort, we're always going to be starting over at ground zero. And it's going to feel like maybe you're perpetually busy, but you're really just running really quickly on a hamster wheel and not making any progress.
- [05:34]
B
Absolutely. So talk to me about the four S's that you describe. The harmonized self and how tracking these different metrics can lead to improved sales performance.
- [05:50]
A
Yeah. So I'll sort of back into that with sort of sharing how I discovered the four S's and why tracking them became really important. So back when I was a field sales rep, so you know a little bit about my history into sales and how I was able to use corporate sales to eventually escape the corporate world and now do my own thing. I happened into sales. Like many listening here, it wasn't necessarily a deliberate career move. Um, but the forces conspired to put me in sales, and I ran with it, and I'm so glad that I did. Um, but the unfortunate downside of getting into sales, especially when I started my first account management role in 2006, you know, at the time, and really unfortunately it's still prevalent today, is this mentality of ah, you can rest when you die. Um, it's, it's great to wear, you know, a lack of sleep like a badge of honor. You've got to hustle, you've got to grind around the clock if you want to be successful. Because we looked at the Elon Musk of the world, we looked at these people who sacrificed everything for their business or to, to attain wild wealth. Yet we don't always know what the trade offs or the sacrifices they were experienced experiencing behind the scenes. And I unfortunately in 2012 experienced the downside of that mentality and that approach by landing in the hospital. I was only 31 and I was almost blind in one eye. And I later found out once I went to the hospital that I had a mini stroke and it was idiopathic. There was really no known cause for it and typically a stroke for a 31 year old is one of two reasons. Either you have a hole in your heart and after a battery of tests they ruled that out or heavy drug use, which was not the case for me as a former aspiring professional soccer player. Took good care of myself, ate well and treated myself right except for the wearing the lack of sleep like a badge of honor. Constantly working around the clock, 12, 14, 16 hour days. I tied my self worth to always being at the top of the leaderboard. And so it was a painful lesson that unfortunately I didn't learn. Well at that moment I did creep back into my old ways. But something really changed as I elevated. I went from SMB sales to mid market consulting. That gave me an opportunity to get into enterprise sales. And then eventually I got into strategic accounts where I was dealing with the top whales of the economy. And when the pandemic hit, when I started that role in 2018 and I was getting back into some of those bad habits, constantly on a plane, constantly caffeinating myself, lack of sleep, three, four hours of sleep a night was, was commonplace. So it was just racking up constant sleep debt and I felt myself getting burned out, but I was still getting, getting the results. And once the pandemic hit and sort of equalized everything for everyone, where, you know, we were sort of forced to be grounded after coming off a really successful year in 2019, I started to change my ways and I started to do things very intentionally, very deliberately and said to myself, listen, I Can't continue operating this way. Otherwise I'm not going to be able to produce the results that I want for myself, for the company. And so I went back to some of my earlier sort of training and habits as, as trying to be a professional football or soccer player in Europe with a pro team. And I got consistent with my calendar. I sort of scrapped everything and redesigned it from the ground up. And I started tracking things that weren't necessarily sales performance related. I sort of had this hypothesis that I think I can influence my sales performance a lot better. And if I take care of my mental health, if I take care of my physical health and focus on understanding what that would do to my professional performance. And so I laid out these four S's, you know, S number one is sleep, S number two is skills, S number three is strain, and S number four is satisfaction. And all of that sort of harmonizes to create success on, on my terms. And so to dig into that a little bit, I started wearing a whoop, a wearable that tracks your sleep as well as other things, your recovery score. I've tried Oura Ring, Apple Watch, Fitbit, I've tried them all. But Whoop for me worked really well. And it showed me, you know, certain insights and how that affected my sleep performance, how I could get restorative sleep versus just looking at my overall number of hours in bed or the sleep that I was actually getting. It was restorative sleep I found. I kind of found a sweet spot for myself around seven hours allowed me to have the energy throughout the day to be on for meetings and to be able to deliver really sharp points of view and perspectives that I couldn't quite do when I was, you know, had that brain fog and I was unclear with my thoughts, being constantly sleep deprived. So I got really consistent about going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time. And that really helped show that I could deliver consistent revenue. And then the skills I, I started tracking in an interesting way. I started just using something called the Pomodoro technique and the, the concept behind that. And there's a great book on this by Cal Newport called Deep Work. Doing deep Work is what solo tasking, focusing on one really important thing, and for even a field rep, when it feels like more shallow work, you're going from appointment to appointment. But even looking back on my career, it was the deep work that moved the needle for me to eventually graduate into higher levels of selling. And examples of deep work would be the information maybe you prepare before you go Meet with a prospect for the first time and showing that you know something about their business. Delivering a really powerful insights that connects what you do and what you're capable of or provokes a really thought provoking conversation with that prospect. Or perhaps it's delivering an interesting or creative business case or a creative way of breaking into an account that's been really cold and has ghosted you or you just can't find your, your yourself breaking into that account. That's what I'm talking about. Deep work versus the mundane. Following up on emails, the, the, the, the updating, the, the CRM. All the things that keep you busy. But being busy doesn't mean you're being productive and that's going to lead to driving revenue. Anybody can be busy and if you're busy you can be replaced. So I wanted to be more impactful and so that meant I need to up level my skills. So I measured that through setting a timer for 25 minutes and focusing on that one task and removing all the distractions when it was time to work on something meaningful.
- [14:30]
B
And then I've definitely used Pomodoros before and I think that can be really helpful especially if you have like something you have to really like focus on. And it's not, you know, it's not for emails, it's for you know, I'm, I'm working on a, on some you know, analysis or a presentation or something more complex. You really have to be zoomed in on. And I think the most important part is it'll, it reminds you to zoom out for and like you know, take a break after 25 minutes. It's a, it's powerful.
- [15:00]
A
Yeah, exactly. And that, that was the, the critical piece too is after that timer goes off, just go take a break. I would often go for quick walks outside, step away from my computer, let my sort of brain decompress and if I still needed to work on it, chances are I didn't need to. Right. Because the 25 minutes of deep work, concentrated work, being in flow states was enough versus what the typical modern knowledge economy worker like us in sales are doing. We're constantly multitasking. A slack notification, an email from a client. We're constantly, our attention is being pulled in a million different directions. But if we can direct that attention, in fact I have an acronym for it Time T Time energy Attention leads to M. So it's really team Time energy and attention equals money. And so if we can better design our time and block that off really thoughtfully and intentionally, if we can manage Our energy. If you're unwell, it's hard to sell, right? If you're sick or you're depleted or you're burned out and your attention are you mindlessly scrolling social media, are you just instantly going into your inbox and giving your attention away to others before you've accomplished something that could potentially drive a high value, you know, income generating action? Those are the things we need to be thoughtful of. So that's what I wanted to visualize. And tracking this stuff every day very simply showed me and proved my hypothesis was right. And so the math behind it was again I was in strategic account sales, Fortune 500 companies. The first two years, 2018, 2019, it took me 24 months to build an $11 million a year business ARR annual recurring revenue. And then the 10 months after sort of implementing this new approach, I was able to close $14 million in ARR in just 10 months. And that was a big proof point that hey, human performance, human first, professional second, we can't discount that. And measuring these things, integrating these aspects that are often neglected in sales and in business was a really important eye opening thing for me. And we see it in other performance field like professional sports athletics, right? They have a mindset coach, they have performance and conditioning coach, strength and conditioning coach, they have people helping them with their, their finances and so forth. Yet in sales and we're called the corporate athletes or, or we're called the athletes of the business world, yet most teams are not set up to do that. You're measured based off of activity metrics from a dashboard in a CRM and it's missing a lot of the things that are leading to low quota attainments and high levels of turnover and burnout. And so this tracking, I call it my thrive space, was the first effort in proving that to myself and now I'm sharing that with others.
- [18:32]
B
You read a lot about athletes and looking, looking at their mental health because it drives their physical health which is so important to them, working at their peak performance. But you, you hear less about people that work with their minds thinking about their physical health and, and how it relates to, and how the physical health supports the mental. Do you have thoughts about that or examples of, of how getting, making sure you're physically in a good place can drive, can drive success in the, in the mental world for sure.
- [19:12]
A
You know, again going back to like one of the pillar S's sleep, I found that when not just tracking my sleep, but also my sleep debt and sleep debt is the, you know, the, the sleep that your body needs, right? That you either give it on a nightly basis or you don't. And if you're in a deficit of what your body needs, you accumulate sleep debt over the course of, say, a week. And so when I found that I kept my sleep debt under three hours, I could have more energy throughout the day, cognitive clarity. And that allowed my, my meetings to, to run very well. And the, the thing that was also measuring at the end of the day in this tracker was my overall satisfaction. And there would be kind of two things that I would use to, to measure that. Just my mood, like how did I feel? Like smiley face neutral or a frown. And why was I feeling that way and what, what caused that, what went well, what didn't go well? And so I'd reflect on that at the end of the day. Also I'd have a score around the intentions I had for the day. And typically those intentions would be pretty steady. So I would always have an intention to like meditate, do that as a part of my morning routine, move for rigorously for like 30 minutes. And so I found that when that score was high as well, it was correlated to the lower the sleep debt, the better the ability that I had to move throughout the day, have more impactful meetings. My habits also when it came to my diet were better when I was over the three hour sleep debt. Usually in the evening I would make poor, poor food choices. I would be craving the greasy pizza versus making a salad. And so it all started with the sleep that allowed me to acquire and apply my skills. My strain could be at a higher capacity, the physical strain and the mental strain that I could apply throughout the day, meaning how much time I actually worked, real work, how much time I could apply in meetings, and then finally the overall satisfaction that I felt. And so I measured all that and that gave me this holistic thrive score. And I'd be looking at, okay, when my thrive score was the highest, how do I replicate those days? And it always came back to keeping the sleep debt low. That set me up for a great day, usually physically and mentally.
- [22:14]
B
Really interesting that sleep was so important. I would have guessed what, what you ate would be really important or how much you exercised or something about mindset you hear, you hear a lot more about those things, I think. And that's what people have at the top of their mind as opposed to sleep. But yeah, so that's, that's really how, how much more important do you think sleep is than, than the other things? It seems like you're really Guiding us and guiding us in the direction of get enough sleep and what, what tricks and thoughts do you have for grownups who are very busy and you know, have kids at home, etc? I mean my, my one and a half year old decided 6am was, was the perfect time last night to be open awake for two hours. But you know, what are your, what are your thoughts about how to do that as a, as a grownup who grown ups juggle a lot of things. Right?
- [23:12]
A
Sure, that's right. So it's not easy and, but there are things that we can do and I really am an advocate for simplifying things. So when I was going through sort of this process and redesigning my calendar with all, all the pressures from leadership of continuing to close these large deals, dealing with a pandemic and what we were all feeling at that time and all the other human factors that we're dealing with, family and dynamics like young children and so forth, I got down to using frameworks and principles to guide my decisions and, and giving myself also the self compassion that I was tracking this stuff for me. So this was my scoreboard. It wasn't necessarily a scoreboard like we're typically greeted with in sales, which is, you know, measuring and pitting you against others. So that gave me the freedom to say, okay, I'm not going to treat this scoreboard, this tracker that I'm keeping for myself like these other scoreboards. So I'm not going to make myself feel bad if something doesn't go well or you know, I'm in the red versus the green. And having that self compassion was just, hey, I want to use this data to make better decisions and I just want to collect the insights and see how, how that affects my performance. So when it comes to sleep, yeah, I agree that it's a foundational element that will naturally affect how you eat. Right. Again, I found that when I'm well rested, my nutritional habits are better, my decision making overall is better. So I started following something called the 103210 rule. I was, up until this point I had been struggling with hitting the snooze bar often because I was so sleep deprived. So it was just hard to get out of bed because my sleep schedule was just so out of whack. So the, the, the 10 was 10 hours before bed, no caffeine. Because that's the science behind that is caffeine can linger in our bodies for over 10 hours. So by reducing the afternoon caffeine and coffee and espresso that I would normally have during that afternoon dip, around 2pm I started to eliminate that. And so that had a compounding effect of not disrupting my sleep patterns. Then the three hour rule. So three hours before bed I would stop eating and eliminating alcohol as well. But I just try to get away from alcohol as much as possible because that would, I always found my whoop scores, my recovery scores were lowest even if I had a glass of wine the night before. So three hours before bed, you know, I had a sort of this mental reminder to stop eating because not eating and not having my body working on digesting what I had eaten help helped with my sleep patterns as well. And then two hours before bed I would absolutely try to eliminate work. Thinking about work, having the temptation to look at my phone and respond to emails coming through. We're a global company, you're in Spain, so I know you know what that's like. So I would, I would really try to eliminate that and be disciplined to not be tempted to be pulled back into work because that would activate my brain and that would get me all either excited or agitated and it would be really hard to wind down from there. And then one hour before bed, and this is something I'm still struggling with but I would really try to eliminate all screen time, phone, tv. It's a great time to pick up a physical book, wind down, meditate, hot showers, relax, talk with your spouse. Hey, novel, novel thing. Um, but, but those types of activities again, just allow me that. When my head hit the pillow, you know, I'm, I'm getting to sleep pretty quickly. I'm sleeping very soundly, getting that restorative sleep. And then that was the impetus I needed to, you know, start off well, have a great day, be focused and want to deliver high impact work. It really started to help me to transition from work to play. And what I was doing felt like a fun game. I, I got to play every day and this tracker started to become sort of a fun scoreboard just for me that I was trying to turn green every day.
- [28:15]
B
My only other trick that I would add to that is not have a one and a half year old. But, but those all seem like fantastic tricks. Yeah, so you keep mentioning your tracker. I'm envisioning in, in my simple little brain a, like a Google sheet. Did you have something more sophisticated or were you.
- [28:36]
A
That was exactly. Yeah, that was exactly it. And this, this really got provoked from reading James Clear Atomic Habits and, and he talked about the power. If anybody has read that book, it's just really the, the, the power of compounding your habits, getting 1% better every day. And a part of getting 1% better every day is being aware of what you're doing simply right. We may think we're getting seven hours of bed because, you know, we went to bed at 11 and got up at 6. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting seven hours of actual sleep. So understanding using these insights and then putting them in somewhere gives you this visual tracker. And he gave a couple great examples. One is sort of some from folklore, Folklore history. Jerry Seinfeld, he would use his calendar to write a joke every single day. And every time he did that, he would, with a big red marker, would put an X on the day, Hey, I did it. And he would just simply tell himself, don't break the chain. And so this is what this tracker was. It was a very simple Google sheet that I just didn't break the chains every day I was just tracking these things and seeing, okay, what's happening when my sleep is here, when I'm doing six Pomodoros, when I'm, you know, working, actually working for, for eight hours and I'm in meetings. And I found like my sweet spot in strategic sales, not necessarily for a field rep working local businesses, but for me in strategic sales at that tail end of the career, I found that no more than four hours of meetings, internal and external, and four hours of deep work measured through pomodoros. That was the sweet spot for me. Now that might range over a 12 hour period because I'm taking breaks, I'm taking a real lunch, I'm walking outside, I'm exercising. So this work life balance was definitely proven as a fallacy. You can't work in a clean eight hours in a small box and then go have eight hours of friend time, family time, hobby time, and then eight hours of sleep. It just doesn't work that way. We know that. So integrating in a way that's like, okay, if I've got a doctor's appointment today, kids in school, whatever is happening during the middle of the day, those things are going to disrupt that. But if I had a place that I trusted, that I came back to, to kind of keep me on course, I call this my personal operating system. And this tracker, thrive space was a way of keeping me on track and keeping that personal operating system pointed in the right direction. My time, energy and intention is going to make money. And then I use that money as a tool to free up the things that I want to do in life. Like now. I didn't have to wait until I was 65 to retire from the corporate world. I did it at 42 and now I can design my life in a way that leveraged sales to make life changing income, became a seven figure earner. I used this personal operating system to do it three years in a row. And now I free up my money by not inflating my lifestyle but freeing up more time to go do what I want to do. And I think I call that purposeful performance. And I think that is, you know, sellers, revenue generators and value creators. We are probably in the best position in the corporate world to be able to, to do that and, and, and purposeful performance even if you're a field rep today, because I was able to do it and, and I know from firsthand experience doesn't mean you have to stay there. You can climb being very purposeful and intentional. And a lot of that starts with getting better in touch with yourself as a human first before over indexing on the professional side and tying up your self worth into the leaderboards and the activity and you know, the income and so forth. Those things will come when you sort of harmonize and integrate those things more intentionally.
- [33:15]
B
And, and those are some fantastic thoughts about how to track things and how to be a better sleeper and how to manage your life. What about your thoughts about how to food and how to increase, how to get great nutrition, how to be healthier with that, especially through the lens of our listeners or are, you know, you know, often five days a week on the road all day, which really can mess up your ability to, to get good nutrition.
- [33:46]
A
Yeah, I am by no means a, you know, expert when it comes to nutrition. I try to again keep things as simple as possible. I try to inform myself, you know, what makes sense. And, and so I think for most people we know what's good or bad for our, our bodies and it's the inconveniences, it's the, it's, you know, the chaos of modern work that you know, tempts us into wanting to make the easy choices. And sadly the easy choices are, you know, typically the poor choices for our body. And so again going back, not to harp on it, but I think it really is important. Again what I found myself and now, you know, coaching others is that when your sleep debt is low, your sleep is, is good, you, you just naturally have more energy to make better choices. Those cravings for the bad greasy quick snacks that's just so easy to get, you have less temptation to do that and so you have More thoughtful preparation about well, maybe I'll prepare healthier snacks a week in advance. Hard boiled some organic eggs, have sliced up cucumber that I can eat tons of versus the chips or the candy bars. And so I think just being again mindful of and thoughtful and, and intentional around prepping and giving your yourself space for that is, is, is really important because we're just constantly allowing ourselves without any thought or reflection being pulled into the whims of, of, of the chaos of, of modern, the modern world and, and trying to be successful in somebody else's terms. We don't know to us. And you know, again, I'm getting maybe a little too philosophical on such a basic topic, but I think nutrition, like any other topic you want to dissect, really does still come back to some foundational things of using sort of design and principles and frameworks to make better decisions like the caffeine, the 10, 3, 2, 1 rule. Allow me to make a decision. Okay. It's after a certain time frame and I could even use apps like this to assist like Rise literally has my circadian rhythm and so it knows when I'm waking up and it knows when I should cut off caffeine. So I got a notification, hey, you know, it's, it's after 12:15pm you should probably cut off your caffeine. That allowed me to make a better nutritional choice because if I put that caffeine in my system, well, it's going to disrupt my sleep and that starts a whole cascading snowball effect. Not in my favor. I, I want to work every, I want to use these systems, my personal operating system to work in my favor. And every small little decision that gets tipped in my favor gives me the leverage to stack all those good habits to you know, again, make more transformational change in my life, make life changing income because I made better impact as a seller to my, my clients.
- [37:31]
B
You're making me want to put a, an alarm in my phone that goes off Every day at 1pm no more caffeine after this point. But what about your, what about your tips and thoughts? I mean these are so great. Obviously like that you're, we've done the sleep, we've done food. What about fitness? What are your thoughts and tips and tricks on, on fitness? Once again with the lens that folks are, you know, on the road, you know, a lot and, and kind of have these, these set schedules.
- [38:06]
A
Yeah. So again, just like nutrition, I, I think for most of us we, we know what's good and, and, and, and what's bad? And, and so where people typically struggle is, well, I, I am in the car, you know, eight hours, 12 hours a day, and I'm going back and forth, forth. So what are some small things that we can do? You know, moving more, standing more is better than sitting or not moving. I think we could all agree with that sort of universal principle. So how do you use design and systems to ensure that you're standing or moving more? So simple things could be like, well, take the stairs instead of the elevator. That's better than not doing those things, right? Parking, maybe at the end of the parking lot. So you've got to get a few extra steps in, right. And meet those 10,000 steps, 12,000 steps, whatever step goal that you have or don't have. Just knowing that you're, you're moving more than you did before. Those little, small, little things add up and they accumulate. Even if you're thinking to yourself, well, if I can't do my 90 minute CrossFit workout, then I'm a failure. Or it's, it's not getting me to where I want to be. You know, those extremes and those internal thoughts weigh us down. But we can just incorporate very small, simple things. They don't have to be monumental. Start tiny, small, and then scale and build from there as you're gaining success. Because if you try to do two too much at once, we know where that leads us again. We're all smart enough to know that that's going to lead to quitting and going back to our old habits and bad habits. And unfortunately, like I was saying earlier, like nutrition, you know, the bad habits are easier than the good ones. So how do you design, create systems to encourage the good habits? Well, it comes down to starting big, very, very tiny, and then building up from there.
- [40:18]
B
And when you say start tiny, do you mean pick one of these areas and focus on getting the, getting a little better at it and then asking yourself, what could I do to be a little better? I, I feel like a lot of people when they, when they try to self improve, they're like, I'm gonna, it's January 1st, I'm gonna do everything different. And then five days later it's like, well, I can't do everything differently. I give up. But how, how would you recommend approaching that?
- [40:44]
A
Yeah, so I think starting with one main area of your life is, is very helpful. And then starting tiny. There's actually a formula to it by BJ Fog of Stanford. He, he does, you know, habit and behavior design for students. He Has a, a great book that's was referenced in the time comic Habits. His book is called Tiny Habits. So very similar vein, but his formula is abc. So a great way to think about it is your anchor. The A stands for anchor. What's an anchor moment in your day that you do every single day? A good example would, would might be, you know, making your morning coffee. You know, so what could you pair, you know, with your morning coffee? And then the B is behavior. And so what's a behavior you want to include in that? And that could be, you know, movement, you know, exercise related, could be nutrition related, it could be performance related. So let's just use the example of making more phone calls right before you, you head out for the day. So anchor moment is, well, I have coffee every morning, so when I put my coffee cup on the desk, my immediate behavior is I'm going to open up my call list. And BJ Fog would argue that that's all you need to do. And then if you celebrate that, have some sort of internal celebration, it sounds a little cheesy, but like the fist pump or whatever works for you. What that does to your brain is it circuits it to say that celebration says that behavior is good. And because it was tiny, you can do that every single day. So some days you might then once your call list is open, well, you might start actually calling. And some days it might be, you know what, I'm feeling good, I'm gonna get a half hour, an hour of calling in before I head out. Other days it might be one call, it doesn't matter. But the model is that when you put your coffee cup down on your desk, first thing in the morning, you open your call list and that's all you have to worry about. Those kinds of moments can be architected in our days if again, we're a bit more thoughtful and really the skill set is starting to think more like a designer. And you can start to design and architect all these various components of your life, but it ultimately starts with one area. Start tiny. That will give you the skill set that you need to prove to yourself, hey, I can be a good designer. Now where can I go next? Right? Once that habit is ingrained, and that's the kind of, the beautiful part of now, it's no longer work, it's play. And it starts to feel like a fun game. And so then you get excited on, okay, well now it's time to level up. My nutrition game, my sleep game, my fitness game, my cold calling game, my presentation building skills game, Whatever the case may be.
- [44:20]
B
And some of these things seem easy to track. Like did I get eight hours of sleep? Yes or no, zero or one or you know, how many calories did I consume yesterday? Or how many minutes of exercise, how many steps? Some things are very tr. Trackable. Other things are also really important to have a successful life or a successful career or a successful sales job. They're really hard to track. Right. Like how do you, how do you track. Improve relationships with spouse or kids? How do you, how do you track interpersonal skills that I'm, that you're trying to develop? Or how do you track presentations skills or. Yeah, the, these things that are important that don't fit so neatly into a spreadsheet.
- [45:15]
A
Yeah, that's a, that is a awesome question. And that's where you start to. Then, you know, once you get these foundational elements and you at least start tracking right, what, what most status quo performers are doing is they, they don't have these insights because they're simply not gathering these inputs. And so that's the easy thing to do. Just like it's easy to grab the donut because it's there, it's been brought in from a colleague, it's right there on the table versus denying it and going somewhere else to get a healthier option that might take a little more preparation. And so that's a simple concept we've all encountered in our life. It's easier to do the bad stuff than the good stuff. So once we get in the cadence, the operating rhythm of tracking the things that are easy to track, then we've built the skill and a solid foundation to start expanding that into the more nuanced things. So when it comes to being, say a more impactful seller versus just an activity driven seller, phone calls, number of meetings, number of emails sent, number of proposals sent, that's the easy stuff to track. But what does it mean really if you have, you know, 10 meetings in a day and none of them lead to revenue? So now you're getting into the more nuanced. Well, you know, looking at overall revenue and tying how you spend your time, energy and attention, how does that lead to the m. The money that you're generating for the company that employs you and the money that you need for yourself to sustain the life that you want. So correlating revenue, money to, to time, energy and intention, that becomes the next sort of evolution of the skill set. And you know, things like uncovering customer stories versus just I made a phone call or I had a meeting that Is one way, for instance, to start to uncover, all right, if a customer sharing a story about their business versus just taking the meeting and sitting there, mm, mm, mm, there, that's sort of what you want to attune yourself. And, and then you start shopping for, for, for different things. You know, you're, you're, you're literally redesigning your conversations. You're, you're asking better questions, more strategic questions, because you're looking for, well, a meeting for, for meeting's sake isn't pointing me in the right direction. I, you know, I'm top of the leaderboard when it comes to activity, but I'm zero when it comes to revenue. What's the gap? And that, that sort of forces you to be able to look and say, what's happening in these meetings. Maybe I need to listen to those calls if, if I'm able to, to track those things. But if I'm an outside rep and I'm getting no, no, no, no, no, no, well, then I need to have a moment of self reflection and introspection or a conversation with my manager to say, where's the skill gap here? So that forces you to search for the more nuanced level of tracking, to say, okay, well, I had a meeting. Now what within that meeting should I be looking for? And again, an example that I started searching for that was meaningful to me is could I get a prospect to share a story, a real story about their business? Yeah, we, you know, we try to implement this fleet technology for all of our plumbers for, you know, our business. And what we found was this was happening. That's the kind of thing you should be searching for. And so you could start tracking that had a meeting. Now take it a step further. Did you uncover a customer story in that meeting? So that's sort of a, a long winded way of exploring the more nuanced things that you actually can start tracking.
- [49:49]
B
And so let's time travel, let's go forward in time six months. And I want you to talk to the people who have taken you up on your advice. They've, they've taken a Google sheet and made different columns of the things they want to track and work on and improve themselves on. And they've been, they, they tracked it really well for five months and six days. And then after six months and four days, they're like, oh crap, I forgot to do that for like the last month. How do you, these routines, I think, are really hard for people to, to follow. How do you recommend that, that people stay on Track when and keep their routines from slipping. And how do you keep, how can you stay committed to, to these goals?
- [50:38]
A
So it goes back to one of the things we talked about at the top of this episode, which was embracing seasonality. And seasonality is actually, it's very natural thing. Yet in the knowledge economy and in the high pressure sales world, the high pressure of business, we've got to grow 20% month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. That's unnatural. And so we have to realize that actually stopping routines, stopping tracking, I would actually encourage it because what tracking does when you do it consistently is build the foundation. And what you'll find with this is you'll find your personal rhythm, you'll find what works for you. What works for me may not work for everybody else, but we can all fall back on universal principles. And again, one of those universal principles is seasonality. You know, in some parts of the world, leaves fall off of trees. It may look from an alien coming down of like, ooh, that tree is sick. It's, it's, it's failing. All of its leaves are falling off the ground. But six months later, you know, after some snow comes, it's going to regenerate new buds and leaves, and then it grows and it, it expands. So embracing the seasonality to say, well, actually after maybe a quarter, I stop and I physically do, I actually stop tracking. I step away from it. And if I go on a trip or a vacation and come back to it, I'm not doing this tracking while I'm away. And then it takes a little bit of time to sort of get back into the mode. But because I've done it before and I've used these inputs to gain insights to guide my intentions that lead to impact, that ultimately drives in income, that ultimately frees up my independence, this flywheel is always there for me when I choose to pick it up again. And so that's all to say is it's actually good to step away from this stuff. But know that if you get off track or if you deliberately step away from it, you know that it's there waiting for you. That tree isn't going anywhere unless it really is sick, right? And hey, some of us do get sick, mentally, physically, that's okay too. We can heal ourselves right through, through proper help and aid. But the point being is it's okay that we don't have to do this stuff. It shouldn't be an obsession. This is for you. It's not to compete with others and be tying your, your self worth to your performance. It's meant to be an aid to better gain the right insights so that you can perform and gain satisfaction on your terms. And, and that goes back to another universal principle. When you know, we're a happy human, we're typically a much better seller. And so let's not sacrifice the things that make us happy humans and healthy humans.
- [54:06]
B
Absolutely. Well, next section is sales in 60 seconds. Quick questions, quick answers. First question, what are some of the daily habits you use to perform better?
- [54:17]
A
Yeah, so I have one really simple tip, an anchor routine at the beginning of the day and end of the day. So I try to have a really quick routine that primes my brain before doing the most important activity. And so a great thing I like to do is eliminate screen time, basically giving my attention away to like social media or slack or email before I've done something for myself. And that could be really simple things like again, making espresso for myself. I write my wife a quick love note. Part of my system is going back to how do you track things to improve relationships? Well, that's something I can control and it's a little small thing that puts a smile on her face. Meditate outside for 5, 5 minutes while the espresso is brewing. So I have this little, small, little routine that I do and it's kind of like a checklist before I then give my time, energy and attention to anybody else. And it just primes me. It's like an athlete instead of going out and lifting the heaviest weight possible right out of the gates, which we kind of do, and then that athlete gets injured or sprinting as fast as they can down the track with the, without properly warming up, you know you're going to hurt yourself. So having that, that warm up routine is, is powerful. Same thing on the end of the day, the anchor today I try not to end my day without having a shutdown ritual and routine. So those anchor beginning and end of the day, that is something we absolutely control.
- [56:02]
B
And short of, you know, having going, finding blindness and having a stroke, what are some negative health warning signs that. Yeah, that you know about that people should be looking out for?
- [56:15]
A
Yeah, I would say, you know, check in with things like your irritability, you know, that might be a sign that you're, you know, you're, you're getting into some heavy sleep debt. Are you lashing out at co workers and colleagues? Are you laying last year, you get frustrated with clients? Are you getting frustrated with your family, your spouse, partner, children, unnecessarily, unprompted Right. So keeping a check on that, boredom with your work, another sign that maybe things aren't moving in the right direction or overwhelm. Right. And stress, anxiety, sort of two ends of the spectrum there, you know, are you feeling overwhelmed with like, I just, I can't do this all. It's also a sign that maybe you don't have, you know, a framework or principle to come back to to keep yourself on point and in check that, you know, things will get stressful. But do you have sort of the release valve? That's what a good personal operating system does is it prevents you from getting overwhelmed. It allows you to process those thoughts consistently versus them piling up and weighing you down to a point where it's just like, I can't handle it, I gotta escape. Grass is greener on the other side. Or I need a, you know, a three month sabbatical to sort of recover from this. So, you know, overwhelm, boredom, irritability. Those are three very simple things to sort of look for that we can all sort of have a pulse check on. Are any of these three things happening in, in my life right now? And if so, why is that? And, and we should always have those moments of introspection and reflection to, to kind of understand, well, why, why, why? Keep asking why.
- [58:17]
B
And what about stress? What if you found yourself under stress, as so many people do? What would you do to combat that?
- [58:27]
A
Obviously, there's tons of research around the power of meditation or mindful breathing. You know, I suffered from social anxiety as an introverted seller and especially in local field sales, you know, working with local businesses and knocking on doors, oh my God, I hated that. But overcoming those things with just a bit of a moment of silence. And, you know, there's techniques called box breathing. You breathe in for four seconds, holds for four seconds. You're following a box. Basically breathe out for four, four seconds, hold for four seconds. And going through even just four cycles of that before going into a meeting. This can clear your head, put you in a state of, wait a minute. All those things that I was thinking of that were stressing me out, those are just thoughts. Now I'm back in the moment and who cares what's going to happen? I'm ready for this, to do this thing. So just mindful breathing, little small techniques like that, we can incorporate those very simply into our days.
- [59:42]
B
Fantastic. Well, I'm. This has been so much great advice. I'm going to do my best to summarize the, the knowledge and information you've given us here for all the folks that are on the road while they're listening to this.
- [59:56]
A
Yeah.
- [59:58]
B
So first of all, salespeople need to look at growth through a human perspective and not just a business perspective. You're always going to feel like an impossible, an imposter when you're faced with new challenges. But you really have to embrace those new challenges. New challenges in order to progress and grow as a person. It's so important to take care of your physical health and it can have a really major impact on your sales performance and in a way that, that people don't really necessarily understand. On the face of it, the the four S's of the harmonized self are sleep skills, strain, and satisfaction. Brandon uses a Whoop sleep tracker to help improve perfect his sleep routine. He uses the Pomodoro technique that helps him work more deeply, level up his skills, and improve customer interactions. The better you sleep, the less mental strain you will suffer throughout the day, which will help you avoid making bad decisions and make you just better at your performance across the board. You want to create your own scoreboard. You know your, your sales job will likely have a sales job, a scoreboard that keeps track of your current sales, maybe even tracks your growth of your skills there. But you've really got to create your own scoreboard for things like sleep and health and food. Brandon advocates the 1032110 rule for better sleep habits. This is so important, I thought it's, it's worth covering again here. 10 hours before bed, no caffeine intake 3 hours before bed no food or alcohol 2 hours before bed Stop thinking about work. 1 hour before bed eliminate screen time. You know, pick up a book, meditate, take a hot shower, conversation with the spouse, whatever it is. But no doom scrolling before bed movement is so important. Try to incorporate it whenever you can. Simple things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator can, can make a major difference in in your your health. Instead of sitting, try to stand whenever you can. Start by focusing on one area of your life that you want to improve and work on creating good habits in that area. Measure your results and then move on to the next area. Once you've consistently tracked these, your measurements and these metrics over a period of time, you eventually settle into a rhythm where you naturally fall into your routines. And you can really stop tracking things. If you track your sugar intake in grams of sugar for a month or two months or three months, you probably can stop tracking it after three months because you've already, you already kind of know how much sugar you're having, you know where you have more sugar and you can choose to have it or not as an example. And you always know that if you, you want to, you can always revisit the tracking of, of any of these things and, and jump back into these types of systems to get back on track if you feel like something, something slipping, you know, this has just been so fantastic, so much information here. Brandon, you really taught us a ton. Where can our listeners read more about your work and how do they reach out to you?
- [63:51]
A
Yeah, two very easy places to go to. So find me on LinkedIn. Follow Brandon Fluharty. I write multiple times a day, twice a day typically during the week and once on weekends. So that's a great way to consume some of the these thoughts and these systems that I put out there. Very easy free place to level up on this front. And then I house everything on my personal website, brandonfluhardy.com if you want to gain access to the free tracker that we were talking about that I used and I have evolved it and use it similar version even in my life today you can go download that again. It's a simple Google sheet. Kind of shows you all the tools that I use and simple ways to implement it and start tracking these things. So follow me on LinkedIn and visit brandonfluarti.com for more more tools and resources.
- [64:55]
B
Fantastic. We should all check, check that out. This has been a great episode of the outside sales talk. If you work in field sales, you'll love Badger Maps. It's the number one route planner. Helps you sell 20% more and drive 20% less. Free trial@badgermapping.com if anyone can think of any other sales reps that would benefit from what Brandon's been teaching us about today, definitely forward the sound of them. And I guess this isn't just, you know, involved. This isn't just focus on field sales reps at all. I mean a lot of these things are great for everybody. So this is a great one, Brian, I really appreciate it. Take care until next time everybody. And Br, thanks for coming on the show.
- [65:36]
A
Yeah, thanks for having me.