Killing The Beast: Real Talk for Sales Guys With ADHD (Part 1)

A Letter To My Past (And Future) Self

Intro

If you read this blog, it’s safe to say that you value being exceptional at your craft.

Unlike the vast majority who simply clock in and clock out, collecting a paycheck and phoning it in, being great is important to you, and a central part of your identity.

You’re the first one in and the last one out.

You go the extra mile to serve your customers and your team.

And you love doing it…

…most of the time.

In your darkest moments, when the obstacles in the road pile up, would-be customers callously rebuff your sincerest efforts and the fading rays of the setting sun close the chapter on yet another tough day, you find yourself peering into neighboring gardens - where unfailingly, the grass sure looks pretty darn green.

Introducing: The Beast

Inside of us all is The Beast.

And unlike the helpful beast of “Beast Mode” considerations, this one is a hungry monster that will take everything you have and leave you with nothing.

Despite this, many of us continue to unknowingly feed this cruel, parasitic entity - at the cost of our sanity, our dreams and our success.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, ask yourself how often the following situation plays out for you:

In an idle moment, you pull up the LinkedIn news feed. Inevitably, somebody appears to be absolutely crushing it selling a different product, service or into a different industry. “Comparison is the theft of joy”, Teddy Roosevelt reminds us, and yet we’ve taken the first step to the more The Beast is fed the hungrier it becomes.

“You’re wasting your time here. It would be so much easier if you just pivoted over to selling AI”, a faint voice says to you as you scroll past yet another “I’m at 300% of quota working from Mexico” post.

“Should have just invested in Bitcoin at $1,000, chump” the voice grows louder as you scroll past yet another high schooler in a Lamborghini.

With each self-pitying, comparative thought you have, the voice grows louder and louder. It visits you more and more frequently, speaking with increasing audacity and authority.

Even though you’re smart enough to “know” that nobody on social media is going through the effort of showcasing their worst moments, the mind and the heart process differently, and once the seed of doubt has been sown, the damage has been done.

The next day, you do your outreach and the same rejection that would have rolled right off your back stings just a little bit worse. “If only I was selling AI”, you sniffle. It’s easier to day-dream than it is to take action, and the resulting distraction destroys your activity levels. Alex Hormozi’s injunction to “outwork your self doubt” begins to feel like a hollow, futile platitude, and the resulting vacuum of activity creates a self-fulfilling prophesy and vicious feedback loop.

Before you know it, the faint voice has evolved into a commanding internal monologue - constricting the very best parts of you in a paralyzing grip of entitlement, envy and resentment.

From the dark abyss, The Beast gives a raspy, self-satisfied chuckle.

It has you.

And you’re going absolutely nowhere.

Channeling Your Inner Van Helsing

If the above situation is relatable, fear not, for we’re going to equip you with the necessary tools to slay The Beast.

Specifically, we’re going to walk through the building blocks of mastery: Systems, skills and discipline.

Grab your hat, throw on your best Steampunk outfit and let’s go kill some monsters.

Developing A North Star Mantra

Every good monster hunter needs a mantra to ward against evil, and I urge you to consider developing one I came up with below. When The Beast whispers its nonsense to you, as “woo woo” as it might sound, it’s important to have another statement that you can assert back. Check out mine for inspiration:

“Joy is found in mastery

Mastery is developed by repetition

Repetition induces boredom

Boredom induces frustration

Frustration induces the temptation to quit

Quitting precludes mastery.”

Robert Greene’s Mastery was a huge influence here - The fundamental thesis? Being good at things is what makes you happy. And being good at things requires doing them over and over, even when they’re boring. Thus, feeling bored is actually a GOOD sign, and you should lean in to it for progress.

When it comes to formulating your own statement, I urge you to take a page from the stoics and (1) focus on what you can control and (2) reframe “negative” emotions as a sign that you’re moving in the right direction.

Now with our mantra in place, we can lean into developing the strategies and mental frameworks to support taking massive action toward that north star.

Systems

AKA: The “what” to do that enables you to succeed.

Imagine two gym goers:

Gym Goer A has no routine and “does whatever he wants that day”. Because he leaves going to the gym up to feel, he is inconsistent about showing up. When he does get himself to the gym, he picks movements he feels like doing, with whatever weight “feels right” and leaves at some ambiguous point when he thinks “he’s done enough”. Beyond getting suboptimal results, the real damage to Gym Goer A is the open loop of uncertainty - in the absence of conviction in a system, he is torn every time he sees a YouTube influencer touting a new program, or somebody with an aspirational physique making a different recommendation from what he’s doing. He is unmoored and lacking in conviction, which makes him easy prey for The Beast.

Contrast this with Gym Goer B. Gym Goer B has been following the same program for years, and has a logbook in which he tracks every movement alongside the weight and reps from his last session. He knows exactly what he’s training on what day, which means he can visualize adding more weight or more reps and train all out to make that happen. He knows exactly when he’s done because he’s completed his pre-determined set of exercises for the day, and can leave the gym knowing he executed the job to be done. In addition to achieving better results, Gym Goer B understands the fundamental principles of getting bigger and stronger, and wastes absolutely zero time on what anybody else does in the gym because he understands that it’s totally irrelevant to him. He is focused, convicted, and The Beast’s empty promises fall on deaf ears to him.

You think Dorian Yates would have made these gains “just training by feel”?

Sales is exactly the same way: The ideal system sets you up in such a way that all you have to do is wake up and start executing according to your schedule. There is no question about what needs to be done, and simply following the rules of engagement will enable you to produce a statistically significant volume of work guaranteed to move you closer to your goals.

If you’re a top of funnel specialist, our article about list strategy was designed to give you exactly this from a targeting perspective. So many sales people say they’re going to prospect, waste huge amounts of time trying to figure out who to talk to, and take far too little action to get better - much less produce outcomes. In the resulting anxiety, they then

For full cycle reps, simply continue the logic, but extend it up through your opportunity stages. For example, if the follow-up date is the same for a prospect that’s in an active deal cycle and a prospect that missed an initial meeting for you, you’ll start with the prospect that’s closer to revenue (AKA the one in an active deal cycle).

The coolest part? As you stay in a given role, the buckets of prospects that are closer to revenue will continue to grow - compounding in a virtuous and lucrative cycle that rewards your patience and diligence. What this means is that over time, on any given day you will work with more and more people who are closer to consummating a partnership with you and your company, and the expected value of your efforts will only grow.

This virtuous cycle can only happen if you (1) Take massive daily action according to the rules of engagement from your system (2) stay in seat long enough for that activity to compound and populate the buckets closer and closer to revenue

The grass is greener where you water it, and hopefully at this point you’re starting to see The Beast’s lies for what it really is: A mirage caused not by thirst, but by boredom.

Persist and you will reap the rewards.

Skills

AKA: The aptitudes to execute your system

As you execute massive action within your system, you will necessarily run into roadblocks that require you to level up your skills to overcome them.

After all, your systems are predicated on human to human interaction, and humans have variability in their responses.

The classic example for sales people is objections - the first time you hear one, it’s probable you’ll clam up and make a complete fool of yourself, but by the 1000th time the same comment will barely slow you down. Thankfully, if you disposition your calls correctly, you’ll start to see the patterns. Like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, you’ll go from fumbling with your mech suit and being torn to shreds to zipping around and blowing up aliens.

The only way this happens? Repetition.

Every time you change roles, go to a new industry, sell into a new vertical etc. you immediately reset the clock. Any of you that have played an RPG know that the best loot drops come from overcoming the most lethal bosses, and overcoming those bosses requires failing. A lot.

So why make it harder on yourself and make a change every time you’re bored, only to go back to being a level 1 noob? Though we recognize it in video games, sometimes it’s worth being reminded in real life: Everything sucks when you’re a total noob.

The good news here is that if you have a good system in place, the skill development will come as a byproduct of executing it. The only other consideration here is paying attention to what the roadblocks are and setting aside some time to specifically drill them: If a particular objection is coming up a lot, get with folks more experienced at your company to rehearse a professional answer. Pretty soon, as soon as you start to hear that objection you won’t be able to stop yourself from smiling: And that is the hallmark of a pro :)

Discipline

We started to write about this building block only to realize there’s so much to say that the next two weeks of articles will be dedicated entirely to understanding discipline - more to come here.

Conclusion

If you ask most sales reps whether they want to be great, the majority will say yes, but if you examine whether those same professionals have the system, skills and discipline necessary to foster the prerequisite repetitions to cultivate mastery, most will fall short.

Today, we contextualized some of our prior articles in the context of a broader macro framework that includes systems, skills and discipline. For the next few weeks we will be doing an in depth dive into discipline - what it is, how to cultivate it and examples of applied discipline.

Rooting for you always,

Charles