The Sales Superpower No One Talks About

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Good Morning! A recent survey of 10,000 high-achieving high schoolers found that Gen Z is ghosting Big Tech for healthcare and government jobs. In past years, companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple held the top spots for most desirable jobs, but are now passed up by hospitals and the FBI. Looks like the next generation of sales reps will be pitching policies and medical devices instead of iPhones and Alexa’s. 🏛️

In today’s Follow Up:

• The secret sales superpower ☕️ 

• A cold email tip of the day 🧠

• CrowdStrikes $10 Uber Eats gift cards 🚩 

• Sales jobs, Linkedin & a meme 😂

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The Sales Superpower No One Talks About

Today’s story is a guest post by Dipesh Jain, VP of Sales at Magic EdTech.

I never understood the power of focus and concentration until I hired my first sales intern.

Having never hired an intern before, my expectations were low. The whole experience felt like an experiment more than anything else… I was hiring an entry level employee with no sales experience, strictly to book more meetings.

However, a month later, his performance surpassed all my expectations. 

He set nine meetings in his first month with virtually no onboarding or training. In just one month he achieved more than my full-time SDRs achieved in a year.

Their best months ended with 5 meetings on the calendar, and here the new intern got 9 in his first month. This kind of productivity and performance had everyone paying attention, including our leadership. They wanted to understand what made him so successful and how we could replicate it across the organization.

When I dug deeper, I realized there was one thing that differentiated him from everyone else on our sales team. That one thing was his ability to focus and concentrate. 

Focus was his superpower.

But rather than chalk it up as something he was good at and no one else could do, I wanted to understand how he did it (and how other reps can do the same). Here’s the playbook:

1. The Real Goal

For the sake of the story, we’ll call the intern David…

David knew his job was to get meetings. Period. Everything he did was directed towards booking more meetings. As salespeople, our job is to bring revenue to our companies. Once we are clear about this, it becomes easier to be intentional about our time and focus on activities that lead us closer to that goal.

2. Audit Your Time

There are only two types of activities in your day:

• Activities that move you towards your goals: Prospecting, preparing for sales calls, demos, negotiations, contract discussions, demos, etc.

• Activities that move you away from your goals: Attending irrelevant internal meetings, discussing office gossip, 1:1s without an agenda or outcome, etc.

One look at your calendar will help you understand where you spend your time. If your calendar reflects more of the latter, you are setting yourself up for failure. 

3. Defend Your Prime Time

Prime time is when:

• You are at your peak focus.

• Your customers are most responsive.

Think of a restaurant owner. Do you think they’re entertaining vendors or suppliers during peak dining hours? 

In our virtual world, we often allow distractions at any time. This is a trap. Define your prime hours and defend those hours as if your life depends on them (because it kinda does…). Decline all non-customer meetings, CRM updates, and 1v1s during these hours. Use these hours for your deep work.

4. Keep Your Phone Away

Nothing will distract you faster than your smartphone. In his four hours of work each day, David never checked his phone more than twice, and for no more than ten minutes each time. Nothing on your phone is as important as the task at hand. 

5. Stop Living in Email Land

This is one of the biggest issues I see with salespeople these days. They refuse to leave their email and DM inboxes. These work like slot machines constantly luring you with intermittent rewards in the form of new emails and messages. 

Yes, cold emails are a major part of our jobs, but drafting them separately (in your CRM/docs) or using tools like ‘Inbox When Ready’ to hide your inbox while typing new messages will save you tens of hours of unnecessary distractions every week.

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Checking In On The Job Market

That’s gonna be a YES from me..🤣 

Sales Meme of the Day