CHAPTER FIVE:

The Act of Personal Sales Leadership

“The world is full of people who want to play it safe, people who have tremendous potential but never use it. Somewhere deep inside them, they know that they could do more in life, be more, and have more—if only they were willing to take a few risks.”

—GEORGE FOREMAN

I’M GOING TO TELL YOU A HARD TRUTH. YOU ARE THE VERY reason that you don’t have the success you think you deserve. Stop blaming your boss, your parents, circumstance, the product, the market, competition, God, the universe, or plain bad luck. We all attract what we radiate, we harvest what we sow, and we deserve what we get. Embrace it. Life was never intended to be easy. The value of what we pursue is in who we become, not what we attain. Adversity makes us stronger, and all lessons in life are repeated until they are learned.

If you want success in selling, think like a Marine—it’s a privilege to serve, no matter how much crap is thrown your way. Choose to feel grateful rather than entitled. You’re on a mission to change the lives of your customers and those you love. Do whatever it takes rather than merely your best. Embrace the difficulties because you will be one of the few who does, and this makes you more valuable in the market. If succeeding in professional selling were easy, it would not be very rewarding. Choose to personally be the biggest point of difference for your employer and customers as they make decisions and strive for success.

This is your time to rise above the pack. The way you sell is more important than what you sell. Leadership is the name of the game, if you’re an individual contributor or otherwise. You’ve got to believe you are worthy of breaking through and being trusted. The sellers who became champions all questioned their ability. They all had peaks and troughs but raised themselves up through positive affirmation, belief, and massive action. A bias toward action will dissipate any negativity. Keep drinking cups of coffee; keep getting back up to get knocked down again. Always make one last call at the end of the day, and be the first in the office and on the phone every morning.

Eliminate all negative self-talk and instead visualize the goal, germinate the seed, and then plan for success. I’ve always been amazed when I set my heart on a particular client at the beginning of a sales calendar year, and later that year I end up meeting and then closing a sizable engagement with them. Goals and dreams are the cosmic rudder, so you must breathe life into your prayers to bring about high performance.

There are so many examples I could provide about the importance of integrity in professional selling, but lawyers won’t allow this because it involves real negative examples. I’ve seen obscene greed, lies, knives in the back as footholds to climb higher, robbery using the corporate expense card, and customer and staff welfare being flagrantly disregarded. I’d like to say that bad behavior is always punished, but many times the corporate psychopaths and snakes rise higher and higher as they play politics and manage perceptions. Please just know this: Your personal integrity and reputation is your most precious asset—period. Stay true to yourself, and hold on to positive, timeless values.

Integrity is about telling the truth, warts and all, even if it makes your solution look a little weaker. I guarantee you that your cutthroat competitors are talking trash about you and your product and falsely positioning themselves as superior in every way. That’s disconcerting on a subconscious level to prospects. I remember one of the top performers I ever saw delivering good news and bad news, exactly what the solution could and couldn’t do. He was candid and trusted, just as you should be with your customers. The best salespeople aspire to trusted adviser status and treat prospective customers as if they were a part of their own extended family, looking out for their financial best interests.

Fight, Fight, Fight to Earn the Right

I mentor a stunningly brilliant salesperson who sells marketing technology across the United States. He’s been living COMBO Prospecting for the last 12 months and has been achieving amazing results. Here is his true story:

Breakthrough! Three months of COMBOs on three continents. It started with a dead account in the CRM and progressed to the dialer. The company had been contacting this lead for six years via drip campaigns in marketing automation to no avail. The response was, “Please stop calling. I told you we are cool—we’re good!” I was amused. Bring it!

I kept going . . . I saw an article in WIRED Magazine in which the CMO of that company was talking about innovation, and it gave me context, a use case and the business value angle. It hit me like a bolt out of the blue. So I wrote her an InMail. Then I wrote her an email with her best quote from the magazine article in the header. I then called her direct line. Amazingly, there was no EA, and it rang right to her voice mail. I left a concise message about her article and the result I could help her achieve. Then I tracked the email in Cirrus Insight and noticed she forwarded it umpteen times: to Britain, to the West Coast of the States, to the East Coast.

Two days later, driven by the opens and forwards analytics, I called her office and left a message again. I sent another email. It was opened six times. Forwarded to some more far-off destinations.

At last, on a Friday night, a response came via email: “My team has informed me that we’re already using a solution like yours, but you’d have to talk to my colleague in the UK who vets everything like this. The UK person had been copied.” I thanked the CMO and felt pretty jazzed that I broke through with a COMBO after our company had failed to engage this Fortune 1000 for the last six years.

Next step was to start dialing the UK. I finally pinned down a response using triples: call, voice mail, email. The problem was that UK confirmed that the incumbent was already deep in there; in fact, it was just installed plus the company was very satisfied. But it didn’t matter because I sold a complex solution, so I pivoted to another niche pillar in our offering. I found the CEO of the problem in the Midwest and referenced the vetter in UK and the CMO. I called them for three weeks straight, and used five COMBOs each time: call, voice mail, email, as well as text and InMail, but I never got a response.

But then, out of the blue, he responded and agreed to a meeting. We demoed and he vetted the stack. He loved it and figured we could replace the incumbent due to better value and stronger alignment with where they were going. In time (once contracts expired), we could provide a single holistic view of the data. This was a bonanza—David versus Goliath.

Was it 27 touches, or was it 63? Maybe it was 100. It was COMBOs all the way. It was grit, tenacity, vision, and a relevant business case. The person who asked to stop being called left the business, and that’s a good thing because they were the blocker. I didn’t give up. I saw that departure as a trigger. I got in the air, and I pitched to the team and gained consensus to help them create the business case with all of the complex funding issues covered. I got a niche deal in the door.

I got punched in the face from day one. I heard crickets. The account was radio silent. The competitor was embedded. But I got in high at the C-level and made the case for a solution sale where I could plug in my technology as a turbocharger for a multi-vendor approach. The ultimate outcome I offered was of far greater value with fewer supplier relationships—and their CFO loved it. We offered the best of breed initially, and, over time, we integrated everything they needed into one single place and with one system.

This is what it takes to break through and succeed in selling. A CMO gets 1,700 emails a month. They get 200 InMails a week. They have a full-time EA blocking the pesky salespeople and time wasters. But like Dale Carnegie said, “Nothing in the English language is as beautiful as the sound of the prospect’s own name.”¹ And nothing is more relevant than their own quotes in leading publications or the annual shareholder call. They’re putting themselves on the world stage to build their brand. The apex predator’s competitive instinct is to kill or be killed. That’s how they got into the corner office. Can you? Apply COMBO and you will. Many CEOs rose through the ranks as top sellers.

Visualize the goal, germinate the seed, and plan for success. Create a strong personal brand to leverage Cialdini’s law of social proof.² You don’t have to bite their ear off with rudeness or bluntness, but be the honey badger and cultivate finesse while being wildly persistent. This is how you fight for the meeting. Once you open, you’re in with a shot. Assemble the A-team: your CTO, your CEO, and your solutions consultants. Scramble a jet on the tarmac, parachute in, and make sure it’s a brainstorming or whiteboarding session where they’re talking 80 percent of the time. Sell a multiplier not a “rip and replace.” Build consensus in a place that used to be broken. Harmonize. Sell in. Land and expand. If you create value, they will come, and you can close to open a lifelong relationship.

The leader defines the culture, and you lead the individual sales cycle as the face of your company’s brand. Leadership comes in many forms, but you’ll need to lead as the conductor of a symphony to bring harmony where there is discord; you’ll need to bring utility to the dysfunction. You deserve to lead because you’ve faced your fears and embraced the phone, poked the bear, spat in the face of rejection, embraced the difficult, and loved your customer.

Avoiding the Roller-Coaster Performance Ride

Consistent, intelligent hard work always wins, but sales is one of the hardest jobs in the history of the world. You can run for 18 months and exhaust every resource and still lose. It’s extremely repetitive and tactical but also demands masterful strategy. You’ve got quotas, deadlines, reporting, admin, expenses, travel, and management breathing down your neck. It’s a 50 hour a week job of rejection and disappointment if you suck, and it can be a 70 hour a week obsession if you’re great.

The point here is that you must first inculcate yourself to just how difficult high performance is in professional selling and in life in general. It’s going to be painful and you’re going to want to quit if you don’t know why you’re doing what you do. Once you pass through the trough of disillusionment and out the other side, you can gain a determined, conscious competence. But it really all starts with overcoming your fear, and that fear is always, always, always . . . the telephone. This is because when you’re not using the phone, you aren’t really being fully rejected—aka punched in the mouth. The phone is becoming more important because your competitors are abandoning it in droves, but the smartest people are not where the competition is. They are where the customers are present. Everyone you want to sell to has a social phone.

Disciplined, intelligent activity is what sets the great apart from those who are merely talented. At the end of the day, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s success isn’t a fluke; he worked out six hours a day for 20 years. Arnie was the same, and so are all the greats. Without being desperate, you still need to be hungry and driven to wildly exceed your quota. The harder I work, the luckier I get. Daily smart activity builds the mental muscle and grit you need to break through. Abs are made in the kitchen and the gym; but the first discipline is usually the hardest. Analogies abound, but at the end of the day you have to be tenacious beyond belief.

You can’t just send the same stale template over and over. You need to keep a consistent message but one that is smart, well researched, and with an edge for cut-through. You need to take that one extra step to make each task just a bit better. Reverse look-up their email address in Discover.ly or Rapportive. Double-check your common connections for a warm introduction. Check their LinkedIn profile to see if they publicly share their email address or cell phone. Ask, who on my team knows this person or used to work with them at a company in common? What are the internal and external referrals I can garner? What are the trigger events I can monitor and pounce upon? We’ve already covered all this and more . . . but will you actually do what needs to be done every workday?

The world is filled with busy fools who feel justified in their failure. One failing senior salesperson looked me in the eye and said, “There’s nothing else I could be doing; our brand is just not strong enough, and I’m not getting enough leads.” His qualified pipeline was less than 70 percent of his target. He needed to make it 3X, but he ignored COMBO principles and persisted with tiny deals that made it impossible to succeed because there were not enough hours in the day to transact the necessary volume. I explained the CEB Research that revealed that 53 percent of the buyer’s decision is due to how the salesperson and their team engage. Brand and capabilities contribute 19 percent each, and price accounts for a mere 9 percent of decision weighting. Yet he chose to lead with price and sought to be the cheapest as a way of entering an account. His strategy was madness—he was fired.

You can also sit on a silent sales floor and work 12 hours a day blasting out emails and socializing on LinkedIn but never making a deal. Massive dumb action, at any level, is just plain stupid. It’s even dumb to do the right activity but inconsistently. I see it everywhere I consult—salespeople lurching into action once they realize, too late, that they don’t have enough pipeline. Prodded into action, they thrash around and create barely enough opportunities before stopping. They stop on the basis that they are now too busy “selling and closing.”

Imagine a timeline going left to right in a spreadsheet. Two key metrics are tracked for each month: prospecting calls and revenue. Tracking the number of calls is the only key pipeline metric needed because all social and email activity is designed to result in a phone call for a real H2H connection. My experience is that, over time, 98 percent of sellers have wild cross-overs in the two tracking lines of prospecting activity and revenue achieved. Here is how the story goes: “I’m so busy responding to web leads, updating the CRM, following up on existing deals, doing proposals, and closing that I just don’t have time for prospecting . . . no one answers the phone anyway. I do what I can each week and push updates on LinkedIn and social—that’s outbound isn’t it?”

Note: The idea that “no one answers the phone” is one of the strangest and most powerfully destructive beliefs in sales! It’s 100 percent wrong, so don’t buy the lie! Chris Beall, Mike Scher, Kyle Porter, Steve Richard, Anthony Iannarino, Jeb Blount, Mike Weinberg, Jill Konrath, and Mark Hunter are just a few who can prove incontrovertibly that senior people answer the phone to then become customers.

For those who don’t consistently do the required prospecting activity, sales results fall well below target within 60 to 90 days: “Holy crap, marketing and the SDR team have failed to deliver leads—again! I’ve gotta prospect to fill my pipe!” A few weeks of furious activity ensues to create enough qualified pipeline to keep the wolf from the door . . . but then the cycle repeats. The lag between prospecting activity and revenue creates a false impression that they are disconnected. The same happens with our weight. We diet and don’t seem to lose any weight after a week, so we give up and binge only to see weight fall off. Wow, dieting doesn’t work! I do the right thing and don’t lose weight, yet when I eat crap (carbs and sugar) I don’t get fat! Wrong. It’s just a lag between inputs and results. Selling is exactly the same.

Intelligent targeting + the right value narrative + disciplined COMBO with good phone = appointments = prospects = sales = referrals = more appointments = overachievement. The key is having consistent inputs every day of every week of every month. That is the only way to smooth and align revenue and activity to deliver consistent high performance results.

How many COMBOs do you need to execute on a daily basis to create 3–5X your quota or sales target? Do the math yourself. You need to back into your own number based on the results goal you set. If a day goes by and you have no appointments set, you’re just snoozing or marketing. You’re not hunting and it’s not sales; it’s almost like you’re a human banner advertisement to build ambient awareness of the brand. You will be cut from the roster because that’s the most expensive billboard ever and a quarter-million cars aren’t passing you every day.

Work ethic is important but, make no mistake, it’s real quality sales pipeline that cures all ills—even if you’re missing your revenue targets. What gets measured, gets managed, gets done (according to Peter Drucker). Track all that you do, even if it has to be manually on a sheet of paper or spreadsheet. You’ll find yourself cycling through the 50 accounts, mining for warm intros, nodes in your network, and pattern recognition. You’ll be running fresh COMBO plays on each. You’ll do a pass with more personalized outreach referencing profile data, then a pass with stats, then a pass with questions. The seller who uses COMBO with B content but is rigorous in adhering to cadence (even uses SalesLoft Cadence software) will achieve much better results than a strategic seller who communicates like a powerful A+ but doesn’t have the magical skill of consistent follow-up.

Selling is not rocket science; it’s far more difficult than that. Consistent COMBO outreach and follow-up is the secret of everything. You’ll COMBO top-funnel just to land the meeting. You’ll COMBO mid-funnel just to progress to next steps. You’ll COMBO in the bottom-funnel to close, negotiate with procurement, and drive the deal over the line. Pay attention to your children and how they hound you for candy, gaming, and television time. You could sell jet engines, and you still need to hound with COMBO—it’s just the nature of the beast.

But you’re not a machine, and it’s very hard to Six Sigma your way into optimal productivity. You could call 50 prospects and get nothing from it—it would be just like going through the motions. You could spend the entire day commenting in LinkedIn groups and have a few other interesting narcissists poke you back. You could research the perfect business case to high heaven! If a bear researches in the woods . . . you get my point! For many, selling truly is an exercise in futility.

We are all allotted the same cosmic clock, so why then do some optimize this time for better results? This has been dogging management consultants—thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming and Peter F. Drucker—throughout the ages since the days of Aristotle and Plato. We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not days; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heartbeats. Read Matthew Michalewicz’s book Life in Half a Second—it will change your life if you act on his advice.

You can have the perfect dashboard pulling your Salesforce CRM data. You can use predictive intelligence to decide whom you should prospect next with your auto-dialer featuring local presence and optimal time of day. You can use marketing automation lead scoring to see which prospect is hot based on rules. But it’s truly a mystery sandwich to actually know what to do tomorrow that will be most effective.

Peter F. Drucker was right when he said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Here are some areas where I would look to find the answer for sales effectiveness:

Leading vs. lagging indicators: Very little has been written about proactive sales management, but it’s an important science to understand from rep level all the way to the corner office. There are myriad KPIs to measure but precious few smart actions that actually move the needle on revenue. Revenue itself is a lagging (rear-view) metric, and not one that can be moved by the SVP of Sales barking at the team to walk through the pipeline strategy again each week. The book Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana is essential reading in this area.

WIGs (wildly important goals): These are literally daily goals you set that are massive. By focusing on them, they gradually lever the boulder toward overarching objectives. The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling is a stellar book that looks at execution as a management science for confronting the whirlwind of your day. For most sellers, just handling their email and getting to in-box zero is unfathomable.

Pick a major action to do before lunch that scares you: Look at your pipe and think from the gut—who is the one person you could call today to truly move the needle? Who can sign? Who can say “yes”? Who can only say “no”? Who do you really need to phone in that account that you’re petrified to call? Board member? Time to go to the CEO, CTO, or CIO?

Make strategic lists of prospects that are “similar to your best customers” (Mike Weinberg’s idea): COMBO with these lists daily like there is no next week, and then do it every week. Prioritize interactivity as the highest leading indicator of success. Who is returning your call, replying to email, responding on LinkedIn, interfacing with your LinkedIn Publisher post, willing to have subsequent calls with you, inviting you on-site, and asking provocative questions? Interactivity is the litmus test for prioritizing a book of business. When the prospect starts to drive the sales cycle from the front, you know it’s going to close.

Thinking about doing it and talking about doing it are not the same as actually doing it. “The number-one trait of successful people is a bias toward action,” says Dan Forbes. “Have a bias toward action—let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away,” says Indira Gandhi.

The bottom line is few people furiously protect their calendar to make 30 targeted prospecting calls happen in a two hour block every day, followed by a voice mail, email, InMail, and text message. Most salespeople enjoy the coffee catch-up with colleagues and like to check email and their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts throughout the day. Most salespeople have fewer than three on-site meetings in their territory per week.

If you’re willing to take 30 to 50 smart actions per day, every day, you’ll kill it. This is like a commitment to brushing and flossing. If you have a beautiful smile and no cavities late in life, you get it! Make a commitment to A/B test everything: email length, message delivery medium, script, unique value proposition (UVP), subject line, time of day, cadence, length, message style, tone, relevant clients, social, SlideShare, networking events, even how you dress in meetings. Be teachable and determined, and you’ll crush it.

I can’t make you stop being a two- or three-toed sloth. It will take your own commitment to understanding what the smart actions are that lever deals forward and truly produce leading indicators. You’ve got to drive progression with prospects rather than accept continuation. Let me give you a pro tip: Next time management jubilantly dumps a carcass of an RFP on your desk, push back with gusto! Even flat out reject it. As Lee Bartlett mentions in his fabulous book No. 1 Best Seller, “Furiously protect revenue-generating activities.” This means you have to be willing to check out of the glad-handing and internal corporate politics of your sales organization. Let the other yes-men and yes-women go get coffee with your GM. Trust me, you’re better off getting one more discovery or on-site in that week. Commissions are worlds better than backslapping and a hangover.

These tactics won’t make you well-liked, but they’ll make you consistently successful, without the stressful troughs after a peak. Once you’re incredibly successful, you’ll be untouchable as long as you stay true to ethical values and conduct. Your actions protect you and so do revenue and the trusted relationships you have with valuable customers.

To pull off all of the above will take a tremendous amount of focus. Simply shut out the noise of all the social networks, mobile phone blips and beeps, and intra-office spam email and collaboration messaging. Make no mistake, 80 percent of most people’s workday is actually wasted, with only 20 percent being productive. This is the Pareto Principle, which is an inexorable universal power distribution law. I don’t care how aggressively you sell, time will defeat you before you slay the dragon. You must prioritize executing COMBOS every day and become addicted to the hustle, flow, and grind. You’ve got to move from wasting 80 percent of the day to driving 80 percent of the output to a reverse power curve.

80/20 Power Laws and Personal Effectiveness

I’m a big fan of Richard Koch and the 80/20 rule based on the Pareto Principle. In many respects, this inspired Tim Ferriss to write The 4-Hour Workweek. The truth is that waste is rampant in all human and natural systems. Eighty percent of your effective output is generated by 20 percent of your actions. This is why the tale of the jar with rocks and sand is everything from a prioritization and time management standpoint. I discovered the analogy of rocks and sand from Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s book, First Things First. If you fill the jar with the sand, the rocks never fit. In contrast, if you put the big rocks in first and then pour in the sand, it all fits. Big rocks, then pebbles, then sand . . . in that order. Prioritize the important rather than have your chain jerked by someone else’s “urgent.”

We all feel that there is never enough time in the day. You must therefore use time-blocking and focus on the 20 percent of the opportunities that will drive 80 percent of the revenue. But how do you choose? Each day when you get to your desk, don’t even open your email. Write down the top three things you need to accomplish by lunch on a pad, and execute on those in the optimal sequence. Better still, write that list the evening before. These are the big rocks to fit into the jar of your life. These are the proactive lead measures you can effect to lever the Sisyphean boulder of your day up the proverbial hill. The pebbles are the reactive prospect emails. The sand is the training video you had started to watch, social media notifications, the news of the day, sports scores, etc.

What’s important is that you take the time to clearly define what the rocks and sand are for you. If you put the sand into the jar first, you’ll never fit the rocks that matter into your schedule. You’ll struggle just to play catch-up. Social media is just one tool in your arsenal. It’s very powerful when you leverage batch processing. Utilize a social listening platform to track your greatest prospects in target companies first. Prioritize them. Companies like Avention, InsideView, and Nimble can help you do this. Watch what’s trending with CXOs, and take the time to comment on it. First, listen to the stream and pick out the people with whom you’d like to engage. Then make it meaningful. Ten touches trump 100 when you make them count. Setting Google Alerts or a daily LinkedIn digest of group activity can give you an edge to find the signal in the noise. Batch process by having the discipline to take just 30 minutes when you wake up and 30 minutes before bed on this exercise. You’d be amazed how far you can get with a concerted mono-tasking effort on the target. The secret is scheduling time just like you would with COMBOs, and don’t forget to still do that, too. Yes, it can be rocks or sand. The choice is yours based on the due diligence and time you put in to picking the right targets.

LinkedIn Navigator is a powerful weapon for frontline sales managers and salespeople alike. It enables the monitoring of targets you wish to pursue and then engagement at precisely the right moment. It allows you to receive a blended digest of these updates without needing to glue your eyes to the feed like a stock ticker. The myth of social media is that you have to spend all your time on it. Just as with using a tool such as the telephone, if you schedule your time, have an objective in mind, and execute your plan in a concerted way, you can produce dramatic results. There’s a major compulsion to always be on because you fear missing something. But control this impulse, and realize you can always catch up at scheduled intervals.

Do at least one thing that scares you before lunch. If that means contacting Mr. Big in your book, do it! You’ll get his executive assistant anyway. Does that mean calling the cell phone of your warmest opportunity and moving it to the next step, demo, on-site, or proposal phase? What really scares you this week, this month, or today? Do it now! By starting to prioritize the WIG, or wildly important goal, you’ll be able to create a true lever. If you identify the 20 percent of actions that make the biggest difference, and then do them as a priority, you can tip the scales of efficiency in your favor.

You need every possible advantage in selling. Make your calls warm instead of cold; have an awesome personal brand on LinkedIn, stand up straight with great posture, have a great headset with fully charged batteries, use practiced scripts that you drilled with friends, kill objections with finesse—every single thing makes you more effective. The fact that you’re prioritizing the COMBO outreach method means you can buck the 80/20 rule and create your own 70/30 or 60/40 rule.

If you want to change the rules altogether, you can make your output massively more efficient by embracing technology. If you’re serious about achieving live conversations, use hot switch-dialing software such as ConenctAndSell that can increase your conversations 20-fold. They integrate with your CRM and dial in the background to techno-magically connect you only when there is a live person on the other end of the phone. No dialing courage required, no call fatigue; just fit your headset, strap yourself in front of the screen, and hit the start button.

Why You Must Become a Mentor and Coach

Guard your attitude and your time. Revenue protects but it is also good to align with winning agendas and the powerful people internally, within your channel and inside your customer base. If you don’t know how to manage the internal politics in your organization or those within the prospect base, you could be euthanized and be DOA. Dissing competitors, gossiping, and rumor-mongering are never the way to go. Take the high road and be stately in how you operate. Your hallmarks should be a warm and friendly persona tempered with thoughtfulness, good manners, and deliberate language. You are on a mission to make a difference, and you know why you invest your time in any project or pursuit. Be seen as the one who rises above the negativity and noise to create strategy and then execute without a fuss.

Be under no illusion: You will make enemies if you are committed to COMBO Prospecting because others will look bad. They will accuse you of all manner of nonsense, from harassing customers to damaging the company’s brand by calling people on the phone, spamming prospects with too much outreach, working too hard, being too provocative, failing to push the corporate message of product and solution superiority, and much more. My advice: Stay laser focused on a business value narrative, and keep a low profile as you execute your COMBO time-blocks—in a meeting room if you can. Stay humble and be Switzerland. Smile and simply say, “I can see why you’d think that. Have you read COMBO Prospecting?”

Your enemies are driven by envy, jealousy, and fear of being found out for being lazy, cowardly, and unimaginative. It’s just like the old days of unions when the young, enthusiastic new worker would be pulled aside and dressed down by the shop floor steward for making everyone look bad: “If ya wanna last here, slow down and stop makin’ the rest of us look bad. Ya get my meaning?” For you it’s all just water off a duck’s back.

One of the people I mentor worked for a company that was full-bottle social selling and frowned upon anyone prospecting on the phone. He had to get in early and stay late plus book meeting rooms to make his calls. This was so that he was not labeled a nonbeliever in the new passive silent sales floor approach to nonselling. The head of global sales had flown in from HQ and walked onto the floor—my mentee literally terminated a prospecting call mid sentence because he did not want to get fired. You can find insanity in every business. He called the prospect back 15 minutes later, apologizing for the call dropping out.

If you want to succeed with COMBO, you better wear a headset every day and light up the keypad on an honest-to-goodness phone. You also need to infect your organization with truth and the presence of the social phone. Spread the word with this book and my articles on LinkedIn. At the end of the day, it’s undeniable that a seller actually interacting live with a prospect is infinitely more power than anything digital. We all know this, and we know that the best things in life are still messy—love, business, growth, learning, and sales. Watch kids play in the dirt and convince their mother to get them a lollipop, playing one parent against the other. This stuff is so innate and hardwired to our neuropsychology that it’s more of an internal awakening than an esoteric ivory-tower epiphany.

Your success is not a game, and it’s certainly not optional. You could be the VP of Sales within five years if you lead the way with spectacular revenue and stupendous customer acquisition. What you learn and who you become, by overcoming your fear of the phone and becoming masterful with your voice and attitude, make you worthy of becoming a CEO. Every entrepreneur needs to be brilliant at setting a vision and winning the support of investors, partners, and customers. It’s all selling and leading. Everyone needs to make a living, but most also really want to make a difference. What will be the legacy of your work life, and how will you help others achieve theirs?

It’s a fitting end to the book to make one last point. Readers are leaders, but legacy comes from deeds. What will you do now? Really, what will you change in your life? Is this all too hard? Are you not up to it? Too much hassle and hard work? Jonathan Farrington says it best:

Perhaps of all the temptations we meet in life, the subtlest of all is the comfort zone, that invitation to settle for less, to go for contentment when the stresses of over achievement beckon. The way that takes you out of the comfort zone is the route less travelled. Most of us when we come to that place where the two paths divide prefer the one that leads to safety, to warmth and to comfort.

Before you finally decide on the blue pill or the red pill (from The Matrix), settle in for an evening and watch two movies back-to-back: Jerry Maguire and The Pursuit of Happyness. Then go outside and look into the night sky and ponder your future. I think you can be so much better and make a far greater difference in the lives of others. Professional selling could be the ideal vehicle for you to do just that. What do you think?

Success is about achieving your goals and living the life you want. There is nothing wrong with stepping back into an account management role or maybe abandoning sales altogether. Do what is best for you and your family. All I ask is that you are honest with yourself—if you claim to be a business development person, then actually do what it takes to claim that title.

If you accept that challenge, as swamped as you may be, take the time to pass on the knowledge. You can pay it forward and make a difference in other people’s lives. You’ll be enriched and learn by helping others, and you’ll create your own unique selling style. The infinitely curious seller can never become bored because, however hard the grind in the coal mine, you will see more diamonds than anyone else.

Zig Ziglar was a man of genuine faith and integrity, and early in my sales career he said to me, “You can have anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want.” Success is not about grasping and greed, nor about dominance and power. It’s not about bluster and bravado or crushing and closing. It’s about courage, values, leadership, and service.

This book may seem over the top and the metaphors a little violent, but you really are fighting your own fears and the apathy of the people who need your help. Be the person worthy of the success you seek. Love and respect yourself and others as you strive to make a difference by giving everything you’ve got. Most important, have the courage to believe you are capable of achieving anything you intelligently and passionately commit to do. Carpe diem!