🎙️Transcript: Selling Forward 2020
ringDNA's Selling Forward Virtual Summit
"You're in Your On Way: How to Overcome Mental Barriers and Get Through Crises"
Andy Paul, Ralph Barsi
June 10, 2020
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Summary
In this session from Selling Forward, Ralph Barsi, VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io, lays out a practical, no-excuses framework for sales professionals who want to move from average performance to true mastery.
He starts with mindset, emphasizing that 90% of what we do is mental and that success is sequential, built on small, consistent actions over a long period of time.
Drawing on lessons from Jack Welch, Michael Jordan, Jesse Itzler, Steve Prefontaine, John Wooden, Stephen Covey, and Jim Rohn, Ralph challenges listeners to decide to be successful, give their best effort, and cultivate a deep attitude of gratitude.
From there, he connects mindset to execution. He explains the "domino effect" from Gary Keller’s The ONE Thing, showing how intense focus on one key priority compounds into major outcomes.
He walks through how to build a professional brand and network, communicate like a boss in prospecting and email, and create repeatable, high-quality pipeline by thinking in systems and proven sales methodologies. Throughout, Ralph stresses ownership: of your calendar, of your excuses, of your development, and of the results you produce.
Finally, he frames modern sales as a thinking profession. You are paid to think, solve problems, and drive results. He introduces critical and creative thinking tools like McKinsey’s Pyramid Principle and Michael Michalko’s Thinkertoys, then ends with the U.S. Army’s Be–Know–Do leadership model.
The message: if you raise your standards, get ruthlessly clear on your priorities, and deliberately sharpen how you think and act, you become the kind of trusted advisor and leader whose expertise the market actively seeks out.
BIG Takeaways
• Mindset Is the Primary Lever
Ralph hammers home that 90% of what we do is mental. Before you worry about scripts, tools, or tactics, you need to decide to be successful and to hold yourself to higher standards.
He references Jack Welch’s mandate to be number one or number two, and Michael Jordan’s obsession with winning, as examples of people who made a clear internal decision about who they were going to be.
Without that decision, all the productivity hacks in the world won’t matter. Your mindset sets the ceiling on your performance and determines how you respond when things get difficult.
• Success Is Sequential: The Domino Effect
Using Gary Keller’s “Domino Effect” metaphor, Ralph explains that success is not a one-time event; it’s the cumulative result of small, disciplined actions. A two-inch domino can knock over something 1.5x its size, and when that pattern continues, by the 31st iteration you’re metaphorically towering above Mount Everest.
The same applies in your career: you join one relevant LinkedIn group, send one thoughtful note, add one piece of value, and repeat this process enough times that it compounds into opportunities, expertise, and reputation. This reframes success from “instant big wins” to “deliberate, sequential wins” that you control every day.
• Gratitude, Ownership, and Eliminating Excuses
Ralph pushes listeners to adopt an attitude of gratitude for the tools, opportunities, and people that have helped them get where they are. At the same time, he’s blunt about excuses: whenever you make a list of reasons why you’re not hitting quota or scaling your team, you belong on that list too.
Drawing on Jim Rohn, he reminds you that “if you will change, everything will change for you.” Frustration is often just misaligned expectations, as Stephen Covey points out, and recalibrating those expectations—along with your standards and effort—is part of the job. The throughline is simple: be thankful, but also brutally honest about your own role in your results.
• Communicate Like a Boss and Make Every Word Earn Its Place
Ralph’s standard for communication is ruthless: every word in your emails, LinkedIn posts, and presentations must earn its right to be there.
In prospecting emails, he argues you should put the ask up front—don’t bury the request for a 15–30 minute call at the end of a long block of text. Be specific about why you’re reaching out, what you want, and why it matters to them, not you.
He warns against “email tennis” and phone tag caused by vague or weak communication, and encourages using frameworks like PAR (Problem, Actions, Results) to structure conversations and messages. If you want to be seen as a trusted advisor, your clarity and brevity must signal respect for the prospect’s time.
• Build a Professional Brand and Network with Intentional Systems
Rather than “winging it” on LinkedIn and networking, Ralph advocates for deliberate systems. Start by joining relevant groups and communities, listen first, then connect and engage with personalized messages—not generic connection requests.
Over time, this consistent behavior teaches you the language, trends, and problems of your market, so your outreach and conversations become more relevant and valuable. He emphasizes that everyone—not just SDRs and AEs, but leaders too—is responsible for both revenue pipeline and talent pipeline.
Thinking in systems and processes instead of one-off goals allows you to create a sustainable rhythm of activity that the market begins to recognize and seek out.
• Own Your Calendar and Priorities or They Will Own You
Ralph is explicit that your inbox is just “a list of other people’s agenda items” unless you take control. He highlights Tony Hsieh’s "Yesterbox" concept as a way to batch email and impose boundaries, and Brendon Burchard’s "One-Page Productivity Plan" built around Projects, Priorities, and People.
He pairs this with the urgency/importance quadrant, urging you to distinguish between what is urgent and important, urgent and not important (delegate), and non-urgent but important (plan and schedule).
He also pushes for regular self-assessment: define your short-, mid-, and long-term aspirations, who you want to emulate, and the gaps you must close. Without this structure, your days are reactive; with it, your calendar becomes an asset instead of a liability.
• Get Paid to Think: Critical and Creative Problem-Solving
One of Ralph’s strongest points is that modern sales and leadership roles are fundamentally thinking jobs.
You’re paid to solve problems and drive results, not just to “stay busy.” He urges reps to bring two potential solutions with every problem they escalate to a leader, both to lighten the load on leadership and to build their own problem-solving muscles.
He introduces McKinsey’s Pyramid Principle—answer-first thinking—where you lead with the conclusion and then support it with logically grouped arguments and questions that drive to the root cause.
For creative challenges, he recommends Michael Michalko’s Thinkertoys to break habitual patterns and generate unconventional solutions. If you consistently think this way, you move from order-taker to strategic advisor very quickly.
• Be, Know, Do: A Practical Leadership Framework to Grow Into
Ralph closes with the U.S. Army’s Be–Know–Do framework as a simple but demanding definition of leadership.
“Be” refers to your character—your physical, mental, and emotional attributes, combined with your values.
“Know” refers to your mastery of your profession: the conceptual, technical, interpersonal, and tactical skills required to win consistently.
“Do” is execution—actually applying what you are and what you know in the field, with your people and your market.
When you align who you are, what you know, and what you consistently do, you become the kind of leader who leads by example instead of title. In Ralph’s framing, that’s the path from being just another rep or manager to becoming the person whose judgment, insight, and presence the market and your team rely on.
Transcript
Andy Paul (00:00):
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Day Two of Selling Forward. Hi, I am Andy Paul, host of the Sales Enablement Podcast. We're so glad to see you here again and hope that you're finding these sessions exciting and valuable.
So we're going to get right back into it today with Ralph Barsi, widely recognized as one of the top speakers in sales and VP of Global Sales at Tray.io. Ralph will help salespeople master their mindset during these challenging times. Now let's get into it.
Ralph Barsi (00:28):
Hello there. This is Ralph Barsi. I'm the VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io in San Francisco.
We are a general automation platform in the cloud, and we enable businesses to integrate and automate all the components of their tech stack to drive workflows across the enterprise. A little bit about me, just for some background, color, and context. I've been in sales for over 25 years now.
Half of my career has been spent as an individual contributor. I've been an account executive overseeing territories and carrying quotas, of course. The latter half of my career has really been spent building and leading sales development organizations.
Prior to Tray, I led the global sales development organization at ServiceNow. Prior to that, I was at Achievers and saw that team through its acquisition by Blackhawk Network. And prior to that, I built and led the sales development organization at InsideView.
(01:32):
So I've seen a lot, and I think some of these observations could help you move the needle from X to Y in a given timeframe. That concept, by the way, comes from The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which is a fabulous book, so check it out.
Here's what we'll talk about, probably over the next 25 minutes or so. Ninety percent of what we do is mental, so what we have to do first is fine-tune our mindset. We also have to understand that success doesn't just happen overnight; it is sequential.
It takes people their entire careers to see success in their lives and see it on a consistent basis. It also comes from understanding and knowing that little things make the big things happen.
It's critical that we communicate like a boss in everything that we do—when we're emailing prospects or partners or referrals, for example, when we're giving presentations like this, whether it's online to a small group or to a large group, whether you're standing on stage, whether it's internal or external. Every word has to earn its right onto your email, or onto the page of your LinkedIn post, or into your presentation.
(02:41):
It's also important to understand that you have to set things in order before there is confusion. If you don't know where it is you're headed, if you don't know which way is up, or you're not visualizing success for your day or your week or your quarter or your year, it's going to continue to be an uphill climb.
Ultimately, because 90% of what we do is mental, we have to get paid for how we think, how we solve problems, and how we drive results. So we'll talk a little bit about that as well.
So let's start with the mindset. The late Jack Welch, who was the CEO of GE and brought GE to the behemoth that it once was, once said, "To hell with it, we're either going to be number one or number two in every field we're in, or we're going to be out." It's pretty plain and simple.
(03:42):
I’ve been watching the docuseries on ESPN called "The Last Dance" about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the nineties, and that was the decision they made. It was just to simply be number one—to live and play and execute with the highest standards.
Brian Tracy, who's a really famous author and speaker, wrote a killer book called Eat That Frog about productivity and time management, really owning your calendar versus the other way around. Brian once said, "Get serious about your career. Decide today to be a big success in everything you do." And he couldn't be more right.
Unless you make that decision to be very successful in what it is that you're doing, you're just not going to be successful, as simple as that sounds.
Jesse Itzler is married to Sara Blakely. Sara Blakely is the founder and CEO of Spanx. This is a billionaire couple.
(04:44):
Jesse started a great program called Build Your Life Resume, or BYLR, and I had the privilege of taking it a couple of summers ago. I learned from Jesse that "how you do anything is how you do everything."
So how I'm talking to you right now, the slides I've put together, the color palette I've used and the font I've used, the images I've selected, the books that I'm going to cite and reference in my presentation—this is how I do everything.
Steve Prefontaine was a famous distance runner at the University of Oregon. He once said that "to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift," and he was right. There are a couple of ways we could define "the gift."
The gift could be from within. It's something that you possess. It's a unique strength or gift that you might not be sharing with us. So to give it up and to not give your best is to sacrifice that gift that you were born with.
(05:36):
On the flip side, the gift could be just the day that we have today. It's important that all of us continue to develop an attitude of gratitude. You're likely watching and listening to me from a pretty cool MacBook. You may not have even paid for that MacBook—maybe your company paid for it—or from your slick iPhone.
Don't take that stuff for granted. Think about some of the great things that you have in your life, as well as the great people that you have in your life, who helped get you to where you are today. Maybe you learned from them, or maybe people in your family or close friends made big sacrifices to help move obstacles out of your path to get you to where you are right now.
You should feel an obligation to pay that forward and help others. Maybe there is a nugget of value that I can leave for you today that you can go share with someone else to make their lives better.
(06:31):
The late coach John Wooden, who coached the UCLA Bruins to, I think, 10 consecutive NCAA basketball championships, wrote an awesome book with author Steve Jamison called Wooden on Leadership. To this day, it sits atop my recommended reads list.
In it, Coach Wooden talks about activity and says that to produce real results, activity must be organized and executed meticulously. Otherwise, your activity is no different from children just aimlessly running around the playground at recess. So make sure that you're executing and organizing your activity on, if it makes sense, even a minute-by-minute basis.
Finally, the late great Dr. Stephen Covey, who authored The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, wrote in that book that frustration is a function of your expectations. So if you're frustrated right now because you're not making quota, or you're frustrated because you're not making quota consistently, or you're a leader who is having a heck of a time scaling your organization—let alone to world-class levels—and you're frustrated, it's because your expectations need to be recalibrated, reset, refined, and probably reinvigorated.
(08:00):
What I'm going to ask you to do is, when you're creating a list of excuses and you're pointing fingers at people or other business units or the economy or the market, make sure to remember that you're putting yourself on that excuse list. You are on that excuse list every single time, whether you like it or not.
You're often in your own way. So if you remember another quote from the late great Jim Rohn, it's this: "If you will change, everything will change for you."
(08:33):
The concept illustrated on this slide comes from another fabulous author named Gary Keller. He's also the CEO and founder of Keller Williams Real Estate. He wrote a book called The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, and he wrote a book called The ONE Thing.
I mean, listen to that title. Stop focusing on your top 10 list or your top 30 list of things that you need to knock out this week, or this year, or over the course of your career. What's one thing that you need to focus on overcoming right now in order to move that needle that we talked about?
Hone in on just that one thing and get super focused. Anyway, in The ONE Thing he presents this concept called the domino effect. He takes a domino that is two inches in length or height, however you want to look at it.
(09:25):
It's about the same size as a matchbox. But due to the laws of physics, it carries a force that's strong enough to knock over an item that's one and a half times its size.
If you carry that concept forward and you topple over that first domino, and it knocks over the next item that's one and a half times its size, by the time you get to the 18th iteration you're knocking over an item that's the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. If you get to the 31st iteration, you're now looming 3,000 feet above Mount Everest, which, by the way, is about 32,000 feet in the sky.
And if you get to the 57th iteration, you're almost talking about the distance between the Earth and the moon. That is what he means by success being sequential.
(10:20):
Take a look at your professional brand, for example, or take a look at how well you're building—or not building—your network. Start by joining those LinkedIn groups or those local communities and associations, listening first, then connecting with the people in that group, and then engaging with them.
Reach out to them on LinkedIn to connect with you, but reach out with a message that's personalized and tailored to them. It's not just this blind invitation. Your personalized invitation could be one to two lines: "Hey, look, Howard, it's great to connect with you here on LinkedIn. I've loved the content that you've been publishing of late. Looking forward to connecting on the phone soon." Boom. That's it.
Doing that over and over again and adding little nuggets of value to your network on LinkedIn goes a long way. All of a sudden, you're now gaining knowledge of your industry and your marketplace.
(11:21):
You're starting to learn and understand the trends. You're knowing the problems that your prospects are running into on a case-by-case basis and at large, and you're able to have relevant conversations with your prospects about those problems.
You're starting to know the answers to the problems because you're establishing flow in your conversation when you're talking to your prospects and to your marketplace. It's what's driving your daily prospecting. You're doing thorough research before you're making your calls and before you're writing your emails.
You're keeping the content and the copy of your messaging about them—not about you, your company, your offering, your company's history. Nobody really cares. They want to know if and how you can solve their problems for them. You want to be seen as a trusted advisor to them.
(12:18):
Always follow up and follow through. Don't just say you're going to do something and then not do it.
If you're going to broker an introduction, for example, between two people, actually follow up with that email and be very personalized and tailored in that approach as well—and keep it about them. Make sure that over time you're building repeatable, viable pipeline for your business.
And as you know, that applies to everybody listening right now. If you're a sales development rep, if you're an account executive, if you're a leader, you too are responsible and accountable for contributing to the revenue pipeline and even the talent pipeline of your organization.
Think in terms of systems and think in terms of processes instead of just goals, so that you can establish that rhythm that I talked about. Leverage the myriad of methodologies that are out there in terms of how to sell, whether it's SPIN Selling, Solution Selling, Miller Heiman, The Challenger Sale, ValueSelling, Solution-Centric Selling—there are so many different methodologies that are going to help get you to where you need to go and help you master your craft.
(13:22):
So stay focused and disciplined, and you'll go a long way, ultimately reaching the top of your game where you're seen as that trusted advisor—where your expertise is actually sought out by the marketplace, by your prospects and customers and peers.
What's really important is that you communicate like a boss. I said at the beginning of our talk today that every word has to earn its right onto the page of your LinkedIn post, or your email, or into your presentation, or onto your slide.
Ultimately, when you're emailing somebody—especially a prospect—you want something from them. You want that first meeting. Ultimately, you want to build a long-lasting business relationship with that prospect. You want them to come into the tent and into the family of your customers.
So put that ask up front. Tell them why it is you're even reaching out to them in the first place and what it is you want them to do.
(14:20):
Spare them the challenge of having to read through—hopefully not—an email that's too long from you to finally get to the ask for the standard 15- or 20- or 30-minute phone call. Instead, just put that ask up front.
Say, "Hey, look, I'd love to get you on the phone. I want us to cross paths pretty soon here, whether it's this afternoon or next week or within the next month. Here's why I'm writing to you and why I want to get on that call."
Be super specific with your ask and in the copy of your messaging. Otherwise, you're going to end up playing tennis with them. You're going to play email tennis with them, or you're going to play phone tag with them, and it's a big drag and it's a big time suck.
You want to avoid that on both ends because everybody's time is valuable, and you'll be able to cut through the noise by being very specific.
(15:11):
Always pay attention to the details and always make par, just like you're playing golf. So use PAR as an acronym for Problems, Actions (or Activities), and Results.
You'll find that when you're using that mind map, when you're talking with somebody on the phone—starting with the problem, then talking about the actions that are required to solve that problem, and the results that will yield from taking action—you’re going to find yourself articulating that message smoothly and clearly when you're on the phone or when you're in email.
Sometimes people who are having trouble establishing conversation flow in phone calls have to envision themselves standing on top of an area rug that's kind of split into three. There's a beginning section, there's a middle section, and there's an end section.
As you're talking to somebody about the problems that you've seen in the marketplace and you've seen perhaps in the way that they might be doing business—of course you're going to say that tactfully—you'll say, "Let's talk about some potential activities or actions that we can implement today, tomorrow, or next quarter."
(16:16):
Then you step into the middle section of your area rug when you're on the phone with somebody. Then you ask a pivot question that helps them start to engineer a vision—with you in it—of the results that they're going to see by doing business with you and by taking those actions.
Turn up the level of your energy just a notch. For example, in the presentation I'm giving right now, I could be really super enthusiastic with you. I could focus your attention on the image to the right of this page that's given to us by Ramit Sethi, where he talks about compelling subject lines that will stop your audience cold and force them to keep reading.
Their thought should be, "Tell me more. I want to hear more. Let me get into this email and see what the ask is," ultimately leading them down a nice, healthy slippery slope where you keep them captivated throughout the message and you finally have the call to action at the end. Or you could change the disposition and the tone, and you can get right back to this cadence of talk track that I'm using.
(17:22):
All of it counts. All of it is part of the detail.
Set things in order before there's confusion. You have to parse things out and filter things out and distill things out on a regular basis. Sometimes using a quadrant, like the one we're looking at here from MeetingSift, tells us that you might be running into a task that's urgent and not important.
These are often tasks that are for others, so put them in the "delegate" quadrant. Reassess, and if needed, delegate these tasks to someone else. Whereas on the flip side, you might have something that's urgent and important. Obviously, you've got to put it in the top-right quadrant. You've got to do it now. These are the most critical tasks; you have to prioritize according to urgency.
(18:17):
Oftentimes, people aren't even self-assessing. They're not asking themselves what their career aspirations are—short-term, mid-term, or long-term in their career. They're not defining what short-term, mid-term, or long-term even means.
So try to do a self-assessment. It doesn't take long. Maybe it'll take an hour, but fully focus and invest the time in talking to yourself about who it is you're trying to emulate, whether it's personally or professionally. Who is it that inspires you?
What are the characteristics or attributes that they're illustrating on a regular basis that you want to pull from and model? What do you need to learn and work on to get where you're going? Where do you think your areas of improvement are? And how can we—the marketplace, your peers, your colleagues, your mentors—how can we help you address those areas of improvement and help you get where you need to go?
(19:11):
Take ownership of your calendar. Own your day. Otherwise, your email inbox, for example, is simply a list of other people's agenda items.
I have loved how Tony Hsieh, who's the CEO and founder of Zappos, handled email. He actually created what he calls a "Yesterbox," where he lets all his emails pile up on one given day. Then the next day, he takes a look at the list, and he knows that he's got a finite amount of messages.
He can then compartmentalize them, and he can block out time on his calendar to put them in one of the quadrants that we're looking at here, or address them firsthand. So check out the Yesterbox.
Then Brendon Burchard talks about owning your calendar by way of what he calls a One-Page Productivity Plan. That's really using three Ps: Projects, Priorities, and People. All of us have people that must hear from us today, and there are people that we must hear from today. So take a look at Brendon's One-Page Productivity Planner.
(20:08):
Ultimately, we're getting paid to think. We're getting paid to solve problems and drive results.
If you have a problem, try to come up with two solutions to that problem before you escalate it to your leader. Leaders are in their positions because that's what they've done over and over again for the organizations that they've represented: they've solved problems. So become a leader yourself and start coming up with solutions to these problems before you escalate them.
Give your leaders multiple-choice options. I'll bet nine times out of ten, if you're employing this approach, you're going to solve the problem on your own.
Try to employ one of two paths when you're solving problems. One is a critical thinking path; one is a creative thinking path.
(21:15):
I made the mistake of not employing either one one time. I built a slide deck and presented it to my boss's boss, who always wore—and to this day still wears—a consultant's cap on his head. He approaches problems with the answer first and then deconstructs those answers.
Well, I wasn't doing that at one time. I presented the deck to him. He ended up ripping up the deck and then taught me the methodology that you're seeing on this page. It comes from McKinsey's way of thinking. It's called the Pyramid Principle, or "answer-first" thinking.
You always start with the answer first—the answer to the problem. When you're direct, especially as a trusted advisor, you're persuasive. So come up with that answer to the problem first, then start to break it down by grouping and summarizing your supporting arguments to that answer, and logically ordering your supporting ideas by way of questions.
Ultimately, that brings you to the root cause of the problem that you're trying to solve.
(22:22):
The creative way of doing things can come from a great book by Michael Michalko called Thinkertoys. It's essentially a book of creative thinking exercises to help you get that square peg into the round hole.
But again, get paid to think, solve problems, and drive results.
And I'm going to leave you with this. This "Be, Know, and Do" approach comes from the U.S. Army Leadership Manual, which really lays out a framework. It talks about leadership attributes that are comprised of physical characteristics, mental characteristics, and emotional characteristics. Together with these attributes, combined with values, you have character. That is what it takes to be a leader.
Then, of course, there's knowing your profession, knowing the craft, knowing what it entails to win on a consistent basis. It possesses interpersonal, conceptual, technical, and tactical attributes of leadership.
You have to, as a leader, know your people, know your equipment, know your marketplace, and know your profession. Then finally, you have to execute on all this. That is what the "Do" part means.
So when you Be, Know, and Do, that's when you're illustrating leadership by example.
Again, my name's Ralph Barsi. I'm the VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io. It's been a thrill and a pleasure to be able to leave some nuggets of value for you. Take them, add value to the lives of others, and you'll become more valuable in the process.