🎙️Transcript: How to Prospect Using the Basics

Sales Hacker Revenue Summit | San Francisco
"How to Prospect Using the Basics"
March 13, 2018

📺 View on YouTube

Summary

In this energizing Revenue Summit presentation, Ralph Barsi delivers a wake-up call to the modern sales profession: despite the explosion of sales technologies from 1,200 vendors five years ago to over 5,000 today, salespeople are still fundamentally struggling with prospecting and qualifying.

Ralph argues that the root cause isn't a lack of tools—it's that people have forgotten the basics and fundamentals of sales. Drawing from his career that began in 1994 at UPS, where he learned old-school door-to-door prospecting, Ralph emphasizes that no amount of sophisticated technology can compensate for poor execution of foundational skills.

Just as basketball requires mastering the bounce pass and drumming requires mastering rudiments, sales requires mastering the fundamentals before layering on complexity.

Ralph structures his talk around three core pillars that form the foundation of effective prospecting: adjusting your attitude, getting known for adding value, and doing the work.

He observes that too many salespeople move too fast without getting their head right, leading to performance plans after 18 months at new companies and a cycle of job-hopping without ever mastering the craft.

He challenges the audience with the reality that two out of three people hate their jobs, correlating this dissatisfaction directly with poor performance—when you're not doing well in sales, you're not enjoying the work.

The solution isn't more tools or tactics; it's returning to fundamentals like proper physiology, understanding your "why," keeping a win jar, and truly internalizing that this is a learn-it-all industry, not a know-it-all one.

Throughout the presentation, Ralph provides tactical, actionable advice rooted in timeless principles. He emphasizes that people will only do business with you when they trust you, and trust comes from consistently delivering value over weeks, months, and years.

He instructs the audience to own their domain name, share vulnerably on LinkedIn, always lead with "how can I help," use people's names frequently, and respect the craft of writing concise emails that earn every word.

Ralph closes by challenging the audience to focus on impact over productivity, implement Brendon Burchard's One-Page Productivity Plan focused on people, priorities, and projects, and recognize that when you master the basics, your problems shift from struggling to prospect to managing too large a pipeline and counting too much money—the kinds of problems salespeople should have.

BIG Takeaways

• Master the Basics Before Leveraging Technology – Ralph argues that despite the explosion from 1,200 to 5,000+ sales technologies in just five years, the fundamental struggles remain: prospecting and qualifying.

The abundance of tools cannot help unless the people operating them have mastered the craft of sales. Just as basketball requires perfecting the bounce pass and chest pass, or drumming requires mastering rudiments (right, right, left, left), sales requires fundamental mastery.

Too many salespeople over-engineer and overcomplicate their approach with 10 browser windows open, trying to leverage every tool, when what they really need is to perfect the basics. Technology amplifies your capabilities, but if your foundation is weak, technology only amplifies that weakness.

The tools exist to solve your daily problems, but they're useless in the hands of someone who hasn't invested time in building a solid foundation in the fundamentals of human communication, value delivery, and relationship building.

• Adjust Your Attitude First—Your Physiology Drives Everything – Ralph emphasizes that if you're not dialed in mentally and emotionally, it's going to be an uphill climb every quarter. He sees too many salespeople fail or get put on performance plans after 18 months simply because they haven't gotten their head right and aren't focused on fundamentals.

The solution starts with understanding your "why"—whether it's making a difference, buying a home, or traveling more. When you're crystal clear on why you do what you do, you stay present and execute better.

Critically, Ralph teaches that your physiology is connected to your emotions, words, and thoughts—but it works in reverse. If you lean in, smile, and adjust your body language, you send a message to your brain that everything is cool, which then affects your emotions and vocabulary.

Throughout the day, check your physiology and adjust accordingly to maintain energy, presence, and impactful conversations. The win jar practice—documenting victories and physically putting them in a jar to revisit during low moments—provides tangible evidence of success to reset your mindset when needed.

• Get Known for Adding Value—Trust Beats Likability – Ralph shares Zig Ziglar's insight: "If people like you, they'll listen to you, but if they trust you, they'll do business with you." It took Ralph his first 10 years of selling to truly own this quote.

All the rapport-building skills in the world mean nothing unless people trust you, and trust comes from consistently delivering value over extended periods—weeks, months, years, even as you move between companies.

Building personal brand isn't about self-promotion; it's about the impression you leave with people and the piece of yourself you share. Ralph's tactical advice includes owning your domain name (ralphbarsi.com), being vulnerable by sharing content on LinkedIn that you originally wrote for your team, and always leading with "how can I help" rather than what you need from someone.

When you consistently lead with service and deliver value, doors open, prospective customers become interested, people want to hire you, and conversations happen naturally that you would otherwise be pitching for. This is a people business above all else, and your long-term success depends on your reputation for value delivery.

• Focus on Impact Over Productivity—The One Page Productivity Plan – Ralph references Anthony Iannarino's principle that impact matters more than productivity. You can have a wildly productive day where you made all your calls and sent all your emails, but if you had no impact on your world or your organization's world, what's the point?

The solution is Brendon Burchard's One Page Productivity Plan centered on three P's: people, priorities, and projects. For people, write down who must hear from you today and who you must hear from today—when your eyes are on specific people, you'll see no obstacles and do everything possible to connect with them.

Focus on just three priorities and three projects, period.

This single-page framework keeps you focused, centered, present, and hustling with purpose. Rather than drowning in an endless task list, you have clarity on the handful of things that will actually move the needle. Pin your target logos on your mirror, eat/sleep/breathe those accounts, and remember you're connected to them through someone—it's just a matter of finding who so you can ask for introductions. This targeted, impact-focused approach beats scattered productivity every time.

• Respect the Craft of Writing—Every Word Must Earn Its Place – Ralph emphasizes that your writing has far more impact than most people think, especially in emails. He uses the Wall Street Journal's "What's News" column as an example—those tiny one-liner blurbs on page one require incredible time, energy, effort, and editing.

It's actually harder to write smaller, more concise emails, but it's worth it. The principle is to "hack away at the unessential" and ensure every word earns its right to be in that email before you hit send.

With 98% of people reading email on mobile devices, if your message requires scrolling once or twice, it's unlikely to get read unless you're an exceptional writer.

Think in terms of tweets and texts: two sentences, maybe three bullet points, two more sentences, and one question mark—because question marks evoke responses while statements are just informational. Ralph recommends three books to master this craft: Writing That Works by Joel Raphaelson and Ken Roman, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and On Writing by Stephen King.

Send yourself drafts and review them on your phone before sending to prospects. The same principle applies to speaking—don't waste voicemail opportunities or phone conversations talking about yourself, your product, and your company's history while asking yes/no questions. Get your writing and speaking dialed in and watch your response rates climb.

• Do the Work—Establish Conversation Flow Before You Research – While research is important, Ralph warns against over-engineering your approach with 10 browser windows open trying to get every duck in a row. What's most critical is establishing a conversation flow should your prospect pick up the phone.

Methodologies like "three and three"—having three relevant nuggets of value for a three-minute conversation—are essential. The higher up-market you go into enterprise and C-suite selling, the less patience executives have for rambling.

If you're not on point quickly when a C-suite executive answers, you don't just dent your own credibility and rapport—you risk denting your organization's reputation and potentially getting locked out of that logo for 12 to 18 months.

Absolutely do the work of understanding your prospect's problems, assembling case studies and use cases, and establishing mutual connections to warm up conversations. But prioritize being ready to deliver value immediately when you get someone on the phone over perfecting your research.

Context and relevance matter—Ralph notes he was bombarded before Revenue Summit with cold outreach for coffee meetings with zero context, when a better approach would have been to reference his speaking engagement from the previous year six months earlier, demonstrating long-term attention and thoughtfulness rather than last-minute desperation.

• This Is a Learn-It-All Industry, Not a Know-It-All Industry – Ralph challenges the audience to recognize that we've shifted from know-it-all industries to learn-it-all industries. There's too much to know, too much to share, too many tools, too many technologies for any individual to master everything.

The imperative is to help one another by sharing what you're learning. When you meet people at events like Revenue Summit and learn new approaches or discover new vendor technologies, internalize those insights and share them with others—not to put the spotlight on yourself, but to save people time.

Ralph himself writes content for his sales development teams and organization first, then shares it publicly on LinkedIn, creating vulnerability but also building a documented body of work he can reference over time.

This practice of chronicling and sharing isn't about showing off expertise—it's about contributing to the collective learning of the profession. He maintains a beginner's mindset and student's mindset despite 25+ years in the field, constantly seeking what he needs to sharpen his game and level up.

The professionals who embrace this learn-it-all mentality, who take the time to unplug from chaos and put their thoughts in order, who use people's names because it's "the sweetest sound" (Dale Carnegie), and who remember personal details about prospects' families and life situations—these are the people who win long-term in modern sales.

Transcript

Ralph Barsi (00:00):
Good afternoon everybody. Can you hear me? Yes, no? How about now? Better? Turn the phones up. How about now? Test, one, two, three.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Glad to hear it.

Ralph Barsi (00:00):
I'll just get the handheld.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Yeah.

Ralph Barsi (00:00):
Should I just do that? Okay, I'll get the handheld.

(00:00):
Is that okay? Oh, how about now? Cool.

Good afternoon everybody. Give yourselves a big round of applause by the way. Seriously. That's it? Okay.

It's three o'clock on a Thursday and unfortunately most salespeople aren't doing any selling right now. They're just hanging out kind of hoping it's a good quarter, hoping it's a good year. But all of you are actually here upping your game. You're at Revenue Summit. You're speaking to the vendors that are outside and networking with one another. You're listening to great talk tracks, so good on you.

Another round of applause for you.

(01:13):
So I'm going to pick up where I left off last year at Revenue Summit. I'm very grateful to Max and the Sales Hacker team for inviting me down.

My name's Ralph Barsi. A little background for some color and context—my sales career started in 1994 at UPS. And in 1994 when you sold for UPS, let alone any company, we were doing some old school practices back then. The evolution of technology and the evolution of sales and sales development over that course of time has grown exponentially.

(01:59):
However, per the title of my talk today, a lot of people are forgetting the basics. A lot of people are forgetting the fundamentals. And it's really important to include the basics and the fundamentals into your daily disciplines so you can move the needle.

So I've spent half of my career as an individual contributor carrying a bag, carrying a quota, managing a territory, selling deals, and I've spent the last half of my career building teams—sales and sales development teams. And I've seen both sides of the fence and I understand how important it is to refer back to the basics.

(02:40):
So this is from HubSpot's State of Inbound report from last year, and there are a number of reports very similar that highlight the exact same issues—that salespeople are still struggling with prospecting and qualifying. So I'm thrilled that my friend John Barrows and Morgan Ingram are going to speak after me to talk about prospecting and qualifying.

There's a reason there are more than one talk tracks about prospecting and qualifying. It's because a lot of people are still struggling with it. Getting prospects to respond has become more difficult over the last two to three years.

I wonder why that is. I wonder if it's because everybody's sending the exact same message to the prospect.

(03:27):
As an example, just leading up to Revenue Summit over the last two weeks, I was bombarded by emails, InMails, and phone calls to connect for just 15 minutes here over a cup of coffee. And I appreciate that, but there's no context or background to warm up that introduction whatsoever.

You just want to talk to me about what you might be able to do to help my business, which I appreciate and I want to learn more about. But maybe a better tactic would be that you would notice that I spoke at last year's Revenue Summit. And six months ago you picked me up and said, "Hey, I saw that talk you did at Revenue Summit and I'm wondering if you're going to be speaking at the one in early 2018. I'm going to be taking a look at your company and I'm going to be taking a look at you and I'm going to be taking a look at your marketplace and ecosystem, and I think I'm going to have some valuable insights for you if we get an opportunity to meet in person at Revenue Summit next year."

That's a way better approach than hitting me up like three days before the conference. So it's something to take note of.

(04:38):
Scott Brinker spoke this morning. This is an incredible piece of work that Scott talks about in his blog. And this landscape just four or five years ago was filled with about probably 1,000 to 1,200 vendors and technologies and tools. Today it's north of 5,000.

Yeah, it's a crazy chart if you want to look at it that way. But you know what this is? This is an incredible profession that we are part of and look at all the opportunity that our profession allows and enables.

There are so many different companies out there, tools and technologies, in the window behind you actually, right under the patio, that have the answers to the problems that you're facing every day. And these vendors and tools and technologies can help you get where you need to go.

(05:46):
But they can't do that unless the people that are operating these tools and technologies have a foundation and are mastering the craft of sales. Unless that's happening, these tools and technologies can't really help.

So you have to master the basics. In basketball it's the bounce pass or the chest pass. I've been a drummer my entire life. I started playing when I was three years old. We call it rudiments. It's right, right, left, left, left, left, right, right, and so on and so forth.

The exact same thing applies to how you're selling.

(06:10):
So I thought I would focus on three really key areas that continue to surface as best practices when it comes to using the basics. And the three areas are:

Number one, you've got to start with your attitude and your disposition and your overall mental and emotional approach to what we do every day. If you're not dialed in up here, it's going to be an uphill climb every single quarter, every single year.

I've seen too many salespeople not get their head together and they were moving way too fast and they're not focused on the fundamentals. And what happens is they get put on a performance plan after 18 months of being an account executive at their new company, and they fail or they bail early and jump to another company. And 18 months later they get back on a performance plan.

(07:11):
It's simple. It's because they're not stopping to master the basics, and I see this on a regular basis leading and developing sales development reps.

Many sales development reps are very early in their sales careers and they take multiple swings at the plate doing what they do, and a lot of them are successful at the craft. Yet six months later they're knocking on the doors of my leaders telling them that they're ready to get promoted to the account executive role. It's way too early.

You have to bake. You have to incubate. It was mentioned earlier that I started with UPS and started my career and I shared with you that was in 1994. It takes so long to learn the craft. And I still wear a beginner's mindset hat and a student's mindset hat in order to figure out what I need to sharpen my game and to level up.

So you have to start mentally first.

(08:02):
The second one is to get known for adding value. It's one thing to brand yourself in the marketplace and have a great LinkedIn profile, but when you meet people in person, if you're not present to them when they're talking to you and if you're not looking them in the eyes, maybe putting your hand on their shoulder, listening to them, and if you have met them before and you haven't taken mental notes that they have a wife and children, or they're caring for ailing parents, or they're trying to get married, or they're trying to relocate and buy a house, and you're not taking note of that the next time you circle back and see them, then you're missing the whole game.

This is a people business. As much as we don't want to admit that, it's about applying people to the systems, applying people to all the tools and the technologies that are out there, and applying people to the craft.

(08:49):
There are so many amazing speakers here. You met a lot of people here. I encourage everybody to think through who you meet and what you learned today. Whether it's an approach to sales or a vendor technology, try to wrap your head around it, internalize it, and share that with a number of people. And when you share with a number of people, I'm trying to argue, have an agenda that you don't want the spotlight on yourself, have an agenda so you can share what you just learned so you can save somebody time.

Hopefully I'm able to save all of you a little bit of time today by explaining why the basics are so important. That's kind of the same thing. So share with people what you're picking up along the way, what you're learning. This is a learn-it-all industry. We used to be in the know-it-all industries. We know longer are.

(09:31):
There's too much to know. There's too much to share, too many tools, too many technologies. We have to be learn-it-alls, so help one another. Get known for adding value. Okay?

And then the third one is doing the work. I've broken that down into three basic things. I'm going to talk about research, time management, and know your writing.

So are you with me? Okay.

(09:57):
Alright, so on attitude, you've been doing this for a while. If you've been doing this for three or four years or four and a half months, you know what I mean? This is a stressful gig. It's an incredible gig, but sales, sales development in particular, is a very difficult role to play.

You have to get your head right. You have to exercise. You have to eat right. You have to keep that temple in order, that body in order. And I'm not a fitness junkie or a fanatic, but I'm an advocate for just getting good rest, making sure you're eating and making sure that you're exercising. And if you want to learn about the science behind that—why it's so important to get those things in order—I encourage you to pick up the book or listen to it on Audible, The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr.

(10:44):
So we all know what the statistics are. Two out of three people hate their jobs. And I'm sure that the data also shows that the majority of people, unfortunately, aren't crushing in sales either. So, what do you think the correlation is between those two? Why do you think there are so many people who are dissatisfied in their roles? It's because they're not doing well.

So if you want to do well, you have to start adjusting or crafting the right attitude. And I don't have the silver bullet to tell you the right approach of what the perfect attitude is because it's different for everybody. But what I can tell you is that when you circle back to your why, when you understand why it is you do what you do—is it to make a difference in other people's lives? Is it to buy a home? Is it to do more traveling? Whatever it is—when you circle back to your why and you are crystal clear as to what that is, then you will continue to stay present on that why and you'll have a better grasp as to how to proceed and how to execute.

(11:53):
Here's the quote, "Either you run your day or your day runs you." It's Jim Rohn. I think it's important to call out. You can actually plan your day. You can actually plan your year. You can actually plan next year starting today, and it's important that you take the time out to do that. To unplug from the chaos, get in your zone, and put your thoughts in order. And you'll be a lot better off.

So that's a little bit about attitude.

(12:20):
Adjusting your attitude also, as much as we believe in positive thinking and as much as we know that your physiology is connected to your emotions, is connected to your words, and most importantly connected to your thoughts—so a lot of people think thoughts and then they say words and then they display physiology and emotion—it's actually reverse. It starts with your physiology. If I'm leaning in and forward and I'm smiling, I'm sending a message to my brain that everything is cool, that I like where I am. That I like the people I'm sitting with. That I'm friendly. That I'm open-minded. I'm listening. And your prospects read that.

(13:04):
Your physiology is telling your brain what to think and then what emotions to share and what kind of vocabulary to use. I encourage you to keep checking your physiology throughout the day, adjust it accordingly, and you're going to probably find a lot more energy and be more present, and you're going to have more impactful conversations with your prospect.

So to help with that, I work with some really great leaders and there's a handful of folks that were talking about keeping a win jar. And it's simple. All it is—I have my phone right here—like if I have a good conversation with any of you after I step off the stage, I'm going to jot in my iPhone notes section right here, what the win was. And I'm going to put it in a jar. I'm literally going to print out that note, put it in a jar, and it's going to represent a real physical piece of evidence that I had a good conversation with one of you and maybe we're going to continue to work together, or you invited me to connect with you on LinkedIn, or you have an open door for me to share my insights with your team.

(14:06):
I don't want to forget that. So it's in that jar. Throughout the year at very low moments—and we all have them in sales—I'm going to go to that jar, pull out a few wins, read them, and get my head back where it needs to be so I can move on and move forward.

So we got attitude. Moving on. Okay?

(14:26):
Getting known for adding value. Let me read the quote to you so I don't butcher it. It's by Zig Ziglar. "If people like you, they'll listen to you, but if they trust you, they'll do business with you." It took me my first 10 years of selling to kind of own that quote.

All the rapport building skills that you'll ever pick up and that you'll learn and that you'll read about mean nothing unless people trust you. And they're going to trust you when you deliver value. And when you consistently deliver value—and I'm talking about weeks, months, a year, two years, even if you move from one company to another, you should keep doing this—when you continue to do it, you're building that trust with your ecosystem and with your marketplace and people are going to remember you over the long term. And if and when they can do business with you, they'll do business with you.

(15:21):
So it starts with being known. [Inaudible] today, personal brand is very critical and top of mind for most people. Personal brand is the impression that you leave with people. You can actually leave a piece of yourself with them. And again, I don't have the silver bullet for you on how to develop your personal brand. It's a very individual thing. But I think it's important that you start.

If you haven't already, make sure that you own your own name, like ralphbarsi.com as an example. That's my blog. It's my digital imprint. It's my site and no one's going to purchase it. I don't care if you have to purchase it from a Chinese guy that owns your name right now. Get it back. Because you don't want a prospective employer or a prospective customer Googling you and you not being able to own that search and deliver your message on your site. Okay?

(16:19):
The other thing about developing your brand is that you need to speak up. You need to be a little bit vulnerable. If you go to my LinkedIn profile right now, people come up to me all the time saying, "I love your posts on LinkedIn." I didn't write them for LinkedIn. I wrote them for my sales development teams. I wrote them for my organization. And I thought it would be cool to share them with the outside world. And I don't know how many of you do that. It's easy. It takes like three seconds. But it's vulnerable. I'm putting myself out there. You know what I mean?

But it's worth it. Because at the end of the day, if you look back over the course of years, you have a body of work that's documented, that's chronicled. You can actually refer back to it and it helps you understand your value and it can increase your momentum. If you read it yourself at the end of the year and you look back at all the articles, say, that you wrote and posted on LinkedIn, and you're reading them, you're going to get goosebumps and you're going to want to move forward.

(17:28):
The other thing is—I forgot to mention this actually but it's pretty important—always lead with how can I help. Always. It's so easy for us to want something from somebody. I need this from you, I need that from you. Start leading with how can I help. And you're going to find doors opening. You're going to find prospective customers that all of a sudden are interested in what you have to share. You're going to find people wanting to hire you. And you're going to find that people are inviting you to have conversations with you about things that you would have otherwise been talking, pitching to them about.

So always lead with how can I help and you'll go a long way. Okay?

(18:12):
A couple last nuggets on adding value. One is use people's names. If I were to say, "Hey Chris, do you love me?" Chris would just be like, "Yeah, Ralph, I love you." That's better than saying, "Hey, do you love me?" "Yeah." If I don't use his name, you know what I mean? Use people's names.

(18:26):
So I love the Momentum app on Chrome because every morning when I open up my browser it says, "Good morning, Ralph." And I love that. Dale Carnegie said it in How to Win Friends and Influence People, that a person's first name, their own name, is the sweetest sound.

So try to pepper in a person's first name when you're talking to them. It goes a very long way and it also makes you very present to them. Okay?

(18:54):
The third one is doing the work. A lot of people over-engineer. I do the same thing, over-engineering and overcomplicating. When thinking through prospecting, we have 10 browser windows open and we really, really want to research and we really want to get all our ducks in a row.

Well, I'll tell you what's most important is that you establish a conversation flow should those prospects pick up the phone. So we've heard methodologies like three and three, for example, where you have three relevant nuggets of value that you can bring up in a three-minute conversation.

(19:04):
The higher up-market you go, if you're calling into a large enterprise or a very large enterprise, for example, they don't mess around in those C-suites. And again, if you're determined enough to get to the key people that you want to have conversations with and meet with, you have to have your act together and you have to establish a conversation flow.

Because should those C-suite executives pick up the phone and say hello, if you're not on point in a very short amount of time, what happens is not only is your own credibility and rapport dented, but you risk denting the credibility and rapport of your organization. And when you're calling into very large enterprise companies, for example, you risk not being able to get back into those logos for 12 or 18 months.

(20:18):
So make sure that, yes, think it through. You absolutely have to do the work in understanding what's a problem to your prospect. Share case studies, share use cases, establish the mutual connections to warm up that conversation, because you're not going to have a lot of time to deliver value when they pick up the phone.

(20:41):
The second graphic is all about time management. And I think, per Anthony Iannarino, a great sales leader that I follow, it's more important to focus on impact than productivity. So you can have a very productive day and a productive week where you did all the calls in the world, sent all the emails you want, but you have no impact on your own world or on the world of your organization.

So come from a source of how can I be impactful today?

(21:09):
If you download the One Page Productivity Plan, and I have a link for you to make it pretty easy, it's going to talk about three keys. And it was drafted by a creative leader named Brendon Burchard. And the three P's stand for people, priorities, and projects.

When it comes to people, when you approach your day, there are people that you should have written down that must hear from you today. And vice versa, there should be people that you must hear from today. So you will see no obstacles when your eyes are on what people you need to focus on, who you need to contact today. You'll do everything you can to connect with those people and make sure that the people that need to hear from you, hear from you.

(21:52):
You'll focus on three priorities and three projects and that's about it. It's literally a one-page productivity plan and it keeps you focused, it keeps you centered, it keeps you present, and it helps you hustle. It lights a nice fire under you when you see the people in front of you that you need to get in touch with.

(22:10):
And then lastly, it's like I said, pin those logos on your mirror and eat, sleep, and breathe those logos and follow what those people are doing if you can. If not, remember that you are connected to them and it's a matter of finding who else is connected to them so that you can ask for an introduction.

(22:31):
Which leads me to this—know that your writing has a lot stronger of an impact than a lot of you think. And I'm specifically talking about emails.

If you go buy a Wall Street Journal, not online but if you go buy the physical newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, every Wall Street Journal, in the left column on page one, has a thin column called What's News? And you can quickly digest the news of the day, the news in the world, by just reading the What's News column.

The amount of time and energy and effort and editing that goes into writing those little one-liner blurbs is incredible. It's tougher to write the smaller, more concise email, but man is it worth it. So take the time and the effort to hack away at the unessential. Make sure that every word earns its right onto that email before you hit send.

(23:32):
Respect the aesthetic aspect of an email. 98% of us are reading email on our mobile device. If we have to scroll once or twice, unless you're a killer writer, it's really unlikely that we're going to get through that email.

So think in terms of tweets and texts. Two sentences, maybe three bullet points following those two sentences, two more sentences. One question mark. Because the question mark evokes response from your prospect base.

So make sure you're asking a question. Otherwise it's just informational to the recipient. They don't have to answer you. Keep that stuff in mind. Send yourself drafts, look at it on the phone before you send an email. Okay?

(24:22):
Three great books to get better at writing include Writing That Works by Joel Raphaelson and Ken Roman, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and On Writing by Stephen King. Stephen King is Stephen King because he knows how to write and he decided one day, "I think I'm writing a book on how to write, because a lot of people get it wrong."

(24:53):
So respect the art and the craft of writing well, and respect the art and craft of speaking well. We, especially in sales, have to deal with a lot of voicemail greetings, for example. That's a prime opportunity.

However, a lot of salespeople, not us of course, but a lot of salespeople make the mistake of just getting that voicemail greeting and doing everything they can in a minute and a half to two minutes to talk about themselves, talk about their product, to talk about their company. And again, that key contact picks up the phone, the same thing happens.

A lot of salespeople can't wait to tell you about the history of the company and all that, and then want to know, "If you can give me five minutes," and they're asking yes/no questions instead of open-ended questions, and they're losing credibility and rapport. So get your writing and speaking dialed in.

(25:48):
And then you get to worry about this. I'd much rather see reports come out like this, that salespeople are starting to turn away too many gigs. You know what I mean? When they're making club every single year. Where they're managing too big of a pipeline. Where they're counting all their money.

These are the struggles that salespeople should have, right? Well, it will happen when you start to apply the basics. Okay?

(26:19):
So remember our key points: adjusting your attitude, getting known for adding value to the marketplace—and in turn you will become valuable in the process—and you got to do the work.

And there are all the links of the things that I've referenced. Download, you can do it right now, and learn more. I even put your website on there, Morgan. So you can come up here and spit some game and everybody's going to look you up. Cool?

(26:43):
Hey, you've all been really generous with your time. I hope that I was able to add at least one nugget of value to your life today. Thanks for your time and your attention. Let's crush it.