I'm Chris busing we have an amazing guest today Marcus Chan he's a dual offender I've had him on before and he blew us away and he's going to do it again we're going to talk about how to become a 250,000 to $500,000 Tech sales earner as an account executive and Marcus really is the best person to talk to us about it he crushed his quota for what was it 13 years in sales Marcus was it 13 years 13 years in row 12 Promos in eight years so unbelievable in closing uh I was doing some research
on LinkedIn closing 700 million in total contract value president's Club basically every year and you were the first in your company's 90-year history to run a team of 110 at your age and I how old were you when you're running that team of 110 30 years old I'm 31 I'm a little bit behind I'm not running to team of 110 Marcus has gone on after being a proven real world Producer to as I said be the author of sixf figure sales Secrets but also train people at the companies that maybe you're working at or that
you want to get into like Google Dell Gartner Zoom what other ones are you proud of Marcus oh man we've had so many now whether it's Salesforce spunk Zoom info Tableau I mean so many logos now as a result but I think the thing is what I feel Most Blessed about is you know AE these reps are able to change their own lives and Achieve things they never thought possible in their career and to do things they never thought possible as well cuz as you and I both know making a lot of money is really
cool but when you excel in your career it gives you level of different confidence but but also then you can also do other things too whether you give back you can donate money you can buy more time you can go on vacation you take care of your family that's what's really all about Absolutely and so we're going to start off digging into that so guys I haven't sold Marx's credibility I don't know what else I can do here but just wanted to set a context for who we're learning from today make sure to stay for
the whole conversation to get as much value as possible and don't just watch it this conversation I didn't encourage you to watch it multiple times take notes so that you can translate it into action and celebrate what you learn in your Successes in the comments so um Marcus let's start off by painting a picture of what does this Tech sales path actually Empower when it comes to helping AES create the lives of their dreams because I saw that was something you put on your profiles like you help people ultimately create the lives of their dream
so tell us about this path and where it can go well before I go into I think this repor give you a little bit of context I grew up really really poor I was a middle Child of Chinese immigrants right and my parents actually were entrepreneurs had a restaurant and I grew up working in the restaurant so I saw my family putting 80 to 100 plus hours a week of working and not making very much money and that was kind of the opportunity vehicle I that I saw them go into and as I got older
I'm like I never want to do that not only did they work that hard they were never really around because they were working so hard so I'm like Okay how could I join an opportunity vehicle where it can be high leverage I can like use my brain to make money and to make exponential money and do it in a grand way and bdb sales Tech sales is really the way to get there and reality is a lot of people when they go into Tech sales they go to B2B sales and they have a decent opportunity
to earn a decent amount of money most of them don't fully maximize the opportunity so they start working with a company taking Their train whatever but the reality is is when you look at any stat across the board the average team has only about 50% people hitting CA at the best right so that's a pretty scary stack where most people are actually going to miss their number what that means is most people are actually never going to fully maximize their potential to make the money they would really want to make and I think the good
way to think about this is you know let's just say for example If you're watching this you have a 200k OT as your On Target earnings all right and so that's mean just hitting your number that's called keep your job number is going to make you 200k now that's fine just doing that but what's your upside from maxing at your comp plan hitting the accelerators and all the spiffs is it 400k 450 500 or more right and chances are pretty good if you have a 200k OT it's significantly higher so let's just say it's tapped
at 400k Doubles so every year though that you're not hitting 400k is actually costing you that net difference you're just hit your target of 200k you're cost yourself the difference of $200,000 right if you're hitting 150k in earnings that's your net difference of 250 so that's your opportunity cost and what a lot people don't realize is that costs you every single year and early on in my career I realized every year I wasn't do my best to maximize my comp plan and leverage All the earnings it would cost me more so once I realize that
and I focus heavily on blowing on my comp plan make as much money as possible it allowed me to do other things with those earnings so now when I talk to sales professionals when we take someone who's maybe hitting their number which is still good least hitting your number but we help them do 150% 200% and Beyond and they're maxing the comp plan out what ends up happening is they start to Achieve far more things so I'll give you a really simple example he got Julian in our program absolute stud and when he started working
with him he worked for a smaller tech company he was making about 100 150k a year you know every year not bad decent income relatively young guy started working with him first year made quar million dollars so beautiful so add an extra $100,000 onto his earnings great pretty much capped out so really couldn't do more just because of Opportunity Vehicles he was in however because now he started to increase his skill stack he was able to go into a different company so he went from there to a compan called Zoom info right at Zoom info
in the mid-market Enterprise AE role his first year he became the number one rep at Zoom info and he made over $848,000 wow nice exponential now right so now it's in over $600,000 more the following year now here's the thing money is Really cool whatever right but really when I hear yeah I mean I is was pretty awesome but like up I'm excited for him but he's like but he's the best part he's like listen like I'm a pay off debts I'll be able to take care of my aging parents I think they live in
like Columbia he also bought his first property it's furnish to Airbnb so he's starting a side hustle he's getting recognized as company he has more confidence so that's really the cool Part those are the side effects of when you start to learn how to maximize your earning potential and you use it as a tool to get to where you want to go versus just being okay with hitting your number or hopefully hitting your number so you mentioned a term in our conversation that we're having before going live here on escape velocity right and tell us
I don't even want to throw any of my perspective into this L you tell us for dummies what is escape Velocity and how does this apply to the tech sales path yeah so escape velocity is a term that means hey how long will it take for me to basically make enough money so I can stack the cash and capital if you have capital is part of your comp structure to be able to exit out of working for someone else is do whatever I want to have true Financial Freedom to do what you want with who
you want when you want wherever you want ultimate freedom and it's also tied to What's known as the fire lifestyle if you're familiar with that which is financial Independence retire early and in order to get there it's actually a relatively simple formula which is you just take a look at what's your typical annual lifestyle burn for cash how much cash are you burning every year from your life expenses right and then you multiply how many years you want to have least stacked up so you can basically leave Corp feel comfortable and safe Right for me
personally I want to have at least 20 years completely covered for my whole family myself plus you building inflation plus other expenses Etc and plus life right I want to have at least 20 plus years of that set aside after tax cash that I can access some might be held in stock so access it easily but I can access things with very minimal fees and to get to that point definitely not easy but when you're at an opportunity vehicle like Tech sales if you do it Right you can get there much faster for example many
great friends are in sales coaching as well and they're able to do it in their mid to late 40s which is still incredibly admirable I was super fortunate that I was able to do by 35 and it wasn't because I was anybody special it was I realized it's crial earlier on so I started to work towards it with the right habits up front from skills to had develop to how I manage my money to how I do all these things Because ultimately to have the ultimate freedom to do whatever you want is really quite powerful
so for instance now I've been doing my own thing now for five years I could not do this if I didn't want to right I like to have the choice the choice to do whatever I want if this is my season right now great next season I want do something different I'm G do something different I'll never not do anything but I want the freedom to just do whatever I want So that's what we're talking about today what it takes to earn that freedom for yourself for your family and you mentioned some of your friends
and it turns out some of my other guests are good friends of yours like Kyle Voris are you Budd I'm friends with Kyle yeah Jason Bay or I don't know man if the actual situation but and there might be a few others but because you mentioned a couple buddies that are in the coaching are you able to share some of the other Names oh yeah Ian conak is really popular yes had him on yeah yeah Ian's fantastic he also escape velocity early on as well Brandon flery you know you know a lot of these guys
and maybe the difference was I failed so early on and I'm so terrible I'm like I got to get my act together you know and maybe they had better success than I was they're smarter than I was you know but you know I think I just realized so much early on like my God I could get my act together Well 35 right that was your when you velocity that's amazing that's so young and I'm 31 so maybe I didn't manage a team of 110 at this point but hey I got four years to reach escape
velocity so it gives me man so that's why I'm excited about this combo there's many directions I want to take this but I'll try and keep us organized gosh real quick aside though before we get into some of the tactics I think the story of how you met your wife was so great I saw It on LinkedIn and it just always stuck with me yeah yeah that wasn't that in college it was in college yeah the story just because I mean that's actually I think the most important thing is finding the love your life and
then the way it went down for you was pretty extraordinary and I think there's a lesson in it too oh for sure I one of the the greatest life hacks is literally who you marry I mean that completely can change your trajectory so I actually met My uh wife years ago this was 2003 and I was in college and there was one free buffets for like college kids on campus kids would just attend and I was hanging with my buddies at the table and I see her across the room in the buffet line and I'm
like Oh that girl is super hot and I asked my buddies anybody know who she is everyone like no I don't know who she is I'm like watch this I'm gonna get her number cocky I'm arrogant I go up to her I don't remember what I said but she Completely shut me down and it did not work like ice clean to me I'm like oh man so I walk back my buddies see the whole thing they're laughing they're like what a boo and I'm like I'm not gonna give up so later on that evening you
know I see her I'm like I'm going to go back and let me see if I can try again I go back I end up getting her number I'm like all right great now over the next year or so I attempt to call her and text her to hang out she never Responds for a year for a year every day maybe like once every couple months and this is the art of followup by the way nice Insight right there whether it's dating prospects or actual prospects you don't want to overdo it on the followup but
hey we got to break down though the second time you did get the number you made progress so do you remember like what did you say were you just like disarming and authentic I don't even remember what I said remember I I was Probably being stupid or I might just like over there bumbling over my words and like Hey listen like would you ever want to hang out sometime and get coffee probably something very boring right anyway you went for it again I did I think that is such a great lesson in life like your
personal brain anyone would say oh give up like it didn't work out and you start to devolve into negativity but you were unreasonable you stepped outside the world of rationality And you went for it again and you got the number anyways now you're phone up for a year yeah so a year goes by and never response there's no engagement back at all so I'm like okay whatever now fast forward a year later I was part of this Asian Pacific American student union and they had this like date auction Fashion Show event thing and I was
like one of the people helping out with the event like on stage and stuff whatever and you know I do the whole Thing and then after the event's over she's in the crowd she comes up to me and she's like hey like how's it going I'm like I hadn't seen her like a year so strange okay she has not engaged all year now she's having a conversation with me I was dating someone at the time Chris so I'm like we'll just having a like conversation great whatever see you later yeah fast forward a year later
I see her again in the same place same event a year later again I'm dating Someone different this time all right so I'm like again timing is just completely off you had a girlfriend when you saw her again and then you had a different girlfriend when you saw her again correct correct all right now fast forward like I think the following summer and this is like September 2005 I had just gotten back from living in Beijing China for about half a year and every year I used to get a new phone number and I would
move my old context Numbers to my new phone and I was going through my phone deleting old numbers and if you remember back in called you like label people's names plus some sort of trigger to help you remember right like Marcus math 241 you know like okay so you know who that person is yeah now hers was Saro hot Persian I'm like oh let's just see send a little text hey how's it going and she calls no way she calls so I'm like hello and she's like hey who is this I have a new number
I Totally forgot I had a new number when I texted her and I'm like oh hey it's Marcus Chan and she's like oh hey I'm like okay I'm like all right she's like how's it going I'm like well you know I'm good actually I just came back from China blah blah blah how about you she was like oh I just came back from Spain I'm like oh it's cool like she was working there and I was like cool and she's like I'm actually moving back to Eugene Oregon that's where University Oregon is for my senior
year and I said oh you know what I live e hey do you need some help moving I'd be happy to help oh right that's an opening I'm going for it and she says that sounds great I'll give you a call next week on Saturday while I'm coming in town I'll be with my mom I said awesome great fast forward a week later it's Saturday I'm hanging out with my my best friend Mike I'm like Mike listen we can't get wasted today we Can't be irresponsible this girl's going to call me I'm gonna go help
her move I got Drive later he's like got it no worries she never calls I mean you offering a big value ad to help a big fre value I'm just saying right so anyways next day Sunday she actually calls me and she's like hey super sorry I meant to call you yesterday but with my mom around it was pretty easy so we didn't really need any help but do you still want to get Together I'm like sure yes we can get together that's fine what do you want to do I'm like okay what this is
like three plus years in the making at this point and you're like kind of detached at that point 100% 100% so then at that point she's like okay let's get some ice cream so next day I go pick her up we go of ice cream and by the way we're sitting down just Mee and her there's nobody else that runs act I wouldn't even call a date we're just like hanging out and I'm like this is the first time we actually had a conversation cuz I really didn't know that much about her you know we
started talking and all I knew is she was like super attractive and that's all I really knew and we start talking and I find out that she's absolutely incredible she speaks like five different languages you know she's like a 4.2 GPA it's crazy yeah she's like Elite of the elite of the education like super smart super I'm like dang she's smart she's beautiful she's got great personality very warm very charismatic I'm like wow this is almost too could be true so anyways that the first time hanging out and fast forward six months we started to
see each other more often and then we started dating and then long story short but the hardest part at that point was even in our first date we've now been together for let's see we've been married now for comeing on 15 years oh Congratulations that no joke years it's been uh it's been it's been pretty cool but what's interesting is and her and I spoken about this tooo that it was probably better that early on we didn't start dating now I wasn't the man she needed like I wasn't mentally quite ready I was still wildly
immature I still didn't know what was going I wasn't the person I needed to be quite yet you know so like at that point when we finally got together start hanging Out years later I made a lot of mistakes I was a little more mature but I had a better head in my shoulders and all my trajectory is more lined to where I wanted to go and it really end up working out well because then we started getting really serious with each other and we were able to kind of build our lives together and we
realized we had so many common values and that was the biggest thing like we had some common interest but most importantly our values Are super aligned and that made it just really powerful for us for our relationship you know then for our marriage having a kid and building a pretty cool life together gosh what a good story it really resonates With Me based on where I'm at in my life and I'm sure it does with others in the audience we have a range of audience members some might be married and maybe it reminds them of
their story of how they met their loved one but I just think it's Special that you recognize now looking back that you weren't ready early on and it did if anything that could give some people faith that just stay patient and keep growing into the person you're capable of being but of course also be persistent and I feel like there's there's definitely a parallel with some of the largest deals and sales yeah let's just talk real quick about the importance of persistence and followup for like massive deals that can lead Money oh yeah 100% right
so I think we all wish that we sold an amazing product that after the very first meeting they're like amazing send the docu sign we're ready to go what's longest contract double it what's your price increase language double it let's ready go right now that's just not what happens right and the reality is is we have to always play the long game the example of my wife and I was a good example to even the big deals are Perfect example because what happens is when you look at something on a longer time frame let's say
most people look at deals and they're kind of thinking okay I'm looking at this deal maybe in this quarter time frame maybe a year at best and my challenge to most people is that can you look at a longer time frame can you look at maybe a fiveyear time frame because if you look as a fiveyear deal you're going to be working would you potentially do different things right Now instead of what you probably would normally do and here's what I mean by that so let's just say you're working a large Enterprise opportunity and your
quarter is coming to the end and you're pacing to hit your number and that happens to the best it's happened to me your instinct might be like oh here's this deal I feel like it's kind of close to the line let me go see if I can throw a discount at them to push to close now if you do that chances are very unlikely That even going to move forward because of that because usually other reasons why they haven't moved forward quite yet yep if you know it to be a case but if you're thinking
shortterm wise unfortunately the shortterm many sales manager as well is well we can give him 25% off right now do it now or we can weigh the X fee right now go give it to right and see if we can get the deal to close and again short-term wise it hurts right but long-term wise if you take a Step back instead of looking at just qu the year look at five years you know it's not the best decision and what you may do instead just try to email them with a discount maybe what I can
do it says before you know Christmas it's like let me go get them like a nice gift basket and just send it to them custom and just thank them for the opportunity so far without any ask at all and if you do it from that perspective you're going to gain far more trust and momentum with That deal than anything else right and I'll give you a really really simple example I'm working on this deal right now my own business the company is a 40 billion a year company pretty big Enterprise company and the deal is
actually supposed to get done in like October we had legal the paperwork finan is going through everything I'm like ah beautiful everything is dialed I got my economic buyer I got my Champions down I'm like hell yeah we got this di for Year One what we're going to do year two what we're going to do I'm like this is going be a killer deal lo and behold what happens I get an email hey I've argued every way how it's going to help us but we're getting a freeze across the board in fact even our reps
can't travel at all even see customers this quarter so we're gonna have to put a pause until you know January to q1 basically however we've already also built everything you offer into my annual operating budget Anyways already for q1 so it shouldn't be a problem in q1 but want to give you heads up super sorry now if I'm thinking short term of just Q4 I'm doing something sleazing weird and trying to push for a closed instead what do I do I'm like no problem and M I call them up I say do you see anything
else potenti hold this back to making this happen in q1 he's like well we just got to make sure our team delivers in Q4 so I'm like okay no problem now because I know some Of the skill gaps his team already has let me send over a few resources are completely free that your sales leaders can use right now to help in Q4 right peer value give it's all I'm doing right so I do that end of October November do something as well and then in December my EA reached out to send them a gift
basket as well now come early this week January call my guy up he doesn't answer but what happens he immediately texts me before I can send a message hey let plan To give you a call I'm stack this week let's get on a call get get our things dial for q1 so now we're back on the docket again and this is a good example of running a deal but thinking a larger time frame so this way you are persistent but you're also doing the right things as part of your deal to actually add value to
your bu buyer and help make it easy for them to buy such a good example and I have a deal that I had pursued all year last year my Biggest deal in the past four years it pushed to q1 because legal could be rushed even though I sent them the contract on October 31st I gave them so much lead time they never got to it to the week of and they didn't have enough knowledge and context to redline to they felt good about it so literally CFO ready to sign and the Eng leader ready to
go to get the cost looking for and we missed it and to your point man I had to accept there was nothing really I could Do other than equip them now to be ready to move forward in January and now my guy says it's 5050 it happens this month I we're gonna get it I believe we're gonna get it period but I feel encouraged by what you shared about playing the long game and did you get your deal yet or you're it's still on the still on docket I don't want to say it's done till
that payments in my bank okay well in that case then we can both cheers to getting our deal yeah exactly Cheers right so I have so many questions like that you know this is more of a random thing that I plan to talk about later but the FW is a thing because we're talking about follow-ups yes and this is a concept that more so applies to like or when you've maybe qualified an opportunity progressing it but then they're going cold I think but tell us about the fword and and a better alternative than using the
FW beautiful so the common FW that every other rep is Usually making is hey I'm just following up hey I'm following up on this and it could be anything it could be hey I'm following up on this email I sent you I'm following up on this thing I sent you I'm following up because you told me to follow up now the reason it's not good to use is it's super overdone it doesn't really mean anything and what happens is when every other rep is using that terminology and they're staying it constantly whether it's written or
Verbally people get blinded to it it's kind of like they start ignoring when reps use a lot of buzzword for example anyone that says AI now customers are like oh you know they start to roll their eyes it's because they're so like inated with it right it's the same with the word follow-up so the simplest thing to do is actually instead of using the word follow-up just replace it with specificity be really specific on what you're doing so even the ACT is you Following up but you don't have to say hey I'm calling to follow
up right so for example let's go back to my opportunity that I mentioned like my phone call feed answered I wouldn't say hey Chris I'm just following up to the emails I've been sending you over the last couple months like can we talk you know if he answered it belong like hey Chris you know how's your news blah blah blah it's great hey reason I'm calling is when you and I spoke back in October You have said we're ready to make this happen come q1 as part of your aop so do you have some time
discuss details right now to map out how it's going to look for your team in q1 for implementation there's a slight shift in language there but it's very specific because I'm really clear on my objective I'm not just following up to follow up I have a clear end go goal of what I want to do with that followup and for sales people watching this it's a very minor Detail but if you make that shift you'll see your proc like wow actually like this guy or gal is much more like on their game than anybody else
because they're so specific in what they're saying and most people like specificity when they speak and they say General words like hey I'm just following up so this is just another example of an acable tip that adds up to the 250,000 to 500,000 and up right it's these things Consistently applied that lead to the better deals the bigger deals and more consistent deals and by the way that specificity I realize that that applies to a cold email or a cold call I mean you gave a call example but you up the specificity too in in
terms of messaging to get in the door for a first meeting right like we work with other retailers of your size maybe you put their specific company size to solve this specific challenge produce these Outcomes I guess I just randomly went to this topic but anything you would add in terms of specificity in outbound messaging it could be cold emails cold calls to get the first meeting and just other keys to getting in the door to open up these big opportunities 100% this is can apply to whether it's outbound okay this could be calls emails
whatever to how you run your Discovery calls to how you do your demos yep so for instance say you go after a large Enterprise opportunity and maybe you you're selling to the retail space and before you go and do your Outreach Maybe a software that helps with optimization on the checkout process because you're seeing that the big trend is people are buying more online versus like talking to sales people right our software can really help with that really optimize it so you go through and you pretend to be a prospect on their site and you're
checking out and you're like oh here's All these gaps right here very powerful and then you listen to the earnings call and maybe they mention like some of the challenges are running into or maybe some conversions right so now you have conversion data that they're talking about you have example from what you're doing yourself so now when you call them up it's an easier conversation to be able to say hey Chris the reason I'm reaching out is because well number one your CEO Bob had Said one of the biggest issues you guys are having is
people clicking off the page on the checkout page and that abandoned card which is leading to x% uh x% people were clicking off which my assumption is about you know $20 billion a year like lost revenue on top of that I myself was on your page and I went through and I see exactly where people lead off we have a potential solution that can help with this to actually increase optimization for click-throughs And conversions and we're already working with other large Enterprises such as x y and z now notice that level specificity is beautiful man
how can they not respond exactly it's much better now you go deep take that same principle you tie it to the rest of your sales process so let's just say it's a demo most people like hey let me show this feature now you can really crease optimization you know like it will reduce your abandoned cards yeah that's Cool okay versus hey so you remember how your CEO said x% clicking off it's leaning to potentially X billions getting lost because there's no way to optimize for that let me show you feature why which solves exactly this
this is what it does can you see how that would solve that problem you're currently running into and actually would help you increase the average cart order for your customers boom so now leaning in exactly They're leaning in now they're like you're speaking my language right because you're so specific and it's really hard to fake specificity it's very hard to fake it what a way to cut through the noise and just another example that shows like this person is a professional that's right this is someone I can trust with a major investment that'sa my job
could be on the line I could lose my job to make the wrong one so man time flies we've got 24 Minutes and there's so much I want to ask you about so I'm going to do my best uh to keep it rolling I wanted to hit on that inflection point after you basically were failing in your first year and then you became a beast man and figured it out and just to continue at the road map wanted to talk about like ipas and what that is and some of the actionable things we can do
to join that deep six figure earners club and then talk about your coaching and everything You're doing so that's what I'm trying to achieve in these 24 minutes let's see if we can get to it tell us about that shift that first year like what was going on and and what changed well it's interesting I think a lot of people whenever people make a shi it's very rare it's like they just realize on their own usually something happens or enough small things happen to the point where you're just like man either I got to like
figure that or I'm in trouble And everyone's a little bit different a lot has to do with your standards of yourself I remember when I first got started I had pretty high standard of myself just expectation of be a to show up now in all my prior jobs I've always been able to like work hard and get results now granted like they weren't hard jobs it's like hey work as a cook in a restaurant if I worked hard I can make a good meal you were a cook yeah I was a cook right so Yeah
so like so he like you work hard got pretty good results if I was a server hey I worked hard took care of my customers they were happy they gave me a tip right so like it was always like this direct correlation and then once I got into like true B2B sales sound businesses it was like oh hard work by itself wasn't really enough I it started to kind of eat at me early on cuz like my peers were closing deals and I wasn't that's what was my barometer I'm like What's going on I'm new
but when weeks keep going Buy and they start at the same time as basically me and they're doing way better than me eventually have to start looking in the mirror now at first though I'm like well it's not my fault my boss didn't train me my company didn't give me any training the manual they gave me is written my people never done sales before I have the worst territory I have the least amount of zip codes no one's helping me oh the Market's terrible because this is 2007 by the way so the market stting to
go downhill really quickly this is the worst like I'm not set up to win and those are all my first internal excuses I had Now by 8 weeks into the role and I was not doing well zero results mentally not doing well because I'm like can I even do this what is wrong with me why is this so hard and I was like I don't think I can do this anymore I think I should probably give up and do something Else and at the same point my boss called me into his office on a Friday
afternoon at 4: and he just ripped me a new one and he said listen I'm look going to have to fire you I'm going to put you on a pip and fire you if you don't figure this out now again didn't from any resources this is just he just threatened me this has never happened before I wasn't used to this I'm like this is weird like usually like I can work pretty hard and I get results and And at that point that's when I realized had to step it up and take things into my own
hands and I realize at that point I really had not taken true ownership like was I really doing everything possible to pick on the best version of me the story I told myself was yeah I am but I wasn't I wasn't right so at that point when I really started to just take my job more seriously right going and reading books I started to attend events like Tony Robbins events I started to Join coach coaching programs I started to learn sales because that wasn't being given to me and then not only that like think that's
crazy but I would practice I would roleplay non-stop with myself every part of the sales process because no one was willing to do with me I remember even I was trying to get better at coold calling at a 45-minute drive to the office one way on the drive there I would roleplay out loud my cold calls I I'll play Both Sides myself Prospect go Back and forth from the gatekeeper all the way through the main person and I'll give myself objections I'll give myself like five objections the most common ones I like and I'll deal
with them out loud verbally and Not only would I do out loud I would do the exact tonality the exact Pace the inflection because I need to make sure I showed up that certain way so I start do all these things what happened of course I start getting better results and reality was Actually by the third month I became number one and then I held number one for several more months and then they basically made me switch to a different like territory and like basically manage some while having the same job still and that I
maintain my number one stat still right but it was a realization that in order to achieve more I had to become more like the version of me that got me to that job was not going to keep me in that job and I think mistake a lot of People make is let's say they want to break into Tech sales they break into Tech sales amazing they're a huge amazing opportunity vehicle but do they have a skill stack to be able to fully maximize the opportunity to get to where they really want to go let's talk
talk about the skill stack baby do does a skill stack tie into ipas or is it would you categorize it like a because I love that term ipas too but do they both overlap or they totally overlap because Think about like I mean there's so many potential skills you have to learn right from you know from prospecting Discovery organization blah blah blah you know it's part of it right but it's all about even ipas which are incom producing activities these are the things that make you money and to be really crystal clear I break it
down into four key things that are really ipas number one generating pipeline okay number two moving deals in your pipeline number Three closing Pipeline and number four advancing your sales skills and those show up in what you do on the calendar anything outside of that is just noise and I think a lot of times we don't realize is if we were to track our own time and pay close attention very rarely are we doing these ipas at the level we probably think we should be doing it and with you really want to be able to
do is like ideally have like 80% of your counter or more show ipas so that means You have prospecting blocks you have Discovery calls or prospects you have maybe legal calls or dis demo calls or prospects negotiation calls those are actually moving the needle on deals or you're studying improving your sales skills by the way you illuminated the fact that practicing is really important it's almost like another thing that is a great way to learn I guess that's the final IPA so you're not just reading books and that you are doing trainings You're actually practicing
like a crazy person in the car talking to yourself in multiple tones right love that man and you know what I today was H walking through a presentation deck a few times I'm gonna do it after this and I again I just feel very encouraged that that's what you need to be doing but is there any particular IPA that you might want to dig into I bet they're all critically important but is there one in particular that you might want to double click into So they're all vitally important right I would say it depends on
where you are in terms of your territory development for instance let's just say you join a new company and you have no pipeline that's actually that's a good place to start man yeah that is yeah so if you have no pipeline you're really not advancing deals for you're not closing deals right your number one Focus has to be generating pipeline right again that's that's one of the Four components of the ipas right for example to make it super tactical what that actually means is like okay if I need to generate X pip you do your
math to figure out what type of outbound you need to do so maybe calculate okay I need to have at least two hours of outbound a day all right so just call for Simplicity sake we'll call two hours of cold calling and one hour of email great by way so you separate those two is that for productivity purposes rather Than mixing them 100% so whenever you context switch between calls to emails Etc what happens is you have a tension residue Leeds over from from one task to the other task versus if you're on calls you
can like boom boom boom boom boom boom boom right so you'll be really consistent with it and I have to shiman again how do you know that that you're targeting the right companies in contacts because I know they're not equal so you have these blocks of your Two hours of calling one hour of email but how do you know you're going for the right ones what's your criteria beautiful the first piece is ideally you you want me crystal clear on your ideal customer profile all right so you want to know exact things about them so
not just like the common demographics but ideally some sort of psychographics like their levels of pain issues that they're running into and then what you want to think through is if you're going tier You know tiers one two and three depending what type of data your company provides for you ideally the hottest prospects are ones with some sort of Trigger or buyer intent for example if your company has a tool like six cents then you might have signals showing you hey a CTO from this company is clicking around your site on these Pages that's a
pretty High intense signal okay depending which obviously which Pages it's going to be right so I'm always Thinking like your hottest Prospect should be like the right ICP the right target market The Right Use cases The Right Use you can solve for and then some sort of buying trigger those are like ones potentially in the active Market on the hunt already to be looking for a solution or something those be the best ones and then you can go down to the next level which is maybe there's no necessarily immediate trigger but there's still the right
ICP and they Also have the same use cases they you kind of go get the worst on of you more of the searches right in the perfect world you do good enough job with the top stuff that you don't have to go to the bottom ones where just a general search because those are usually the least effective all right so make sense so far good absolutely keep rolling keep rolling so talk about the ipas you have your dedicated blocks so you know all I need to make sure I'm filling the funnel Up I got two
hours of phones one hour of email and it's set in your calendar so now you know that's your ipas right again Professor Marcus so prioritize phone that higher converting yeah the phone but I love the phone the phone is the fastest way to convert that's just Realties you you can it's easier to handle objection on the phone than handle object your email so yeah yeah okay continue on I had to call that out though okay cool so yeah the IPA it's on Your calendar then I would also build in time to master improve your skills
okay this is like really getting your Discovery talk track right do all these things if you're like in a program like mine you're going through the content you're building out your Frameworks you're implementing your me to the coaching calls you're getting help right so you want time dedicated as part of your schedule to make sure you're actually advancing your skills if you're Going to role play have time built in to role play you want to make sure it's consistent with that because what you're doing when you're consistent with that is You're Building discipline but also
you're creating systems in place that you can set and forget as long as you know you're going to stick to your schedule from 8: to 10 I going be on the phones and then from 10: to 11: I'm going to do cold email then you know you got prospec and cover like it's unlocked You don't the worry about that anymore and that's how you get really really effective now over time as you start to develop your territory you probably will start shifting a little bit or maybe instead of having five days a week because now
you have more meetings and stuff depending what you sell right meetings you might have maybe now it's twice a week right or maybe you're breaking up to daily stuff or maybe smaller blocks right maybe it's like an Hour each day on the phones and then half an hour email and it's better it's broken up in blocks right but the key is is having that consistently built in your calendar as part of your ipas what's going to happen is as you're booking more meetings which will be ipas those will be in your calendar too but what
you have to be really careful of is espe when you're new into a company is meetings start to pop up and show up on your calendar that you maybe don't want To go to because they're from your company they're not a good use of your time people just inviting you to random meetings for whatever reason so this is where it gets hard for a lot of new sales people they're like I should go to every single meeting well do you need to or is it optional ask your boss hey I got invited to this meeting
with revops about whatever like is this required for me to go like what's the objective of me being on this meeting like it's okay to Push back and find out why you need to be on certain meetings because your goal is you have to protect your time because the more time you could spend selling the more money you're going to make and I think the Salesforce stat is like I think the average reps is maybe 37% of the time selling which is crazy because selling is the number one way you excel in your role make
money one of the key uh sales activities one of the greatest the epitome of selling some might say is The Discovery call because it can set the tone for the whole opportunity engagement and so I know we're limited on time man by the way for the audience like Marcus is actually sick right now and he's showing up like a beast so let's acknowledge Him for that so maybe I'll try and fit in two questions gosh okay like a tip or two on Discovery perfect there main tips on Discovery right but I think most people have
a good idea in Terms of what to ask on the upper level but I think mistake a lot of people Miss is actually in the follow-up questions so one super simple tip is whenever someone responds to your Discovery question they give you response if you say like hey why do you guys do it this way and they say oh the reason we have our website optimized this way for the checkout is because of x z most people like check you got it now instead use this really simple framework I call Rim Which is what's the
relevance what's the impact what's the motive what's the relevance what's the impact what's the motive and you use that as a way to dig a little bit deeper to uncover what's the relevance of why they're saying that what's the impact and what's the motive and You appli by for any part of the discovery process okay let me give you an example from my own company sometimes I'll get ask hey so does your company offer reinforcement support for The training and that could be easy yes or no answer right now a rookie Markus would say yeah
we have that but season Marcus says hey that seems like it's really important to you can you help me understand what's making you ask this now it's going to lead to a deeper more Rich answer it might sound something like well you know the reason we asked is because you know in the past we've done workshops and people kind of forget about it after the week is over so we Don't really get the ROI and I know my boss is going to ask about this so I need to have an answer for them got it
so now I can go even deeper hey so had your boss asked about this before in the past yes he has and what has happened in that situation well I didn't have an answer okay what's he looking for specifically what would he like to see so now before you know it I pull out one single thread right I'm trying to cover the relevance the impact the motive and It's going to lead to a potentially a very different response I need to have to really address what's really on their mind down the road whether it's my
demo or something else so you may have great discovery questions but when people respond back think what's the relevance what's the impact what's the motive if you impa every single way you'll find you're able to go an inch wide like a mile deep and you'll get deeper and more richer insights by going super deep that Way so much wisdom has been shared today Marcus thank you so much and we're just scratching the surface of the wealth of knowledge that you are so let's finish up by talking about who your coaching is for and what people
can expect at a high level awesome so I work directly with hungry Tech sales AES who want to fully max out the comp plan they want to earn a quar million 500k plus if not more depending on their comp structure but they also want to do in a way where They're not working like 80 plus hours a week like they want a repeatable systematic framework across the board this is whether they're working at company a or at Company B so of time we find for a lot of our customers they come in we're help Crush
into one company some will stay there but then may jump into another company for better opportunity vehicle until the point they basically escape velocity or they build a side hustle and they just go off and Do their own thing as part of so literally sign up with Marcus crush it at your own company then you can identify if there's a better company to go to where you could crush it and make even more and a better opportunity vehicle and then you're probably gonna end up with a side hustle going all in or just escape velocity
where you're financially set at 35 and if you take a little longer that's okay but Marcus any other final words otherwise I'll tie a b In this conversation we got to get you rolling your next thing no was my absolute pleasure you know I think if you you're watching this and listening to this you know congratulations to you cuz that means you're in the small percentile the top 1% of of sales professionals who are hungry and you're taking your own career into your own hands so kudos to you and go crush it absolutely to the
audience your success in Tech sales and in life happy selling And happy living and we'll see you in the next one thanks Marcus
