“You can blame somebody all you want for something messing up. But if you’re not taking extreme ownership, if you’re not taking it extreme ownership to lead yourself, you definitely can’t lead others.” – Luke Floyd in today’s Tip 1166
Do you lead yourself?
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Deel
Luke Floyd on LinkedIn
Luke Floyd on Sales Success Stories Interview
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got a couple of short clips from the most recent interview on the Sales Success Stories Podcast and my conversation with Luke Floyd who finished as the number one AE in North America for Deel last year. Listen to this:
Luke Floyd: This is actually one area that I’m really passionate about in my career. So I am an intentional individual contributor, as you have coined the term, I believe. But basically, I’m a salesperson through and through. This is what I’m going to be doing for a while. So when I think of leadership, anybody can be a leader. You don’t have to be a manager to be a leader. And that’s one of the biggest misconceptions in the corporate world. I learned this just from being in the military, where there are a lot of different leaders in the chain. So, well, yes, you might be a leader, as I was. I was an NCO at the same time, you have a leader and they have a leader.
So exerting leadership, I think it just comes natural to me. Obviously, I joined the military, spend time for 6 actually going on 7 years now as an NCO. So I’m getting out this month, thank goodness, as an ESA Staff Sergeant. So I both had troops. I trained troops. And what I found is that the thing about when stakes are high, whether you’re downrange or whether you’re in a really dangerous training environment. If you don’t do your job, blame doesn’t work. Like if a vehicle rolls over and somebody dies because you didn’t call out something correctly, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. There’s still someone dead. Right now luckily in sales, we don’t have that level of stakes involved. It’s not people’s lives necessarily, but the same thing still applies. You can blame somebody all you want for something messing up. But if you’re not taking extreme ownership and that’s a book I’ll recommend multiple times as many of your guests have, if you’re not taking it extreme ownership to lead yourself, you definitely can’t lead others. And as we know, some organizations aren’t exactly organized and maybe have some internal dysfunction. And when you see a project that’s really worth taking on, it’s your job to lead them to the promised land, whether that’s helping them navigate their stuff. You navigating your stuff internally or some combination of the two.
When I first got into sales in the door-to-door and then in selling insurance, there’s a lot of what I would call just my personal opinion, negative influences in the sales community that I listened to, The Hustle 10X Culture. And so the problem is some people can afford to do that because if you burn out, you have people there to help you stand up. Not all of us can afford to burn out in that way because if we can’t sell, then people’s bills don’t get paid.
So I had to be very careful and so when I came in and I thought of sales as a craft like, Hey, this is what I’m going to get back into. I thought, okay, what do I really want to do? I want to sell. I enjoy selling. I don’t want to go into management again. I can be a leader without being a manager. So knowing that I want to sell and knowing that it’s going to take me 10 or 20 years until I can retire at the earliest, I’m in this thing for a minute. What kind of life do I have to be selling or I have to be doing so that I can sell for 10 or 20 years and not burn out because I’m not going to do the roller coaster thing over and over again.
So it’s really designing that and what I have had to do over the last year in achieving that, there’s actually a really important inflection point that I want to call out, so and I think I even messaged you about it at some point but beginning of December, basically, I had a vacation scheduled. And so it was like I was coming up on this vacay. I was at 190%, and I was like, I can really push hard through the holidays. I can hit my 200% goal because when I came into Deel, I told Chris, “Look, I don’t care what number you put in front of me. I’m going to do 200%”
Scott Ingram: Because that’s what we do here.
Luke Floyd: Exactly. And so I was going to have it happen. And in that moment, I just realized, “You know what? If 190 was my best, I’m just going to let that 200% go, and I’m going to do what I know I need to do,” which is Q1 planning and transition to 22. So let’s just go take care of business. We missed. Oh, well. And then had a meeting the next week. turns out my numbers were low. I was actually at 225%. So it really worked out and I was proud of myself that rather than get distracted by the end result, I focused on the process instead, and it wound up being okay. Like, the world did, nobody died and the world didn’t fall apart. So, yeah, that’s kind of one area I’ve worked on is the anti-hustle culture.
Scott Ingram: For a link to the full episode #140 on Sales Success Stories and to connect with Luke directly, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1166. Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!