“That brought a lot of awareness to me around some kind of really core pillar to my approach now, which is having the foundation of being well-rested and sleeping well.” – Brandon Fluharty in today’s Tip 873
What’s your thrive score?
Join the conversation below and go check out the links!
Brandon Fluharty on LinkedIn
Brandon Fluharty on Sales Success Stories Interview
$13.4M ARR in 5 Months! Becoming a World Class Sales Athlete with LivePerson’s Brandon Fluharty
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip is a clip from my round 2 bonus episode conversation with Brandon Fluharty on the Sales Success Stories Podcast. When I first interviewed Brandon, who’s in an enterprise sales role at LivePerson for episode 85 of the podcast, he had sold $11M in Annual Recurring Revenue in the previous 2 years. In this updated interview, he talks about how he’s sold $13.4M in ARR in just the last 5 months. Here’s a sample for you:
Brandon Fluharty: We really geek out on the concept of treating ourselves like professional athletes. I’ve always believed in that. In sales, we geek out on some productivities stuff. And so I doubled down on those things. Really started tracking some noncommon sales metrics. So my sleep, hours of sleep and I was getting from a wearable cold loop sense added, ordering to track similar metrics.
The quality of my sleep, the sleep debt, which I measured through an app called Rise. So it was really front and center for me of understanding; hey, when I am less than three hours of sleep that I started, like when I first started using the app, I was like 13 hours of sleep that crazy. And I think that’s would be common for a lot of people. We get accustomed to running, almost getting numb to the fact that we’re in constant sleep debt and we don’t really know how much it’s affecting us until we start putting a spotlight on it and becoming a bit more aware of it.
So that brought a lot of awareness to me around some kind of really core pillar to my approach now, which is having the foundation of being well-rested and sleeping well. And then I started corely, I started tracking things like how many meetings I was in in a day. Not in the sense that I wanted to have more meetings so I could sell more deals. Because actually, I wanted to start getting out of meetings because I was reading the book at the time by Cal Newport called Deep Work.
And that was profoundly insightful for me because what Cal lays out is that you want to be hyper-successful in today’s modern knowledge worker era. You need to dedicate time for deep work. And so in this simple Google Spreadsheet, I would just sort of track here’s how well rested I am. Here’s how I’m sleeping, what my sleep that is, how many meetings I would need. I got to a sweet spot an understanding of like, no more than four hours a day meetings, because then the other four or five hours a day, I wanted to dedicate towards going deep with my prospects. And it was sort of necessary in 2020, right? Because we weren’t getting the amount of leads we did that the previous year. So we had to go do it without a necessity. I had to go deep. I had to think really creatively for my prospects, think about some really creative ideas that could fundamentally help with their business, especially since I’m selling the transformation. How could they be super smart with their budget? How could I unearth problems they might not be considering? How can I get that business? Think about moonshot ideas when it’s seemingly impossible.
So I was trying to like, paint the dots and then the like the final piece would be just overall how I felt for the day and my mood, my overall satisfaction. So we kind of look at these tranches of things of my health data, my productivity data, my overall satisfaction, I called the thrive score. I wanted to understand what are the trends that make me feel satisfied at the end of each workday and then building the routines to, well, let’s repeat whatever it is that makes me feel happy and satisfied in my work and also produces good results. And I do it in a way that’s not constantly hustling and working.
Well, that sounds like utopia to me, and what I learned not about the perfection of it having the perfect day. It was more about the progress of getting to a perfect day, because since I was tracking in the past, whatever, almost a year now, very rarely have I had a perfect day, but I committed to myself. Now, it’s not about being perfect every day. It’s about the pursuit of that and measuring the progress and it can be incremental improvements and then bring that as a steady habit and routine to my day, and it’s obviously produced amazing results, 13.4 million in annual recurring revenue in less than five months. I’ll take it.
Scott Ingram: For a link to the full interview and to connect with Brandon on LinkedIn, just click over to DailySales.Tips/873
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!