108: Sales Player Coach Michele Marshall is a Dual Threat at Experis

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Terryberry, Vidyard, and Alice. To learn more about them and all of our sponsors who are supporting this show and this community, click over to top1.fm/sponsors. You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Michelle Marshall. Michelle is the top seller and the player coach at Experis and is based in Boise. Welcome to the show, Michelle.

0:49 Michele Marshall: It is so awesome to be here. Thank you, Scott.

0:51 Scott Ingram: I am so glad you're here. We have been talking for quite some time. I know you, you joined us at the Sales Success Summit, and I'm just thrilled to have you on the show and, and talk through your story. And for folks that are new to the show, it's worth noting that I only interview active quota-carrying individual contributors like Michele who are either the outright number one top performers in their companies, or they're at least in the top 1% inside a very large organization. So Michele, with that, let's start like we always do with some immediate value and talk through the 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success.

1:29 Michele Marshall: Ooh, breaking it down. That's hard but important. Leading with curiosity, key. And it's not just about the fundamentals of asking open-ended questions. It's truly being curious about what your client is doing. What is their company's goal and objective, whether it's top-line revenue growth, Automating, cost optimization on the bottom line, acquisitions, really understanding what they do so that you can find out where what you offer juxtaposes, really meeting individuals where they are. In my business, it's candidates, clients, and colleagues across the IT staffing communities. Not trying to get people from the beginning to say, hey, can't you see it? Meeting them where they are and working together to come to common solution goals. And another one is really creating a flexible framework that serves as my overarching sales program to set my annual goals, my monthly goals, my weekly goals, my daily goals, and to break it down hour by hour.

2:47 Scott Ingram: Well, we have to talk about that one. Your timing on that is perfect. You know, here we are. I guess, in December as folks are listening to this. And, you know, goal setting is going to be a huge, huge topic. So, talk us through kind of your process and approach there.

3:02 Michele Marshall: Well, thank you. It's about nesting the goals. You know, I work for a large publicly held company. It's back to mirroring, understanding your clients. It's understanding your company. How is your CEO measured? How is the head of sales measured? What are their expectations for top-line growth and profitability? Breaking it down for your immediate boss so you understand what is going to drive your one-on-one sessions, your coaching sessions, and what you're going to talk about in terms of business, and then breaking it down to What are my goals? How do I want to get paid? How much do I want to make this year? How am I going to do that through serving my customers? And I line it all up.

3:51 Scott Ingram: Awesome. We will dig deeper into that, but I think it's important that we kind of contextualize this because you're, you're in a unique kind of sales role. There's a lot of facets to recruiting. So, give us some context. Talk about what is your role and also maybe the nuance in this kind of unique player coach role that you're currently in and about Experis and all the rest.

4:11 Michele Marshall: Excellent. If I get too granular, raise me up, but that's what it's really all about.

4:16 Scott Ingram: There's no such thing as too granular on this show, Michele. Haven't you listened to this?

4:21 Michele Marshall: I have, and I love it. And it's not painful. So at the end of the day, Experis, as a ManpowerGroup company, we are people providing people to people. How we measure that is through What are our client meetings? What are we doing to drive opportunities, which are requirements for talent, whether that's one person to do one IT project or 100 developers? How many of those do we fill and at what profitability level? It's really broken down. In my role, As a performer, I'm in the manufacturing vertical. I serve all clients, and it's my leading with curiosity again. It's, how does IT enable manufacturing companies? Taking that down one step further, understanding the companies that fit the profile of who we're selling to, the buyer personas, and the contacts. Within those companies, learning about them, breaking down the call log, doing the outreach and drip campaigns that last over 7 to 10 weeks using multiple tools that we can talk about whenever the time is right, doing that myself every day, every week, and then helping my local team do that. And I also provide leadership on a volunteer basis to account managers and business development managers across the U.S. It's a lot. My quota is measured by weekly performance metrics. And, what else would you like to know about that?

6:11 Scott Ingram: Well, I'm going to ask you a very industry-specific question. I'll let you explain what I'm asking after you answer the question, but are you running a full desk?

6:19 Michele Marshall: Great question. You know this business, Scott. I am not at a full desk. For those of you that may or may not be familiar with staffing, which by the way is a global billion-dollar business… who knew? When my father asked me, what do you do for work again? And I said, I help people find jobs and I help companies find people. And he says, and they pay you for that? And I'm like, yeah, they do. And it's hard work and it's a lot of fun because Again, people providing people to people is a lot of moving parts. A full desk means that I'm out meeting with clients, understanding what their IT-based business projects are, where they have gaps in resources, people to get the job done. Then the other side of the desk is the recruiting piece, which is finding that talent. I am focused on working with the clients to identify the gaps in what they need to get their initiatives done. A full desk, my hat is off to people who do that. That's a big job because you're talking to the client by day and you're burning the midnight oil at night to find those people. I'm focused. I'm client-facing. My esteemed peers, colleagues, and I worship them, the recruiters. They find the talent, which in a single-digit unemployment, even in this pandemic right now, is not easy. Lots of need for talent. There's a big gap. Hard to find the people. That's the full desk. I'm on the sales side.

8:01 Scott Ingram: Perfect, perfect, perfect. And then quantify your results for us. I mean, what does it take to be number one and how are you measured?

8:08 Michele Marshall: I'd like to talk about that for a minute. Our performance metrics are published weekly. The sales activities that are measured are meetings, openings for staff, trying to find people, covering those, which we call submittals, et cetera. But, the single most important factor is gross profit achievement. That's the dollar price point between what you pay a consultant, candidate, contractor… they all have that name… And you bill the client. The difference between $25 in pay, $50 in pay, $100 an hour in pay, and what you bill is gross profit. And that's what makes the world go round in the staffing business, is gross profit. In the profit and loss statement, it's going to be revenue, payroll, gross profit. Payroll includes all the fiduciary loads. That's taxes, Social Security, the cost of doing business. Cost of sales, SG&A, everything else is below the line. What I can influence as an individual contributor salesperson is gross profit, which is profitable billing. That's what's measured. There are different thresholds per week: $2,500, $5,000, $10,000. $10,000, $15,000. Those were… you're really accomplishing a lot. And that is published at my company for the whole company to see. In my segment, I have been number 1 of 145 salespeople. I'm in the what's called convenience group. That's non-global, non-enterprise. And I put myself out there. I'm in rebuild mode. Rebuild in that I am, as a player coach, responsible for helping opening the doors. As my leader opens doors for me, given her market expertise, I hand off to new team members. And so as those accounts go off, I start all over again. And so I'm still number 15, so it's respectable given the business I've handed off, working my way back up to number 1, which I was for several months coming out of 2019 and going into 2020. That's the business and that's how it's broken down.

10:37 Scott Ingram: Terryberry is all about rewarding this type of performance. Recognition drives performance, and Terryberry understands that what gets recognized gets done. Organizations all over the world have turned to Terryberry and their award-winning 360 recognition platform to recognize people for their contributions towards success. If you understand that a powerful recognition solution can help you drive the success you're looking for? Let Terryberry help you build a culture of performance and recognition today. You can learn more at top1.fm/terryberry. That's T-E-R-R-Y-B-E-R-R-Y. Now, how, how do you… I think the one of the biggest challenges in that player coach role is just choosing how you prioritize your time between your own production and, and your own work, and then the time that you spend coaching your team and, and helping them get up to speed and find success themselves? How do you manage that?

11:34 Michele Marshall: Patience. Absolute patience and a laser focus proactively on scheduled trainings, on-the-job training, which I love. Shadow me. I'll shadow you. By the way, with our new virtual selling, it's much easier now. I'm meeting my clients on Zoom and Teams. And I'm sharing with them openly someone that my peer will be joining us. And I really don't get into too much detail that this person is new to career or brand new. Just my peer is going to be joining us. You good with that? 10 out of 10, your clients are happy to help and they get it, right? So if I look at my most recent peer that I'm standing up, what we do is Micro-training. If I've learned anything about scheduling 90 minutes to go through a syllabus and tactics in this dynamic world and where every deal and moment counts, that's gone out the window for me. What we do are micro-training sessions early in the day, late in the afternoon. We stick to them as much as we can with Glue. That is our commitment on both sides. We do them in 20-minute increments. We have a topic, etc. And that's the proactive. For the reactive, help, I need an SOS, we have established our communication vehicle, which is a chat on Teams. And if neither one of us is responding, a text. And what I'll say Experis has done as an organization In staffing, anybody who is familiar with it, in the past, most organizations that are really good at it may or may not have a learning and development group. They throw you into the deep end without water wings. What we've done now is made the time to say, here is a framework. We call it the Common Operating Framework. Follow this, shadow me, find a buddy, and you go through a ramp-up period where you've taken the first year and broken that down into very specific milestones. So because of that framework, it makes what I do as a player coach a lot easier, and I focus on the day-to-day. What are we going to learn today? What do we need to get you up and running where you're making your own outbound calls, sending out your own email campaigns, serving the customer independently, and finding that time for them like a bookend, Monday, Fridays, around what timeframes in my industry have a little bit more forgiveness on being… because it's very interrupt-driven… making sure that I'm available to do what I need to do. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to drive the business. You know, you're on a plane. I absolutely miss travel, Scott. I don't know about you, but something I took for granted. There's a reason why they say put the oxygen mask on your face first, because if you're not breathing, you can't take care of anybody. So making sure that I stick to what are my outbound calling campaign times, what are my research times, what are my times to sell, bringing them along to shadow and telling them when I need alone time too, kind of like when parents lock the door to the bedroom or the bathroom when they just need a moment. Leading with patience because someone's success… there are 2 people's success that are counting on you, yourself and that other person. That's how I've been able to do it proactively, have a plan. Reactively take a breath and see what they need with a smile on your face.

15:36 Scott Ingram: I'm kind of stacking up the sponsors here, but Michele's talking about micro-training has me thinking about a concept that Vidyard has been advocating for that I think you could think of as micro-demos. Instead of trying to get all the stakeholders in the same room at the same time for a long drawn-out demo, what if instead you sent very short, hyper-relevant demo videos to each of those stakeholders based on what they cared about? Vidyard makes that process super easy, and thanks to their free Chrome plugin, it won't cost you a dime to do it. Download Vidyard today from top1.fm/v and get started and see if delivering a micro demo or a micro training can help you in your sales process. That's top1.fm/v. That is brilliant, and I can't help but thinking, and I'm probably oversimplifying things a little bit, but the way that you were describing some of the onboarding and the learning, it reminded me of You know, and you said, you know, people get thrown into the deep end. It's kind of like swim lessons as a kid, right? So you start with your buddy.

16:38 Michele Marshall: Absolutely.

16:39 Scott Ingram: You got to have your buddy. And we have independent lessons where each lesson is focused on a particular part of the stroke or the swimming process. It's not, let me teach you everything all at once. You got to break it down. You take it step by step.

16:54 Michele Marshall: Absolutely. And the last thing I'd offer on that player-coach, I mean, we could talk about this for a long time is knowing if you shouldn't be one, right? It's not selfish to say, this isn't working for me. It's actually the right thing, the most effective thing to do because you're hurting yourself and you're hurting your mentee. The other thing, so I think it's fine to say, hey, I can't do this. The other thing that's really important in the player-coach relationship is establishing your role so that they know what are you focused on. And I make it 3 very simple things. Number one, as your coach, it is my responsibility and my commitment to you that I will clearly communicate the expectations of the business development role at Experis. Clearly, what are you being measured on? And, more importantly, number 2, how do you get there? Not the why, not the when, but the building blocks on if you're going to be measured in your first 90 days at 7 meetings per week, how do we get there? So, that's number 2 in my role. And, the 3rd is to lead by example. Give them something that they can model, not be giving any advice that I wouldn't be willing to take myself.

18:28 Scott Ingram: That is fantastic. It's interesting, and we will come back to this probably in the early part of next year because we've been having a lot of conversations around this player-coach topic, and there are a lot of challenges around it, and it sounds like you are dealing with it extraordinarily well. Have you gotten I think one of the biggest challenges with it is it's 2 full-time, you know, very important roles. And a lot of times organizations don't recognize that properly. And there's, there's really no, there's no quota relief. It's like, well, you've just got 2 jobs. Do you get any support and help in that, or are you just superhuman and you figured out a way to manage both of these things extraordinarily well? Because your story is not typical.

19:22 Michele Marshall: My boss, Dari Westover, is amazing. Our one-on-one, which is once a month, is that question. It has a kind of a two-way street. One is, how are you feeling and thinking about your ability to meet your individual commitments as well as standing up your charge, if you will? And then get ready, it's her telling me what she sees, right? Clearly, supportively, objectively, firmly when needed. And it is the way… it's not about superhuman, it's about having a great servant leader to me in that she's like, we're going to move this over here. What do you think about that? How do you feel? Tell me really. I'll come back and say, oh, I might feel marginalized if I'm no longer responsible for that. It's constant, candid calibration. That's the key, that consistent, candid calibration. What helps us is looking at the results. What is my sales performance in terms of gross profit generation? How are my meetings going? What are the quality of those meetings? You know, because I think any of us that have been in sales for a minute can get a meeting, right? But are the meetings the quality that are going to fill your pipeline? She gives me that feedback. I tell her what I need, and it's consistent, candid calibration. So we're not working on superhuman strength, and we make adjustments when needed, and we graduate individuals out of my full-time coaching when they're ready to stand on their own without the training wheels. We actually, at our organization, call them training wheels and kind of concerned, is that going to be insulting to the staff that we're bringing in and the team members? No, it's clear. It's candid. It's tangible. You understand what that means is you don't need me anymore like you used to need me. We have a new relationship, an elevated relationship, and that's how it's constant calibration. I can't say that enough, Scott.

21:40 Scott Ingram: That is fantastic. And I've talked about this quite a number of times on the show. It's an observation that I frequently make. It's not one that I ask about consistently enough, but I really believe that, especially among the top 1% performers that I interview, I don't think I've ever interviewed anybody, and I'd be curious about just kind of your, your history, if you've, if you've ever experienced this. I think it's extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to be incredibly successful and high-performing despite your boss. The importance of that relationship that you have with your manager, with your leader, in supporting you, and, and it seems very, very clear that you have that in, in spades with, with where you're at. Have you experienced that differently at different points in your career?

22:31 Michele Marshall: Oh yes, just get it done and I don't want to hear about the details. Yes, and that's why I'm not there.

22:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Well, let's go back and I would love to hear about your origin story. How did you get into sales in the first place?

22:48 Michele Marshall: Oh my goodness, so accidentally I was outsourced I grew up in business banking, thought I wanted to be, you know, Wall Street banking, went to operations officer training at Wells Fargo Bank and popped out the other side a candidate for IT, then called management information systems. I didn't even know what that was. So long story short, I had a career in data centers and then I was outsourced to my organization and became a member of that outsourced company's transition team. As I transitioned to provide services back to other banks, then they're like, hmm, you're really good at that transition thing, recreation, badge flipping is what they call it in the industry. You used to work for Wells Fargo or Vons or British Petroleum. You now work for MCI System House. Verizon Business Systems. Okay. So, I moved then in my career, always looking for something new, leading with curiosity, like, what else? What do you do? How do we bring in more customers, et cetera? Because more customers is what keeps everybody employed. I moved to post-sales support. One day, the partner responsible for a strategic pursuit taps me on the shoulder, and I was voluntold to stand in for a salesperson that was unavailable to attend a client meeting. It happened to be with American Savings Bank, now known as Washington Mutual, now Norwest, Wells Fargo, all the roll-ups. Stood in, and the next thing I know what happened next is I was appointed to the pre-sales pursuit team with this global data center outsourcing company. It was very accidental, just through performance and curiosity. And no regrets. I'd had my first career was as a business analyst, project manager, data center infrastructure and business applications. And boom, I was in pre-sales and sales and I have zero regrets, zero regrets. I have never looked back.

25:05 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. And maybe talk about, I mean, I've, I've kind of watched you through this adventure. I think we connected right after you had made a pretty significant transition. Why don't you talk about your, your more recent history? And kind of what's, what's gone on in the, in the world of Michele and why you have found yourself in kind of this, this rebuilding mode.

25:24 Michele Marshall: Awesome. So I'd been with the Experis organization. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the toughest times in my career. And I left and they asked me to come back. This is now 2015. And I said yes. And I have zero regrets. I led as a managing director the sales, delivery, and operations for Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Very tough market, incredibly competitive, big. Put a plan together, blessed to inherit some good team members, blessed to hire some good team members that stuck. This is a hard business with a lot of attrition. I had a life plan, and that life plan was to relocate from Northern California, the Bay Area, to Boise, the Northwest. I'd met my boss, Dri Westover, when she was my peer. We put together a plan. She's like, let me see what you're made of. We met the first week I rejoined the company, February 2015, and she'd only been on board a couple of months herself here in Boise. Like attracts like, and we both killed it. It was fun. Then our mutual boss, when he hired me back, knew I had this plan for 2 things. To get to Boise, they already had an amazing leader, and that was her. He's like, so what do you want to do? I said, I want to get back into sales. I want to be, as you taught me, Scott. I said, I want to be an individual contributor. You're like, no, correction, intentional contributor. I came in 2018 as a business development manager peer like everybody else, starting at the bottom of the list with a few hall passes, a great reputation that the team had built, and a charge to get some accounts back on track, grow ones we had, and find some new ones. And I did that. We fast forward to 2019, and Jhery approached me about my interest in being a sales lead and said, could you do what you did last year again and help others do it, too. I'm like, ooh! I didn't see that in the cards. I didn't see that one coming, but it felt right. So I did, and we hired a couple of people. We've hired a couple more, and our team has actually quadrupled. We're a small team in a B city but one of the highest-performing groups. I'm honored to be a part of them, and they have been for 4 or 5 years consistently. In the country. Who knew? Boise. So as we come into 2020, and I'm not going to bemoan the obvious… election year, pandemic, social injustice, murdering hornets, whatever… I'm just going to share that part of the role is building something up and handing it off. That part I can totally get my head around. What's been challenging? Boom. Current clients aren't buying. Time to pivot. Get back to the basics. Reinvent yourself all over again. And I've had… I'm happy to share. I don't know if it's the timing. I call luck laboring under correct knowledge. Someone gave that to me. That is not made up, and I'm sure many have heard that before. But laboring under correct knowledge, I've had some of the best couple of weeks I've had in a long time in terms of filling pipeline and soon to be closing business. And I'll rebuild again. So from leader in the Bay Area to the beginning and zero regrets and rebuilding again in my new player coach role.

29:13 Scott Ingram: One of the ways that I've seen sellers have a lot of success in opening new doors and generating new pipeline is through personalized gifting. Alyce has a platform to help you do just that. Their platform doesn't just send the gifts, it will also help recommend gifts based on the recipient's unique interests. Alyce calls these their 5 to 9 interests, those things that they love outside of work. To check out this incredible way to connect and open new doors, just click over to top1.fm/alyce to learn all about it. That's top1.fm/alyce. Well, and we'll come back and talk more about reinvention, right? I think that will be a theme as we get a little bit further into this. But I'm curious, you have had a pretty broad experience over the course of your career. If you were starting over today, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently? Or how would you, how would you guide yourself?

30:10 Michele Marshall: I do reflect on that, not with regret. But what I would do different that I would share with others to help them have the data necessary to make their own decisions about their careers. From a career perspective, I would have done my education differently. I dove right into business administration. I wanted to apply that immediately to banking and get out there and start working. Probably not. As conscious as I might have been that that work world could be a long time, and whether work is required or work is optional due to the things that matter to an individual on financial success, health, etc., I might have done it a little differently. So the education path, liberal arts undergrad with an M Master of Science or Master of Arts in education because what I didn't know then that I know now was all of this learning and development via technology, my 2 worlds juxtaposed. That's one. Really thinking as I offer advice to individuals looking at their educational path, and it doesn't mean that I can't do it again, right? More to come on that. Post-corporate success ongoing education. My sisters and I often… one's a teacher, one's a nurse practitioner… we talk about, should we have enlisted in the military? Should we have looked at Air Force, Navy, Army? There are other branches, too, that are equally wonderful. But what might our careers have looked like If we'd done that, and now with the focus on veteran appreciation, which is not what I grew up with in the Vietnam War period of time, or even how we treat our veterans today, better but nowhere near what we should, how would that have shaped me differently? The last thing, from a career perspective, I sometimes wish. What if, what about, again, no regrets, just reflection. What if I had started my sales career sooner? Should individuals, after they have a little bit of work experience, whether it's in a startup, mid-range company, Fortune 100, nonprofit, or public sector, consider doing a sales role right out of school? You know, what if? What would that have looked like? Those are the things that I reflect on.

32:59 Scott Ingram: I'm also curious about just your thoughts on having been on both sides of the sales management, sales leadership side of the equation, and obviously been now an intentional individual contributor. It's funny, I was having this conversation with somebody earlier this week, and we were just getting to know each other, and he was really struck by the fact he's like, wait, you You've been doing the sales thing for a long time. And he was just sort of dumbfounded by the fact that I was still in an individual contributor role. And I was like, no, this is very, very much on purpose. And it sort of blew his mind because it didn't seem like something he had seen a lot. You know, most people just follow that traditional path and go, okay, well, the next step for me is I'm supposed to become a sales leader. Again, you have a great depth of experience in this. What's your take?

33:46 Michele Marshall: I'm going to start with what I did. And it's something that I love that my former boss, Jason, when I said, hey, if I come back to Experis, here's my plan. And I worked the plan. And he said at the time, I have never heard anyone want to give up leadership to be a bag-carrying individual contributor measured in every metric possible. I think we all are told, well, success is when you rise to the top. I think success is embracing what you enjoy most and how that manifests through compensation, through health, through purpose, through serving others. Where I really get invigorated is understanding what my client companies are trying to achieve and being a meaningful part of that. You can get that through a lot of different ways, but you can't get it frontline if you're not out there in the field. Zero regrets. Love that full range. You just have to accept. That haters are going to hate, like they say, and say, oh, she couldn't cut it or didn't like it. People who know you better are like, wow. And the greatest compliment was to the team that I left in the Bay Area that said, you did everything you said you were going to do. You came back to the company, the people that were here, you were going to help them backfill you, hire around that, and then go sell. In some ways, I was just feeling like it's time for me to step to the side and let that next generation of incredible leaders, sales leaders, recruiting leaders, operational leaders, have the room to grow and not hog up the top of the food chain. Not hog the top of the org chart and go do what's actually most meaningful to me. Just get in the field and make it happen.

36:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's so interesting because, you know, the thing that really drives me is, is a lot of that, right? It's the direct contact. I love working directly with my clients and just being in those conversations, right? It's me and them. I'm not a step or 2 or 3 removed. You know, it's, it's also for me about just the freedom. The biggest complaint that I hear from my friends that go down the sales leadership path is your time is no longer your own. You no longer control your calendar and many of your activities. And, and I just, I love the sense of control. I get to decide how my day gets structured and when I do what and, and how that works. And similar to you, when I joined Relationship one, when I joined the company that I'm with now, gosh, coming up on on five years, I really shared my plan with them. You know, I had come from a company that was really starting to second guess some things that I was doing on the side, even though those things were very very supportive of my work there and where things were headed. And I just kind of shared this vision, and I knew that I wanted to create this podcast, and I just I laid it all out there. I said, "Look, here's." Here's my plan, here's what I want to do, here's where I want to focus. I think at some point in the future I may come to this fork in the road and I might want to go this way or I might want to go that way, and I want you to understand what those are and kind of this journey that, that I'm on. And I need to know that you're supportive of that and, and that you don't have any concerns around that in terms of where my loyalties lie and what my priorities are. Because if I don't have that… because what I, what I learned the hard way Is it's you can't do it if you don't have that support. And the culture here was just right. They're like, man, we believe in all of this stuff. We want our we want the people on our team to be passionate about things and have lives outside of work. But we don't expect you that this is you know the only thing that you do in your life. So they were they've been nothing but supportive, and that has incredible value to me. That's probably why I've been here for five years, right? Versus right, you know that's that's way beyond sort of the traditional tenure. And sure, I've had plenty of other opportunities, but that, that support has so much value. It's so rewarding to do this, this work. I just, I can't get enough of that. So it's, it's really interesting and something I wish more people would really think about and be transparent about. Like, look, here's where I think I'm going now. I wasn't, I was kind of wrong about what that fork would look like and how that would come about, but still kind of having that idea and partnering with your employer and with your leadership and saying, you know, this is where I think I want to go. And making sure that they're supportive of that.

39:01 Michele Marshall: You know, it's less about that they get you and more that they want to get you, right? That's that difference. That they want to, again, you know, meet me where I am, right? And getting the support that you need. Whether they get it or not. So yeah.

39:23 Scott Ingram: Well, Michelle, we call the show Sales Success Stories, and it seems only fitting that I should ask you if you would share your favorite sales story. And hopefully there's some type of lesson embedded that maybe, maybe it's a great sales story. Maybe it was just an epic fail and something you learned from that. But what have you got for us?

39:40 Michele Marshall: I've learned the most from my failures, boy, and I've got loads of them. If we're ever going to do a let's grab some adult beverages and get a group together and do a group podcast on, wow, you would not believe. I'm going to go there because those things are what shaped me to be better. And, uh, I was pitching a deal to the global CIO of Fluor Daniel. We're in the rounds. My deck is perfection. This is back when you walked in with your little projector. I was dressed to the nines. They have a beautiful office there in Southern California.

40:18 Scott Ingram: Now, Irvine. This is Irvine, right? So, that building. So, it's a quick, quick aside because I used to live 10 minutes from that building.

40:26 Michele Marshall: Oh my goodness.

40:27 Scott Ingram: It struck me. I'm trying to think. It may have been the beginning of this year before the travel stopped being a thing. Ingram Micro is in that building now. And for those, well, I'll find a way to put it in the show notes. So, top1.fm. Forward slash Michelle dash Marshall, because I have no idea what, what episode number this will be, but you can do the forward slash the episode number as well. I'll find a picture of that building because you know it. It's, it's been in, in lots of movies and, and things like that, and it's quite an iconic building.

40:55 Michele Marshall: That's the word… iconic. It's just something from outer space, way ahead of its time still, and yet timeless. I had the honor to deliver this pitch In the center tower, which was the executive suites, which was 2 stories high and what is very old-school corporate. Mahogany Row, when they call it Mahogany Row or the Ivory Tower, it was legit Mahogany Row with mahogany desks, mahogany paneling, chandeliers off the charts. It's Fluor Daniel Global. Architecture and environmental company. So I pitched this deal. I probably got my suit and all the fixings at… what's the mall down there? South Coast Plaza or Fashion Island in Newport Beach?

41:44 Scott Ingram: On the other side of the 405.

41:46 Michele Marshall: Other side, right there, because I lived right there off Jamboree myself. And I did it solo, and I knew… you know how you walk away and say, yeah, I nailed it? You know, I led with questions, I was on, I paced. It was him and 3 or 4 decision-makers. At the close, he's like, hey, Michele, I'll walk you down to the lobby. I'm like, okay, this is really, really, really good or really, really, really bad. Right? He shared with me on the way down to the lobby that, hey, you're in the middle. We've had somebody come in before. We have somebody coming in at the end. We've got a couple more next week, but I'm going to tell you that Your competition rolled in here with an entourage. He broke down for me the subject matter experts that they brought, et cetera. He goes, I think it's either completely insane or very bold that you showed up here alone. He coached me to leverage my support teams better. What made me go solo was not that I didn't know that I had a great support team. The need for control. I wanted to make sure this went well. This is my first really big pre-sales deal, like really big, 7-figure, right? And I don't know if he knew that it was my need for control, but he didn't go there. He just talked to me about… and then he says, and the reason I'm walking down with you is I want you to look on the right as you walk out to see the other your competitor and how many people they have. And I'm like, oh my God, you know, this is epic. This is such an epic fail, right? And so here's lots of learning lessons there about control and what you think is important versus we're selling a multi-year, really large thing. Give it the value it's worth. Lean in, you know, get some help, seek some help. I don't think I even did the dry run with my principals. Here's the good news. I saw him on campus because we were an existing provider, and he said, hey, are you okay? Have you recovered? Because I'm sure he could just read me as I was ready to throw up as I walked out of the lobby, right? And I… he's like, hey, You all good? I said, all good, Dennis. Dennis Benner was his name. Dennis, yeah, thank you. Thank you. Learned a lot. He goes, all right, kid, you're going to the next round. And he just kept walking. We ultimately did win. We ultimately did win the deal. I ultimately did bring others to get me to the next level, to elevate myself. But I really learned a lot from that. It's one of my favorite stories because of the scope, because of that building, because of the solution. And mostly that in this theme of recovery and reinvention, it wasn't I that recovered. As a team, we recovered and closed the deal.

44:58 Scott Ingram: What a great, great story. Now, I will say the story that's coming into, into my mind is that you can overdo that. And for folks that know my background, I'm not going to name specific company names, but you can imagine sort of the, the big tech company that I may have spent some time with in the past where they have oftentimes lots of different kind of sort of overlapping salespeople and stuff like that. And it's one of these meetings we just walked in. I mean, entourage is not a big enough word. You know, it's one of these 24 people walk into a meeting and the executive walks in and just like takes a step back, just complete shock. And I'll never forget his line is, Wow, that's a lot of dry cleaning.

45:44 Michele Marshall: That's classic. Classic.

45:47 Scott Ingram: So, Michele, what are you most proud of? You have done a lot, accomplished a lot, had a lot of success. What are you most proud of?

45:53 Michele Marshall: That's a tough one. That's a tough one. You know, I could say it's other IT services companies tap me for various roles in sales leadership, sometimes even partnership. Do you want to buy in? Do you want to come in and coach? Do you want to train? What are you doing next? So I'm proud that I'm recognized amongst my peers, team members I've led, leadership, the industry, and including the competition. I'm also proud that I'm not air quote feared by the competition. Actually, some of those people have become my friends, and you're not supposed to, but you do in staffing. Sometimes you're friends, right? I love that I'm tapped to train and coach new sales team members, like new-to-career folks. That is something later in my career that's come up, is being able to break down things, concepts, into actionable items. That's a lot of fun and it brings me a lot of joy. That's a good one. Being able to provide for my family. I think that that's It's something that we overlook, that I worked hard. I'm able to reward myself. I'm able to reward people I care about. I'm able to give back to my community. My father, before he passed, said he was proud of my accomplishments in sales and said that he didn't really… his relationship with sales was the play Death of a Salesman. Really understand the professional world as an engineer, that there was any such thing like people who are athletes, movie stars, rock stars, and salespeople. He's like, who knew, right? Getting that from him was important. And finally being able to say that I jealously guard time to have fun. You got to be off. I'm proud that I have not that I know the difference between this new term called presenteeism… responding to your texts immediately, responding to emails at 2 o'clock in the morning, responding to chat, you know, on, on, on, on, on, 60, 70, 80-hour weeks… to measuring my success by performance. So that's something that's an individual thing. That I'm proud that I'm not going to worry about it. I have 3 or 4 more emails. The zero inbox, is that really effective? Is it real? Is it something you pursue? Do people just create other folders to put stuff in there, or is it just time to say, I'm done for the day and I'm going to go have some fun? I'm going to go ride my bike. I'm going to go have a glass of wine. I'm going to go see what the weather looks like that I haven't seen all day since I've been in my office doing virtual meetings back-to-back. A few of them, Scott?

48:58 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Well, I am an inbox zero fan, but only once a day. Only, only once a day. It's not something you can maintain perpetually. Otherwise, you'll go bonkers and…

49:07 Michele Marshall: You'll go bonkers.

49:09 Scott Ingram: Offended is not the right word because you certainly didn't hurt my feelings. But I'm like, oh my gosh, here we are. It's rather late on a Friday afternoon. I just looked out the window and I'm like, gosh, it's already getting dark. And yeah, I haven't been outside all day. I have no idea what the temperature was. I have been just at it.

49:30 Michele Marshall: Yep, I get it.

49:31 Scott Ingram: So that's how that goes. Well, we'll, we'll come back and circle up on the fun and, and what you make time for. But I want to talk about kind of the, the flip side, right? We've talked about accomplishments and, and what you're proud of. What has been the biggest challenge, or what have you struggled with the most through your career?

49:50 Michele Marshall: Gratefully, external factors for which I've had little control and how to find what I could do about it. If I think about just the last 20 years and cycles, I moved to the Bay Area in 2000, 2001, post-9/11. Dot-com bomb, and then something that was a real bomb, 9/11. Recreating myself, big challenges. I have to tell you that Silicon Valley, which from where I lived, which was only 30 miles in any direction to my clients or office, was up to a 2-hour commute each way all the time. There was literally no one on the freeway, no one in a parking lot. Cisco had that huge campus on Tasman. There was nobody anywhere. The precursor, of course, was, you know, as the bubble burst, there was so much technology and it was so exciting and so cool, but some of that technology didn't have purpose. It was just like, I'm going to hire a bunch of people, do something cool, and sell and cash out. Well, a lot of those companies failed because they didn't think about, what am I connecting to? Who is going to buy me? What do… am I an adjunct to? And there were companies that were wildly successful: Google, Apple, Intel, Microsoft. You know, some of them already at certain levels of success, but Outrageous. The Triple Crown was Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft at the time from a tech stock portfolio perspective. And then there was… we've all forgotten about them… AOL, right? You know, the first internet provider. But getting back to a very challenging time, zero business, zero need, zero money. Zero people to sell to. And how I got through that is I drank a heck of a lot of coffee. I was grateful to be employed consistently through that period of time, and I just started meeting with everyone and anyone. And I had just moved to the Bay Area, and I was doing professional services at the time, not staffing, but it's like a staffing And I would just… I called up… this is back in the day, we're talking Rolodex. So, you know, a period of time, you know, even though we had flip phones, it's 2000, 2001, there's some high tech, but, you know, there's still a lot of paper. And I called everybody I know just to ask them how they were. That was it. I did that for like 9 months, Scott, wondering When am I going to be let go? When is my boss at the time going to say, you're going to have to close your office? How… I just moved. I had just gotten married in '98, just moved to the Bay Area, beginning to get myself in a new groove, and it was really rough. In fact, when the planes flew into the Twin Towers, I was in North Carolina in the Outer Banks on vacation at a friend's house. So I actually saw the second plane real time. Like, my husband said, get out of the shower, something's going on. And I'm like, what? Running down the hall, and it's real time. And it was just like, how do you recover? And we did. Let's look at the world. Not the same. Significant loss. Travel forever, man. I shared with you that I was down there in the Newport Beach area. I would get to that John Wayne Airport with 45 minutes, get out of my car, park, and still make it to the gate and on my plane with, you know, it wasn't the 3-hour let's get in line, let's unpack, let's go through the check. It changed the way we travel. Changed the way we looked at different groups, religiously, ethnically. It was rough. And yet here we are. And they rebuilt an amazing new building, an amazing memorial. And New Yorkers are resilient. And the rest of the world was too, such that we were a hockey stick of recovery through 2007. People were needed everywhere. Amazon, eBay, PayPal, all the usual suspects, banking, public sector. Projects were going off the hook because it was the beginning of what today we call digital transformation. Everybody was automating in some form or fashion, rolling out upgrades to Microsoft or checking out new tools because we were looking at Apple growing and becoming part of the business world, et cetera. Then boom! 2009, 2010. Dang it, a decade later it happens again, the banking crisis, right? Here's what was different. There were cars on the freeway, maybe not as many. There were companies that had money to spend and things to do, unlike previously when there was nothing, but everybody was very cautiously watching where, how, and when they spent. And you know what? We recreated ourselves again, and we were doing really well until the pandemic, right? So I share that these have been struggles that I've had to face as sales leader. The first 2, I was in charge. In 2001, I had just opened an office for a company that was starting out in the Bay Area, which is why I was like, oh my God, all these people I hired, XYZ. And, you know, I got a lot of strength from my husband who said, but they might be facing that anywhere they're working. Just do the best you can, right? The banking crisis, I was also a sales leader. Vice President of Sales for an infrastructure solutions company. Man, all eyes on me. It gives a whole new meaning to the Britney Spears song, All Eyes on Me. It wasn't in the way that she meant. It meant, like, work a miracle. We broke out the Jim Collins book, Good to Great, and said, how do you sell in a crisis and stay through it? Then where I am now is an intentional individual contributor, so my point in sharing all of those is How I broke through is I may not have been here before… millions of people sick, hundreds of thousands of people dying, hospitals in maximum, you know, to capacity, people afraid, etc.… but I've been here before, right? All these things I mentioned… 9/11, the banking crisis, this current situation. No one planned or predicted any of those. Interestingly enough, if I look at the years, they're in 10-year cycles: '01, '10, '20. I'm not making any… I'm just noting the years. I'm not making any prediction of patterns or anything else, just that every 10 years I've been here before. Times before that, if I looked at my personal life, and it's really just about digging deep to say, What am I going to do next? Not the new normal, like what Ted Koppel was saying post-9/11, which it was at that time, but what is the new next? What is the new next for my clients? What is the new next for my colleagues? What's the new next for my contractors that I put out to work? What is the new next for me? And how am I going to reinvent and recover yet again?

58:19 Scott Ingram: Awesome. I think that was a well-timed observation. You know, one of the things I remember somebody drawing a chart, and we tend to project and predict that whatever direction we're heading, whether we're heading up and things are good, or we're headed down because things are not so good, we tend to project that line in the same direction sort of infinitely and not recognize the fact that nope, it's a cycle, right? So while it's going down, you think it's going to go down forever and it's going to be hard forever. Nope, it, it'll turn around and things will get even better than they were before. But at the same time, you know, that line doesn't go straight up forever, right? There will be another cycle, and maybe it'll be 10 years, or you never know what, what it is. What's the strategy though? You know, especially while you're in it, right? Because while you're in it, it's hard and it feels like, oh, we're never going to get to travel again. I am never going to see my clients and my friends ever again. How are you thinking about this right now? How are you reinventing right now? I know you're, you're really starting to find some, some bright spots and you've done some really good work kind of getting through this. How do you think about now? Hmm.

59:33 Michele Marshall: Don't squander a single minute. I look at each day and what am I going to do today? So I'll back up to the satellite mode for a moment and say, who are the companies, contacts, roles, and areas of net new companies that I need to meet? That's the plan. That's the science. The art is I'm not going to worry about who isn't buying or that anybody is buying less. I'm going to focus on I need to find out who is buying staffing services now. And then moving to action, creating the call logs, creating the outreach drip campaign emails that are tailored. We learned a lot about that. Thank you for the great Sales Success Summit. You know, I learned so much about the power of the 10K. Talk about knowing your client. Boom, there's your talk tracks. What are their initiatives? Taking those initiatives, embedding that in your drip campaign, making sure you have a view out of at least 7 touches over what period of time that's going to take, that you still do your outbound calling power hour. Challenge yourself, do a contest with your team. That you're focused the week before on the upcoming week's client meetings. Your existing clients, don't forget about them whether they're buying or not. Ones you need to say you're sorry to because something went sideways, still stay in touch. Meeting a certain set of new, very important to have structure to each day, to each week. Attending As not fun as it could be, but it's fun in a different way. Those community and professional organizations that you used to go to… for me, it's the Project Management Institute of Western Idaho. They've gone virtual. The Treasure Valley Agile Scrum Meeting. The Boise Metro Chamber. Man, did they have to pivot and reinvent themselves. They're all about Breaking bread, clinking glasses, getting to know you. We've all had to, so don't give up those things that are community. Within your own company, finding time to do self-development and professional development. If there wasn't time before and you're not taking advantage of the online courses that are there to help you be a better salesperson, how can I learn my CRM better? How can I learn my Microsoft Office tools better? You know, I've been always wanting to play with OneNote and OneDrive and get really better at this. Now is the time. Granularly, it's really knowing what you want to accomplish. You might take it less from 2020 to this quarter or even just to today, but that you have days where you don't walk away and say, oh, that was a zero day. What did I do that produced a micro move that was an advance towards phone calling, email outreach, getting a meeting, which produces a requirement, which helps me put somebody to work? Doing that day in and day out and embracing that that's what needs to get done.

1:03:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Let's talk about the day in and day out. I love this part, right? Just kind of dissecting how people structure their days and their weeks and morning routines and all the rest of it. Walk us through kind of the day in the life of Michele or the week in the life of Michele.

1:03:20 Michele Marshall: You know, like many of the memes, I was going to wake up at 4:30, learn how to bake bread, speak Mandarin, get myself ready for a triathlon. I haven't done any of that, but I'll tell you what I have done. I have designated a start and stop time. And while we're all talking about work life and life-work integration. I have a sign above my desk on my whiteboard that says, office hours, life and work integration. It doesn't have any time. I've actually established a Monday through Friday, this is when I get up, weather permitting. I do like the Benjamin Franklin take a morning walk, and it can be from here to my mailbox that I forgot to get my mail yesterday, but right At least once a day, get outside. I want the team that I partner with, whether they're online or not, because we have now taken advantage of the fact that some of us have moved to the East Coast, moved to the islands, thinking about moving to another country, right, that they know when I'm online, right, and that they can count on that so that I can also preciously guard my time. To looking at, this is Monday. What do I do on Mondays? What do I do on Fridays? How do I create the Tuesday through Wednesday through Thursday, 10:00 to 4:00, out the door that I used to do because I was honored to have badges at most of my clients where I could walk the halls into how I'm going to meet with them now? While my calendar looks heinous and everybody is like, I can't find one, like, speculate in there to get a meeting with you. We figure it out and make it happen, but I've found I've been a better time manager of those things that offer the most return on investment and structure because that allows for reactive, interrupt-driven crises. Then I'll know, as I do my spot check through the day, right about that 9:30, 11:00, 2:30, and 5:00, keeping honest with myself. Have I gotten the things that are going to create gross profit? Because, again, we started with, what am I measured on, done today? And if not, how am I going to fit it in? And also, how am I going to take care of the people I need to coach? Did that get to the heart of structure? Of the day and week, Scott?

1:05:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, let's… I'm curious. So the sign says these are your office hours. What are your office hours?

1:06:01 Michele Marshall: So 7:45 to 6.

1:06:06 Scott Ingram: And then talk about… you mentioned that you have… this was before we were recording, but I'm curious about your… you have kind of a weekly, weekly process. Talk about that.

1:06:18 Michele Marshall: I do. I talked about my bookends and and weekly process. You know, I don't have those other morning routines, or like some people are like, I'm going to meditate, I'm going to read a book. And while I do those things, they're a little bit more freeform. What I do weekly is on Fridays, my husband and I are passionate about whether it's homemade nachos and homemade margaritas, or we're gonna just… I'm gonna do some fries. I've gotten really good at this air fryer thing and doing healthy favorite fast foods at home and soda, etc., we decompress by talking about the week. You know, the mail has piled up and it's probably on the counter. Not gonna lie, we don't open it every day. And it's like, let's sort through this. What was good? What was bad? What do we like? And it's really… we've been together 24 years and married 23 of those 24, and it's something that we started doing like a long time ago. I'm going to say almost 20 years ago, so that we wouldn't find ourselves going into the weekend not having celebrated something really cool or having something heavy on our souls for the whole week. Weekend. It's just like, okay, is there anything we can do about X? Are we going to need to just put this on the parking lot and get back to it later? If we can do something about it, what are we going to do and when are we going to do it? So you don't go through that brain food and that mind chatter and that constant revisiting of something that went wrong or something that you need to fix or something you can't fix. Past that Friday. Do, do our best to really help each other through that. And I… my sisters, when they checked in with me mid-pandemic… I've been working from home since March 17th, 7:45 to 6, March 17th to November 20th. Wow, Scott, right?

1:08:37 Scott Ingram: Wow.

1:08:38 Michele Marshall: I said, this togetherness is gonna make or break us as a couple. I'm grateful to say that that little routine of whether we would have started it or it was something that we had been doing is what made us, right? I don't think we've ever been closer. Have we had debates? Absolutely. How could you not given this current political climate, right? Have we had arguments? Of course. We're both oldest children. And he's a Taurus and I'm a Leo, and we both are last-word fanatics personally, right? And etc. But have we become closer, more candid, more supportive? I've shared with him things about my peers, my workmates, my clients that I don't know that I ever told him before. Vulnerabilities. Arguments, disagreements, things. And it's been very helpful to work it through on that Friday, not let it linger. It's a great routine. It works for us.

1:09:48 Scott Ingram: Love it. That is really, really good. See, I, I always expect some, some good sales tips and other, you know, productivity. And but every now and then you get some really good relationship advice too. So, Michele, you said it was, was pretty freeform, but I'm curious about your information diet. What, what are you reading, listening to, and watching?

1:10:10 Michele Marshall: I'm right now trying not to watch any mainstream television. And even though I have a smart TV and I can control who, what, when, and where, I have reverted to a lot more podcasts like yours. There are a few folks here in my community that I watch. I have myself linked up via Facebook to all my professional networking events. I have a little coding system. I'm either A, going to actively participate, B, bail if the topic matter isn't going to add immediate value and I don't see the correlation of what I'm trying to live or do in my personal professional life, or C, catch the recording. So I'm on a steady diet of the Facebook events that come through from groups like I mentioned earlier… Boise Metro Chamber, Boise Valley Economic Partnership, the City of Boise. I've gotten to… whether we like them or not, listen to your leaders, listen to your governors, you know. So I'm doing a lot of those live streaming events quite a bit. And quite frankly, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, and LinkedIn, and LinkedIn some more. I have met new clients, net new clients, net new contacts, net new peers. Meeting you… and I want to take a moment when the time is right, I'm going to let you cue that up… why I chose Sales Success and this group to earn the right to be part of. LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. My husband says he doesn't know. He thinks I'm cheating on him with LinkedIn because it's one of those things I go to. What I like about it is it's a central repository, like the hub, and the spokes are, it gets you to the Harvard Business Review. It gets you to the Wall Street Journal. It gets you to the Economist. It gets you to Scott Ingram. It gets you to meet, know, and learn from the top sales stars of LinkedIn. You know, it's really, really important just to learn from them personally and professionally. I mean, I feel like Wow, this access to talent, this access to knowledge, this access to the 1% is really important. And the origin is LinkedIn, like ground zero. Yeah.

1:12:56 Scott Ingram: You know, sometimes I'm really good at being patient, but this is not one of those. I would love to hear your story about just kind of your, your connection to and involvement in the Sales Success Community?

1:13:06 Michele Marshall: That's a good one. We met over LinkedIn comments and engagement, right? But it was much more than that. You were seeking to understand my interest in coming to the Sales Success Summit. I said, you know, I'm really dear friends with the people that do the Sales 3.0 Conference. I've been multiple times. I get to go for free, you know, the investment of my time. I just need to get there. My company pays for this. Here's what I learned. Here's who I've met. It's been really good to me. And what I really appreciated, Scott, about your approach to helping me make the decision between that and the Sales Success Community was You're leading with curiosity. Well, and non-judgment, talking about the Sales Success Community is for the top performers to meet and be with each other, to help each other be better, to create a community that is candid, consistent, supportive, and is the best of the best. You did the compare and contrast against the 2 organizations in a very respectful way, you know, what 3.0 has in terms of training and leadership. Some of the tipping points: number one, your approach; number two, Sales Success Community is not vendor-based; it is people-based. It is by the people, for the people. Very powerful. And that as I looked at some of the analytics, these people were truly the best in their careers out there willing to make time for complete strangers at first, because you're never really a stranger for long in the Sales Success Community, that want to help and want to learn. I've heard from people who aren't even remotely I could do anything for them about something they saw on LinkedIn or something they saw in one of our sales success meetings about what I could do for you. Too many for me to even name here, but those were the things that contributed. An organization by sales professionals for sales professionals, not to sell anything, but to provide success. To make us all better.

1:15:45 Scott Ingram: Thanks for that. You know, it's funny, I have like an anti-sales approach when it comes to the summit, right? Because it's part of what makes it so powerful is the people. I mean, sure, the content matters and the way that we structure the event and who we put on stage and all of those things. But the biggest ingredient, and if I really boil it down, my job is super easy because all I do is put the most amazing people I can find in a room together and stir a little bit. And you know, it's one of those things, like, if you're not like really attracted to this and really interested in what we're doing and really interested in making these connections and being a part of the community and, and paying it forward and contributing and, and all of this stuff, then it's cool. Like, there's, there's tons of other events. Go to one of those, right?

1:16:33 Michele Marshall: Right.

1:16:34 Scott Ingram: So it's kind of a fun process. And like I said, it's, it's an anti-sales process. Like, I'll tell you what it's about and who for, but it's, it's really your decision. And I feel like if I, if I have to sell you on it, don't… it's not the right fit. Don't worry about it. You don't need to come. Mm-hmm.

1:16:50 Michele Marshall: Mm-hmm. It was just so good. I mean, you nurtured our relationship from March to present. We really met very close to the beginning of this new Next, and it was through me reaching out to get a code. To get access to Sales Success Summit and other information from 2019. And you broke it down for me in a way that I was like, you know what? I am going to invest in myself and my career. I was going to come back and do the Train the Trainer. Haven't spent any time in Austin. And you know what? I look forward to the time when we will be able to do that. And I got great value. Out of this year's event with a lot of friends. And I still have to talk about the 10K session. There were so many. I don't want to just pick any one because they were all equally valuable for different reasons. But in terms of what's helped me help coach and train, that 10K session, Vincent Matano and his tailored emailings and his videos. I mean, so many. Camille Clemons and her approach. I'm going to forget somebody, so I'm going to stop naming them. But yeah, that's what made me pick, and I have… was the most effective choice I could have made.

1:18:15 Scott Ingram: Awesome, awesome. I appreciate that. Well, I guess I'll follow on to that with a little bit of a commercial of my own and give people kind of 3 options that are coming up. Obviously, the first thing you do, and you can do, and what Michele did to get us started in this conversation If you go to top1.fm and join the listener list, if you're not already on that list, and I will send you 2 videos of your choice from the 2020 Sales Success Summit now. So that's, that's the first thing you can do. The next thing that's coming up, and depending on the timing of this, the folks who are on the listener list, this will probably be pretty obvious and I will have already talked about this, but we're going to do an encore series. We're going to, we're going to take the presentations from that 2020 summit. And replay them, but replay them in a very interactive, very engaging way. So I'm going to be bringing all of the presenters back. They will be there while their session is replaying to answer your questions in the chat. We will follow that with a live Q&A, and then from there we will pivot to some of our world-famous, world-class networking where you can connect with some of the other folks. So this will be all virtual. And all free. So all of that will be sponsor-supported. So again, the best way to find out about all of this stuff is just to be on that listener list at top1.fm. And then, and then the third thing, if you're ready to go all in and this feels like, hey, these are my people, I am driven in this way, and it's not limited to… you don't have to be a top performer, but I sure hope that you want to be one. And that's really who it's for. There, there are no limiters or criteria on who can come other than, you know, hopefully there's a really great fit there. So you can learn all the details about the Sales Success Summit that we'll host here in Austin next October, October 11th and 12th, and you can find those details at top1summit.com. Michele, let's talk about your sales philosophy. So do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

1:20:16 Michele Marshall: Oh, my goodness. If you've been in sales, and like I said, I started later in my career, which I started earlier except for one thing. I would have had to have been cookie-cuttered, pressed, brainwashed, et cetera, on everything that's out there. I'm certified on all of it: SPIN Selling, Hyman Miller, Miller Heiman. I always get those two reversed. IBM Strategic Selling, Microsoft Solutions. We could go on and on and on. Honored to have met Tom Hopkins very early in my sales career. He's the great real estate mogul from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, now in Arizona. All of that being said, my favorite is Simon Sinek's Starting with Why. Just when you see him do the first Hey, this is what Apple does. This is why I want to sell it. What do you think? It's just like you get chills, like, wow, that's the way to sell, starting with curiosity. He's what's helped me shape where I want to meet people where they are. It's when we first opened and leading with curiosity and understanding what your client is doing before you ever begin to talk about, and this is what I can offer, spending a lot of time in that space, starting with why.

1:21:39 Scott Ingram: Love that. Love that. And, you know, I think it's… we talk about this a lot too, that I don't know that there's really ever been somebody that said, oh, I'm all 100% this particular approach. It's really just taking the pieces from all of these different things. So, you've got to expose yourself. You've got to spend the time and learn the different processes, the different approaches, the different strategies. But it's really just kind of picking and choosing and finding what fits you and fits your approach. And I always like to ask as kind of a follow-up to that, Michele, what… how would you describe your style in the way that you deploy your curiosity and starting with why?

1:22:16 Michele Marshall: Wow. You know, and I think it's because of how long I've worked and how long I've had the blessing to walk the planet. Servant leader. If I look to serve the candidates that I help put to work, my clients who are looking for talent, the community that makes that all possible, the company that enables my success, and keep all of those circles kind of concentric and looking at them, it's going to pull me through to success. So really, outside of myself, leading with What does this candidate do well? What do these clients need? What's happening in the community? Where is my company to make this happen? It just really helps. I guess the best thing I could say as a servant leader is, I'm going to make sure we get all this done, but I'm here to serve you. Then we end up serving each other. It's not about me being subservient. That's a key distinction. It's about, if we take that approach, everybody ends up serving each other. What do you need? How can I help? It's that unspoken code with the Sales Success Community. What do you need? How can I help? There were many people offering that who did not have jobs for most of the summer, Scott. You know who those people are. Still putting themselves out there. So I would say that's what describes me now. That has not always been me.

1:23:55 Scott Ingram: Hmm. Hmm. Well, I also like to ask about, and I imagine this maybe has shifted over time, just what is it that motivates you?

1:24:03 Michele Marshall: Doing the basics of the job and doing them well. Looking at the… what motivates me is I know that those micro moves of creating my call log, doing the calls, recording my calls, flipping that into my campaign, understanding the market, etc., will result in filling pipeline, which will result in wins. If I were to be motivated by the wins… and it has changed over time where you were like so focused, where am I in the standings? Oh my gosh, where's my percentage to quota? Oh my gosh, am I going to make trip? No, I've reversed it. What motivates me are the micro moves and disciplines that are going to help me get to those big milestones. And that's how I operate now.

1:24:54 Scott Ingram: Oh, that's brilliant. Right. And what a great way to just protect your mindset because you can't control the outcomes.

1:25:02 Michele Marshall: Nope.

1:25:02 Scott Ingram: You can control all of those inputs.

1:25:05 Michele Marshall: Yep. It's what I'm living now in reinvention and recovery to my climb back up to number 1. Right? There's no wishing it will happen. There's no waiting for the pandemic to go away. There's no miraculously, you know, I'm assertively and aggressively waiting for the phone to ring and for that email to come. Not going to happen. Not going to happen. Has never happened. Right?

1:25:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, Michele, is there something you believe that the average sales professional would think is crazy?

1:25:38 Michele Marshall: Well, first of all, we're kind of crazy to be in sales to begin with because there's, there's no, like, real guarantee that anything we're going to do is going to result in a win. Right. So that's crazy. That whole guarantee thing that if I do all these things, it's going to happen. It's insurance. It's not a guarantee.

1:25:56 Scott Ingram: What about the flip side? Is there something the average sales professional believes that you think is crazy?

1:26:01 Michele Marshall: Lack of preparation. That's an easy one.

1:26:03 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:26:03 Michele Marshall: You know, I struggled with the first one. That with all the data… I mean, let's think about it from when… even when I went through my post-dot-com period. If I look back the last 15 years and where we've come in terms of LinkedIn and a self-populated site, DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo, the sophistication of CRMs, Outreach.io, email campaign software like Yesware and Clitzy and all of them. There's no silver bullet, but there is no lack of access to information to make you better prepared. So, to not prepare… and I still see it when I'm coaching and when we have those gaffes on calls that I'm shadowing. As a coach, I let the team struggle. I just don't think… I remember when my bosses would swoop in and be the hero. And I'm like, really, dude or dudette? Did you just do that? You know, I know how I felt and I remember that, right? You know, you don't remember what people say, but you do remember how they make you feel. And so, and then following, when we do our debrief, I'm like, hey, so what'd you think of that meeting? Right. You know, I didn't prepare, Michele. I'm like, oh, and it showed. It showed. Right. I certainly don't let them walk into traffic and get run over, but I do let them twist their ankle off the curb because that's what makes them better. It's what makes them stronger, and it makes them human. But that whole… just, I think it's crazy with what we have at our access and all the great coaches out there and the things that you can learn. How can you possibly not have come prepared to this situation?

1:27:57 Scott Ingram: Right, right. And I love that you just give people the space to… I mean, the only way you get that lesson from failing is to actually complete the act of failing.

1:28:06 Michele Marshall: Exactly, exactly. Again, let them twist an ankle off the curb, not fully get, you know, run over or put the company at jeopardy. But, you know, I'm in a business where We do help people from being ill and dying in the IT support that we put in healthcare, but a bad client meeting, no one's gonna die, right? So let's just keep that in perspective, but let them gaffe and let them regroup. That's the way they learn. It's the way I learn best, right?

1:28:38 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So 2 bits of advice and a challenge. So the first thing is what advice would you give to somebody that's just starting out in their sales career today?

1:28:51 Michele Marshall: Oh my goodness. You know, if I met someone wherever that might be, a sporting event out there, not much of that's happening these days, but I am getting a lot of traffic from LinkedIn. I'd probably start with, you know what, you think you want to be in sales? Here's some movies. Glengarry Glen Ross. Death of a Salesman, Boiler Room, check those out. And if you think this is still something that you want to, because that's the dark side, right? I think we all agree.

1:29:21 Scott Ingram: Is that really a fair representation of what sales really is? Right.

1:29:25 Michele Marshall: Not necessarily, but that's the dark side. If you still have an appetite to understand how amazing sales is, I'd be happy to talk to you. I do interviews. I connect people. Jheryn, my boss, does it too. We talk to people all the time. She makes connections all the time. That was more of a tongue-in-cheek, right? Watch this. But it's really starting with, what does sales mean to you? I'm always really curious about the answer, right? Is it money? Is it service? My friend is doing it and drives a cool car. So I go back to that curiosity kind of thing. It's like, what do you think sales really is and what are you trying to get out of it? And when you look at your resume, you know, my resume is from a different time, right? When keeping a job was what was really important when you were in that next interview. Now it's all about, can you get a job? Right? The 1- and 2-year tail of the tape is not a detriment like it was in the past and the not-so-distant past. Right? What I do with an individual really wanting to talk about sales, what do you think it is? What's leading you to believe that that's something you want to do? When you look at your resume 3 to 5 years from now, because we don't ask that question anymore, what do you want to be in 10 and 20 years? Not where we are today in our fast-paced career, ever-evolving world. It's when you look at those 3 to 5 years right out of undergrad or grad school, what do you want to look back and that story to tell? That's where I really guide them. If they still want to be in sales once they get that sales job, find a buddy in the company. That you can learn with and from. Find a good coach, and I can help you do that. And then be a buddy and be a coach.

1:31:35 Scott Ingram: That is great advice. Michele, I know that you are a fan of Good to Great. So what advice do you have for that sales professional that's been at this for a while? They're good, but they're not great. How do they bridge that gap?

1:31:49 Michele Marshall: Find the person that's going to be able to tell them what they're not great at. Focus on the things they can change that will eclipse what they can't change.

1:32:02 Scott Ingram: So for those listening, my editor I'm sure just edited out the giant gap of my processing that. So I'll go back and listen to that one again. It says, is it sounded profound? But that's, that's great. It's great. Again, it goes, it goes back to the buddy and kind of what you're talking about around this process, and we can't see our own blind spots. That's why they're called blind spots, I think, is kind of what you said, right?

1:32:28 Michele Marshall: Right. And focus on the things that you can make better.

1:32:32 Scott Ingram: Yes.

1:32:33 Michele Marshall: That will compensate for the things that you may or may not be able to change.

1:32:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's great. We've been spending a lot of time, and particularly just after the summit with our follow-up, you know, talking about our strengths, right? The best sales professionals have figured out the things that make them best, and they're doubling and tripling down on those things. And there's certain things that they're just weak at, and that's okay. And you just find other ways to shore that up and deal with that. Absolutely. Yeah.

1:33:01 Michele Marshall: And just embrace it and move on.

1:33:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. So, Michele, the last thing, we've covered a ton of ground. This has been an incredible conversation, and I always enjoy spending time with you and chatting with you. But let's make this actionable. So for the person listening to this, what would you challenge them to do over the course of the next, say, 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:33:25 Michele Marshall: Look at how they're spending their day.

1:33:27 Scott Ingram: Say more.

1:33:28 Michele Marshall: Are you focused and completing the things necessary to fill the funnel? Are you knowing what to be distracted by and not distracted by? And this might sound a little simplistic. Get together with your sales leader and ask them to have, as we come here to the end of this incredible year, what did I do well? What could I do better? And how can I start on that today with your help to already have a running start at 2021?

1:34:08 Scott Ingram: Perfect. Perfect.

1:34:09 Michele Marshall: Perfect.

1:34:10 Scott Ingram: And if I can make a recommendation, since we're talking about time and what you're doing with your day, you may want to go check out Matt Du Pont's presentation from, from the summit. It was eye-opening and has certainly made a difference in some of the things that I'm learning about myself and experimenting with. So great stuff there, Michele. This is just as incredible as I, as I thought it would be. Thank you for your time. Thank you for being a part of this Thank you for asking me, Scott. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.