120: Sid Nazareth on Sales Success through Curiosity, Support Networks & Giving

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Vidyard, Alyce, and Proposify. You can learn more about them and all of our amazing sponsors who support this show at top1.fm/sponsors.

0:21 Scott Ingram: 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.

0:29 Scott Ingram: To learn more, visit Visit us at top1.fm.

0:34 Scott Ingram: Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:37 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Sid Nazareth. Sid was the number one salesperson worldwide at Appian for two years in a row before starting his current role as a strategic account manager at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show, Sid.

0:51 Sid Nazareth: Hi, Scott. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

0:54 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Really looking forward to digging into this, and it's it's worth noting here at the top: a lot of people come to the show and may not know. That I only interview active quota-carrying individual contributors like yourself who are either these outright number one top performers or willing to settle for the top 1%. So you've had a really interesting history. One of the things I'm excited to dig into is the way that you came into sales through more sales engineering type of background. So looking forward to digging into all of that, but we always start with a whole big dose of immediate value. And I'll have you talk about the top 3 things that you believe have been the most important components to your success in sales?

1:38 Sid Nazareth: Yeah, Scott, I've given this a lot of thought, and the top 3 things that have got me to, to where I am today. Number one is insatiable curiosity. I've always been a very curious person. I've always wanted to learn how things work and how people think and interact with each other and deconstruct and understand those patterns and map it to mental models. And it's helped me build relationships, establish trust, learn about initiatives at organizations, discover patterns, uncover opportunities. And that by far I can point to directly and say has led to a lot of my successes, asking a lot of questions and really diving deep and figuring out kind of how the world works and the like. Number 2 is building an internal network and a support group. So research points, and I read this going into sales, that research points to the most successful salespeople having the strongest networks inside companies. If you think about it, my experience with the company becomes my client's experience. I mean, I think about being an ambassador for my company. I'm representing my company. I'm helping the client get things done. When the client asks me to deliver something for them, I have to navigate my organization and bring it back to them and deliver that outcome. So I've found that building deep relationships within the organization, pays back in so many ways. And it's not just about building a network, but it's also establishing that support group. So one of the things that I've found over and over in my career is it takes a village not only to… it takes a village to sell and to deliver successful outcomes. And so as you build your network, you'll quickly find your biggest supporters, the folks who can get things done, the mobilizers within our own organizations. And as part of that network, you also get diversity of thought. Right, which, which really helps with delivering better outcomes and generating a number of learning opportunities. And number 3 is I can point to clearly giving back. It's been a big focus of my career. So I've always focused on learning and then going and teaching and mentoring others. I've got involved with employee onboarding and training officially and delivering classes that way. I have unofficially mentored a number of folks as well. And what's really great about it is it's a symbiotic relationship because you get to meet wonderfully talented people who are coming to the organization. You can help them, you can share what's working, and it's a virtuous cycle because I get to try things out in the field. I then will come and teach it, and it helps me… it makes me internalize what's working and what's not working. And then I hear ideas and feedback which I can go back and try. And I also get to talk to new folks coming into the company that I can learn from to say, hey, what worked in your career? So to summarize, the top 3 things for me have been insatiable curiosity, building an internal network and support group, and giving back.

4:26 Scott Ingram: I love that. And I'm really interested in kind of those last 2 points, I think, are maybe related to the way that we came together. So another thank you to Stephen Meyer, who connected us. And Stephen is the founder of TPC, the Top Percentile Collective, who folks are… who are longtime listeners of the show know that Evan Kelsay is part of that group, and more recently, Jheryn Kenney. Is a part of that. I'm interested in your participation in that group. And Steve said you were a very active member and strong contributor to that. How much of that is about having your own support group versus an opportunity for you to give back?

5:04 Sid Nazareth: It's both, Scott. I'm glad you asked that. Yeah, I love working with Steve and the Top Percentile Collective. It's a community for me. A lot of times sales can feel lonely. You can feel like you're on an island, even though you do have a support group within the organization. And you have a number of folks you work with, and it can also be competitive. And so I love going to a place like TPC and sharing ideas and learning about what other top sales professionals are working on. I believe everyone has their own superpowers. And so I'd love to learn about, I love to learn about what they're, what's working for them, what mindsets they have, what they're bringing to their clients and how they're delivering outcomes. As part of that also, I'd love to share what's working for me. So I suspect a lot of the things that I'll speak about today, I have shared with, with my cohort at TPC as well.

5:54 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. Yeah, we will definitely dig into… I want to understand all of your own superpowers and the things that, that you're doing. But let's contextualize this a little bit first, and maybe I'll have you talk about 2 roles. I'll let you talk a little bit about your current role with AWS, but also provide some context around the work that you did with Appian. So what were those roles exactly?

6:16 Sid Nazareth: Sure, Scott. So I'm currently a strategic account manager at Amazon Web Services. I work in the strategic accounts group, which is the largest AWS customers worldwide, and I'm dedicated to a single customer. I work in the financial services space. My customer's a Fortune 100 financial services firm. I have always been drawn to working with one or two organizations as a client and really going deep and understanding their business and building deep relationships and delivering value. I've just finished 9 months at AWS. I joined them in August of last year, the height of the pandemic, you could say, after spending 17 years at Appian. So I was one of the early employees at Appian. I joined them when there were about 80 employees way back in 2003, fresh out of grad school. I then did a number of different roles there, ended up in sales, in direct sales as an account executive. Also worked with a Fortune 100 financial services firm, and that firm was based in New York. And after 17 years, last year, basically after winning Salesperson of the Year the second time in a row, stepped back and said, you know, I think it's, it's, I'm ready for the next chapter in my life, and made the move to AWS.

7:29 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's talk about your origin story, because again, I guess I alluded to this earlier on. It's been kind of an interesting path, and I'm really curious about particularly that last leg of the journey and how you ultimately made that transition into sales. But kind of walk us through, how did you get started in your career in sales in the first place?

7:51 Sid Nazareth: So I got into sales completely by accident. I had no idea I'd end up here. And if you look back at my career, it's kind of this, you know, zigs and zags and taking on number of different roles. So I'll start by saying that I've always been interested in business, and I remember picking up Fortune magazine when I was 10 or 11 years and reading about Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong entrepreneur who was running Orange Telecom. And I was like blown away by, by the questions that the article asked and the types of things he was thinking about, about growth and customers and marketing. And I was like, oh my gosh, business And these questions are so fascinating. So I couldn't get enough of business books. At the same time, I was very interested in software and computer programming. I remember my dad buying me an Atari when I was probably 8 or 9 years old and just spending hours and hours with that. I ended up getting my Bachelor of Engineering degree in information technology and then working as a software developer for a year. And then I always wanted to go to grad school. Something my dad did as well. And I thought to myself, look, I can either go the business route and get an MBA, or I can stick with the technical route. And I thought to myself, you know, I am so interested in business. I do it for fun in my spare time. I even read like business school textbooks. So why don't I go do something in graduate school that I wouldn't normally do by myself, or I wouldn't do as much of? And so I decided to get a master's in computer science. And I ended up doing that for a couple of years. And then Appian has 4 co-founders that are still with the company. 3 of them went to the same graduate school that I was at. So they came to campus for recruiting and I had no idea what they did. They were a consulting company. They came in, they gave us the pitch. They said, we'd like to hire consultants. That's why we're here. And the first question I had was, what's a consultant? I thought to myself, I had no idea what a consultant was. And the more I looked into it, I was shocked. I said, I can't believe like companies pay us consultants hundreds of dollars an hour to tell them what to do. Like, I have no idea what I'm doing. How can I, how can I tell companies how to run their business? But, you know, the more I looked into it, the more interesting it was. And the biggest draw to me was that Appian, there were some really smart people running the company and there were about 80 people at the time. And everyone I met was, was really smart and also had a number of interests. There was diversity of thought. And I said, I've got to be around these folks and I know good things will happen. And that's sort of been a guiding principle for me throughout my career. So I ended up joining them. We had a month-long bootcamp slash academy where we would learn and they would teach us different skills. And unknown to me, when I accepted the position, they were transitioning from a consulting company to a software company. And when we finished our bootcamp, they had released the first version of their software. And so as part of our final presentations, you know, we had to take that software, make a presentation, talk about the value. And after that, the person running the academies pulled me aside and said, Sid, you know, we're transitioning to a software company. We'd like you to be our first sales engineer. And the question that went through my mind at the time was, what is a sales engineer? I have no idea what a sales engineer is. And so again, I dove into it. I was like, oh, this is interesting. You know, this is a great blend of software and business, 2 of my passions. It helps me program, it helps me stick with configuration and software, but it also gets me from behind a desk and gets me talking to clients, to executives, to understand how their businesses work. And Appian's in the low-code case management and process management space. So they're all about improving business processes. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is like getting a practical MBA. I get to talk to companies across different industries. I get to look at their processes and improve it using software. So I gladly accepted the position and I ended up doing that for about 10, 11 years. Ended up running a sales engineering team for 3 fastest growing verticals, which was financial services, insurance, and life sciences. I also raised my hand during that time and I said, I'm really interested in competitive strategy. And so I ran Appian's global competitive strategy for a couple of years as well. And then I was mentoring a lot of the incoming sales folks because we were growing a lot by that point. And a few of them said, Sid, you'd be really good at sales as an account executive. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm not, I'm not a salesperson. Like, you know, I'm an introvert by nature. I can't see myself spending hours on the phone or wining and dining clients. And, you know, I'm more of like analytical and I'd like to think about processes. And, but, you know, I kept hearing people say that to me. And what's interesting, in 2014, my dad passed away unexpectedly. So I went back home. I'm from India, and I spent a few months there taking care of the family, the estate, and the documentation, all that stuff. And I came back and I said, you know what, Sid, like, you've always been about learning and growth and about doing different things. You've done a number of positions at Appian. You should really think about the next stage now, and you should you should just jump back into the deep end. And so that's when that's when I got into. I said I went to my boss at the time, and I said, "Look, I want to be I want to be an account executive." And they immediately in a blink they said, "Yeah, absolutely. Any territory you want, any client you want, any prospect you want, we'll give it to you." And that's how I got into sales, Scott.

13:21 Scott Ingram: I love that story. Let me ask you this: Before you went into that, what did you think sales was? How would you describe sales? And then how do you think of it and how do you describe it today?

13:33 Sid Nazareth: So before I was a salesperson, I thought I knew everything about being a salesperson because I was surrounded by salespeople when I was a sales engineer. I was supporting them. I ended up mentoring them and teaching them about the company, the culture, the product, the industry. And lo and behold, I would say I probably knew only 1% of what a salesperson did. When I was a sales engineer. I thought the hardest part about sales was the mid-stage and the late stage. It was building the business case and then negotiating and signing the contracts, because that's what I was exposed to as a sales engineer. I now know why when I was getting involved in an opportunity for the first time as a sales engineer, why the salesperson often looks so nervous when I sometimes showed up to the meeting only 5 minutes before the meeting started, right? Because I didn't realize how many months of work went into getting that first meeting. The cold calling, the building credibility and trust, the sharing of information, all towards getting that first meeting. And so I had no idea about the process of building a pipeline, of getting, you know, putting those numbers on the board, moving them through, qualifying them, and getting to the real meat of like, yes, now I've built a qualified pipeline and I've identified the opportunities that are going to help me make my number. And then of course, help me outperform. Also, of course, I'd heard the jokes about all a salesperson does is get donuts or, you know, wine and dine and have expense accounts. But being around sales folks, I knew that was not the only thing they did. But yeah, it was that early stage of the process that I didn't have visibility into.

15:17 Scott Ingram: And how do you see it today?

15:19 Sid Nazareth: Oh my gosh. Today I see it as such a wonderful opportunity and career to meet people and learn how businesses work and really deliver successful outcomes. Sales is a blend of consulting and problem solving, and it's about bringing teams together. In many ways, it's entrepreneurial because an opportunity is like starting a little company. Bringing the right people together, delivering the resources and the outcome that you need, and then disbanding and moving on to the next one.

15:53 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. I love that description. And I think it's one of those things, particularly, I mean, I've mentored a number of people that have been in more sales and engineering or thinking about starting in sales engineering and moving to sales. And I think it's, I think it's such a neat opportunity to get some visibility and awareness of how the processes work, seeing different styles in action and things like that. But the thing I explain to them is there's so much behind the scenes that you just, you can't see. And until you get into it, it's really hard for you to understand. And unless you're really interrogating your sales partners to understand all of the nuance of what they're doing behind the scenes.

16:40 Sid Nazareth: That's right. Absolutely, Scott. I mean, I now am so thankful for my account executives, my sales partners who shielded me from a lot of the stuff that needs to happen to move a sales opportunity forward. So for example, when I was a sales engineer, the time between meetings for me was like, okay, we had one meeting today and we've got another meeting in the next 2 weeks. That's easy. All the salesperson had to do was shoot an email over and say, okay, set up the next time. Not realizing that after a meeting, there are all these threads that have to be unpacked. There's information that comes out of there about other players, other folks that need to be pulled in. Not to mention that the prospect, even though you might know them quite well by this point and you've been talking to them for the last 6 months, they might not get back to you for the next 2, 3 weeks because they're busy.

17:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's awesome. This is a great spot to talk about Vidyard because I've been using Vidyard more and more to stay top of mind in exactly these types of situations. With Vidyard, you can easily create videos to support your mid-stage deals, to engage with more stakeholders in a more human way, and to reiterate, clarify, or follow up on what you need to. The best part is it's free. Try it out today. top1.fm/vidyard. I wonder, you know, given the variety that you have seen over the course of your career, would you have changed anything? Or if you were starting over knowing everything that you know now, would you have taken a different approach?

18:07 Sid Nazareth: My mindset, I think I could have had a little different mindset starting out, which I've got to today, having more patience. So coming into this at Appian, I knew the product and the competitors in the industry. And I said, you know what I'm going to do, Sid? I'm going to start with the low-hanging fruit. I'm going to knock this out of the park. I'm going to have the fastest sales deal ever. And then I'll start building my book of business. And when it comes to complex enterprise software sales, I realized 6 months in, there's no low-hanging fruit. There's no, you know, because even if you find that person who's really enthusiastic about solving a problem and doing a project with you, and it's exactly the right fit, at this scale, it takes a village not just to sell something, but it takes a village to buy it. And so you have to think holistically and deeply about what is it that I'm trying to do here? And what are the different threads that are involved? And that takes patience, and it also takes pattern recognition. You know, being able to say, oh, I've been in this situation before, I understand what's happening. So patience would be a big one, Scott, to say, look, you know, LeBron has a… LeBron James, the basketball player, has a great saying, right? He's like, let the game come to you, don't force it. And so I follow that. It's like you have to have patience, you have to put in the work, you have to think about the pipeline development. And sales is As much as we like to talk about sales as events, like, oh, look at that big deal I did. Sales is not an event. Sales is a process. And you got, you got to think about the end-to-end process.

19:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's so good. We will definitely talk about your process coming up. But I call the show Sales Success Stories. And I wonder if you have a story, and maybe it's the story of a particular deal, or something that just really stands out. And usually with most stories, there's a reason we remember it. And there's probably some big lesson embedded there somewhere.

19:58 Sid Nazareth: I have a few. I'll give you one. It was… I like it because it leveraged my superpowers. I feel like I went about it the right way and it had a really good outcome and it combined with something else in my life that was really good at the time. And so here it is, Scott. Like, I was started… I was assigned to the New York region at Appian on January 1st, 2016. And when I came in, the previous sales rep had just left the organization. And so his set of opportunities got transferred over to me and we were trying to figure out what, you know, with my manager what was real and what we could pursue. And there was an opportunity with a top investment bank based in New York, and they were launching a new business. Their CTO, their new CTO, and our CEO were in communication. This was before I got assigned to the territory. And what their CTO had said is, look, you know, we really appreciate you working with us. We… this was a prospect at the time… we love your software, but it's just not a fit for us or what we're trying to do. And so me and my regional vice president at the time, we went up there, we went to New York, we met with them, and the meeting was with the chief architect of this investment bank. And it was going to be a short meeting to just say thanks but no thanks. We looked at your software and we're not interested at this point, maybe in the future. So we sat down, we effectively had that conversation, and then, you know, curiosity just got the better of me. Like, we were sitting around in these temporary cubicles. This was a startup environment within a large investment bank, and they were launching a new business. And I said, can you tell me about… just tell me about the business? Like, what are you trying to achieve? How do things work when a customer clicks on your website? What's the flow of information? You've got a contact center. Like, tell me about the business plan. And he was really gracious and he talked to me about it for about 10, 15 minutes to both of us, the folks in the room, and he described it. And as a result of that and asking a few follow-up questions, we uncovered an opportunity. And I was like, that's interesting. And he said, yeah, do you do that? And he had We offered a couple of different product categories and he didn't know about the other one. And he said, yeah, absolutely. And that led to a whole new opportunity, a whole new sales process. We engaged with them and he said, thank God, because I'm looking at these other products and they're not appealing to me. This was in the first week of Jan of 2016. We ended up signing on April 27th, 2016. It was a marquee deal for us. And I remember that date exactly because my wife and I were at our swearing-in ceremony for our US citizenship holding our 2-year-old son.

22:30 Scott Ingram: That is awesome. I was gonna… I was wondering how on earth you remember dates so specifically 5 years ago.

22:36 Sid Nazareth: Oh yes, I remember this because it was not only one of my first big wins, but it was our naturalization ceremony. We were swearing in. I got the text from my regional vice president because she and I were there at that first meeting, and she said, we just signed the deal. And what I loved about it in the postmortem, we went back and interviewed the chief architect, and he said, you know what I loved about working with Sid? Of all the other… all the things he said, He didn't yes me to death. He said, when I worked with the other salespeople, our use case to start with, he said, not that complex. So a lot of software could have solved it. But every time I asked them a question, they would say, oh yes, yes, yes, we can do that. We can do this. Let me show you how. And what Sid did was he'd actually be thoughtful and he'd push back and say, actually, no, we don't do that part. We might do it in the future. That part we'll never do. And it was a very, he said it was a very honest discussion and he really liked that engagement from me. And I look back and I can now point to that style of engaging with customers has helped me get to number 1 multiple times.

23:31 Scott Ingram: That's really interesting. So what I think I hear you saying is the superpower is, well, it's probably twofold. It's one, being able to leverage your background and the depth of knowledge that you have about the culture and the product and what the roadmap looks like and all of those kinds of things. But probably more importantly, just the honesty and the transparency and the truth and your ability to build trust because you're going to tell them like, this is the reality. I'm not going to just say Yes, because that's the easy thing to say.

23:57 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely. And it's a mindset. If you think about sales as a transaction, as a relationship that's only a month old or 6 months old, or of a life of, you know, a half-life of 6 months, you're not going to get that level of engagement. It's not going to happen even subconsciously. But if you say, you know, this person that I meet, I'm going to have a 5 or 10-year relationship with them, and the world is small and people move around and I'm going to move around And it's another level of conversation. And I can't tell you, Scott, like how many times, like I'll give you an example. By the way, that investment bank we worked with that we signed, I built into Appian's, one of Appian's top customers. And I took that same approach with other executives at that firm. And I remember one of the executives, we were trying to do a deal together or work together, and I lost 4 opportunities with that executive before he signed on the 5th one. And it was nice. It wasn't… it was like, yeah, Sid, I want to work with you. This is… and I would tell them, I'd love to work with you too, but this is not a good fit. Let's keep trying again. And we finally got it done on the 5th try. So that mindset, I think it translates to many, many aspects of our sales careers.

25:02 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that. Speaking of building great relationships, Alyce is an incredible tool you can use to do just that. Imagine sending a truly personalized gift to your most important sales contacts, something that they love, that they'll keep on their desk or even display because it's meaningful to them. Alyce can make that possible for you. Take a look, top1.fm/alyce, and start your team's personalized gifting efforts today. What do you find to be the most challenging part of just your work in sales today?

25:36 Sid Nazareth: It's hard when, firstly, when folks don't respond, you know, it can be a grind. I'm used to working with Amazon, with Appian, organizations where they're really smart, responsive folks. When you reach out for help or you send a note to someone, you pretty much get a response within 24 hours, 99% of the cases. And in sales, I find it is a mind shift where even if you know someone for a while, they're like, okay, you're a salesperson. This is part of your job to follow up with me. And so it often may take 4 or 5 times of following up. I don't hold this against folks by any means. I know how busy folks are, executives especially. They have to prioritize. And so they put the onus on me as the salesperson to follow up versus them saying, oh right, I have to remember to follow up with Sid. So that can be a grind sometimes, right? Getting phone calls to be returned, getting emails to be followed up on, because I think analytically, I think in terms of process and I'm like, yep, these are the steps we need to have happen. Why is it… why are we delaying things? Why is it taking… you know, this seems very inefficient. The waiting 2, 3 weeks to just set up our next meeting because we both know there's something here we need to solve for.

26:49 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What have you found just in terms of strategies to work through that issue?

26:54 Sid Nazareth: One is a mindset. So if I ascribe meaning to the larger sort of environment to say, look, we are doing this together and working on it together, then the day-to-day trials and tribulations, to use a dramatic term, I guess, but it doesn't seem as much. To say, look, no, this is something bigger we're working on. It's okay, I'll deal with this. On a more tactical level, I've found setting up recurring meetings has been super helpful. People are busy and it's hard to follow up and set up the follow-on meeting. So especially once I have a cadence going, my goal is very quickly on an opportunity to establish trust and say, okay, let's set up a weekly or biweekly meeting, 30 minutes. Let's say every Thursday, 10:00 AM. It's on the calendar. We don't have to waste time. And some weeks we can cancel it if there's nothing happening, or we can have a quick 5-minute discussion. And then also, of course, when wrapping up a call, it's super important. I tell my team this all the time. Please leave 5 to 10 minutes at the end, even if it's a 30-minute meeting, because there are questions that come up and I can ask. I can say, hey, you're in front of a computer right now. Can you bring up your calendar and let's set up the next session?

27:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that is definitely my secret, right? Because as soon as you go offline and you're trying to coordinate multiple calendars, it's just a freaking nightmare. But if you can, if you can do it real time with everybody there, like, let's just get this committed, and then we move meeting to meeting. And I do find that that tends to make things go a little bit more smoothly.

28:14 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely. I'm curious, Scott, what have you found in terms of like some of the tough spots in sales that you've had to work through?

28:22 Scott Ingram: And you're not supposed to turn this around. I get to ask the questions. I'm not supposed to have to think so hard about this. I think that is a good example. I mean, you know, what's interesting is, as you were saying it, I was thinking, oh my gosh, I do this too. In terms of if it's a salesperson that's reaching out to me, I expect them to kind of take the lead and be the one that's kind of persistent and leading things. And to me, it's almost, you have to show and prove that you are going to be persistent and do this. And it's just, it's just kind of on you. I'm like, yep, that's not the most important thing right now. And I don't feel compelled to respond because I'm like, well, they'll ping me again in a few days or next week or whatever it is. So I'm recognizing even in myself, I'm like, oh my gosh. I have kind of a bad habit here. I think it's probably ubiquitous with the executives and others that we're working with. And I think maybe there's just kind of recognition in that. For me, I think the other big thing is, and it's, it's something that I obsess about, is the one thing that we all have in common is the amount of time that we have in a day. And I am just constantly working on not just the time, But also kind of managing my energy and managing myself so that I'm in a position to make the most of that time. Because if I'm really honest, this last week, I don't… I don't just don't know what the disconnect has been. I think, one, I'm a little bit overtired and sleep deprived. And, you know, it's also possible I'm a little bit depressed or my mindset is just a little bit off because I'm just not finding the same level of drive and energy that I usually have to kind of tackle things, right? And we all have these different phases and different things that are going on with us. And so, you know, it's really trying to be proactive in managing, managing that, managing yourself, managing your time, and really trying to produce the most results, the outcomes that you can with that, with that most finite of resources.

30:27 Sid Nazareth: I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, prioritization has been a big focus for me as well. I find you know, my list of things to do in my journal, my diary here. I always have a list at the end of the day. And one of my favorite authors is Adam Grant, the organizational behavior professor at Wharton. I've read a lot of his books. And for me, he changed my mindset about this. He said it's not about time management, it's about attention management. And I think together with that is energy management, because sometimes I'll get stressed not about the fact that I don't have the time to do something, I know because my mind is burnt out, or because I'm burnt out, when I sit down at the computer, if I started 30 minutes for something, I'll do it for 10 minutes and then I'll wander off to Chrome and go browse something because my mind says take a break. And so I'll get stressed about saying, how do I focus for 30 minutes if it's been a long week? That's something I think about a lot, which is why I focus a lot on recuperation and rest as well, Scott. So like, I'll take a break around lunchtime and at 5 PM And for me, a break used to be, okay, I love to play basketball. I've got a hoop in my backyard, and I'd put on a podcast on my earphones and then play. But I realized even a podcast is not rest because my brain is thinking about it and listening to it. So what I'll do is I'll have complete silence at lunchtime for 30 minutes, and it's amazing how the thoughts would just go through my head and resolve themselves, and then I'll be rested to, you know, pick things up again.

31:51 Scott Ingram: Oh, that's fascinating. You know, I'm not quite sure what my order of operations is going to be. I think it'll be live before I release this interview. And if not, this will be a pretty epic tease. One of my most popular episodes ever was an interview I did with Brandon Fluharty about a year and a half ago. And at the time, Brandon, Brandon's at LivePerson. He had sold $11 million in ARR in the previous 2 years. But I was, you know, we follow each other and I was watching some of his current stats and I was like, oh my God, we have to bring you back because he has now done $13.4 million in just the last 5 months. And he attributes so much of that to, again, just kind of managing himself. And there's, there's a huge like sleep and rest component. And he's turned me onto this app. I've been using it all of 2 days since the end, since we had this conversation. Called Rise, which is kind of looking at… it's consuming my Fitbit data and my sleep data and telling me where my natural cycles are and when I'm going to be at a peak and when I'm going to be in a trough. And it's really amazing stuff. And I think the more that we can be aware… and going back to your idea of curiosity, being curious about ourselves and understanding, like, when do I work best? How do I work best? And how do I not defeat myself when I'm not working at my best? Because maybe I'm just sort of in a trough and I'm or I'm in a little bit of a funk. So how do I make sure I'm making the most of those moments as well?

33:25 Sid Nazareth: Yeah, so important. I'm going to have to check out Brandon's podcast. And Rise, I've heard about, but I've not looked into it yet. That's going on my list as well.

33:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah, perfect. Perfect. I need to bring them on as a sponsor or something. There's going to be a lot of people paying the $59 a year that I think they're going to charge me after my trial was up. And I can tell you right now, I'm doing it. So we talked about the most challenging part. What's the highlight? What are you most proud of over the course of your sales career?

33:53 Sid Nazareth: I am most proud of the mentorship and the giving back. I love getting in the mindset of there's something bigger than myself. You know, when I left Appian, my manager organized a whole bunch of people across the company to put together a photo book of all my memories over 17 years.

34:10 Scott Ingram: While Rise might not be a sponsor yet, Proposify is, and they just released Proposify Free, a new account level that you can sign up for right now. Take advantage of a tool that might just revolutionize your proposal game like it has for me, and now it's free. top1.fm/proposify will get you right there. Do yourself a favor and check it out. top1.fm/proposify.

34:36 Sid Nazareth: And with messages, and message after message, you may or may not be shocked to hear this, but not one of them talked about my sales performance. All of them, all of them talked about how much I help people, how much I give back, And, you know, it makes a real difference. And I'm also a fan of Stoicism, and there's a, there's a saying, memento mori, remember death. You know, when I think about that, I remind myself I've actually got a coin on my desk with a picture of a skull to say that I'm going to die one day. And when I look back on my life, what are my regrets and what will I be thinking about? And, you know, it's great that I'm a top-performing salesperson, but I'm pretty sure not many people are going to say that at my funeral, or maybe some will, I don't know. But most people will remember me as saying like, Sid, you gave back, you helped us. And that's what people talked about when my dad died as well. I remember that a few years ago. So I love being able to assimilate information and create mental models and boil complex ideas into simple concepts and then go explain that to folks. And I love when I talk to someone and they get it. You can see that light in their eyes. It's like a light bulb going off. And they're like, oh my gosh, it just clicked for me. And I'm like, great, that's leverage, that's scale, right? Now you go off into the world and you teach other people and you try it out and you become successful. So that's one of the most enjoyable things for me, Scott. Looking back also, Appian went public in 2017. They were the number one tech IPO of 2017. And I was on the floor of the NASDAQ ringing the bell with our 4 founders. And we were at Times Times Square and just enjoying that day. And that was a highlight because it was just a culmination of all the blood, sweat, and tears over those 7… over those 15 years at that point, including, you know, literally spending all nights in the office trying to get things to work and trying to figure things out with the team and solving problems. So those are some of the highlights I can think about my sales career.

36:29 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. I'm going to take a stab at another one of your superpowers and guess that that approach is also something that you bring to your sales process and a mindset that you bring to your clients and the way that you work.

36:42 Sid Nazareth: Sorry, which approach, Scott?

36:44 Scott Ingram: Just one of giving and helping and kind of paying it forward, right? Taking more of an almost selfless approach. Because what I have found on this show is that… and I have a quote, I'm going to try and quote myself, but I'm not sure what I always say. It's something about, I have found that the very best sales professionals are those who care the very most. Right, about their customers and about their outcomes. And the results tend to just be a natural outcome of that. It's not really… it's not the result that is the driver. It's the, how do I help this client get what they're trying to get?

37:15 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely. You know, the outcomes is a way to keep score, right? It's to know that you're winning, you're on the right path. But like, let's play the game. Let's play the game to the best of our abilities. I certainly take that approach. And we can control our inputs. We can't always control our outputs. In terms of giving back, giving back, absolutely. So that's how I approach my clients as well. And I learned that from my mother. She always said, you know, help people wherever you can, don't expect anything in return. And that has helped me throughout because it's just the one, the joy of being able to help each other and just seeing people sort of benefit from that. The next is I'm a big fan of Paulo Coelho and his book The Alchemist. And there's a line I really like there. He says, you know, the universe conspires to help us. And it's so many times in my career I can say, yeah, it's funny, I was helping these people, I was doing this, and then from another area, like, this helped me. And it's just… that's why, I mean, it's like a symbiotic relationship. Like, helping others helps them, and it helps, helps the individual as well.

38:12 Scott Ingram: Yeah, love that, love that. Well, let's dig into kind of your own personal process and routine and, and the way you structure things. And the way I like to work through this and talk through this is On a typical day, your alarm goes off. What time does that happen? And I want literally the blow-by-blow from there until your head hits the pillow at night.

38:34 Sid Nazareth: Sure. So I'll give you the current pandemic version of it, also being in a new job.

38:37 Scott Ingram: Fair enough.

38:38 Sid Nazareth: So my alarm goes off at 6:30 and wake up. I try not to touch the phone and I go and, you know, take care of my business and my shower. And then the kids are up at 7. We're making coffee, we're having breakfast. And then I take them both to school. So I've got a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old. So I take the 6-year-old to his school and then I take the 3-year-old to daycare. And that's really an enjoyable time for me because we talk a lot in the car. I ask them about the previous day. I ask them about what they're going to do that day. They have a lot of questions. I love to kind of share knowledge. And then right in the last few months, we've started a new habit. I'll play classical music, WETA. And then we'll guess what instruments are being played. So it's just a really fun, serene way to start the day. I drop them off, come back, and then what happens is before breakfast, I'll go up to my closet. I've got a walk-in closet, close the door, and I'll do 10 minutes of yoga, and then I'll do 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation. So I got into yoga a few years ago because I broke my leg playing basketball, ended up getting a plate with 6 screws in it and doing physiotherapy for 6 months. And at the end of that physiotherapy, therapy. My leg was about 80% back, not fully back, and I was trying to figure out how to get it better. And my wife is into yoga, and she said, you really should come with me and, and try this out. And so it really worked wonders for me, just light stretching, which I do more of now. So that I do 10 minutes of that to get me in the right mindset and get my body relaxed, and then I do the 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation. You know, you mentioned this, I don't like to use apps. I've tried it, so I tried Headspace, but what I did is I ended up buying the book written by the founder of Headspace, Andy I forget how to say his last name. And so he's got a practice there, 10 minutes sitting on a chair, feet firmly planted on the ground, and just breathing. You know, first releasing, taking some deep breaths, and then breathing the in and the out. So counting inward 1, outward 2, and counting to 10. And it sounded really easy, but I couldn't do it for the first couple of months. Like, by the time I hit 4 or 5, my mind would wander. And then sometimes I'd be counting up to 13 or 14, like, oh, wait a minute, I gotta get back to 1 because it's only 1 to 10. So I do that. It gives me a sense of calm and control, and I'm out of the closet 30 minutes later. Go down, make my cup of coffee, get my breakfast done, and then go to my home office, and I start my day there. I've been very influenced by a book I read in the last one year called Deep Work by Cal Newport. He's a professor, associate professor of computer science at Georgetown, and he's also got a really good blog about deep work. And he basically says how the most productive folks… and he uses Adam Grant as well as an example… are the ones who block out all distractions and really time block and for long stretches of time focus on one thing. So what my schedule is, at least first 90 minutes of every day is blocked out on my calendar and I literally write deep work on it. I make it private so, you know, folks don't wonder what I'm like, if it's a personal thing, it's actually work-related. But what happens is I sit down at my desk and then I open up my diary. So I like analog. I've written down the night before what I need to get done and I prioritize it. So another good book, Eat the Frog by Brian Tracy, about time management and productivity. So I label them. So I'll write a letter and a number. So I'll write A.1, A.2, A.3, and then usually by 3 I'll go to B.1, B.2, B.3. And that's all I need to do. I just open the book. I don't ask any questions. I don't check email. I look at the A.1 and start working on it. And then I'll move to A.2 and A.3. Depends on how long it takes. I might get to B. Some days I don't get to B, or some days I'll get to B later in the evening after the kids are home and gone to bed. But I have to get the A's done. So I get that done for 90 minutes, and that's the most important follow-ups. Often it's writing a document or a long email that needs a lot of thought. Then I'll start opening up my emails. And of course, the night before, I spend about 10 minutes, so I'm checking the calendar. Sometimes I'll have a meeting that is in the middle of those 90 minutes. I really make it a habit not to schedule it, but sometimes if it's an executive meeting, I can't move it. So I'll try to move the deep work later in the day, but that's how I start. And then I go until lunchtime, which is between noon and 1. I'm a fan of time blocking, so I do block 30 minutes for lunch because I've found if I don't do that, it's very easy for me to overschedule and then miss lunch or eat like at 2, 3 PM. So make time for lunch. I try to get out of the house. This speaks to the rest and recuperation. So I actually like to get in my car and drive. I'll drive for like 15 minutes. Maybe I'll pick up food somewhere. I'll take a walk. But I just don't listen to radio, nothing, no music. It's just complete silence. And I'll find my mind working through things and just, you know, taking a break. I'll come back, I'll work through the afternoon, and then the kids are home. My wife picks up the kids between 3:30 and 5:00. Then I stop around 5:00, sometimes 5:30, but I make it a habit to stop by then. I'll go play basketball in the yard, in the driveway, and then spend time with the kids. We come in for 7. At 7, 7 to 7:30 is dinner. Then I really enjoy helping put them to bed. So my wife and I will go up to their room. They sleep together in a bunk bed and we'll read books for an hour between the two of them. And then the older one will read as well. They'll be in bed by 9:30. I'll come down between 9:30 and 10. I'll just relax, maybe watch a little bit of a documentary or something like that. And then between 10 and 11, I'll spend an hour working. 11 o'clock, I look at the next day, and by about 11:30 to 12, I'm in bed or I'm on the couch and I'm reading. I have to read constantly, Scott. So I am reading everything I can get my hands on. I've got a huge backlog of things I want to get through. I'll get in bed, I'll read for 20 minutes, and then usually when my eyes start closing, I'll put the book on my bedside and then I'll fall asleep. That's my routine.

44:23 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So I can't wait to dig into some more of the books given how well-read you are. You've already called out a few of the classics. That get mentioned here quite a bit. Brandon Fluharty and I are both big fans of Deep Work for sure. I have a book recommendation for you for your kids. And when you mentioned that you were listening to classical and picking out instruments, I thought of this the first time before you said that you were reading for an hour every night. A book that I swear I must have read hundreds of times to my kids is a book called Zin, Zin, Zin, a Violin.

44:54 Sid Nazareth: Ooh, okay. I've not heard about that.

44:56 Scott Ingram: So it is so awesome. Your kids are the perfect age for it. It's just fun to read. I loved this book. This is one of my favorite books that I read to my kids when that was a thing, but sadly they're much too old for that now. And they…

45:08 Sid Nazareth: okay, I'm gonna order it today. Thanks for the recommendation, Scott.

45:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about kind of the deep dive into the information diet. It sounds like really all of the info you're consuming is in book form. Is that fair? Are you also listening to podcasts? Are you on YouTube? Are you doing other things, or is it predominantly books?

45:31 Sid Nazareth: It's predominantly books. I spend… I do listen a lot of podcasts as well. And now and then I'll watch some YouTube videos for specific categories. I try to, even as part of the recommendation from Deep Work, I try not to get down the YouTube rabbit hole because it's easy to get sucked in. So if I do it, I'll do it on my TV that's connected, you know, to the internet. So because on my phone, I find it's really easy to like just let my thumb click on stuff, but mainly books. And I do have some podcast recommendations as well.

45:58 Scott Ingram: All right, let's do it. So favorite podcasts, most impactful books, load us down with a list. And as always, we'll have everything linked up in the show notes. top1.fm forward slash this episode number, whatever that is, or top1.fm forward slash Sid-Nazareth will get you straight there. Set us up, Sid.

46:16 Sid Nazareth: Sure, Scott, and thanks. I did realize I get my own URL. That's very exciting. In terms of podcasts, so Tim Ferriss is one of my favorite. You know, he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, and he's got some really great guests on. And I love the way he very methodically and carefully ask questions and structure them. Tim has taught me that the way you ask questions is very important. Actually, my manager has said that's one of my superpowers. So love Tim Ferriss and the guests he gets on the show. I listen to Joe Rogan sometimes. I certainly listen to his Elon Musk interview and his recent Dave Chappelle interview as well. How I Built This by Guy Raz. Love the way he interviews founders, more for the way he asks questions and structures the conversation By the way, I should say I'm a big fan of interviews in general. You know, I love like watching any sort of executive interview. I used to watch Charlie Rose. Stanford Business School has a bunch of free interviews, and I love the way an executive answers questions. It's one thing to have the question asked, but you know, you could answer the question in 5 different ways. How does the executive communicate the most important part of what they want to… what they're trying to say, not only to the you know, the interview audience, but also to their employees. So big fan of that. Capital Allocators by Ted Seides, that's a good show on investing. He's got a broad swath of folks across macro investing and cryptocurrencies. We Study Billionaires by Stig Brodersen and Trey Lockerbie, again, very good if you're into investing and economics. And then, Scott, I got into cryptocurrency last year and blockchain, so I listened to What Bitcoin Did by Peter McCormack. That is just a fascinating field for me. I didn't mention, but as part of my graduate work in computer science, my master's was in public key cryptography, which is what the blockchain is based on. So I started studying it and I just, I mean, the blockchain is this new layer on top of the internet that is just mind-blowing. It's gonna change the way our lives are. And as of course, as a result of having a blockchain and having all these, you know, millions of servers manage the blockchain, their incentive is to exchange these tokens of value, which happen to be cryptocurrency. And that's how I got in the space by learning about blockchain first. So I've been reading a lot about that, and if I listen to YouTube videos, it's in that area. In terms of books, so I'll mention a few I read recently. For my birthday at the end of March, my wife got me a book called The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal. And oh my gosh, this is one of these books that I just… I mean, it just grabs me. And she's a lecturer at Stanford, and you know, so I'll give you a few tidbits from the book. So if you ask folks who have had meaningful lives by their definition, they will almost all of them say the life also was stressful, that they went through stresses in their life. And if you look at it, to achieve anything or to do anything in life, there is going to be stress involved. And I have traditionally, I do get stressed often, especially with a new job and wanting to perform at a high level. And I always saw it as a negative. And I would get stressed about being stressed. I would say, oh my God, I'm so stressed, I'm so stressed, I should not be stressed. And that made me even more stressed. And she just completely changed my mindset about this. You know, there's… to summarize a couple of key things that I liked in the book, if you believe… first of all, stress is a good thing in many ways. Stress releases chemicals like oxytocin, which is, you know, what they call the love hormone, which is one of the reasons when we are stressed is we reach out to folks, we feel more social, we want to talk to people, and we want to, you know, bond with them. Stress also releases other chemicals that makes the heart stronger. Stress in many ways is a way for our body and our mind to tell us, Sid, you care about this stuff. You know, if I was not stressed about doing a meeting or a presentation, it means I probably don't care about it. I was a little stressed about doing this show, Scott, and, you know, and I was telling myself, that's good, that means that I'm invested in this, I want to do a good job. Now, I will separate this from the stresses in Maslow's hierarchy of needs about, you know, getting food on the table and shelter and paying the rent. I mean, that is clearly a stressful position, but I think we're privileged in the sense that the types of stresses we're dealing with are higher up on the pyramid. And so her message in that book, which really resonates with me, is embrace stress and think about it from a threat response versus a challenge response. Now, the threat response is the stress that I'm encountering is overpowering my sense of resources and I'm not able to handle it. And that's a threat response. And what happens in a threat response is your arteries, your blood vessels constrict, your heart needs to work harder to pump blood through your body, and that's bad for you. But if you say, you know what, I'm stressed, I'm going to embrace it. This means that I am invested in this. This means that I care about this. I have the resources. I have a growth mindset. I can, I can rise up to the challenge. That she calls a challenge response. And that is clinically proven to drastically improve the lives of people, whether it's dealing with a disease and you have to fight through it, whether it's your day-to-day stresses of working. And this is one of the books that really resonated with me, Scott. So The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal. The other one is I just read… I know this is a classic, but I finally got to it… Essentialism, Greg McKeown, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. And this is about stripping away anything not necessary and really focusing on the essential parts of your life. You might also equate this to the 80/20 principle. But one of the things that I got out of this book is either you choose what you want to do in life or life will choose for you. And he says you have to be intentional about making a decision and about the decisions you make, and you have to decide where you want to go and what you need to do. Otherwise, life will choose for you. That could be something as simple as a boss putting… or anybody, not just a boss, but someone putting a meeting on your calendar at 6 PM, and you intentionally saying, no, you know what, this time is really important for me, for my family, for my own personal needs. I'm not going to take those meetings. I'll give you a personal example, which I realize now after reading this book. I used to go to a barber shop near to my house for many years, and, you know, they used to always ask me coming in, do you have a regular stylist that you use? Now, Scott, I don't have a lot of hair left, so for me, I have a very simple haircut. And I'm not used to growing up where people say, oh, you have a personal stylist. I'm like, you go to a barbershop and the first person that's available cuts your hair. And, you know, time is important to me as well. So I tell them, no, it's okay, just, you know, whoever's available. And I thought, yeah, that's great, I'll give my business to everyone here too. I won't favor anybody. What I realized after a couple of times of doing that, of saying anyone's available, they kept giving me to the same person. And this was an inexperienced, newer person who's learning the ropes. She didn't do a great job of cutting my hair. And I was like, that's fine. You know, I don't have a lot of hair to begin with, but I realize now I didn't make a choice. So they've chosen for me. And so I've started to examine every part of my life and say, that's interesting. When I say I don't care about something or it doesn't matter to me, I've realized a choice is being made. I just don't know it. And am I okay with that choice or do I want to redirect my life or become more intentional about that subject? So that's essentialism. And then the third one I just read is I've got to do a shout out to this person, Nicole Lynn Lewis. She wrote Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families. My wife and I… so both my wife and my mothers, both teachers, we place a huge premium on education. And I think education can lift so many folks out of poverty and the circumstances they're in and create a better life. And so we've sponsored children around the world through an organization called World Vision, where you donate money every month and And typically we choose young girls in areas where they may not have a lot of opportunities. So these are 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds that grow into, you know, and graduate from school. But we said, you know, we want to get more involved and we live in the DC area. And so I found an organization called Generation HOPE. And Generation HOPE is founded by a remarkable woman called Nicole Lynn Lewis. She's a CNN Hero. She's won a number of different awards. And her story is fascinating to me. So she was a high school honor student. In Virginia. She was living near Virginia Beach, and she ended up becoming pregnant and decided to keep the baby and became a teen mother. And from being an honors high school student, it was amazing how everyone wrote her off and said, your life is over. You've had a child, you're a teen mother, don't even think about going to college. You're gonna have to, you know, this is your life path now, you're gonna have to deal with this. And she pulled herself up, she took a year off after high school, and then she ended up getting into William Mary. And graduating with high honors while taking care of her daughter, Nerissa, and working in the corporate world for a few years and then founding this nonprofit called Generation Hope. And we are a resource family for them. Generation Hope is a 2-generation solution to poverty. So what we do is we don't just focus on the single teen parent, usually their mothers, sometimes their fathers, but also the child, focus on early reading, supplies for the child. It can be something as simple as books or desks, especially during the pandemic. And then the organization sponsors them to go through either a 2-year college, like a community college, or a 4-year college. A lot of them transfer later. They'll have to maintain a minimum GPA, and there's a whole bunch of support… mental, psychological support, financial support. I mean, and you can't imagine some of the things our scholars have to go through, which is around abuse and sort of homelessness sometimes. And so Nicole wrote this book that just came out. I pre-ordered it. It's called A Pregnant Girl, and I encourage your readers to look into it. But just if this message or this mission doesn't resonate with you, I'll just encourage giving back in general. It's such a big part of what I think what makes us successful professionals, successful salespeople, because I think it's a privilege to think about being a top performer, making quota, right? I mean, it's a privilege to have a roof over our head and money and food in our bellies when so many people go hungry and don't have 3 meals a day. And when days are tough or weeks or months are tough in sales, not making my number or things are not going the way I want it to go, I have to remind myself to be grateful. And, you know, I found that having perspective and gratefulness has helped me in my sales. Sales as well. So those are my 3 recommendations, Scott: The Upside of Stress, Essentialism, and Pregnant Girl.

56:43 Scott Ingram: So great. I knew there was a giant risk in my asking this question of you because now my reading list has grown, but, uh, it's a risk I was willing to take on. That is a fantastic list. Now, you said specifically earlier that you kind of lean towards analog. What are though kind of the tools and apps that you just can't live without in your day-to-day?

57:06 Sid Nazareth: Yeah, you know, speaking of being privileged, I would say I could probably live without it, but I would be highly inconvenienced if I didn't have them. Google Maps for sure. So I love the fact that I can search not just directions, but also businesses and open times and stuff like that. My podcasting app, I use Overcast. I found it to be a lot better than the default Apple Podcast app. I use Spotify. I'm a subscriber there. I love my home office setup. So I've got a Yeti microphone, a Logitech webcam. I've got a standing desk, the Uplift desk. That's been super helpful. And in terms of tools, I think that would be it, Scott. Not a big user of like different apps on my phone. I try to keep things simple. So yeah, that's what I would say.

57:52 Scott Ingram: Perfect. Now what about, do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

57:58 Sid Nazareth: Yeah, you know, I've been told that I follow the Challenger Sale methodology. I've read the book. I haven't gone through formal training on it, though I will say my philosophy is a lot about working backwards and coming up with mental models and pattern recognition. I'll give you an example of that, Scott. So as I ask questions of my prospects and customers and of our products, I tend to ask big questions like, why do we exist as a company? You know, if we don't exist, who are our clients going to go to? Why should our clients buy from us? And I try to map that into the work that I do. And if I make a… can I give you an example, Scott, of how this plays out?

58:43 Scott Ingram: For sure.

58:43 Sid Nazareth: Okay. So thank you. So there's a famous question in sales interviews called sell me the pen. You must have heard that question.

58:50 Scott Ingram: Of course. Yep.

58:51 Sid Nazareth: Yep. So I thought about it when I got into sales, especially transitioning from a sales engineer to a salesperson. I was like, how would I answer this? And I thought about answering it, you know, from features. And I've heard you have to talk about benefits. And but, you know, I wanted to take a step back and say like, okay, and thinking about the context of my work as well, the model I came up with is, and I'll role play with you, Scott. So for example, if you're my prospect and I'm the salesperson, I would say, Scott, thanks for meeting with me again. From what I know about you, you're a knowledge worker like me. We're both paid to analyze and make decisions and assimilate information and disseminate information. And so a large part of what we do is writing and disseminating knowledge and capturing information. And, you know, we have different ways of doing it. So you could use technology, so you could use your phone or a laptop to write down information. Now, it's not always practical. If you're traveling, when we do travel again, if you're flying, you may have your laptop in your overhead compartment. If you're on a train, maybe it'll be… you'll have motion sickness looking at your phone and typing something out. You know, if you wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning with a brilliant idea, you probably don't want to bring up the blue screen on your phone to write something down because it'll be hard to go back to sleep. So I think you really need an analog writing implement. And, you know, there are many options available. You could use a pencil. It's great, but maybe not, you know, hard to sharpen and you have to keep that sharp, so you need to carry a sharpener and eraser too. Maybe you can use a crayon. It's fun, but it's not very practical. You should, you know, so why don't you think about a pen? Now, there are different types of pens. I think someone like you needs a fountain pen. It's unique. People remember you by it. It's graceful and works very well for the reasons I mentioned. And, you know, if this resonates with you, Scott, I want to let you know that we actually sell the P100. It's the number one fountain fountain pen in the market, and it's used by over 50% of the Fortune 100 CEOs. Can I, can I set up a meeting to talk about that? So, you know, that's how I thought about that question. I was like, that's interesting. You'll notice I didn't mention anything about the product. I was trying to get to, first of all, the type of role that you're in, the types of problems you're dealing with, and trying to put myself in your shoes and say, what are the day-to-day problems or needs that you have? Clay Christensen talks about this, right? What jobs why you hired to do. And by getting to that, finally, I get your permission to say, okay, yeah, something like this would be useful for me. Okay, and talking about building trust and credibility, now there's a reason to have that next meeting where we can talk more about this. And so when I present to executives, and I did this very successfully at Appian, when I'd open a meeting, I'd never talk about the product. I'd say, look, if I understand you correctly, I'd bring up screenshots of actual applications they have, or, you know, information I have about their work, and I'd say, I believe for folks that are in your position, these are the types of problems you're trying to solve. And I'll get a lot of head nodding. Firstly, I get a lot of surprised looks because they were expecting a pitch from our corporate deck. And now we just spent the first 30 minutes of the meeting talking about what they like. They've walked into a meeting, they're frazzled because they've just come in from another meeting and thinking about that. And they don't have to context switch and think about what I'm saying now because it's exactly what they know. And we have a great discussion about what they're trying to do. Finally they say, this is great. And it's an opening to say, okay, let me tell you what I do. So I think if you ask me about my working style, it's working backwards and thinking about like, why do we exist? And there are 2 questions that need to be answered. When someone asks me, what do you do as a prospect? They don't mean tell me about your product. They tell me what they're asking basically, what are the problems you solve? And why are you the only person that can solve this problem for me? That's how I think about it.

1:02:29 Scott Ingram: I love it. Now, you've mentioned mental models a couple of times. How do you, pardon the pun, think about that? And how do you apply that?

1:02:37 Sid Nazareth: I ask a lot of questions and I assimilate a lot of information. And I just start to, as I collect more data, the way my mind works is I start to see the connections between them. And I start to see it not just within sales and within the company or the industry But I start to see with day-to-day because I'm thinking about the sociology of it, how people interact, how they absorb information, how we show them information. And so when I start to assemble information or thought about a product, it's just too much for me, Scott. Like, you know, I think this… the statistic is there's only 10% of every presentation that we finally remember or absorb. And certainly when going through learning, I'm like, how do I learn all of this? How do I remember all of this, more importantly? And so mind maps are important for me as well to connect and sort of see the patterns. And so I've always gone into something saying, okay, what can I take this up to? How can I abstract this? And I guess like it's a Platonic form, but how do I think about the models behind it? Right. And how do I also then come up with other applications of this model? And so for example, I'll give you an example here. When I was learning, when I transitioned to a full-time direct sales role, I was being thrown with so many different mechanisms and methodologies at Appian. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can't fit all this into my head. And every week or month, it seems like we come up with a new recommendation or a new toolset, which is great, right? Folks are trying to help us out, but I'm like, how do I apply this? So one of the things I said, okay, what's my model here? What am I really… what do I really do? Like, how do I think of myself, Sid? Like, what am I? What is a salesperson exactly? Okay. So I might call myself a consultant. I might call myself a problem solver. And I tried to apply those, that model to what I was doing. And I was like, okay, it's kind of like that, but not exactly. And finally I came up with, Scott, I was like, you know what? I'm a doctor. And let me think about this. So I went and looked up how clinical medicine is practiced. And there's 3 stages to it. There's the diagnosis stage. So someone walks into the office. And, you know, the last thing a doctor, especially a new patient, last thing a doctor would say is, Scott, I'm so glad you're here. I've got this fantastic medicine. Half my patients are using it. You've got to use it. And you're like, yeah, you're like, doc, I just met you. Like, I've got a knee problem. Do you even know, am I in the right office? Like, are you a, you know, are you in orthopedics? Are you a cardiologist? Like, let's figure that out first, right? So I was like, okay, the first thing I need to do is diagnose the problem and tell the prospect in this case the patient, like, you're in the right office, right? I can help you out. So then it said, okay, all these questions that we're asking or where our organization is telling us to ask our clients, that's in the diagnosis phase. I'm trying to figure out, I can make a couple of guesses when some folks say they're feeling this way. Okay, I think your problem's in this space, but let me ask more questions. And so that's diagnosis. The next stage is prognosis, which is, it's a prediction. I remember it as P for prediction and P for prognosis, which is like, okay, We know what you have now. We have a pretty confident guess. If you don't change your life, if you don't change, this is what your life will be like in the next 6, 12, 18 months. Okay? That's a progn… it's a prediction. And by… guess what? Many patients don't want to change. You know, if change for you means having knee surgery and being knocked out for 6 months of recuperation and physiotherapy, you're like, you know what? It's fine. I have a limp. I really don't want to deal with this. Let's wait until it gets worse. And that clicked for me. I was like, oh my God, that is so many prospects I deal with. You know, especially knowing the product as a sales engineer, I'd go in and say, oh my God, I know the problem you have. I know the problem you have. I can solve it. And they're like, ah, big deal. Or they think it's a problem on the front lines and the executive is like, I've got other fish to fry. Or they're just not ready for it. They may have the money, but they're not ready to make the change because it requires bringing a whole village together and going through that change. And they just had a reorg. And so I was like, that's interesting. So let me give them the prediction. And let me keep working with them, but be prepared that people are not ready to make that change yet. So I have to have an effective prognosis though, and that's where also you sort of understand what gets people to change. A lot of times it's loss aversion rather than getting benefits, right? That's true for our personal lives as well. Psychologically, I think that's how the human mind works. So diagnosis, prediction or prognosis, and then the final one is the wellness plan. Really, when someone walks into a doctor's office, they don't want to see the doctor for the rest of their life. They're like, hey doc, give me something, help me out here, but help me be self-sufficient. Maybe help me build a community of people who can support me, but that I can continue my lifestyle without having to come to you every 3, 6 months. So when I engage with my prospects, I say, really, you're thinking about the overall wellness plan. How do you come together? How do you become self-sufficient? How do you become successful? And, you know, Scott, as I think about these mental models as well, one of the things I thought about I put myself in the shoes of my customers. So for example, in Appian, we use Salesforce as our CRM tool. And I thought to myself, what if the head of sales came to me one day and said, Sid, I'm putting you in charge of replacing our CRM tool.

1:07:35 Scott Ingram: Okay.

1:07:36 Sid Nazareth: And I know the first thing I would do, I would panic. I would say, oh my God, this is a big project. Like, first of all, salespeople, and I'll speak for myself, but what I've seen from my and my colleagues and friends is we hate to use CRM tools, right? I mean, we feel like, okay, it's taking away from selling or I now have to learn another tool in general. So it's like I just want to go and sell and not have to like put in notes on my opportunity. So I'm like, how do I get the whole sales force to change? Who do I need to get involved in this decision? It's my CFO, it's my CEO, it's my head of sales for US, for Europe, for APAC. There's a whole bunch. Who's my committee? Who's involved? The last thing I'm thinking about is, hey, let's get a great product with these bells and whistles because you know what I want to do? I'm going to go to Gartner and Forrester and I'm going to look in the top right quadrant and choose the best 3, invite them in and have them present, right? But before all of that happens, it's I need to figure out what my internal structure is. And so that's part of the wellness plan. How do I roll this out? How do I make it successful? What skills do I need for my technology team internally to be trained on this? And so also, you know, if you look at the research, you have to teach your prospects how to buy. It's a big part of what makes successful salespeople successful. And when I thought about it in the context of a doctor, I was like, oh, that's interesting. It makes sense. Me now, the wellness plan. So a lot of times when I walk into a meeting, I will talk about the wellness plan and I will say, you know what, I have a guess about what you have. Let's, you know, this is a first meeting, so you're probably not going to give me a lot of time. I'm thinking to myself in terms of diving deeper into your problems, you want to see what I provide, but I'll focus on, let's talk about the day you go live. What are the issues you may face and how do you solve it? And that immediately builds credibility. They're like, oh my God, they're thinking about exactly what I'm thinking about. I expected features, bells and whistles, but they're thinking about the overall program and the ecosystem. And so that's how I kind of think about the mental model, Scott. And I keep experimenting. One advice I have for all our listeners is try different experiments and see what works and doesn't work and iterate. Because, you know, you get different tools provided by your company. You have different ideas. Sales is such a great testbed because you could… every day is a new day. You can try something out. If it didn't work, try something different the next day.

1:09:35 Scott Ingram: One of the through lines I think I've heard through the story that you shared earlier, kind of the talk through of the way that you're running these meetings. And actually, it reminds me of when I was at Eloqua. One of my customers was a… oh boy, how do I… I don't think I want to say the name of the company, but a very, very, very large global chemical company, we'll say. And it was their CMO that we were implementing the project with initially, and they really kind of surprised us in the way that this started because ordinarily when we walk into that type of opportunity, we're starting this type of a project, there's dozens of people that kind of show up to this kickoff process and, you know, we're getting this project going. In this case, we totally get taken aback because it's the CMO and his right-hand person. We're like, what is happening here? What, what's happening? And he said, you know, I believe in pull marketing, not push marketing. He says, I've seen so many projects here that we have tried to push down the organization's throat and they fail. So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to start this in this very small, specific space and use case, and we're going to create a scenario where the rest of the business, different geographies, different business units, are beating down our door trying to get their hands on what we're doing. And it was sort of this pull type of approach. And it sounds a lot like what, what you're doing, because I think what you're going in… and again, it's the doctor analogy as well… let me just go in and ask really smart discovery questions, because you're… I don't need to tell you that I know everything. I don't need to credentialize myself if I do a good job of asking really insightful questions and show that I know what you're thinking about and what you're considering. And the ultimate outcome… and this is why I told the poll story… is you kind of get them to a place where they ask you, well, wait a minute, is that something you could help us with?

1:11:42 Sid Nazareth: That's it.

1:11:43 Scott Ingram: And it sounds like you get that a lot.

1:11:45 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely. It's so important to ask those higher-order questions. It's connecting the dots, right? It's going beyond the initial layer and saying, okay, what happens if they implement this? What are the challenges they're facing? And that's where it comes back to curiosity. So for example, your sale doesn't end the day you sign the contract. You know, that's when it starts. It's sitting down with the people who implement it. It's talking to the customers. It's figuring out what's happening. That's why I think sales is such a great opportunity as well, because we are the ambassadors and the tip of the spear. We get to bring back what's working and what's not working in the field. Not only to feed into our organization, but to inform our sense of view. And I'll tell you, Scott, like this, you know, certainly the first 15 months of my sales career, I had no clue about this stuff. I had to learn all of this stuff, right? And so I'm learning through trial and error and the hard way. I'm like, yeah, you know, and I'll tell you, like I teach this too, the hardest part about sales is not getting the first meeting, it's getting the third meeting. And by that, I mean the first meeting, you know, you can, You can badger someone into taking that meeting. You can make enough calls, you can email people, you can say, look, you really gotta meet me. But by the second or third meeting, if you're not asking the smart questions, if you're not saying, I really understand what you're trying to do, folks are like, yeah, I don't see the need to keep meeting. I'm done.

1:13:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that is so right on, right? And to your point, if you're not getting to a second or third meeting, the first meeting didn't matter anyway.

1:13:11 Sid Nazareth: Didn't matter. And a lot of times organizations will focus on that first meeting, right? The metrics. Oh, look, we got the meeting. But then it's like, that's why it's so important, the training and the education of the sales folks, because it's, you cannot just give them a stack of PowerPoint presentations and say, go talk about the features. It's how do you take the collective knowledge of the organization, of professional services, of delivery, of partners and say, look folks, here are the challenges that people are facing when they implement a solution like this. It may not be specific to your product. It may be specific to the industry. And imagine walking into a meeting where people are expecting a pitch and seeing how great your product is and saying, folks, you're looking at this technology. I want to bring up all the things you're going to face and let's start tackling them now. And that's why when you, you know, a common thread we have in sales is expand the interaction, right? Don't single thread. Think about bringing in other people. So I will often, I will bring up a chart and say, look, this is the process of how you buy from us. Now you don't have to buy. This is not a commitment, but I'm telling you, this is what all of our customers go through. You see at this stage where it talks about information security, that's where we get your CISO organization involved. You see this stage where it talks about implementation, this is where you get your subject matter experts involved. Why don't you start pulling them in now so we can get ahead of it and we can start to see that we're all on the same page versus asking someone, hey, can you bring in 3 or 4 other people in the meeting? Because I, you know, because I think we should have more people involved in this sales cycle.

1:14:34 Scott Ingram: Well, and that's good, right? Because you're articulating, well, why do we want more people and what specifically are their roles and why do they need to be involved versus let's just throw bodies at this.

1:14:45 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely. It's symbiotic. And that forces you to also think about, yeah, why are they involved? How do they contribute to a project? How do they contribute to a sales process and a buying decision?

1:14:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting when you were talking about, and this is something I wholeheartedly believe in, the close, right? The signing of an agreement is more of a beginning than it is an end. And the way that that was most directly associated in some of the work that we've done is, is at our Sales Success Summit 2 years ago, we spent a lot of time talking about joint action plans and, and this type of thing. And I think one of the most important things in that process, because you're, you're basically describing sort of that structure. Like, here's the things that we're going to need to go through and we're going to want to make sure that we've got, you know, we don't want to go way down the business path and then get completely tripped up because we forgot to account for the security sign-off or the legal sign-off or some of these other things that we're going to need to address, particularly in your space where you're dealing in highly regulated industries, because I promise you they're going to have a lot of hoops for you to jump through. For you to kind of jump through. But in building those plans, it's going way beyond just signing the contract and going all the way through successful implementation.

1:16:03 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely, Scott. And it's, you know, the Joint Action Plan, when I first learned about it, I scoffed at it. I was like, okay, firstly, don't give me more paperwork. Secondly, I was like, is this being sort of salesy? Like, are you pushing the prospect to say, hey, look, you're gonna buy? I was worried about about the reaction. But what I realized was early on, like, I have now become my prospect's project manager. Yes, I am helping them to buy. I am teaching them how to do so. And working with them, it was interesting. In the early part of the sales cycle when I met them, I would always have it in my appendix, the joint action plan, from day one, from the first meeting. And I would plug in some sample dates. And one of the first questions I ask is, hey, when would you like to go live with this project? It can be the summer, it can be the end of this year, it can be the middle of next year. It also tells me when folks don't have a date of how serious or how early they are in the process. But I'd plug in that date, I'd work backwards, I'd say, okay, I suspect, you know, assume 4 weeks for contracts. And so you need to do these by these dates. And by the way, I'd always say, this is not an obligation to buy from us. I just wanted to share, this is the types of steps that our customers go through. And early on I would get the reaction like, oh, this is nice. Okay. But it's amazing how more than half the time, that person would call me back or email me back within a day or 2 and say, hey, you know what? I'm meeting with my manager. Can you share that plan with me please? I want to take it to my manager and show them these are the different steps that we need to go through. And it just, then it just becomes this really good document to work off of. And there are no surprises. And people really appreciate coming into a meeting again when they're expecting just to talk about product, to talk about the process. The people then say, I like this salesperson. They understand that sales is not an event, it's a process, and it's a relationship.

1:17:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so right on in so many ways. And, and what, what I really love, and this is sort of an epiphany I had a couple of years ago, while I don't have any formal project management training, it's so much of what we do, right? It's collaborating with the, with the client and just thinking through, okay, what, what is the order of operations? What has to What are, what are the critical path items? What's gonna take the longest? What are the risk factors? Where might this get stuck? How do we overcome that? And, you know, when you're able to partner with your client in that way, it totally changes the dynamic. So I'll let you speak to that, but maybe you can do it in just the context of what is your sales process like? How are you typically structuring this entire engagement from start through close since we're, we're talking along those lines?

1:18:33 Sid Nazareth: Yeah, absolutely. So, and I'll speak to my role at Amazon right now is working with an existing customer. So it's different from working at Appian when I was working with prospects for some time and then working with existing customers. Lead generation is a huge part of it, right? It's finding greenfield territories to go look and meet people, look for and meet people that are working on projects that we can help with. I always make a lot of time for meeting folks and generating getting new leads and opportunities. One of the things I realized within a couple of years is I can't scale, and there's a limit to what I can, I can do. So I think a lot about the flywheel effect, which is, can I have an impact beyond the room? I can be as eloquent as possible when I deliver a message to a prospect, but how do I make it succinct and repeatable so that they can repeat it to folks outside the room and say, oh my gosh, I had a great meeting with that guy, Sid, you should come to the second meeting. And when the person asks why, they can say more beyond just, oh, he was so eloquent. He had a lot of great things to say. I don't remember what they were exactly, but they were really good. You know, it has to be a cogent, easy-to-remember message about, for example, hey, look, we really need case management for these following reasons. You know, whatever it is. That was one of the things I did at Appian. So lead generation, how do I build up my book of leads and my opportunities and have a flywheel that have an impact beyond the room and generate mobilizers that are well-connected in an organization that can start to introduce me to other people. So a lot of times my recurring meetings would be with mobilizers who I knew would never buy from me. And that's one way I go into a meeting too with a prospect. I assume that 8 to 9 out of 10 times that person will never buy from me, but who can they introduce me to? So that's the first book of business, excuse me, the first part of the sales cycle, or the way I think about it, the lead generation. The second is the mid-stage, which is engaging with a prospect. How do I think about what they're trying to do holistically? It's easy for someone in an organization that we're speaking to, to put on blinders implicitly and say, okay, I want you to come in and solve this problem. But how do we raise our collective intelligence of that organization as a team? Because I'll tell you, there are other benefits to this. You know, in enterprise, complex enterprise selling, there are large teams of people involved. And if we can raise the intelligence of our entire team and establish meaning and purpose, it just raises our collective team when we're selling to that prospect. And if we can understand the business outcomes and drivers they're moving towards, then we can use that same language internally. And so we can say, hey, look, we had a long week this week, but this is really important for the following reasons because our client is trying to launch this product or grow this part of the business. Or deal with these sorts of customer issues. So lead generation, talking to prospects and having opportunities where we understand the collective goals of the organization and thinking about the bigger picture is large as well. And then feeding that back to the team. And then of course, the book of business. How do we bring in the revenue? Where are the big rocks that we go after? So what I forgot to mention is at the beginning of this process, at the beginning of the year, we'll establish what we call big rocks. ROCs, which are what are the top 2 or 3 things that we're going after. We sit down as a team, we sit down with a customer, we talk about their needs and their goals. And so a lot of what we do during the year is mapped back to those initial ROCs, Scott. So we're all in alignment about what we're trying to achieve.

1:21:55 Scott Ingram: That's great. I think that context is really useful, especially the ROC piece, right? And that's one of the things that I really took away from the presentation that Evan Kelsay did last year and just talking about about leveraging the financial documents and understanding from an executive perspective, what do companies care the most about? And bringing… being able to connect your initiatives to their biggest initiatives, I think, is a great way to get to a lot of those rocks and really drive solid alignment where, you know, you've reported to Wall Street that these are the most important things that you guys are working on. So, there's pretty high likelihood that that's got everybody's attention.

1:22:37 Sid Nazareth: Oh, so important, Scott. Yeah. And not just help with sales, but don't underestimate… I'll say to the audience, don't underestimate the importance of bringing the team along. At these large organizations that we work with, with these large deals, there are so many people involved. And what is the common language that we can use to glue these teams together? It's the goals of the organization. One of my favorite books is The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. And also a book recommendation by Adam Grant. But basically what Daniel talks about in that book about the secret of high-performing teams is 3 things. One of them is establishing a clear sense of purpose, of everyone knowing why are they doing the things they're doing, why are they working hard and sometimes late nights and weekends in order to solve this. And it's, you can take the goals that your customer's trying to achieve and share it with your larger organization. And we can ask ourselves, Hey, is this something that will help the customer achieve that or not? And it also, as a sales professional, gives me confidence to walk into a room and talk to a C-level executive and say, I think you're doing the wrong thing. If this is what you're trying to achieve, this is what you should be doing instead of that thing.

1:23:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, great stuff. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about motivation. What is it that that drives you? How do you think about motivation in general?

1:23:50 Sid Nazareth: I have to keep learning and growing, Scott. So I remember the quote: A mind is a terrible thing to waste. My parents, my mother specifically, who helped me with a lot of my schooling, always said like, look, you can lose everything in life, you can lose the shirt off your back, but you'll never lose the information, the knowledge, the wisdom that you've gained. And for me, I always think in terms of learning and growth, and it just makes life so much richer. I'm uncomfortable with being comfortable. That's one of my sayings, which is if I'm And this was part of, you know, when I was running a sales engineering team, I had a very cushy 9-to-5 gig. I had my own office and I was like, you know, something is wrong here. Like, I'm not growing as much as I want to. I'm not pushing myself hard enough. And it goes back to the book about The Upside of Stress, which is if you ask anyone in life about if they've had a meaningful life, if they say yes, it's usually they're learning and pushing themselves. And so for me, it's, you know, Growth makes life so much richer. And I'll just give you an example of that, maybe not sales related, but just reading about how a supermarket is set up. You know, now when I, when I was a kid and I'd walk into a supermarket, I'd just walk in blind, not much knowledge or wisdom about or information about it. I'd just go in, I'd pick up my, you know, what I wanted to buy and I'd walk out, pay for it at the cashier and walk out. Now when I walk in, I'm like, ah, you know, I know why they put the fruits and the flowers at the front. It's to give you that sense of freshness, to remind customers that what we sell is of high quality. When I walk the aisles, I know that the goods at the end of the aisle are premium goods… or not premium goods, but that vendor has paid a premium to put those goods in a high-traffic area and a high-visibility area. I know when I walk the aisles, any goods that are at my eye level, those vendors have paid the most amount of money to put those goods at an eye level. And the stuff that are at my feet, those vendors have not paid a lot of money. That's one of some of the cheapest real estate, but I should look there because I may find the best deals. And so, you know, just by learning about this stuff and reading about it, I think about the psychology of who's making those funding decisions at these vendors to put stuff in the supermarket, how shelves get restocked, what the supply chain behind it is, who is getting paid, how much are they earning to restock the shelves, how does the cashier systems map with the backend systems. It's just, it's so fascinating. And so I apply that to every part of my life. So what motivates me is if I continue learning and growing, life will be richer. I can share that with my family, with my kids, and I get to be on a podcast like yours.

1:26:26 Scott Ingram: Sid, is there something you believe that the average sales professional would think is just crazy?

1:26:33 Sid Nazareth: Well, you know, I think one of them is I've heard people say not not maybe the average salesperson would understand when I say it's easier to get the first meeting than the third meeting, that you have to over-prepare and you really have to think beyond the initial layers, that your… the hard work is not the first meeting but the third meeting. The other one is less is more. When I was an average salesperson starting out, I was just running after everything and chasing everything and said the more accounts I have, the more I'll get more opportunities and I'll have more opportunities to close business. And I have seen this with average reps saying, oh my God, how can you only give me 1 account or 2 accounts? You know, I need 20 at least because what if the first 3 don't work out? And I think if you want to be top-performing, if you have the choice, and of course it depends on the space you're in, you can also be a high-performing rep with just 1 or 2 accounts because it allows you to go deep, it allows you to build a book of business, And so, you know, for me, less is more. They may think it's crazy. I used to certainly think it's crazy when I was an average sales rep.

1:27:36 Scott Ingram: Well, and it certainly ties back to the focus and the deep work thread and all of that type of stuff. What about the flip side? Is there something that the average or typical sales professional believes that you think is crazy?

1:27:49 Sid Nazareth: You know, I have heard average salespeople say, I just want to sell some software. I think that's crazy. I've heard that so many times. I'm like, come on. I think it's crazy you wake up in the morning and your mindset is, I just want to sell some software. Look at the opportunities we have. Look at what we're trying to do. We're affecting people. We're affecting companies. And think about it this way. One of the massive opportunities and privileges we have is to make our customers into rock stars. I mean, specifically, personally, the people that are our customers, to help them get promoted, based on the projects they do with the tools and the technology and the services that we sell. And so, you know, think about the bigger version of you. Think about the bigger impact that you have. Don't, don't think small.

1:28:37 Scott Ingram: Think big. Yeah, love that. So you have done tons and tons of mentoring and have been in this type of role. What's the most common advice that you give to folks that are, that are coming into these sales roles that you have interacted with? Interacted with? What do you find yourself saying the most often?

1:28:53 Sid Nazareth: So sales is a wonderful opportunity to meet people. You know, it's an opportunity to learn about the businesses, about the economy, to create transferable skills. The number one piece of advice I give them is, is read and learn constantly, whether it's podcasts, whether it's, it's reading, whether it's learning. Because sales is more than just a transaction. It's a relationship. It's the ability to affect entire businesses and corporations. And you have to be able to sit down for a meeting or a podcast or a dinner or a lunch and talk for 30 minutes to an hour and not once talk about the product, right? It's so important and it just makes the role more enjoyable. It makes you more credible. So I've often told folks, read constantly, do your research, do your homework. You know, there's no shortcuts. Many of the things I've mentioned So teach your customer how to buy from you. Think about making a bigger impact. You know, when you're not in the room, how do you make sales progress when you're not in the room? You know, look for those immobilizers. Look for the statements that you can make that can be repeatable as well. And when they say… when a prospect says explain what you do, they never mean tell you about the product. They always mean tell me what problems you solve and why are you the only person that can solve them. Oh, and one more thing, Scott. I believe, which I've told my mentees as well, like business is personal, right? Because we're all people at the end of the day. And so if you think about it from that perspective, like remember there are wants and needs, there's a psychological impact, there's a sociological impact. You're selling to people, you're interacting with people. And so just never lose sight of that as well.

1:30:33 Scott Ingram: You know, one of my most hated sayings in all of business is this idea that it's just business. That is such absolute garbage, right? Because if you think about it, what percentage of our time do we all spend doing all of this work? It's the biggest piece. So how can it just be business? Like, there are humans at the middle of all of this.

1:30:57 Sid Nazareth: Absolutely. You cannot have a business without people, without persons, right? So every business, every interaction is personal. And if you think about it, Whether you're selling, whether you're creating a vision, whether you're negotiating, we'd love to believe that it's a highly logical decision. No, decisions are made depending on the time of day. I mean, I can give you an example about parole, how parole is granted to folks, right? Depending on what time of the day the hearing is held, whether it's before lunch, whether it's early morning, whether it's the afternoon. So, so much, I would say all of business is about people and persons. And so business is persons. Listening to me.

1:31:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah, man, that is one thing. Have you read Daniel Pink's book When? W-H-E-N?

1:31:38 Sid Nazareth: Yes.

1:31:39 Scott Ingram: Here's the thing that I can't resolve about that book. Maybe you can help me figure this out. So the way that I typically structure my day is around my own energy patterns, right? And I'm a super morning person. I get up ridiculously early in the morning and I am hyper productive in the mornings. And I try not to have meetings in the morning for that reason, right? That's, that's when I get real legitimate work done. And I like to have my meetings in the afternoon because the conversations are, are going to keep me energized, right? That's going to kind of turn me back on because I can't do admin work or anything else kind of in that period of time. But what worries me about that is that's about me. It's not about the person on the other end. And I worry about, well, I'm trying to talk to them about really important things that are important to them when they're potentially at their lowest energy point. And maybe I need to turn my entire world upside down. You know what I'm saying?

1:32:34 Sid Nazareth: Yeah, I love the way you're thinking about it. I completely… I think it's… it's game theory, right? It's figuring out what would you like to get out of this conversation and what's what's the more important player here. And if it's if it's a decision that you're looking for them to make in their most optimal state, then maybe you give up a little to give them more.

1:32:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like I said, it's an open issue that I have, and I haven't I haven't really made a dramatic change around it. But I I may start to. Be just a little bit more intentional about for those most high-stakes meetings, probably makes the most sense to put that first thing in the morning or, you know, because I'm also very familiar with the Pearl example, right after lunch.

1:33:18 Sid Nazareth: You're giving me more food for thought because one of the things I focus on when I get replies from executives is I see what time the reply comes to me. And I can tell if an executive is a morning person. Sometimes I'll get replies at 7:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 8:00 AM. And sometimes I'll get replies at 11 PM. And so I haven't gone a step further to say, okay, you know, usually I'm working with their executive assistant and saying, okay, just give me a slot that's available. But I should be more intentional about this, Scott. Thanks for the recommendation.

1:33:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll continue to think about this and work through this together. So I know you're… the first thing you talked about was just the deep level of curiosity that you have, and you're a part of of TPC. I wonder when you get involved in those environments or the Sales Success Community, which we'll talk a little bit more about here in a minute, what do you wonder about when you're talking to the top performers in other organizations? What are you hoping to learn from them?

1:34:15 Sid Nazareth: A number of things. I believe everyone has their own superpowers. And I have managed people and as I've thought about this is my goal as a mentor, as someone who's trying to drive optimal performance out of teams is it's not about converting so-called weaknesses into strengths. It's mitigating weaknesses so they don't become liabilities, but it's really about enhancing and honing superpowers. So I love to learn from other top-performing salespeople to ask them, what are your superpowers and how do you deploy them? It's just really interesting. It's insightful. The second thing is, you know, selling can be a black box. A lot of times. The systems that organizations follow, the cultures that they have, the way they drive performance, the way they set up compensation plans. There are certainly levers that you can pull in the context of that business and that culture and who owns it, whether it's a public company or a private company. But it's just fascinating from a mindset of like being able to structure an organization and getting everybody to pull in the same direction. I always like to learn like what's working and what's not working in your organization, because I've heard top performing, I've heard every type of salesperson say, man, like I just, this part of the business, like this doesn't work, this is broken. And so I try to figure out, okay, but what is working for you to stick around or to be energized by your job? Right? Because there's downsides to everything, but what are the upsides? And what is in one way, what is the superpowers of the organization doing for you versus the weaknesses of the organization?

1:35:47 Scott Ingram: Oh, that's a fantastic observation. So let me ask 2 questions then. I've been working to unearth all of your superpowers.

1:35:54 Sid Nazareth: Have I missed any? It's hard for me to know, Scott. Usually it's other people, you know, telling me about them. I think, I mean, I believe we've covered a lot of them. So I don't think you have.

1:36:06 Scott Ingram: Okay. But now I want to come to the cultural piece and maybe you can share some examples and let's point to 2. I mean, you spent a lot of time at Appian. I know AWS is kind of a newer thing. But what do you see as the cultural superpowers of each of those organizations? What are the things that support you the most?

1:36:25 Sid Nazareth: Sure. So what I loved about Appian and continue to love to this day is the diversity of thought and opinion. Appian hires really, really bright, intelligent folks that are not just good at what they do, but have a lot of interests outside of work. So when we joined, when I joined the founders were in their mid-20s, you know, almost no one was married. A lot of people were out of college. We'd spend a lot of time outside of work. And as I grew with the organization and got married and had kids and my fellow colleagues and friends did the same, we still had all these interests that we still kept in touch with. And it just made going to work so much richer of being able to learn from my colleagues about the world, right, outside of the work that we were doing. A big part, a second big part of Appian was, is the general generosity of spirit. So we actually get measured on this in terms of performance reviews. It's part of the culture. It's like when you need help, people come running, they, they offer advice. Because I'll tell you, like, and I've heard this from other top-performing sales folks, it's not fun to be on an island where you feel like, okay, like people are, are gunning for you, or they want to, you know, certainly everyone wants to do well. And in my case, I'd always want other salespeople to do well, my goal was I just want to sell $1 more than the next top-performing salesperson. That's it, just $1 more so I can say I'm number one. So I didn't have to say sell $10 million more. I was like, I want all of us to be all part of the same team, the same organization. More sales means more revenue for us, more resources for us. We all great for the company, so let's all hit 300%, 400% of our quota, but I just want to sell a dollar more. So happy and loved the team, the generosity of spirit, And that was a great part of it. AWS, they have their, of course, their leadership principles with which they publicly share. Very sharp people at AWS as well. One of their big leadership principles is learn and be curious. And I love that about the organization and working in strategic accounts. These are some of the largest AWS customers. And what I love is, again, the generosity of spirit, right? When we ask for help, people come running. They're like, how can I help? How can I make things better for you? There's a bias for action. There's another leadership principle there. So things move very quickly. I love one of Bezos's tenets, which is basically he has a term called 2-way doors when it comes to decision-making. So he has said, and this is often repeated throughout our organization, which is most decisions are 2-way doors. So think of a decision as going through a door, like an exit. And then if you make the wrong decision, you can always come back. And there are very few decisions that are one-way doors, meaning you go through the door and you can never come back in. You know, that might be a big major public announcement. That might be a bet the business. But even, you know, you could even take the Fire Phone, right? That was a disaster, but it was a two-way door. You could recover from it. And the decisions made there fed into Alexa and Kindle and a whole bunch of other stuff. So Bezos says what our top executives should focus all their time and energy on is making one-way door decisions. And there's, you know, there's only a limited amount of brainpower that you can use in a day before you get fatigued. So use 2 to 3 hours of that day, the most important time of your day, to make those one-way door decisions. And all of the other decisions, especially the two-way door decisions, push them down the organization to high judgment individuals. So people are empowered at the front lines, at the scale of Amazon, you know, 1.2 million employees, probably a lot more at this point, A lot of decision-making empowerment is happening at the front lines, and it's now experimentation. Amazon famously runs in small teams as independent units, and you can make a decision, you're empowered to do so, but you have to take the learnings from that and share it with the rest of the organization. And so at any one point in time, you have thousands of decisions being run, people sharing information, and then they get bubbled up to possibly end up in a one-way door decision meeting above. Making a significant investment for the long term based on, you know, these small experiments run all throughout the organization.

1:40:29 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. It reminds me of… and I actually tell this story a lot in, in my own kind of deal cycles from a variety of different perspectives… but the most effective executive sponsor I've ever worked with, the way he described his role was to call balls and strikes. He says like, look, we're, we're gonna get to this place. And we were working on a huge project, very transformational global project with them. And he said, you know, we're gonna get to a variety of points over the course of this project where decisions have to be made. And at the end of the day, it almost doesn't matter what the decision is. We just have to make a decision and keep moving. So he's like, that ends up being my role. I just have to call balls and strikes. And it may, it may, I may not be right all of the time. But we need to kind of keep moving. And I tell that story so many times because one, it helps me get the mobilizers to understand why that executive sponsorship is so critical to the broader success of the project and why we absolutely have to have it. Because without it, we can literally get stuck and not be able to progress if we don't have somebody senior enough that kind of can override and look across all of the Multi-division politics and all the other silliness that's going on and say, "Nope, we're gonna do this. Keep going." Right? I completely agree with you. And it's also… I mean, this is gonna sound totally crazy, but I feel like it is what I do. It allows me to help mentor my executive stakeholders and say, "Look, this is the role that I need you to do right now. I just need you to make a call on this. We need to make a decision so that we can keep moving because otherwise we're going to turn." I love that.

1:42:15 Sid Nazareth: You also uncover doubts or fears as they're making their decision process.

1:42:20 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and that individual, you made me think of it earlier today. I'm not sure what the… oh, I know what it was. It was just in the context of the cadence meetings, right? It's super helpful to just have ongoing meetings. And he and I to this day have a monthly call that's just kind of a legacy thing. It exists from a project we did years ago. Years ago, and we just enjoy each other. We enjoy learning from each other and each other's company. There's really… we talk very, very little day-to-day business, and it's kind of other things that we're each working on, which I think… Isn't that great? Well, it drives home the point of what you were just saying. At the end of the day, this is personal, right? This is about people. It's about real relationships. And, you know, yeah, we've moved way beyond that project. They're at this point like totally self-sufficient. They basically don't need me anymore, but we still enjoy learning from each other, and it's an amazing… it's an amazing relationship. So Sid, I'm gonna make this kind of last call, right? We've covered a ton of ground, talked about a lot of things. I wonder if there was anything that I left on the bone. Was there something that, as you were thinking about this conversation, that you were hoping to talk about, a point you were hoping to make, a story you were hoping to tell, that somehow or other I just… I haven't… I wasn't able to get to?

1:43:37 Sid Nazareth: One thing I can think of, Scott, is when you asked me about my daily routine, I forgot to add journaling. So after I finish my yoga and my mindfulness meditation and have my breakfast and go to my home office, the first thing I do is before I start working or even going through my list of things to do is I open up my… I have a separate journal and I've got 3 questions there and I spend about 10 minutes writing it. And it's basically the 3 questions are, what am I grateful for? It's really important to start with what I'm grateful for. The second thing is what will I focus on today? What's my big win? And the third is what will I let go of? And that has really helped me sort of again ground me and write down what's important. And it really helps to be specific. So for example, when I say what am I grateful for, it's nice to say I'm grateful for my kids, but it's always been better for me to say I'm really grateful for being able to hold my older son's hand as I was reading this book to him last night. And so what I'll do is when I'm having a tough day, I'll also browse through like the previous entries and say, wow, look at this. I have a body of work that I can refer to and look at the progress I'm making and look at something that I wanted to let go, I thought was a big deal and turned out it wasn't. So in terms of, you know, to the audience, one recommendation I can give to you as you think about your overall careers and your book of business is think about the stuff that goes with it as well. So journaling has helped me a lot, meditation, yoga, really to ground us, especially in this day and age with the pandemic and folks languishing and being burnt out. It's important to think about things holistically and take a step back.

1:45:16 Scott Ingram: That is personally really, really useful. Well, during the week, I'm a daily journal guy, but I don't have a lot of structure to it. And I've been really starting to rethink bringing a little bit more structure into that process. So what you just shared is actually really helpful. Your final question, I think, is a new one I haven't heard that I want give some, some thought to Amy Volas, who I just spoke with recently, who I think, again, we will have shared that conversation prior to this one, has a very interesting process that I'm also looking to for inspiration and just to, you know, it's what you've talked about. It's continuing to learn and experiment and to kind of try things as we continue to grow and evolve. So, Sid, the last thing I always like to do in these conversations, we've talked at length about a whole variety of topics, but now I want to try and make this actionable. For our listener? What would you challenge them to do over the course of, say, just the next 1 or 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:46:13 Sid Nazareth: I'm gonna pull out a page out of the Deep Work book. Can you block out an hour to 90 minutes of your time every morning and work on your most important project? No distractions, no calls, no emails. And look back after 2 weeks, and by putting in, you know, an hour of time Every morning, look at the progress you've made and see if it works for you because it's it's worked wonders for me.

1:46:35 Scott Ingram: Love it. That's a perfect ending. Sid, thank you for all of your wisdom and all of your time. This has been amazing, Scott. It's been a pleasure.

1:46:41 Sid Nazareth: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this, and all the best, and I wish you every success, 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, Power. Powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.