124: The Greatest SDR Story of All-Time - Patrick Joyce

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of our newest sponsor, Skipio, along with Proposify and Vidyard. You can learn more about them 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. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:37 Scott Ingram: Today's episode of the Sales Success Stories podcast is really special. You'll get to hear an amazing story of a true top performer like I always bring you in these interviews, but I'm also going to pull back the curtain a bit as we walk through this and share some of the things that we're working on and towards at Sales Success Media. My guest today is Patrick Joyce. As you're about to hear, Patrick is a true top 1 percenter, and at least until I start building the team here over the next few months, he's my number 1 because he's the first sales hire as I work to build out my own world-class sales team. See, I told you this was going to be interesting. Welcome to the show, Patrick.

1:15 Patrick Joyce: Hey, thanks for having me. It's exciting.

1:17 Scott Ingram: Now we'll get into your backstory and some of our shared backstory that brought us to this point. But why don't we start like we always do with the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success especially over these last 3 or 4 years in sales?

1:33 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I love thinking about this question because it's something that I am trying to figure out what went right pretty much all the time as things are going pretty well for me. So it's something that I've thought quite a bit about recently and what I came up with in no particular order. The first thing that comes to mind is just I think that being in the Seattle tech scene on the West Coast, being from Boston, I grew up in the Northeast. I spent 30 years there. I was a high school math teacher there. I worked on a garbage truck and did physical labor. I was in the Teamsters Union and I just grew up in this working class, like really just like hard-nosed, you know, it's going to snow out and you're going to have to shovel your car and get up an hour early. It's 5 in the morning, it's dark out, you know, the wind's blowing, just that hard-edged kind of nature. And then going to Seattle and working in a tech company was like obviously very, very different things. I just applied a little bit of elbow grease and I felt like it gave me an edge up over on everybody pretty much immediately. So that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about, you know, how was I successful in sales? And the second thing that comes up is really like, I think my ability to learn new things and to seek out new information. So I read a lot, like I read everything there is to read before I even, before I ever made a cold call. I listened to at least 2 audiobooks on how to do sales. And this was like just in my free time while I was doing my other job, thinking about quitting. I'm sitting around listening to Zig Ziglar in my headphones, taking the bus to work every day, and then joined a few different groups and just really just absorbing all of the information that I could as fast as I could, just reading everything there was to read. Challenger, Gap Selling, name it. I mean, I've consumed every book that's out there that I could come across. I'm sure you could name one that I haven't, but I think that that was a major contributor to success. And then the last piece is the network. Like, as I was moving along, I was building this network and it was very intentional. And I guess the way that I did it is just everybody that I met, I tried to do a favor for. And if you think about it that way, right? Like everybody that you meet, if you do a favor for everyone, 5 years goes by, that's a lot of favors for a lot of people. And not all of them are going to work out, right? But I think that if I had to name 3 things that led to my success, that would be it.

4:03 Scott Ingram: I love that. There's so much to get into here. We're definitely going to come back to that network piece because that's what led to my writing you an offer letter after… I mean, I don't think it was even a week that we were into this conversation. I mean, we had some relationship beforehand. We'll get into that. Why don't we, before we get into a little bit more of the backstory though, given all of this reading that you've done, what are the top 2 or 3 most impactful things that you've read?

4:31 Patrick Joyce: Well, it is hard to say because I've seen so many different takes on it that, you know, a lot of it folds onto the same concepts. Like if you really study Zig Ziglar, everything that Zig Ziglar like said or did or wrote or whatever, Most of all the common sales theory that's out there is wrapped into something that he's saying, I think. So, I mean, and then the one thing that sticks out about Zig Ziglar is for me, the objection handling piece. I'd never done sales before. I was a teacher. I worked in insurance as an analyst, and I'm like listening in my headphones, this guy talk about handling objections, and it stuck with me the whole time. And he talks about the quiet method. Basically what he's saying You can Google, you know, Zig Ziglar Quiet Method, but I don't remember what all the letters stand for, but he's saying essentially like, don't handle the objection. Like stop and listen to the person, make them feel like they understand, or make them feel like you understand what their problem is, why they can't move forward. And like, once you do that and like reconfirm that you fully understand it, you're pretty much past the objection.

5:37 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's so good. I mean, it aligns with my own thinking, which is like, even the phrase objection handling kind of drives me crazy because they're not really meant be handled. I think they're meant to be understood.

5:48 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. And it starts a tennis match. If you try to handle the objection, it starts a tennis match, which is rule number one. Don't do it because you're going to lose every time. If you're in a back and forth with the customer, forget it. You're off. You're done. You might as well just go home.

6:00 Scott Ingram: I love it, man. This is going to be probably a long conversation. We're going to have a lot of fun. Why don't we do this a little bit differently than I normally do? Because usually I'd have you talk about your role and your results, but I'm like the guy in Office Space who's like, Yeah, I'm gonna need you to come in on the weekend. Patrick started on Friday. Here we are on a Saturday, and I've dragged him out of bed to do this interview. So I'm not sure what that says about my boss leadership skills, but I appreciate you being here. But let's start at the beginning. Like, what is your origin story? How did you get into sales originally?

6:35 Patrick Joyce: It's a really good question. And, and I guess like professionally and from like the tech sales standpoint, I took a job as an SDR in October of 2017, but that's not really the beginning of sales for me. Like, I told you the story off the air and I'll tell it again here. Like, I was 13 years old, a freshman in high school, burning spindles of blank CD-Rs, whatever software was on my hard drive that I had traded with the Russians for on private FTPs and selling them in my high school for $10 apiece. I mean, like, I've been selling things forever. Like, I had a job at Best Buy and I sold warranties there as a cashier. And my numbers were so far ahead of everybody. I didn't understand this at the time, but my numbers were so far ahead of everybody else that they took me off the register and put me on the floor with a handful of warranty packets and said, like, go sell these because it's just, it's just straight money. It's like the customer gives you money and you don't have to give them anything back. Like, it's just pure profit for the company unless somebody has to, you know, somebody's Walkman breaks and then they fill out the form and mail it in, which like never happens, you know. If you ask, when did I start selling? I mean, I don't remember not selling.

7:46 Scott Ingram: That makes a ton of sense, right? Like you clearly have this wiring, but then there was kind of a big gap. Like there was a long period of time where you weren't in, you came into traditional sales, tech sales much later in life. So walk us through a bit of that journey, because I'm sure that there were influences and things you learned along the way before you, you know, finally made this, this kind of final transition into what led to today.

8:12 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it makes sense to do like a quick flyby of just what it was like from, I don't know, me trying to graduate college until I became an SDR in 2017. So I graduated high school in the year 2003. By 2007, I think I had dropped out of school. I was a computer science major. It wasn't a good program. I dropped out. I started working on a garbage truck with my stepbrother. I was in the Teamsters Union and I did that for about 2 years and then realized I don't want to work outside anymore. And I went back to school and got a math degree and started teaching high school math. So this is just like this roundabout trip already. Already I'm 25 and everything's all messed up. So then we're there. I teach for about 4 years. I met my wife. She was a teacher. We didn't get married for a little while, but we were together and She was from Anchorage, Alaska, and I wanted to leave Boston. So I got out of there and we moved to Seattle together. Like, you know, long story short, we had done a lot of traveling. It was kind of in the middle, yada yada. And I wanted to get into the tech industry, but I wasn't sure how. And I was really good at math. So I passed an actuary exam. And, you know, like there's like these 10 math exams that you can pass and you can do statistics for insurance companies if you get really good at it. Those guys can make some pretty good money. So I was interested in doing that. And then I got a job as an analyst at an insurance company and pretty much immediately figured out that the salespeople were making a ton of money and having a lot of fun. And they had boats and they were showing me pictures of what they were doing on the weekends and they were all wearing nice clothes. And I was like, again, the analyst salary was commensurate with the teacher salary. I was not making all that much money and not having as much fun as they were. I felt like I could do their job, but there was no way that they could do my job. So something was wrong and I wanted to do something about it. And I asked them, how do I get into sales? And they told me to do a lot of cold calls. So I did immediately. I started selling life insurance from my bedroom while I'm working. And it picked up enough that I could quit my job and just focus on that full-time. And that's really when, you know, sort of the powder keg started, so to speak. So I sold life insurance for like 3 months and figured there's, there's no money in me doing this independently. And I I'm in the middle of Seattle and I just applied for, I think, 2 SDR jobs and I got one of them. So that's what got me to that day. And I'll pause there.

10:43 Scott Ingram: There's a couple of interesting little, little bits because I think maybe it's not a relational kind of networking story, but there is kind of a backdoor story in the middle there because you shared with me like how hard it was after you'd passed that actuarial test to actually break into insurance.

11:01 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I mean, I sat there and while I was studying for the exam, I was applying for jobs and I sat there for a whole year, like with no job. I was like collecting unemployment and like applying to 5 jobs a day. And like, if you're just, I mean, if you're from the public sector and then you try to get a job in the private sector, like There's all these assumptions about things like if you apply to 5 teaching jobs, like all of them will call you back and be like, we don't either, we don't need a teacher or yes, we're going to hire you. Like it's not as competitive. And the idea that I could send out 100 applications and not hear anything back from anybody was just like baffling to me. And it's, it's like, there's definitely like a tortured element there. The toy was certainly wound up by the time it landed on the sales floor.

11:51 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that. So, but the last part of that story though, in terms of how you broke through, because I think you told me you spent a year sending, you know, 5 or 10 applications a day.

12:01 Patrick Joyce: That's right. Yeah.

12:03 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

12:04 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. So the way that I actually got a job is I replied to a recruiter who had posted a manufacturing position. It was like a factory worker. And I, you know, I'm sitting there with my math degree and 4 years of teaching high school, and I had no interest in working in a factory. But I took the interview anyway and I went to the interview and I had my resume printed out. And as soon as I sat down, I was like, look, I know this is a job for, you know, this manufacturing company in the factory, and I don't want to do that, but I do want to work in insurance. And I thought that one of you might be able to help me. You know, you might have a job somewhere that somebody was trying to fill, you know, just by chance. And she's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me give you to my colleague. She works in insurance. And then within a week I was on the payroll.

12:48 Scott Ingram: I love it. I love it.

12:49 Patrick Joyce: And I had spent a year, like a whole year applying to jobs. And then all of a sudden I do this side, you know, this, this backdoor kind of sideways entry and got the job immediately.

12:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I think that theme is going to come back, right? As we start to tell our story and kind of the evolution of kind of this jobs and how that actually works in the real world, I think is going to be an important story, but now, now we get to the meat right now. You have broken in, you have your first role as an SDR. How'd that go?

13:17 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, so I had spent the previous 3 or 4 months, maybe even closer to 6 months, cold calling life insurance leads. And these were mortgage protection leads. So to briefly explain that, when you buy a house, you get a letter in the mail that's from this anonymous looking generic source and you open it up and there's a pink sheet of paper and it has this advertisement for buying life insurance to protect your mortgage. So if you were to die, your spouse doesn't get stuck with the whole mortgage. And if you fill that paper out, it's called a lead, right? And you mail it back in and like, that's a mortgage protection lead. And those people, I had a pile of them that were 4 years old. So these are people that had bought their house 4 years ago and filled out this piece of paper. And like, that was my starting point. And by the way, this is a stepped-on lead. This person has been called by every life insurance agent in the last 4 years that's ever done anything in the area of Seattle. So that was my starting point, right? I had, I mean, it's like 2 heartbeats. It's like 1 1,000, 2 1,000, click. Like, that's it. That's how much time you have. And I was getting meetings. You know, I sat, I got my script down and I really just like hammered it. I was making 200 phone calls a day, sometimes 400. And when I say 400, it sounds ridiculous, but I was using Google Voice on my computer, talking into this microphone and loading a list and dialing it and literally just copy pasting the numbers and getting through 400 in a day. And then I show up to my first SDR job and they're like, yeah, it's 100 dials a day. I was like, yeah, no problem. I was like, do I have to build the list? And they were like, huh? You want… so I was a little bit advanced for the job that I was doing and it showed. I was getting 15 meetings in a month. And I don't think anybody else was breaking 7 at one point. You know, it was just like I was doing more than double what the next guy down was.

15:15 Scott Ingram: And then like, this is the beginning of you kind of riding a rocket ship through the industry. So you go from… this is what, 3 and a half years ago, you're doing 200 dials a day on the worst leads on the planet that are 4 years old. But now you've kind of hit pay dirt right now. You've broken into tech, you're doing double the production of kind of the average kind of typical, maybe even second best on the team as an SDR. What happens from there? How does this play out? Like maybe bring us, bring us to today if you can, if that's not too many steps.

15:52 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, it's a lot of steps and we're going to have to go back, but I mean, I quit my full-time job in October of last year. So it's almost August now. We're in, it's been 10 months that I've been an independent consultant. And I've worked with Aaron Ross at Predictable Revenue. Scott, you cold-called me to hire me. Like, I mean, I've… Justin Michael, who just released a book on HarperCollins, Tech-Powered Sales. I basically ran his consultancy for about 6 months. Like, I've progressed quite a bit through the industry in a short amount of time. Yeah.

16:26 Scott Ingram: All right. Well, let's go back and then I'll, as we get to the more current time, I'll get to how it is that I ended up cold-calling you to offer you a job.

16:34 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Yeah. So I get hired at the… I take the SDR job. I do pretty well. And then I don't think it… not even a whole year, maybe 8 or again, like 8 or 10 months went by and I got recruited to work at a small startup with about 10 people in it as like their second sales hire. Somebody that just knew how to open new business and had experience in the tech industry for a company called Fullcast. And they're great people over there. Dharmesh and Bala were They were VPs at Salesforce and Dharmesh had worked at Microsoft for a long time in an executive role. And I gained an incredible amount of business experience inside of one year. I learned more in that year than most people do in their entire career. I mean, I just, they took me to the edge of the wall, really, like territory planning at the highest level, scaling a company from 4,000 to 7,000 reps, talking to everybody in the tech industry about sales operations and just looking at all different Salesforce instances, even some like Salesforce consulting type of activities at some point. So, I mean, really just was able to drink from the fire hose for quite a, quite a while until COVID hit. And then I got another opportunity to sell into the enterprise, you know, this complicated fraud, fraud detection API, you know, selling to JPMorgan Chase and Google and Microsoft and all of the big players, you know, Fortune 100 companies and, you know, built about $6 million in pipeline in like 6 weeks. And that's where I met Justin. And yeah, that pretty much takes like, you know, to almost present day.

18:08 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Do you want to tell a little bit of the Justin story, like whatever parts of that you're comfortable with and that he would be comfortable with?

18:15 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so I hired Justin as a coach. He was somebody that I kind of looked up to online. And the reason was because there's a lot of talking heads out there, but Justin just seemed like a guy that like actually knew what he was doing, that had actually done the work, you know, and he was actually a practitioner. He could go and get meetings, but, you know, somebody could hire him to do that. That's like why I was drawn to him as a character. And then once I met him and I hired him to coach me, like, we pretty much figured out it was almost like in Step Brothers. It was like, are we best friends? You know, it was just one of those, like, like you're meeting like this alien that's from another planet and you're also from that other planet, right? You're both in this, this weird territory on Earth and trying to interact with humans. That's what it really felt like. Between, you know, you know, when I had hired him to coach me and within a month he ran out of stuff to tell me because I was already doing everything that he would do. You know, it was just, it was one of those situations. And then he asked me to actually just help him do some of the work that he was doing. And once we started working together, it was just obvious that we could get along and we could make a lot of money together. And I was able to quit my job. It's literally like living the dream. Like, I don't have to have a boss. I can just hang out with Justin and like, I don't know, like write some emails and make a better living than I've ever… more money than I've ever even seen before. And I worked a lot, but it was certainly like a different flavor than it was like 4 years previous, like eating ramen on unemployment, like applying for jobs and doing math problems all day.

19:47 Scott Ingram: I think this is a good point for me to kind of start to tell my side of the story in terms of what was going on in my world and what led to this cold call. And then we can do a little bit of back and forth of what that experience was for both of us. So I have been building really since the beginning of the year. I don't know that I've talked about it this, that much on this podcast. I guess I'll give the backstory. I have been riding the marketing technology wave for the last decade. You know, I joined Eloqua in 2011 before they went public, before they were acquired by, before we were acquired by Oracle. And I still work in that space today with, with Relationship One. I still work in and around the Oracle Marketing Cloud with Fortune 500 clients. And I saw all the ways that marketing technology literally changed the structure of marketing departments. You know, 12 years ago, lead or demand gen wasn't a thing. Marketing operations certainly wasn't a thing. And when Nancy Nardin released her sales tech landscape the beginning of this year in January, and for the first time had 1,000 logos on it. I went, hang on, I've literally seen this movie before. I've been watching Scott Brinker and the work that he's done. He calls himself the Chief MarTech. He's been doing that same type of infographic logo landscape of everything that's going on in marketing technology. His list today is over 8,000 logos. So I went, wait a minute. When was it that Scott's list got to 1,000 logos? And that was 2014. I went, okay, I've been watching this like I've been watching the emergence of sales technology. And the challenge that starts to happen right about now, having seen this movie before, is it becomes overwhelming, right? If you're in sales leadership and if you're in sales or revenue operations or enablement, It's one of these things where I know we need to be doing stuff. We really need to be arming our sales teams better with some of this tech to help them perform better. But there's so much stuff out there. Where do they start? And the gap that I saw and the opportunity that I'm acting on is there isn't an event that brings all of this together. There isn't an agnostic event that brings all the disciplines of sales, and many of these sales tech vendors together into one space. What's out there currently, you can go to user conferences, you can go to Dreamforce, you can go to Inbound, you can go to Unleash and Celebrate and all these other things, or you can go to analyst events, right? You can go to an event that Gartner or Forrester or one of those, those folks is putting on, but there's not anything that is truly practitioner-centric. That brings together all of, all of these things where really the majority of the presentations are from people in these roles, right? It's, it's a sales leader. It's, it's a revenue ops leader talking about, hey, here's what we're doing. Here's how we've gotten through this challenge. Here's how we've solved and are massively capitalizing and seeing great results from our investments in technology. Here's how we've integrated them. Here's how we're enabling our teams with them. Here's kind of the results that we're seeing. So, That's what I'm building. We're going to host the first ever Sales Tech Expo here in Austin next April. And I have played in and around the event space for many years. After I left Oracle, after the Eloqua acquisition, I actually spent a couple of years working with a company in the event marketing technology space because I kind of knew that in one way, shape, or form, at some point in my future, I wanted to go down this path. I wanted to build these types of events because I love events. I'm a total event nerd. And I wanted to learn it from the inside. So I sold that technology to CA Technologies and it's what they use to run CA World. And I, I never finished the deal with Dell, but I had a lot of conversations with Dell and Dell World and NI Week. And I sold the technology to AT&T. It's what they use to run all of the Pebble Beach golf tournament sponsorship stuff around. It's a really, really interesting thing. And as I think about that model and what we're trying to do, one of the things that happens particularly from a, well, both to sponsors and to attendees, there's just not a lot of thought to that experience once somebody signs their sponsorship agreement or they register and they buy a ticket, right? Everybody's kind of on their own. Like you buy a sponsorship, you're like, awesome, here, pick your booth space. Good luck. We hope that works out for you. And from an attendee perspective, it's kind of the same. Like, ah, you get some random emails. They ask you to download the event app, but mostly it's show up and we hope you have a good time and we hope it works out. I've never seen anybody apply kind of a customer success type of model to events. So I'm hiring a director of sponsor success to work directly with the sponsors to make sure that they get a great amount of value from that investment that they're making in the event and working with them to help me And help this team deliver a better experience to those who attend. And on the flip side, and this we're starting to get to the Patrick piece, is on the attendee side, I wanted to immediately start a conversation every time somebody registers for the event to learn about mostly just why, right? You just spent probably over $1,000 to spend 3 days in Austin. Why? You know, what, what's going on in your business? What are you trying to solve for? Are there other people in your organization that need to join us? Are there other peers? Right. So this, there's a very kind of networking-centric component to this conversation. And as I build the sales team and the customer success team around this concept, I'm very fortunate in that I have probably access to the most incredible pool of sales talent on the planet. I've now done, this is, this is, interview number 124 of me having talked to number 1, top 1%, truly. You know, now I'm not… this isn't facetious. You know, other people will say, oh, you know, this is what the top 1% say, but there's no qualification around that top 1%. Everybody I've interviewed on this podcast is either number 1 in their role or in their company, or they're at least in the top 1%. And so, I was actually in conversation. I'm in conversation with several folks who've been on the podcast who will, who will be joining this team over the, over the next couple of months. And one of those individuals I had kind of pegged for this Director of Attendee Experience type of thing to have these, these conversations. And we'd been talking for months, very productive conversations. The guy's awesome. He'll join the team at some point. But he just in his current role and current situation was like, you know, Scott, this is really hard for me to do this year. Like, I kind of want to finish out this year in my current role with this current company. And as he telegraphed that, I went, crud, I don't have a great plan B. I better figure this out fast. And what I was looking for is somebody who can have a pretty high level or high number of really productive, good conversations and is really well-versed in just the sales technology space and can have valuable conversations with each of these folks that are reaching out. And the first person I thought of was Stephen Chase, who's been on this podcast. I know he is really involved with, with Justin and his SalesBorg community. I thought, hey, Stephen would, would probably be a really good person to talk to about this. So I reach out to Stephen and he is… I don't think this has happened. I literally just checked LinkedIn. By the time this episode goes live, it's probably real. So you can just look up his LinkedIn profile. But he was like a week away from landing and moving into a new sales role with a company I have a lot of respect for. And I was like, okay, well, I missed that. You know, timing isn't right. But I was, I was just talking to him about what I was looking for and what this ideal was. And knowing as involved as he was in Justin's community, I thought he might know somebody. And the thing he said was, you know who you need to talk to who's even better than me? Is Patrick Joyce. And I went, wait a minute, hang on. I know that name. Why do I know that name? Because Patrick actually has a podcast called SalesCast. Is it SalesCast or SalesCasts?

28:18 Patrick Joyce: SalesCast.

28:19 Scott Ingram: SalesCast. So Patrick had asked me to be on that show. I don't know how long ago.

28:24 Patrick Joyce: A year ago, maybe a year and a half, year and a half ago, something like that.

28:28 Scott Ingram: So what prompted that outreach? Because you reached out to me. Yeah. I mean, so, so actually you cold called me first and asked me to be on your podcast. Yeah. What prompted that?

28:38 Patrick Joyce: Well, I don't mean… I mean, I had a podcast, but really only because the podcast to me was a mechanism that I could use to talk to people and reach out to people and network. So I cold-called a bunch of everybody. I've tried to talk to everybody in the industry with the premise of, do you want to be on my podcast? Just because it's like a, you know, I never put all that much effort in into promoting it and putting it together the right way, but I'm a fan of podcasts. And you were somebody that, I don't know, it just it seemed like low-hanging fruit, meaning like somebody that had like somewhat of a following that I could reach out and talk to and sit down and have a conversation with. And we had a great chat. And that was like, I think the best one that I had done really is, is the conversation that you and I had. It's still up somewhere. If you search on Spotify, it's still up there.

29:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. And we'll put a link to it. So if you go to top1.fm/124 or top1.fm/patrick-joyce, We'll have a link to that interview and what Patrick did in that conversation. You're right. I mean, I have done, my God, I'm probably coming maybe somewhere close to having been on 100 other podcasts over these last, you know, 4 and a half, 5 years. You did such a good job. Like you, you were such a strong interviewer and it was just, it was the curiosity, right? It was like you were so into this. It was so clear to me that you are truly a student of sales, which is our people. It's the people that listen of this podcast, the people that put up with the fact that I'll release a 2-hour interview and they'll listen to the whole dang thing. Thank you all. And, you know, we just had this really incredible conversation. So Stephen mentions you and I'm like, oh, that makes a ton of sense. And I just called you. Maybe I'll let you pick it up from there because like the situation you were in when I called you was kind of interesting, in some ways insanely validating considering that I was looking for a very special type of like sales tech nerd.

30:34 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so I'm in Boston. It's just after July 4th. I go there every year to spend some time with my family and eat lobster. And I'm getting my leg tattooed by my friend Mark Richards in Salem, Massachusetts. And he gave me a break. You know, we sat for like, I don't know, an hour or so. And he gave me a little bit of a break and I walk outside and I'm standing there and my phone rings. And it's Scott and he's asking me if I want to work for him and that Stephen Chase sent him my way. So yeah, it was, it really was like, I'd say, I guess validating because I've been kind of hanging. I had been kind of hanging out and not really doing much for like the past 3 weeks. You know, I was like, it's like leading up to the 4th of July, I kind of took the week before that off. And then the week of the 4th, I really just was like sitting around and doing nothing. And I don't have a job. I'm not really. You know, beholden to anybody, and I was just kind of hanging out. And like, all of a sudden, all at once, you and multiple other people started to approach me to do some work. So I don't know, I felt kind of like a rock star, I guess.

31:40 Scott Ingram: And I asked you, I'm like, okay, this is crazy, like, what are you getting a tattoo of? And if you're cool with it, I'll actually put it into the, into the show notes. You want to talk about that?

31:47 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah. So in 1993, 2 gentlemen released a game called Doom. And it was the first really popular first-person shooter game. And the COVID art has been something that I've been fascinated with for my entire life. I even posted it on LinkedIn, but yeah, it's the artist Mark's rendition of the COVID of Doom from 1993, the computer game.

32:11 Scott Ingram: So this is incredibly validating as I'm reaching out, you know, with this, I've got like this really unique role that is I need somebody with strong enterprise SDR types of chops who also can have a high-level sales tech conversation. And then what happens is, you know, Justin Michael's been a friend. We've been getting to know each other here the last number of months, and he's been, he's been absolutely incredible. And you guys must have connected because Justin sends me… I'm going to, I'm going to read this because this is, this is just like interesting and it'll give us a good transition point. Justin sends me a note on LinkedIn and he's like, by the way, Joyce is GOAT. He says he's number 1 out of 2,000. He has a wicked gift of setting meetings in the first 3 emails, like powder bending spoons with the mind. He also believes he can. Is that the secret? So I don't think I even read you the rest of that message when we were talking, when we were talking yesterday, but From that perspective, so I think your superpowers from, from my perspective are, I mean, all of these things. And, and I think from a, from a career, you know, job perspective, I think it's important to know, like, this ties back to that whole network concept because this was never a role that I was ever going to advertise. You know, this, this is something that I rely really heavily on my network. And I was looking for something really, really particular. And when I get not only that recommendation from Stephen, but then the crazy validation from Justin, this becomes no-brainer. And I just kick into… I mean, I don't even know what day it was that we have that conversation. I'm pretty sure that I had a written offer letter in your hand a week later, and you accepted and started the next day.

34:05 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, it was less than a week because I was getting tattooed on a Friday. So it was 6 days later I had the offer letter. And then on the… yeah, the 7th day I started. I was working for you a week later.

34:15 Scott Ingram: So away we go. Here we are on day 2. So I want to talk more about… so we've, we've kind of covered the work that you've done on the phone and your ability to have conversations and generate meetings and the way you've been gritty and the way that you have leveraged technology and the way that you've been a student of sales and have consumed all of, all of these books and all of these contents. So you're, you're a guy after my own heart, but this email thing is really interesting and sounds like an additional kind of superpower that you have around the messaging. Like, talk about that. What is that? What, what can you share with the folks listening to us that can help them kind of write better and create messaging that converts?

34:59 Patrick Joyce: Well, I have to do this. Just, I have to mention the Castlevania guides that Justin and I created together. So once we figured out, once Justin had figured out that, that we kind of had lightning in a bottle, so to speak, like we had this ability between the two of us, like between, you know, he gave me a lot of technique that I wouldn't necessarily have come up with myself. And I had some copywriting ability that He didn't necessarily really even care to know, or, you know, we had complementary skill sets, right? Like I was so good at putting the copy together on my first pass. Like I didn't have to revise and revise and revise. I was like keying into something that I can talk about. Once we figured that we had that out, we had that put together. We built these guides and you can find them. And we, I think it talks about the Justin Michael method. There's like a long-form document and then there's a PDF. That kind of looks like a Castlevania video game guide. A lot of the basic components of what we're doing with the sequences are in there. But then the secret sauce is really like, well, what do you write in the email? That's like the number one question that I got back is like, well, what words do you put in there? I don't know. How much do you want me to talk about the actual content or like, you know, like a quick tutorial or, or just more general, like broad strokes? I don't know how, like, how deep would you like me to go?

36:21 Scott Ingram: I guess, Patrick, you know, this show, you know, that we go deep. So of course we'll link the full guides so that folks can get to them. But I mean, let's put some meat on the bone here.

36:29 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. I mean, so if I'm going outbound and I'm trying to get meetings from a sales perspective, right? I'm a sales rep and I want to go get some meetings. Either I'm an SDR, a BDR, or I'm an account executive and I'm trying to build pipeline. That is a very, very different task than trying to do inbound marketing. And I feel like those 2 concepts get conflated a lot of the times. And I've done both. I mean, And in my intro, like I skipped over the part where my stepbrother quit his job on the garbage truck. And while I was teaching, he was building his own business and I built him a website and ran an ad campaign and like generated a ton of business for him. Now I had no idea that I was doing marketing, that I was like writing copy. I didn't know that that's what it was called. I was just hanging out on the internet, you know? So I have a little bit of a background. With marketing concepts. So I'm going outbound to do sales. I'm not, that's not what I'm doing. What I'm doing is I'm interrupting somebody's day and trying to convince them that I have a new way to help them, something that they may have missed. And that's like a very touchy subject, right? Like it's hard to not offend someone with that idea, especially if you're, you know, a 3rd year SDR and they have no idea who you are. Right. So the first thing that I do is number one, I strip down everything that makes me look like a rep. Remove the signature, no company logo. There's no picture. There's no links. There's nothing. It's plain text. I'm not gonna give my title. I'm gonna say at the bottom of the email where the signature goes, in plain text, I'm gonna write Patrick Joyce slash name of company slash my phone number. And that's it. And I'm also gonna make this message very, very short and succinct. It's gonna be 3 sentences. Max. And the first sentence is designed to convince the person to read the second sentence, and the second is designed to convince them to read the third, and so on. This is the very basic copywriting techniques, right? But what I want to do is I want to appear human. I don't want to look like a machine, even though I'm going to use a machine to send 1,000 of these. I don't want it to look like I did. What I'll do is I'll make a mistake on purpose. Or I'll use shorthand. Like one of my favorites is re: with a colon, like regarding, re:. And that's like trademark Patrick Joyce. You know, curious if you open a chat re: sales technology. Next sentence, Acme was able to use us to decrease operational expenditure and get 300 more rep hours per quarter the first 6 months. If it makes sense, when's a good time to chat? Send, right? That's my email. And I'll go to that. Like, I'll go to that for every company, right? Notice I didn't even say who I work for or anything besides what the outcome that I got somebody else was.

39:22 Scott Ingram: So good. So good. And I mean, what's, what's cool about this is also so simple, right? There's so much overthinking that happens. And I think the other thing that, that you kind of have is you've been able to learn this by doing it, and the number of reps that you have done, the repetitions of calls and emails and all of this stuff is huge. I mean, it's probably orders of magnitude larger than any other person. So, so you, you know it better just because you, you have so much more experience around it.

39:58 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, it is a simplistic answer that I give, and it's not because it was a simplistic reasoning that got me there, right? Like, and you're right, the repetitions were very, very, very high. So it starts with really the year that I put in at Fullcast, and I was the only person that was responsible for getting meetings on the team. So I owned the Outreach instance. I had privileges in the Salesforce instance. I could do whatever I needed to do in order to get this to happen, which amounted to every day I sat down and wrote a new email sequence for a whole year. I mean, most people don't do that. Most people have no, like just that alone. Say, even say it was 180 days out of the year. Like that's what you usually get out of a school year, right? Is 180 school days. So even if it was just 180 days of writing a new email sequence every day, it's like 180 times more frequently than like the average rep does it.

40:48 Scott Ingram: Right.

40:49 Patrick Joyce: I mean, so it started there and not only did I get a lot of reps writing an email sequence for one company, While I've been consulting, like I had like between 5 and 10 clients a month that I was writing stuff for. So like I've seen that many different companies every month for the last 10 months. It's like 100 companies in the last year that have different sectors selling to different types of people. So I got to see different patterns and simplify and break, you know, break different concepts down onto themselves in a different way than most people would ever really get the chance to do.

41:26 Scott Ingram: Well, and maybe the most important idea here is the hardest thing to do is to make things simple.

41:33 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I believe there's… I'm going to paraphrase this quote from Ernest Hemingway, and he said, if you give me a day to write about something, I'll give you 10,000 words. But if you give me a month, I'll give you 10. Hmm. Right. Like, it's much harder. It takes much more exploration of the concept to, like, get it into a short form than it is to just, you know, write for days about it. And I think that's like the number one And that's, you know, you're creating issues for yourself in your own messages by making them long. And it really is like one foot in marketing, one foot in sales, because the copy itself, like, you need to make sure that it gets consumed. And the problem is that there's so much competition out there. The inbox is so competitive, especially like selling into tech, that if you're 3 paragraphs, like, there's no chance unless you're like, you know, handing them $100 million. And even then, You're probably a Nigerian prince. So it's just like, I mean, there's no way if your message is long, it's just not getting consumed. Like, think about how much time it would take the VP to read every one of those emails that ends up in their inbox every day and how much money their time is worth. Like, 15 minutes for that person is like a chunk of money. You know, it's like the hours that they put into their job is like directly correlates to how much money they make. You have to be giving them something pretty good to get 15 minutes from them.

42:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Here's what's interesting. And this is probably a perfect time for me to talk about our very newest sponsor. We just brought on Skipio and Skipio is an SMS texting platform that is… there is so much that you can do with this thing. So you can first learn about them if you go to top1.fm/skipio. That's a great place to go. But as we think about these really simple, short messages, these more kind of humanized type of messages, that's what SMS is, right? And it's, it's not nearly as crowded of a channel. And there's, there's 2 ways I'll encourage you to experience this. The first way, by the time you listen to this, we will have the live, the free livestream registration so that you can experience the Sales Success Summit virtually. Available for you. So if you go to top1summit.com, if you're in the US or Canada, as you're signing up for the live stream, it'll ask you for your mobile number. We're going to connect that to Skipio. Skipio is going to send you what… if I've done it right, Patrick's going to help me, so it'll definitely be right. I'm going to send you a very human message that is automated, but what's cool is If and when you reply to that, hopefully you do, you'll be then interacting with me or Patrick or maybe both of us. And, and there's so much more that you can do with this tool. You can do text triggering. And in fact, if you want to try this, we'll have something set up with this experience too. If you text Joyce to 512-813-0676, we'll have something set up for you from that perspective as well, because I'll know that you've listened to this episode. And, and that you're interacting. And one of the things you can ask for in that chat thread… Skipio's put together this really, really great, like, texting in sales best practices document that's absolutely fantastic. So I'm super excited to be working with them, but also just using their tool to open up another channel, to open up a conversation that is so natural to all of us. You know, I mean, a lot of us… I mean, I do… I prefer text over emails for just kind of those, those short, quippy kind of messages and a way to really start to build that, that relationship. So check that out. We'll probably do a little bit of rapid fire here with some of the other sponsors, but hopefully in ways that I can kind of add some value for you in just using these tools in unique, creative, valuable ways. And Patrick, I mean, this is something that you have done so much of. I mean, you, you have used probably every tech tool out there.

45:39 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I think even just hanging out near Justin, who's likely part machine… I do believe that he is a cyborg, and I've never seen him sleep before, and he talks really fast. So there's the question out there as to whether or not he's a man or a machine. And so just, just being next to somebody like that all the time, like, yeah, you tend to hear about, you know, the latest technology. Yeah, I think I've used every sales engagement platform on the market. I don't want to say that because there's so many different vendors, but I've used a lot of the alternative ones as well as the mainstream ones. And yeah, like Dave Delaney or Nancy Nardin and their, you know, sales technology landscape, like if I was playing bingo with that thing, I'd have almost the whole thing filled in.

46:22 Scott Ingram: Do not challenge Patrick in this way. He will win. He will absolutely win. You know, and a lot of it too is, I mean, these platforms, these tools are, are so amazing. There's so much you can do with them. And there's so many things that it opens up from a creativity perspective. So for example, and I've always wanted to do this, one of the things that I've been using Proposify for, another of our sponsors. So this is, all of these are totally shameless. So Proposify not only allows you to send a proposal where it's totally tracked and you can see how your recipient is interacting with it over time and when they're sharing it and all of those types of things. But what I've been able to do with it and the way that we're using it on the sponsorship front, particularly around the Sales Tech Expo, is the starting point of that investment. We're bringing on everybody at the same level initially around that to do 2 things. I mean, one, it kind of establishes tenure. So the sooner people sign those agreements and get on board with us, the better opportunity they're going to have to be able to choose where their booth is and where their sponsored session sits and, you know, have the opportunity to kind of upgrade their sponsorship as we get a better sense of how big is this thing going to freaking be, right? And what is the quality that we're going to be able to bring to the table, which I think is going to be extraordinarily high. And so there's a starting point for, for that proposal amount, but what I've been able to do is offer them 2 discounts that I want them to take advantage of. And all they have to do, they check a box and it recalculates the total and then they can sign in one seamless motion. And I'll tell you what those are. So we send the proposal, it has the baseline amount, but if they'll agree to prepay the full amount, right? Like we're a startup, cash flow matters. I want your money right now. If you check a box to take a discount and agree to prepay the whole thing, awesome. I want you to check that box. And then the second box is one where they're going to agree to help us promote the event to their, their customers and their prospective customers and, and drive people and get their best advocates and get their best customers involved in this event to help them literally sell in the hallways. Again, I want them to take that discount. I want them to help me market that box. And then I've got a couple of other fun boxes. Where, you know, everything's based on net 30. But if you want more time, you're some giant organization and you guys can't do net 30, that's fine. But if you're going to do net 45, I need you to pay me an extra $1,000. If you're going to do net 60, I need you to pay me an extra $2,000. And now the customer is in complete control of that experience. I've given them all the levers and we don't have to have that back and forth. They don't have to ask me. They're like, oh, hey, Scott, we think we want to change this. Can you update the proposal and send it again and then we'll sign it? That is so much friction that can add weeks to the closing process. And so that's one of the ways I'm using Proposify. So if you go to top1.fm/proposify, you can think about incorporating that into your process. Well, that was like, these are supposed to be 30-second ad reads. That was the longest sponsor, sponsor mention ever. But I love these tools. I use them. They can make such a difference if you think about the creative ways that they, that they can be applied.

49:43 Patrick Joyce: Well, it's a live read, and this is why you have to skip through the first 6 minutes of Joe Rogan's podcast.

49:48 Scott Ingram: That's right.

49:48 Patrick Joyce: You did for a long time, right? Because he just talks about the stuff. But yeah, I mean, I get it. It's genuine. It's because you're, you know, you actually are… the technology is actually impacting your behavior, right? Which is, I guess, the whole intention to begin with, and they're actually achieving that.

50:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, that's it. And it's so funny, like, I feel like that's such the lazy approach. I'm not as big of a Joe Rogan fan. I used to listen to the Tim Ferriss Show a lot lot more. I use Pocket Casts. This isn't a sponsored read, but I use Pocket Casts, and Pocket Casts has a setting where per show you can tell it where to start. So I'm like, oh, I'm listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast. Every time I start this, one of these episodes, just start at like the 4-minute mark because everything before that's going to be ads. It's lazy, right? Like, this is the right way to do it. So hopefully, you know, we're providing some, some value in these as we go. Patrick, I want to come back though to kind of this, this career journey idea. I mean, you were kind of all over the place. We talked about how you've kind of taken all of these lessons through all these different experiences you've had. And then in this last 3 and a half years since you, since you broke into tech sales and the SDR role, I mean, you have been on a meteoric rise. Is there anything that you would do if you could start over today? Knowing what you know now? Like, where would you start? How would you approach this?

51:11 Patrick Joyce: If I could start back at the beginning of the tech scene or the beginning of your career, right?

51:15 Scott Ingram: Like, maybe we go back to 2003. I don't know.

51:17 Patrick Joyce: I like this question and I give an answer that nobody ever likes, which is I don't know if I would change anything. I mean, it was really hard. I would say, like, you know, if I wanted to save myself time, like, was it even useful for me to go and get that math degree? I've told myself before, like, oh, I should have just started selling real estate, or like, I should have just got into insurance in the beginning. Like, I've had that conversation with myself, but I don't know if I really believe it. I mean, like, I walked into my first SDR role and it was like a turn… the whole industry, all the doors just opened for me. It was like a turnstile. Like, I encountered no resistance. And then it isn't… I mean, some of it was luck, some of it was timing, but a lot of it was like that I was really prepared to be there. Like, I was sitting down to take an exam that I was way overqualified for, you know. It was just like not difficult for me, and, and that's for a reason. And I don't know if I would really make it any different.

52:14 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's totally fair. What about… I mean, we call the show Sales Success Stories. What's the story of your favorite sale?

52:22 Patrick Joyce: Oh man, that's a good one. I think so. Yeah, I have one in mind, and Not necessarily like this was in an opening role, right? I was trying to open new business and it was for, let's say, a Fortune 100 well-known like credit card company, somebody that you've heard of before. I'm not gonna mention what name it was, but I was trying to get the meeting and I ended up getting it because they came inbound. One of their VPs talked to one of our VPs and mentioned my name and I got a screenshot of it. And it was… that's like, that's my trophy. Because, you know, 2 or 3 weeks went by of me hammering these people. Like, I had cell phone numbers. I got hung up on by the president of this… of a division of this company and still ended up getting the meeting because I called him. I was on the West Coast and he was on the East Coast, and I called him and it was 7 PM local time and he was having dinner, and I called his cell phone. So I was like trying that hard, you know. I mean, there was a mistake. I shouldn't have called him at 7 PM. I should have called him at 6 PM, or, you know, 8:30 AM or whatever, you know, I messed up the time, but my point is I was hammering these. I had a list of 30 different people and I was sending these Venn diagrams and it's something that Justin taught me and that, and that, you know, that is really a popular technique inside the SalesBorg community. But I had this Venn diagram put together that sort of showed the competitive landscape and how this API like wrapped all 3 of the concepts into one. And this was like the basis for a technique that I've taught to like many, many different reps in a consulting capacity, you know, come in to coach the team. And this is something that I teach, and it's really, really was like helped me to formulate my overall strategy.

54:01 Scott Ingram: Talk more about that. Talk about kind of this, this Venn diagram approach, because it is fascinating.

54:06 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, so I had 3 different concepts. Each of the… there was 3 concentric circles, right? It wasn't just a 2-circle Venn diagram, it was a 3-circle Venn diagram. And then each of the 3 circles was labeled with a type of vendor. And then I had all the logos for each of those vendors in each of those categories. So what, and then the company that I'm selling for is the logo in the middle. That's like a little bit bigger than everybody else. And what this does is, is it, you are able to tell somebody a really deep concept that they can understand at a glance. Like they didn't have to read a paragraph. It's a visual, like visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than words. If you had to read a paragraph, it takes, I don't know, 5 or 10 seconds. But this is like within 1 second, you just glance at it and you know exactly what it means. So that's, you know, that's the concept behind the Venn diagram. But what I noticed is that it was getting attention. Like I was sending to this one VP of the title that I wanted was like VP of risk management. And I sent it to this person and I noticed that like with the open tracking software, that, that email with the diagram in it was getting opened over and over again. Like it was getting opened the next day. It was like the next afternoon. So then what I did is I went lateral to that person and I went on their LinkedIn profile and I looked at all the people that, you know, people also viewed and anyone at that person's company, I sent them a message and said, who's in charge of risk management and put the Venn diagram. So all of a sudden there's like dozens of these Venn diagrams floating around on their mail servers. And I'm getting no response. And I'm like very confused. Like now I'm really confused as to why, like, why do they keep opening this document? I've sent it to all these people. They have to be talking to each other about me. There's no way. I mean, how am I not getting any traction here? Like I thought I was, I was stumped. I thought I was cooked. I thought it, I thought it wasn't working. And then like 2 or 3 weeks later, I get a message with a screenshot of this LinkedIn conversation that happened where they came inbound. And mention me. So that, I think, is my favorite one.

56:09 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. You planted a fast-growing tree, it sounds like.

56:12 Patrick Joyce: But then it gets better, right? So the story gets even better. So now I'm consulting. This is a year… a year goes by, I'm consulting, and I'm helping this company that also sells into the same space. And one of the reps that I'm coaching… I'm meeting with these people, you know, week over week for months now. And one of their reps gets an account and it's the same account. And he is trying to get a meeting with the same guy, the VP of risk management. So I was like, no way, no way. And I've coached… now the company that I'm coaching, the reps that I'm coaching, I taught them how to build the Venn diagram. So they had their own that I helped them make. So I went back to the same thread that was in my personal email. Like I was prospecting out of my personal Gmail account, by the way. I went back to the same thread that had gotten the guy to pay attention to it and replied to it in thread with my old message with the new Venn diagram and said, hey, my friend, let's say John at this company that I'm coaching their team, and he mentioned that he was trying to get ahold of you. And I put the new Venn diagram in there and then he got the meeting.

57:23 Scott Ingram: That's amazing. I love that.

57:28 Patrick Joyce: So that's, that's, it's epic. Right? I mean, it's the most epic, you know, full circle year later story ever. So yeah, that would be my favorite one.

57:36 Scott Ingram: Well, and you probably trained him that like, look, if you don't respond to me at this point, you know, I'm going to call you at the dinner table at 7 PM.

57:43 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

57:46 Scott Ingram: So, I mean, in this last bit of adventure, I mean, especially with all the consulting that you've done, the work that you've done with Justin and with Aaron Ross and all these folks, What, what are you most proud of at this point?

57:58 Patrick Joyce: I would say that I'm proud of my reputation for being able to deliver results and open new business in pretty much any market. Like, I like that I'm known for that. I don't know if that's a good answer or not. It sounds egotistical as I'm saying it out loud, but that, you know, that would be what I'm proud of.

58:15 Scott Ingram: But it's a great answer because you and I wouldn't be having this conversation from this particular perspective if that weren't true, right? Because I didn't have to do much work around figuring out if if you were the right person. Like, your reputation preceded you in extraordinary ways.

58:31 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I mean, and some of that is by design, you know? Like, it's music to my ears to hear that it came out that way. It's almost like, it's like a Beethoven. It's like playing a symphony, like writing the symphony without even really being able to hear whether or not it's working, because I put myself in positions to get that kind of reputation. But to actually hear the reverberation and to get it to sound back to you Yeah, it's almost like it gives me goosebumps in a certain way. You know, like, like that was my intention 4 years ago when I stepped, when I walked into the SDR and they're parading me around the company, you know, I'm like, I'm on this parade of new people and I'm in a group of 22-year-olds and I'm 30. I'm like the old creepy guy that's standing there and I'm like, I'm going to take this industry over. You know, I'm like brooding. So to go from there to here is pretty cool.

59:18 Scott Ingram: Well, so I'm going to ask sort of a selfish question, right? So you, you had access to this great reputation, other people reaching out to you. Why me? Why this opportunity?

59:31 Patrick Joyce: Well, I told you this when I think you… I guess you were interviewing me. I guess that's what was happening. It's not really how it felt, but at one point you asked me, what's the most important thing to you? And it's not money. Like, money is not the most important thing because I could go and get a job as an enterprise rep and like just close a bunch of business and, you know, probably make $700,000 or something if I wanted. If I really… if that was my goal, I could go and do that. But… and you were like, well, if it's not that, then what is it? And I want to do something cool, you know, like I really just want to do something cool. Like I'm fascinated with, you know, early '90s rock music, like Nirvana. Grunge hits the airwaves and then all of a sudden you went from being really cool to like you didn't get the memo if you were listening to Mötley Crüe and you had like primped up hair. Like it just went from being like the coolest thing ever to completely ridiculous. So just, just like, you know, changing the axis of the world by a couple of degrees is something that I'm interested in trying to do. You know, when I was a little kid and they asked me like, what do you want to do when you grow up? This was my literal answer to my 3rd grade teacher. Dude, 3rd grade, 8 years old. I look at my teacher and I said, I don't know, but I want to be in the history book. Right. I mean, I'm interested in doing something that kind of shifts the earth on its axis just a little bit. That's more important to me than, than making a lot of money. You can't spend it in the cemetery.

1:00:53 Scott Ingram: I love it. I love it. And, you know, there's you… I think what you want and your style and, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things that are like very different, right? You do not fit the traditional kind of AE SDR mold. But, you know, if there's anything that I've learned from this show and all of these interviews and what the makeup of top performers is, is to be the very best, to create extraordinary results, you just have to lean in really hard to who you really are. And I think for me, right, like, that is my leadership challenge and opportunity, is to help Patrick be the best Patrick, even though like in a lot of ways we're, we're very, very aligned in, in terms of our, you know, '90s nerd culture fascination with, with Doom and Hotel Castlevania. And, you know, like Justin sent me… it took me a minute to get the reference. I'm like, oh my God, I know what that is. What is that? He sent me like a GIF of Double Dragon. I was like, oh my God, you'd think I would know what that was instantly with the amount of time I spent with that stupid game as a kid. And so there's those things. But let's talk now. I mean, this is, this is one of my favorite parts of the show, one of the most fascinating things that we do. And I think everybody's about to learn about the part of us that is so different. People are gonna freak out right now. Let's talk about how you structure your day. So yeah, I mean, you, you know how I do this, right? So, so alarm goes off. What time does that happen? And kind of walk me through this because I think this might start to blow people's minds a little bit.

1:02:39 Patrick Joyce: This is going to be hilarious because we couldn't… I was hoping that this is where you were going with this because this is the funniest part if you ask me. I'd say my alarm goes off and it's probably at like 7:30 AM. This is what happens. 7:20 AM, an alarm goes off and I snooze it. 7:30 AM, the same thing happens. And then the same thing happens again at 7:45, and then again at 8:20, and then again at 8:30, and then probably again at 8:45. And then somewhere around 9:00, 9:15, I actually get up and get out of bed. So that's, that's the beginning part of my day.

1:03:14 Scott Ingram: And for folks, I mean, if you're new to this show, if you don't know the whole background, sleeping in for me is 5:30 AM. Like, when I'm on my game, I'm up at at 4:30 in the morning. And, and I, you know, there's a lot of morning people that I've talked to on this show. We'll come back to this, but I think that context is interesting. Like, we live on different planets when it comes to the way that we structure our day and, and where it starts.

1:03:37 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, and it comes full circle. Like, it goes all the way back around. Like, so I'm getting up at 9:15. Like, 10 AM is about when I'm like rushing into a meeting. Like, I'm like, you know, so the day is already… and we're at 10 AM Pacific. It's 1 in the afternoon on the other side of the country, and I'm like just rolling, just opening my eyes and like drinking coffee. I go through my day, I'll work from, you know, until 6 PM or 7, you know, 6:30 PM or whatever, and my wife gets back from school and we hang out for a little while. But then oftentimes, like in that beginning part of the day, like I'll go to the dog park with my dog and do some other things, and maybe I have an appointment or go to the grocery store and this and that. And then at 10 PM, I turn back on. It's like when everything quiets down, I have the… definitely have like an ADD type of brain diagnosed. I don't, I don't mean this like, you know, some people say like, oh, I have OCD. Like, that's not what I mean. I literally have been diagnosed like your brain doesn't work the way everyone else's does. So when everything quiets down and there's no notifications and the world sort of like gets nice and easy from a sensory input type of perspective, I turn into overdrive. So 10 PM to 2 AM, those are my golden hours. So I sleep from, you know, 2 AM until 10 AM, and that's, that's my usual day. And so it's 2 AM on the West Coast, and Scott's like just waking up because it's, it's 4 AM for him, right?

1:05:02 Scott Ingram: That's right. And we've been joking about that, right? Like, we're gonna have this really strange overlap. I think the key here is, and what you have to understand is I'm not gonna ask Patrick like, man, you need to turn into a morning person. Like, come on, man. Like, the cycle we run here is we start at 4:30 AM Central Time. That's never going to work, right? You know, whether, whether you're a morning person or in the case of Patrick, just an extreme night owl, I think you have to recognize what those patterns are. And again, just from a reputation perspective and a results perspective, I don't care when you do it.

1:05:42 Patrick Joyce: And again, that makes me feel like a rock star. It's like, it's like, he's a genius, don't bother him, he's gonna be up until 2 o'clock in the morning, just wait, it's gonna be good. Like, I mean, it feels cool to like have that as my reputation. My wife, I told my wife that and she was like, oh my God, aren't you embarrassed? And I was like, embarrassed? That's an accomplishment.

1:06:03 Scott Ingram: But you know what, for me it is kind of living what, what I've been preaching for, for the last number of years on, on this show, right? To me, great leadership is leaning into the styles and the uniqueness of the individuals. And you are a seriously unique dude. And I think, I think we're going to have a lot of fun working together, you know, but, and I'm having to adjust, you know, some, some of my style and typical things because I, even in the short period that we've been kind of working on this together, I understand who you are and what drives you and what some of those personality things are. And, you know, yesterday we were talking about, I'm like, you know, what, what's the best way for us to work together, right? To really be collaborative and work through this stuff. And we're sort of the same in this way, although I'm much more kind of written, paper-driven, to-do list-driven, but I do have this component of I develop my thinking through conversations, even if you're not responding. Like, I just need to talk to somebody to kind of sort things out in my own head. And I think you're a lot the same. And I mean, literally what we've decided to do is, okay, well, let's just make sure that we have a short daily conversation every day and we'll work through kind of what's the biggest priority? What are you working on? You know, where do we need to focus? What do we need to kind of talk through to set up our strategy. Whereas for other people, like, that's never gonna work. Like, in fact, that would be horrible. Like, oh my God, I have to talk to my boss every day.

1:07:40 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Yeah. No, it really is. I do. I process things the same way. Even so, I do jiu-jitsu like 3 times a week. So I'm in this jiu-jitsu class and whoever my partner is ends up getting an earful from me because it's me trying to work out what I'm supposed to do. I'm not trying to instruct the other person. I'm talking to myself and they're just there, you know, like this tackling dummy for me while I'm trying to verbally process whatever we're trying to figure out. So yeah, that's definitely the way that I work also. And the way that I worked with Justin, I mean, Justin and I, we had 2 calls a day, one at the beginning, one at the end, and we just made sure that we were both on the same page all the time. Just close contact. You know, he put me in front of all the work that needed to be done. He's like, if I could just point you in the right direction every day, we're gonna be fine. You know, that's pretty much how that relationship worked. So I mean, yeah, you know, as long as we are sharing a common vision and I can kind of see the headway, yeah, I think it's gonna work out just fine.

1:08:36 Scott Ingram: Well, and that, I mean, that is kind of the entrepreneur's dream too, right? You know, people ask me a lot like, okay, so Scott, you know, when, when do you just go all in on this? And for me, there's actually a lot of value in continuing this as a side hustle for as long as I can because it forces me to build a really great team to be able to execute without me having to… I think the entrepreneurial trap, and I mean, there's a book, Michael Gerber wrote a book called The E-Myth that, I mean, is a super old book, but is, I think, still totally relevant. So many people try and take on everything themselves. Well, for me, my biggest constraint has always been my time. You know, I have to perform in a regular quota-carrying, multi-million-dollar quota job just like everybody else. That has to be my number one priority. That has to be my number one focus. And so now I only have so much additional time to do the rest, and I can't do it all myself. And so it forces me to find great people to kind of shore up and take care of the things that I can't take care of myself. And Patrick, you're doing this too. Yeah, I mean, you've talked to me about like, I've got some weak areas, here's how I fix them. You want to talk about that?

1:09:58 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm always juggling multiple projects. I'm parallel processing so many different things at the same time. My areas of weakness are Definitely organization, time management. Like, and this has been since I was in the first grade. Like, I was one of those kids where you would walk by and the teacher would like check your desk to make sure it was neat and tidy. And she would open mine and like fall down on the floor because she fainted because it was like, so there was like snacks in there from 2 weeks ago, you know, it was just like, like this huge mess of crumpled papers and you could never find anything. But if you said, Patrick, can you find your homework from 3 days ago? And I would, I would be able to pull it out in one swipe. I knew exactly where it was because the mess makes sense to me. You know, and it just looks terrible to everybody else. So I think it's a pretty good analogy. My desk in the first grade compared to my life today, they're pretty much, you know, similar figures.

1:10:50 Scott Ingram: But then how are you kind of augmenting yourself to solve for some of those things? And, you know, like particularly the data entry and just the boring work?

1:10:59 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, that stuff, it absolutely murders me. So I've learned to just pay for help. Like I have a company in based in India, is literally a superhero. He does all, all of the data work that I can… anything that's a repetitive spreadsheet or something I need to do, a data pull or whatever, like I just outsource it. And Aditya has literally like saved my career multiple times. He was doing, I think, 40% of my job while I was a full-time rep. And then I also have a virtual personal assistant. So like if I need plane tickets, an eye appointment, and, you know, just like a bunch of normal life things, I leverage a personal assistant to help me get some of those things done. So it's like a… what, it's one WhatsApp message away, me getting those things done rather than spending an hour and a half on it myself, even though it should only take 20 minutes because I got distracted 16 times while I was trying to check out in the, you know, to buy the airline tickets. So I've said this before in interviews, and I don't think I mentioned it to you yet, but this is a good line where if you asked me to go to the grocery store and get milk, take the trash out on my way out, and then pick up the dry cleaning on the way back, but you have to be there by 12, and if you could also grab the mail, that'd be great. I'm probably going to mess up all 4 of those things. But if you handed me a problem set on particle physics with no textbook, I'd probably be able to figure it out in a weekend. The skill set of normal day-to-day activity is really, really difficult for me, but this stuff that's impossible for most people just seems obvious to It's so fascinating.

1:12:29 Scott Ingram: But, you know, I think what's really interesting from my perspective, again, like having done a lot of these things, like I have, I have a VA and I have a graphic design team and I have an audio editor. And, you know, I have this whole team that I have built over these last number of years that allow me to pull off this, this show and the Sales Success Summit and all the things that we do. And what's super cool for me is I didn't really just hire Patrick. Like, I just hired a frickin team.

1:12:57 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, right. Yeah, you got Task Minions and you got She's a Given also. And She's a Given is based out of Seattle. If you're looking for a personal… this is not a paid advertisement, but if you're looking for a personal assistant and you're in the Seattle area, I think they'll really service anywhere because it's all virtual now. But yeah, She's a Given is the name of the company.

1:13:15 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:13:15 Patrick Joyce: And Ashley is literally like a major part of my life. So yeah.

1:13:19 Scott Ingram: Well, here's her next task. I'm going to make another kind of selfish pivot here, but it's another important thing and kind of focus area that we'll be working on here for the next you know, month-ish. She's going to need to book your travel to Austin coming in Sunday, October 10th, and you'll be leaving… actually, for you, for most people, they'll leave Wednesday the 13th. We'll probably keep you the whole week and keep the team in place so that we can do some additional work. So I guess we'll have to figure out the back end of this together. But this focus that you'll be working on here with the Sales Success Summit, is really important. And, you know, I'll talk about that just a little bit. We've got, I think, well, it's a little bit hard to quantify this because we're going to have this, we're having this conversation a little more than a week before this, this episode releases. Right now, I'll just do it this way rather than guessing. Right now, there are 81 tickets left to this year's Sales Success Summit in October, October 11th and 12th. You can find the details at top1summit.com. And we're going to sell out before the end of August. So if you want to come join us, you need to buy your ticket like right now. Reach out to Patrick. He'll help you. We'll get you, we'll get you squared away. Maybe in the afternoon.

1:14:36 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, you can text me. You can text me and I'll text you back a riddle. And if you get the answer to the riddle right, then you can have a ticket.

1:14:43 Scott Ingram: There you go.

1:14:44 Patrick Joyce: Or you can, then that opens your ability to purchase one.

1:14:48 Scott Ingram: Patrick, what's your number? We're gonna let people like literally text you. And this, unfortunately, not yet is this Skipio. This is like literally Patrick's phone.

1:14:56 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, text me. It's 206-591-3367.

1:15:00 Scott Ingram: There you go. Or you can probably call him too. I bet he'll take your call.

1:15:02 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah. And that's on my LinkedIn profile too. Like, I don't… I mean, I will literally take a cold call from anybody. I don't mind. I put my number out there. And usually the spam filter is pretty good. You know, I don't get too many robocalls. It's usually people.

1:15:16 Scott Ingram: There you go. There you go. So, you know, if you're in the community, you know, Patrick definitely wants to hear from you. We're going to be building this thing out, you know, over the course of the next month or so. I will be finalizing the agenda. It is going to be absolutely awesome because the only people I allow on that stage are the folks that have been on this podcast. They are the quota-carrying top individual contributors out there. The content is going to be incredible, but What's going to be even more meaningful is just the connections and the conversation and the experience that we're working to build around this thing. The theme this year is world-class sales teams and world-class sales performance. We've, we've got some super cool tricks in store around that. We're going to take you down to the Salt Lick for some of the best barbecue in Texas. We've got an afterparty planned that is going to be the most fun thing. We're partnering with UnCrushed. So if you heard the bonus episode with Tim Clark, and the work that he is doing. I'm gonna be writing them a, a pretty significant check and encouraging others to do the same in support of the work that they're doing around mental health for sales professionals and, and those dealing with addiction and, you know, other, other issues that many of us have, have challenges with. So really excited to be partnering with them. And again, this fuse is gonna be very, very short because I think at this point you're starting to get a sense of Patrick. And I'm gonna point Patrick at helping us round this out and bring together the best people who are us. I mean, if you're one of these, if sales is a craft and you're a student of this profession and this is your career and you want to do extraordinary things, this is who I build this thing for. You are our people and I want you to be there, but this isn't gonna be something where you're gonna get to wait around and like, oh, maybe I'll make the decision in September. That ain't gonna happen. But if you don't want to spend any money, at the same time, you can sign up for the livestream. We're going to stream all of this content. It's going to be totally free because we have some absolutely incredible sponsors. And you'll be able to do that on the same page. So top1summit.com is where you go either to buy your ticket and be one of the few, the proud, the 198 that will be here in Austin, or you can sign up for the livestream and get access to what I think is going to be some of the best content in sales this, this year, because these folks, you won't see them anywhere else. I mean, most of them, this is the presentation that they will give. They might give a presentation at their sales kickoff on stage, but, you know, they're not out there. They're not writing the books. They're not giving keynotes at every sales conference on the, on the planet. They're busy selling. So anyway, that was a really long commercial. Patrick, any, anything you want to add? I mean, any, anything that you want to share about kind of your, your own excitement around the summit? Because I mean, obviously you're going to be there.

1:18:04 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. I mean, the interesting part to me is, is that it's almost like it was this magnet or like this planet that I was drawn toward. I was pulled into the gravity of this thing just by the nature of existing, right? It's like this is the center of all the sales tech and the who's who of the whole industry. And then all of a sudden I'm in the middle of it. Like, it's just, it's like, like a tractor beam. You know, just like got sucked right into the center of this whole thing. And that's, I think, really what excited me about working with you or just working on this is that sort of the mission that I've been on in the past year to like really just be an expert in sales and sales technology and be known for being an expert. It just, it landed me here. So the whole thing is like this, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy that this whole thing that you've been spinning this up for quite a while and I've been kind of tangential to it, right? Like I, hasn't been in my line of sight. And then all of a sudden, just, you know, the 2 worlds collide here. Like, I feel like it's going to be a supernova or something.

1:19:06 Scott Ingram: And then, you know, I mean, true to the role, I mean, you know, the responsibility for attendee experience is, is really mostly just a conversational one, right? So, you know, part of, part of the work that Patrick's going to be doing here too is every ticket holder hopefully will, will get an opportunity to connect with Patrick. And I, what I know he's going to do is he's going to do everybody a favor. Right? He's, he's going to help everybody out and make sure that they're having an incredible time with, with no expectation. But, you know, I mean, they have given us money, so it is kind of a delivery of value, and it's just going to continue and ratchet up from there. So I absolutely can't wait.

1:19:39 Patrick Joyce: But it's, it's also a different experience than the usual, you know, event that you go to, like some similarly priced events that you can, you can buy tickets to that kind of look like they're the same. They don't give you the same experience. So that's the exciting part for me is to evolve the offering in the industry and just be a part of it. Yeah. And getting to have those conversations and talking to everybody, like, dude, I mean, that's what I do, you know? So yeah, it makes perfect sense.

1:20:06 Scott Ingram: Let's come back to, we kind of glossed over the details around the structure of your day and your approach and your habits because we were just having too much fun with how different our schedules are. But I mean, Let's talk about a little bit more of the details, right? So, I mean, what I have typically seen with those who aren't morning people, they don't have a morning routine, right? It's like, no, my morning routine is like consume caffeine and survive the first meeting or 2 as I, as I start to warm up. You know, what is that true for you? And give us just a little bit more kind of granular, detailed insight into the way that you're structuring your day and the way that you're structuring your processes and your approach and things like that.

1:20:47 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, it definitely is the way that I start my day is that I'm usually flying by the seat of my pants and I'm like 2 or 3 minutes late to the first Zoom call. That's about how it goes like every day, certainly. But then, you know, as I get warmed up and I get through a few calls and I have some tasks to do, I mean, while I was a rep, it was a little bit different. I was like waking up a little bit earlier when I was on the hook for, you know, closing revenue. As a sales rep, like selling software, I was a little bit more disciplined about when I would get up and when I would make calls because I would like to get a few phone calls out of the way right in the beginning part of the day, catch people, you know, between 7 and 8 AM local their time, ring their cell phone. You know, everybody's working from home. It's like this weird like COVID time where like it was like okay to call people at 7 in the morning, I guess. I don't know. So I would like to get some of those out of the way. But typically what I'm doing is sandwiching my day with like a bunch of like tasks that I have to do, whether those are Zoom calls or coaching or like writing or whatever, you know, tasks in the beginning. And then like the middle part of the day is like there's a lot of floating involved for me where I might even just be sitting at my desk pondering, right? I give myself a lot of time to think and process and make connections. I thought I was really weird and I despise time blocking. Now, this is contrary to very popular advice that you need to like minute by minute schedule out your day and like color code the calendar and all that. And that literally gives me anxiety. Like, I can't, I can't possibly live that way. I'm going to… those things are going to bleed over and then I'm late for this other thing. And the other thing is this self-imposed like thing that I'm trying to… it just, it's not for me. But then I saw an interview with, I believe, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were both sitting down and getting interviewed together. And Bill Gates was talking about his time-blocked calendar. And then Warren Buffett's like, is empty. He doesn't write anything down. And I'm, I'm more of the Warren Buffett type where I want part of the day to just sit there and like kind of work things out in my head and be creative and think deeply about how I want to approach certain scenarios or what connections need to be made. Or, you know, like that time that you get… a lot of people get this time like when they're in the shower, right? It's like a sensory deprivation tank. It's like you're not thinking, the outside world is sort of not giving you any input and you have time to just sit there and ponder in your thoughts. I like to go to that place. So I think that that's, I don't know, I know that I probably sound like a space alien to a lot of the people that are listening to this, but that's a big part of my day.

1:23:16 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's just, it's different styles and you just have to lean into what you are and what works for you. And I mean, certainly, I mean, it's not just Warren Buffett. I mean, I think as you Even Bill Gates, right, has his think weeks, right? He's, he's kind of famous for like, I'm just gonna hole myself up in a hotel for a week with a giant stack of books and I'm gonna think about stuff.

1:23:38 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I do that a lot. I do. I have a stack of books in front of me. It's all the… it's a bunch of Sandler books. Like, one of my friends Gavin Tice is a Sandler trainer and he sent me a care package with a bunch of books in it. So I'm sitting here looking at these David Sandler books, like, my wife's out for the day, I'm I'm probably going to crank through at least one of these books.

1:23:57 Scott Ingram: That is a perfect transition because I always love to ask about the information diet. So, so what do you read? What do you listen to? What do you watch? When, when do you do that? Like, how does that fit into your day?

1:24:08 Patrick Joyce: Dear Lord. Yeah, I mean, I read everything there is. So, okay, I'm usually reading 3 books at a time. Again, I have a very different kind of brain. Like, if I'm interested in something, I will consume the entire book. One sitting. And sometimes I don't finish them. And sometimes, like, I'll read a third of the way through it and then get kind of bored and then pick up something else. And then I'll go back to that one. And I kind of rotate through stuff. One of the things I'm reading right now is My Ambition. It's like Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson's, like, autobiography, you know, somebody helped him with the writing part of it, obviously, you could tell. But you could tell that, like, a lot of it is him, like, whoever the, you know, the co-writer was, is like, literally like recording what he's saying, like typing out like word for word what Mike Tyson said out loud. Like you can hear him say it as, you know, as you're reading through it. But he's, you know, certainly an accomplished fellow, and, and there's like a lot of parallels between the way that his life started and the way that mine started and the way that he approached it and the way that I approached it. And I don't know, that, that's kind of cool. And then I've got these Sandler books I'm working on. I'll go and reread stuff. I just finished Tech-Powered Sales for probably the 3rd time. I did the audiobook recently. So I'll listen to audiobooks a lot. And I'm also reading, like, I'm always reading David Ogilvy on advertising and something that I cycle through constantly. I just finished Matt Wanty's book, Smart Calling, I think. Yeah. Anyway, Matt Wanty's new book, I just finished that one, the audiobook. Really, really good. So like pretty much everything that's out there, I'm trying to consume it. And then there's certain favorites that I have that I'll circle back to. I used to be big on podcasts. I don't do as many of them anymore, but I'm really into audiobooks. So like while I'm, you know, drive time is, is really good time for audiobooks. Nicholas Nassim, I'm forgetting his full name, but Nick Nassim Taleb, I believe, Antifragile. That one's really good. It's really long audiobook, but that book is really, really good. I've done that one. So like, I don't know, a combination of self-help, sales books, and Just like interesting stories of like people that have been successful. I think that was actually the theme of the whole first conversation you and I had, Scott, on my podcast a long time ago was like, how did you become successful? I was like literally interviewing anybody I could find that was successful and asking them how they became that way. And then 2 or 3 years later, like here we are having this conversation, which is a little bit different.

1:26:31 Scott Ingram: There you go. What changed with, with kind of the podcast? Why did, why did that fall away for you?

1:26:36 Patrick Joyce: I mean, it was fun for me to do, but ultimately pretty time-consuming. And I even found somebody to help me do the production. James Bawden is really, really good, but I sort of, I was paying him to do that for a while, but I kind of just lost interest in it. I have 5 podcasts recorded that I haven't released yet. I became too busy with other things. It's not that I'm not interested in it, but it was a fun thing. It was a nice to have, not a need to have, and other stuff kind of got in front of it in line.

1:27:03 Scott Ingram: What about with your own listening habit though? Because you said you focused more on kind of audiobooks lately and less on podcasts. Did something change?

1:27:09 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it just really crowded. Rogan… I listened to Joe Rogan when he was at, you know, from like episode 1 to episode 1,000 probably, and he's like way past that now, you know. I just… I've kind of fallen out of favor with, with some of my favorite ones. I like… they just There's nothing wrong with it. It just, you know, I don't know. I've kind of moved on. There's one that I'd listen to though, Dax Shepard. My wife is really into Dax Shepard, Armchair Expert. I guess there's like a very heavy female audience to that show, but he's got interesting guests. He had Barack Obama on there not that long ago. So that, I mean, it was, you know, here and there I'll listen to an episode, but I don't have any that I'd listen to religiously.

1:27:49 Scott Ingram: Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. So now I'm going to open probably the biggest can of worms there is. I typically ask About the tools and apps you can't live without. So let's, let's talk about Patrick and his tech.

1:28:01 Patrick Joyce: Oh man, look, G Suite is like actually what it is. Like, this is the interesting part is that I'm sort of known for this sales technology, revenue operations, kind of like, you know, tech stack wizard kind of person for sure. But when I was a rep, I was literally using Gmail and Google Sheets. Like that was my tech stack and oh, and Yesware so that I could track the opens. That's literally all I wanted. I just wanted the pixel in there so I could see if it fired and if they were going back to my email and reading it the next day. That's all I wanted to know.

1:28:33 Scott Ingram: Dude, you gotta say more than that.

1:28:36 Patrick Joyce: I mean, that's literally what I was doing. Like I was, so, you know, I've used email sequencers. I don't want to, you know, pick one favorite because to me they all do the same thing. Like if you can automate my emails, like that's cool. I want to make sure that it gets behind all of the filters though. Like, I don't want the mail server to be able to detect that I used any type of automation, which I'm suspecting that that's starting to happen, that, you know, the, the mouse is starting to outsmart the trap, so to speak. Like, I'm very afraid of getting caught up in, you know, either ending up not in the inbox, like in the updates tab, or, you know, getting marked as spam and the message not getting getting delivered. I'm very, very wary of that. So like, I almost want to go lo-fi. I've used Reply.io. That one's pretty good in terms of email sequencing. Like, for me personally, I use a lot of different, you know, apps on my phone. Like, I have a Google Pixel and I use like the Assistant on there. WhatsApp is literally my entire life. Like, everything business related happens on WhatsApp. It all goes down in the DMs, you know, Spotify to stream music. Like, I don't think I could live without having music in my headphones. It's another work habit of mine. You know, I'm either listening to vinyl out loud, like cranking it on the speakers, or there's like… I have noise, you know, like some nice Bose noise-canceling headphones that I'm streaming Spotify into. I use all the different social media apps, you know, the LinkedIn app, like all these different… you know, this is pretty standard stuff. The bulk of… I actually, I call it like a deconstructed tech experience, right? Where You know, like a cheeseburger. Everybody knows what a cheeseburger is, but if a fancy chef were to make you a deconstructed cheeseburger, they'd give you like a, you know, a sourdough crouton and a slice of Kobe beef and then like some Parmesan foam on the side, right? Like that would be a deconstructed cheeseburger. And that's kind of what I'm doing with my tech stack. Like I'll use some automation software to send the emails, but then I'll go and do the calls. Maybe out of a dialer, you know, like an Orum or ConnectAndSell or something. I might do the dials out of there and then I might go and do my social media completely separately and I'll do it all manual, right? So instead of like picking like day 1, here's your first task, you know, day 3, here's your next task, day 5, task 3, you know, instead of thinking about it that way, I'm kind of layering all these things on top of each other. I guess it's the opposite of a deconstructed cheeseburger.

1:31:01 Scott Ingram: So a cheeseburger? Yes. Oh my God, that's so funny. So what about, do you subscribe to like a particular sales philosophy? I mean, especially as well-read as you are across like all of, all of these books over the last number of years.

1:31:19 Patrick Joyce: I wouldn't say like that there's one. I'd say that I even have like a new sales philosophy that I prescribe to. I invented my own, you know, it's, it's really just to me, a lot of them, once you read everything, a lot of these concepts, like end up collapsing onto each other. You know, they push the same ideas around in different ways and Challenger and SPIN and gap selling, like, are, I mean, very similar ideas and it all kind of goes back to Zig Ziglar anyway. So what philosophy is that? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, David Hoffeld, I think, had one of the coolest books, The Science of Selling. And he took a similar, like, agnostic scientific approach. Like, what are all these different concepts? And like, what are the actual results? And like, let's just think about it that way.

1:32:03 Scott Ingram: So what about… I think people are hopefully starting to kind of intuit, but I'm interested in kind of what would you call it? So like, what is your style?

1:32:13 Patrick Joyce: My style is to really jump into the other person's perspective. And it even goes all the way back to when I was a teacher. Like, if you're trying to teach somebody something, like, first of all, you understand the concept and they don't. There's your first problem. So you're not on the same page just by nature. It becomes really, really difficult to explain something to somebody and have them understand it without sort of stepping on their misunderstandings. Like, it's really difficult to do that. And the way that you can accomplish that is if you flip your perspective. If you put yourself in the student's chair and try to remember what it was like to not know something and then look at the board, it gives you like a superpower. Like, this is your superpower concept coming up again, where I have the ability to like jump into somebody else's shoes and look at the world from their angle. And like, that's what my style is. And that permeates all the way through when I'm having a conversation with them and when I'm writing an email and when I'm talking to them on the phone, I'm trying to imagine what their world is like. And I think that's really like what a lot of my strategy and technique centers around.

1:33:17 Scott Ingram: I love it. I love it. All right. This is probably the most important question for me. We'll just let everybody else listen in. So like, what motivates you? How do you think about motivation? Like what drives Patrick?

1:33:31 Patrick Joyce: Well, this is interesting. I had a conversation with Luigi about… Luigi from SalesIQ about this very question, and we talked about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I bring up that conversation because it's one of those podcasts that I have like sitting in the chamber that I don't know was ever published or not. It could be if you search for it on Spotify, it might be there. But that conversation really developed my understanding because he was talking about how Most people have like extrinsic motivators, which is like, I want to buy a car. I want to drive a BMW. I want to make X dollars per year. And the problem is that you get to the end of the rainbow and it doesn't feel that good, or it's, it's over. It dies out. If you can figure out how to motivate yourself intrinsically, like sort of like a fuel source that you don't need any input for is the way that I think about it. Something that can drive you, that you can come up with on your own. You're gonna be much better off every single time. So the intrinsic motivators that I think about are, how do I advance myself in my career? What are, what are the goals that I would like to accomplish? And make sure that I have a really, really clear vision of what those goals are. And the clearer that image is, the easier it is to walk towards it. And then I just make sure that I'm pointing in that direction and then figure out what are the micro goals that will get me there. And then your brain will automatically do this. It's like the first thing that I teach when I'm coaching a rep is I sit them down and I crack them open and I ask them, what makes you tick? What do you want? What would you like to do? Where do you want to go with your career? What are the things that you want to accomplish? And if I can establish a connection there, all of a sudden oxytocin is the chemical that your brain releases and you, you develop trust with the person when you can share that common vision with them. That's how I think about motivating myself or teaching others to motivate themselves.

1:35:19 Scott Ingram: Let's continue that a little bit because you and I have had some of this conversation and, you know, done the cracking open, if you will. Like, what are those things for you? Where are you hoping to go in your career? And then I've got some, you know, additional commentary I'll add to that for sure.

1:35:35 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I mean, I really want to help people as much as I can. And it's not the celebrity of it. It's really just like the transmission of ideas. Like, if I can have an idea or novel concept or a way of thinking about something or a technique or something that I can share with others to help them, I want to share that with as many people as possible, right? Like, I would like to be a published author. I would like to be known for somebody that can deliver results that sort of had like pure intentions, right? Like, it's… I don't want to be known for selling snake oil. I don't want to be known for, oh, that guy's famous, but like his stuff doesn't work. Like, I want to be known for like, oh yeah, if you need a safecracker, you want to call Joyce. He's the guy. And I've, you know, certain scenarios and what I've experienced recently, like I've accomplished some of that, but I don't feel done yet. Like I haven't really put my stamp on it yet. Like I'm not quite where I want to be. And, you know, leading an organization is something that I really have aspirations towards doing, like getting to the point where I'm running my own company and running my own sales team. Like I've, you know, I went from 0 to 100 in, in 3 or 4 years. Like, you know, just, and then the next 3 or 4 years, I want to do the same thing. I want to continue that pace of progress. So those are the things that like, I, you know, they get me out of bed every day.

1:36:51 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I feel like there's a little bit more than that that you've shared with me that I totally get that is, you know, maybe not what you want to share publicly. You know, for me, the way I think about this is when I think of my why, I mean, there's a couple of different angles. And if you've listened to this and listened to me on other shows, I have maybe slightly different answers. It's not really that different though. I think if I boil it down and I try and get specific, what excites me is being able to change the trajectory of other people's careers. And I've been able to do that in my sales role, right? In, in just my day-to-day job and setting up people to do extraordinary things and making them look good and helping them advance in their careers. I know from the messages that I get from people that listen to this show. And in fact, I'll be doing an interview here. It might even be the next one. It's probably the one after though. Had a listener reach out with unbelievable story. I mean, just mind-blowing. And I mean, he attributes a lot of it to having listened to this show and having heard these conversations. As I think about this team and the folks that I'm bringing on, I mean, I'm not kidding. This, this isn't like an aspiration I take lightly. I'm literally trying to build a truly world-class sales team with the best people who are driving each other to extraordinary results, but doing it as a team, right? This is not… I'm not looking to hire a collection of individual top performers. It's going to be a group of people who, yes, individually perform, but together are able to push each other and challenge each other and help each other grow And I'm really, really cognizant of where are they ultimately trying to get. And Patrick, I think with you, I think my reality is I'll be lucky to hold on to you for a year. I think you're going to need to just go on and grow and do bigger and better things. And you know what? That's a great outcome for me, right? Like, I want you to succeed because I know, like, when you're succeeding, when you're, when you're doing the things that, you know, we're determined to do around the summit and around the expo and these things we're putting together, like the results, the experience is going to be extraordinary and your brand is going to continue to grow and your visibility is going to continue to grow and we're going to help you get the book done and, you know, all of, all of those kinds of things. And you are on such a trajectory. I just, I think you're probably going to outgrow me and I'm fine with that.

1:39:20 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. And it's really cool to work with somebody that is at least upfront with that from the beginning because that's what had been happening to me. Like, I worked for 4 companies in 3 years, and I outgrew all of them, like, very, very quickly, like, within 6 or 8 months. Like, I haven't had the same job for more than 10 months in the last 6 years. I mean, think about that.

1:39:44 Scott Ingram: And so many people would look at that as, well, that's a failing, that, you know, this guy's a flight risk, he's not gonna… he's not gonna do what we need him to do. Honestly, I think it's We do this through the Sales Tech Expo in April, and then we're probably having a conversation about like, are we continuing this or is it time for you to go? And, you know, like, I'm good with that outcome because we'll find the right way to help you transition to kind of backfill you and, you know, continue the experience that people are having and away we'll go. Yeah.

1:40:15 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. And, you know, I definitely share a very similar I get a lot of satisfaction from watching people grow. Like when I was a teacher, there was one kid that wasn't even in my class and I had a free period with him. You know, he was in a study hall with me or something and he just talked to me a lot about math and the kid was really, really gifted and I ended up like helping him get through. Like he ended up getting into a program at Boston University and finding a way to get the tuition paid and grants and scholarships and all this stuff. And he was from like a really low-income district. He was a super disadvantaged individual that I watched basically start out his life as an adult with an advantage that he had over the, over the crowd and that I had something to do with. And that was like probably the most satisfying experience I had as a teacher. So yeah, I've been searching for an element of that in this, in this crazy sales world where it's a, you know, pretty cutthroat and, and like, you know, uh, revenue and outcomes focused, finding a way to actually help people is something that I've been after.

1:41:18 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I love it. Well, and that's a good transition. I wanted to talk a little bit more about your networking approach and about kind of this doing favors thing. Like, how do you think about that? How are you managing that? Like, what is kind of the overall structure to that?

1:41:32 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, you just have to take every interaction and play it out. Do a thought experiment that goes one step further than where you are right now. Like, how does this person think about you? After they walk away and you're no longer in the room. That's the end state that I'm trying to monkey with when I'm interacting with somebody, right? Like, and I got this from my brother, my stepbrother that I worked with in the Teamsters Union. He was the shop steward, which meant that he was the representative of the people to management. He was the go-between between union leadership and management and the regular guys. So he was kind of like… and it is an elected position, right? Like, he was voted in as the guy that was chosen to represent the union workers. And the way that he got there is by doing favors for everybody his entire career, from when he was 18 years old until he was, you know, twice that age. For 20 years he did favors, and I watched him do it. I was a part of it when I started working with him. I was like his laborer, so I was on his truck with him And my Nextel, I had a Nextel, I was hooked into that network and my Nextel went off all day. It was people that were trying to get ahold of him. So I'd like watched all of this stuff go down and watch the way that he conducted himself and how he kind of dealt with the people. And I wanted to model that approach. I wanted to be a man of the people, meaning like I was just a regular sales rep, right? Like I'm, I don't want to be somebody that's too far above the fray. Like I mentioned this to you, a couple days ago, like, I'm deathly afraid of losing my edge. Like, I don't want to be somebody that's, that's too far from the action, right? Like, I want to be a guy that you would, you would hand a rifle to and want him next to you in your foxhole, right? Like, that's, that's who I want to be.

1:43:16 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so good, so good. All right, this I think for you could get really interesting. Is there something you believe that the average sales rep would think is crazy? I guess you'll just have to pick one.

1:43:28 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, like I'm trying to get something that's like actually kind of impactful, like prospecting from your personal Gmail account. I think one of the things that I came up with the other day is there was a short list of things that I thought about. One of them was never ask permission for something that's going to make the company money. And there might be something that goes against process, but if you think it's going to make the company money, you should do it anyway. And then on the other side of that, if you're being forced to do something that seems stupid, you should stop doing it immediately and quit your job and go find a better one.

1:44:03 Scott Ingram: You've lived that.

1:44:05 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I don't mean this against any of the other companies that I've worked for. It just, for me, like it just felt like, dude, this is like, what am I doing right now? Like if I ever found myself asking myself that question, like, what am I doing right now? This seems silly. I walked away and I found something else. I wasn't afraid to not deal with something that I thought I had a better answer for and to go and find it and do it myself. I wasn't afraid to do that. And I think that that goes against a lot of the common wisdom that's out there, which is kind of stay in line and march and be a good soldier and stay at the same company for 5 years and things will work out for you. But if I did that, there's no way I would be where I am.

1:44:45 Scott Ingram: So what's an example of that? Like, what is an example of like so stupid it justifies like, I just need to bail?

1:44:52 Patrick Joyce: Calling old leads in the CRM, like leads that, you know, the data is incorrect, or, you know, you're pulling from this list of, of companies to reach out to, and then as you're dialing the numbers, it's like the person has moved jobs, and like, you know, the data is like poor quality, and like you're being asked to like continue to work that list Like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, you should make a new list, right? And like, if I had continued to call the list, I would be down at the bottom or the middle of the leaderboard with everybody else. But because I said no, I'm going to go and actually make a list that, that has clean data in it that I'm going to scrub myself and build it. I'm stepping way outside of the boundaries of what my job description was and what I was being asked to do. But there's no way that I would have had the same success that I that I ended up with if I didn't do that.

1:45:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. So what about the flip side? Is there something that the typical sales professional believes that you think is just nuts?

1:45:49 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. 3-paragraph personalized emails. It just seems like a crazy idea to me. I believed it. I know why you believe it, but it's a crazy thing to do to think that you're actually going to open new business that way. It just doesn't work.

1:46:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah.

1:46:03 Patrick Joyce: I mean, it just… and it's a heavy, heavy lift. It's like you might even get 1 out of 100 or 2 or 3 out of 100. To message you back and they're going to be pumped that you like inflated their ego and like did all this research on them. What about the other 99 people that you spent 20 minutes each on an email for? Right? Like, you don't need to do that. You can lead with outcomes and find business relevance and then repeat that across like multiple verticals.

1:46:27 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. So, I mean, you've done a fair amount of coaching. What advice do you give to somebody that's early in their career? Right? They're just getting their start in sales.

1:46:36 Patrick Joyce: Pick up the phone, get good on the phone. Getting good on the phone was definitely like, before I walked in the door, it was a superpower. I mentioned the 1-1000, 2-1000 click. Like that's the amount of time that I was used to. So I was used to like wedging my way in there in the first couple seconds on the phone and getting somebody into a conversation. You know, there's a few different ways that we did that, but it doesn't matter because that was the goal that I was going after that the rest of the team didn't even know was there. They had never picked up the phone before. They hadn't even, I mean, younger people these days, they don't even pick up the phone to order a pizza. Right? So having the phone skills, I think, was massively, massively important. And then when I met up with Justin and he was like, oh, you should call up and down the phone tree and do this and this and this. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You mean this and this and this? I was already on the same page with him because we both kind of had this old school mentality. So that's the number one thing I would say. Literally just a skill that goes really, really far. It's just get good on the phone.

1:47:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Now, how does that sound different? So, and maybe we can give like real-world examples, right? What is the 2-second, you know, wedge your way in approach sound like compared to your approach today? I mean, are those different? Yeah.

1:47:47 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Now it's… and I learned this from Justin. You're trying to establish the power base of the organization that you're calling into. So if I want to get into risk management, right, I just… I use this one all the time. 'Cause this is one that was very familiar. It was the last full-time role that I had was I was selling into risk management titles, but I would call the VP of risk management and I would say, hey John, this is Patrick from Sales Success Media. Who's in charge of risk management? That's my 1-1000-2-1000, right? There's the wedge in because the person's answer, if I'm calling the VP of risk management and I say, who's in charge of risk management? Guess what the answer is? Me. I am. Oh great, how are you handling that now? Oh, we use another vendor. Oh cool, yeah, I've talked with a bunch of companies that use them. What do you think of them? You know, all of a sudden we're in. I'm in. I'm getting intel from you immediately. It's not like, hey, this is a cold call, do you mind if I have 30 seconds? That sets up the power dynamic so that they're in charge and you're subservient to them, right? You become the beta in that conversation and immediately by asking them permission to have a cold call with them. I'm not asking permission. I'm jabbing them in the mouth and saying, who's in charge of your job? Right? That's the only thing that that person can control in their whole world. It's like the fiefdom that they have. They have control over the budget and who does what job and what the job description looks like. And they'll tell you all about it because I opened the phone call and asked them that. From the beginning. I want them to tell me, right? I want to get the other person to talk. And then, you know, a couple minutes in, they're gonna say, hold on, who are you? Where are you from? And then you can pitch.

1:49:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, start a conversation, right?

1:49:30 Patrick Joyce: Exactly. And get stuff out of them, right? Like, get them to tell you. Oh, and guess what? If they're not in charge of that and they say Sally is, you say, oh cool, is it okay if I use your name when I call Sally and tell her that you referred me? You're in, you got the meeting. If the VP or the C-level sends you down to somebody else and you say, yeah, I just talked to your boss and he asked me to call you, you have that meeting, right? Like you're in.

1:49:54 Scott Ingram: That's it. That's it. Again, we go back to it's simple, right? You don't have to overthink this stuff. There's not all kinds of weird jiu-jitsu you need to do. Like ask, open with a simple question, start a conversation.

1:50:07 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Who's in charge? How's that work? How are you handling that now? How's that working out for you? And why don't you plug us in as a multiplier? There's the framework. Those are the 4 questions I'm trying to ask.

1:50:18 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Now, what about somebody that is a little bit further into their career and either they're feeling a little bit stuck or maybe they're good? Like, hey, I'm doing fine. I'm making my numbers, but I'm not number one yet. Like, what's your advice for them to either break through or get to that next level?

1:50:35 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, Pareto principle. It's all 80/20. So in any closed system, 20% or less of the input to that system is responsible for 80% or more of the output. So that means that most of the stuff that you're trying to do in your day is wasted energy. So let's identify those things, right? Like, you might notice that you end up spending a lot of time, I don't know, loading data between spreadsheets and downloading from ZoomInfo and trying to get it uploaded into Outreach. Outsource it. It's $8 an hour in India, and they would… and that's not… you're not underpaying. It's like they would love $8 American to do some of those tasks, right? Like, use a VA, pay for a personal assistant to do some of it. Outsource the tasks that take you off of your money-making activities, and you'll immediately see an improvement.

1:51:21 Scott Ingram: There you go. There you go. Let's talk about the specifics of that process to getting to that point. How are you finding a VA and just getting that process started?

1:51:29 Patrick Joyce: Well, I mean, I was introduced to Task Minions and they've done an incredible job for me across all the companies that I've consulted in. I've given them, you know, sent them a lot of business that way. Again, not a paid ad. I get no kickback or referral or anything from Task Minions, but they've been incredible. And then I just literally just searched for a personal assistant. Like, I, I asked around, I asked in my network, like, you know, who do you guys use or what does anybody else you know, have any recommendations? And I think it was a Google search that I just stumbled across She's a Given. So I mean, I literally just… the service is there, you know, it's just a matter of fit. You might have to go through a couple. It's almost like finding a therapist or something that you have to go through a couple before you find somebody that you click with.

1:52:11 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. And I've also found, again, through kind of my adventures with, with VAs over the years, and I've had a great one for the last… she's been working with me for at least I don't know, 2, 3 years at this point. I needed to figure out how to do it well, right? Like sometimes I don't think it was necessarily on them. Like I just wasn't very good at leading and managing that type of role. I've also found that in the kind of interview process, give them instructions for and a sample project, and I pay them for this, but give them a sample project to work through that is kind of typical of the work that you would need to have done and see how do they perform, how is their communication, all of those kinds of things. And you can do some vetting pretty quickly that way.

1:52:57 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, right on. Yeah, for sure. And I use… I mean, I use different services for different things, you know, like I'm not going to call Aditya and ask him to book my plane tickets, but I wouldn't call Ashley and ask her to do my spreadsheets or whatever.

1:53:10 Scott Ingram: Right, right. Yeah. So definitely, definitely that specialization. And I mean, the other place you can, you can start, and I've had some really good success Just working with folks through Fiverr is another just great, great resource. So F-I-V-E-R-R, 2 Rs, fiverr.com is a great one.

1:53:26 Patrick Joyce: Here's a bonus prospecting tip with Fiverr. If you have a prospect that you're trying to get ahold of and you have their attention, they're opening your emails and they're not responding, pull their profile picture from their social media and give it to an artist on Fiverr. And for $5, have that person draw a cartoon of your prospect. And then send them that image in the email thread where you're trying to get them to respond to. I've done that one a bunch and it works really well.

1:53:50 Scott Ingram: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Well, we've done some free shoutouts. I've got one more that I almost didn't get to. And so apologies to the team at Vidyard, but here's my theory. If you're still listening to this, you are the highest quality, smartest salespeople out there. So Vidyard has been actually my longest term sponsor. Incredible, incredible tool. And I'm gonna give a shout out because he shared an idea. I love hearing from you guys, right? So don't be shy. Send me an email, scott@top1.fm. Reach out to Patrick. Heck, he gave you his phone number. I'll give you my phone number. You can reach me on my mobile. You know, you know what? I don't, because that's not my favorite channel. It's better to email me and then we can find time and then, and then I'll schedule time to talk with you. But Vidyard is so powerful in so many different ways. I mean, Patrick, The first thing I did when you started, you know, I set up your account and I wanted the first message in there to be a note from me. And I just recorded a minute-long video just to say, man, I'm super pumped that you're here. And one of my great listeners, Steve Reed, shared a thing that he did. And I'm going to bury the lead on this because where Steve works is, I think, just super fun. But he says, you know, every now and then we bring on this batch of kind of seasonal workers and they become part the team, and he wanted to really connect with them. Clearly, Steve is an incredible team player. He's like, there were 15 people. I spent 20 minutes recording each of them a short personalized welcome video message using Vidyard and fired those out. And think about like the impression that that makes. And the coolest part about Steve is Steve sells for the Minnesota Vikings. So, you know, just, just such a cool, cool approach. And if you'll do that, this is one of my favorite things. I, I haven't offered it up in, in a while, But go to top1.fm/vidyard if you're not already using the tool, even, and even if you are, it doesn't matter, and record a short video. Don't even worry about like screwing up, making it perfect. Like I want the first take, screw-ups and all. Email that to Patrick or I or both of us and we'll respond. We'll send you one back. So check that out. And Patrick, I'm sure you've done some fun, crazy cool stuff with, with Vidyard and video over time as well.

1:56:07 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I really have done a lot of work with video. My favorite way to use a video is to use it to punctuate a conversation. So if I have a conversation with you over the phone, immediately send a video. And what you'll notice is that video will get forwarded around the company. All of a sudden now you're having… you do a wrap-up call, you do, you know, a 30-second summary of what you discussed in the call, and now 15 people at that company are watching it. Whereas if you just hung up the phone, like, you wouldn't have gotten that far. So anything to the right of the conversation, to me, it's like you can do magic with video.

1:56:42 Scott Ingram: Jeez, I should have just opened with your idea. I'm gonna do that.

1:56:47 Patrick Joyce: Yeah.

1:56:48 Scott Ingram: So I always like to ask the question, like, what's the thing that you want to know about top performers and other questions? And, and I, I guess the corollary to that question, just in, in our situation, given we're, you know, less than 3 months away from the summit, like what's the thing that you're going to be asking people as we're having conversations at the summit in October?

1:57:06 Patrick Joyce: The number one question that is on my mind is what would you like technology to do that it doesn't do right now? I want to hear the answer to that question from everybody.

1:57:17 Scott Ingram: Fascinating. And what is that for you right now?

1:57:19 Patrick Joyce: For me is I'm imagining like Justin talks about the Jarvis suit, like an Iron Man suit for a sales rep where you can literally have one SDR support 100 reps. Like the technology I believe exists. It hasn't been tied together in one package yet, but I'm imagining almost like getting into like one of those mech armor suits, right? It's just like this thing that gives you this ability to fly and, and shoot missiles and launch grenades and things. I mean, using, you know, again, like '90s Transformer, 9-year-old Patrick type of imagery here. But anyway, that's what I'm thinking about. Like that's, you know, When does the tech come out that like erases, that makes, you know, 3/4 of the Nancy Nardin sales tech landscape, you know, folded into one platform? I'm waiting for that to happen.

1:58:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think what's… I think a lot of people kind of fear the technology from that perspective. Like we're thinking about replacement, but I don't think that's it at all. I think technology used right, the direction that this ultimately goes in is, to your point, it makes us superhuman with a true emphasis on the human. Like, it allows for you to have more conversations and spend more time in the most meaningful parts of the sales process and the sales motion and serving your clients, and less in just like the minutia and the BS that, you know, technology can totally do.

1:58:44 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, think of it this way, right? Like, in the mid-'90s, Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue in a chess match, and it was the first time that a computer beat a grandmaster at chess, right? Like, the computer won. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have chess players anymore. That means that we have better chess players now, right? Like, Magnus Carlsen came up and was, was the computer kid. Like, he was studying computer lines, like, you know, moves that are calculated 22 moves in advance and like understanding what those 22 moves were. And from the time he was 8 years old, and now he's like the world's best chess player, right? It didn't replace Magnus Carlsen. It made Magnus play better.

1:59:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I love that. I love that. All right, like, we're super long. Like, this is again for the super fans. They tell me, they're like, oh, I mean, they get fired up when they see a 2-hour-plus interview in, in the feed, right? Like, oh my God, it's on, we're going on. Good one. And again, clearly you're at like super fan level. You're, you're still here, you're still finding this Fascinating, and and we're going. Why don't we turn the tables a bit? I'm sure you have some questions for me that the audience is is probably dying to either ask or wishes you would ask. I mean, let's let's really go deeper into pulling back the curtain here a bit because I haven't done it in a while.

2:00:04 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, I mean, so the first one is really you kind of beat around it a little bit, and Stephen Chase gave you the referral to me, but like. Like, why did you, why did you come to me?

2:00:15 Scott Ingram: I don't think I beat around it too much, right? It was, I mean, first, and I'm, you know, pretty process, pretty strategy, you know, as I, as I think about the organization that I want to build, the, the types of players that I want, the types of roles, the experience. So I mean, what you described when you were talking about your style, right, and just you're able to really put yourself in the shoes of the other person. That's what I want. Like, I'm not looking for a sleazeball salesperson. Like, I'm looking to serve this audience and I'm looking to serve the broader sales community as we start to go deep down the sales technology kind of rabbit hole to help organizations and help teams and help leadership figure out the best way to make this stuff work to give their sales professionals superhuman powers. And it's a really special, unique person that I need. So I was, I was already pretty clear about who and what that was, right? They had the background to be able to use these tools themselves really well, but, but also were just extraordinary humans, knew how to serve people on the other end, right? Like when, when you're able to, I mean, you talked about also just stripping out all of the stuff that looked like sales. Because, you know, like it or not, sales still has a bad reputation. And when you pull that away and it's really about, look, I'm here to help, right? Like, my job is just to help you navigate this, whether we're navigating the Sales Success Community and the summit and making sure that people are having an extraordinary experience there, there, or we're navigating just this crazy landscape of sales technology and helping people understand and get clear on, you know, this is probably the most important thing to focus on. And why wait until the event for you to get connected and have a great conversation with a sponsor? Like, why don't we start now? Why don't we make that connection now? And then when you do join us in person in Austin, you're that much further. Like, you're already through those awkward introductory steps in the conversation, and now we're having a super meaty, meaningful conversation. You're bringing your whole team, like, okay, let's figure this out. I mean, we're all gonna be together. Let's, let's sort through this. So again, it was that special combination of those character traits, of that experience, of that ability to have that kind of conversation that I was looking for. And just like I've talked about, I've been doing actually a lot of coaching here recently around, you know, helping people choose the right role for themselves. And you have to do kind of that introspective work on yourself and figure out like, who do I want to sell to? What sort of an impact do I want to make? What drives me? In the show notes, I'll link to a story that I wrote in the first Sales Success Stories book that I've also shared on the podcast here as a bonus episode, I don't know, like a year and a half ago, that tends to help people a lot. And it just came down to that, like when you have that clarity, asking for what you want gets very, very easy. So when I had that conversation with Stephen, I knew what I was looking for and being able to articulate that made it just a no-brainer process for him to connect the dot and say, you just need a Patrick. And that's how it went down.

2:03:50 Patrick Joyce: That makes perfect sense. And I guess that was like maybe a selfish question because I really just wanted to hear a little bit more about, you know, how that came to be, I guess. And, and that, that's, you know, you answered it artfully. Here's the other question that I came up with while you were explaining that is the 3 questions, you know, the top 3, like what is your… what made you be so successful? Like, you know, the interview prep questions. That I got, I immediately play this out from the other angle, just like we've been talking about from your angle, which is he's asked the top 1% of the entire sales industry the same question. What are the commonalities? I haven't been able to listen to every, every single episode's, you know, top 3. What are the commonalities? Like, what answers do you keep hearing over and over again? Are any themes? Or like, you know, how do you… I keep using this phrase, collapse things down onto each other, but What are some of the prevailing ideas that come through that are common between people?

2:04:47 Scott Ingram: Man, that's a great question. And it's been a while. There's been a couple of times historically where, again, I've had my assistant kind of work to consolidate that so that we could look for those themes. I've done some word clouds in the past. If that's interesting to you, if that's like, Scott, I'm dying to know the answer to that too, send me a note. We'll put some extra energy energy into kind of doing that again. Off the top of my head, I think it comes down to there's always just a component of you've got to do the work. Like, there, there is no… I've never talked to anybody who is, I figured out the secret 4-Hour Workweek version of this, and I'm so efficient, and I'm so strategic, and I've, I've found silver bullet that allows me to sell like a rock star. Even if they have, I mean, to some degree, I mean, you've, you've kind of gotten there. You know, Jack Wilson, when I first talked to him, you know, the way that he kind of boiled things down and was able to get, you know, really efficient and clear and stay away from having to make just huge numbers of calls and things like that. There's a little bit of that, but in order to get anywhere near there, It's a ton of work. Like, you really have to study, you have to do the reputation, the repetitions, you have to kind of figure this out. So there's always a work grit. This is a craft, you know, you really study this, you study the other top performers, you talk to the other people in your organization, and in the industry that are performing at a high level. That's one. Another is whether they say it or not, you know, part of my role, and, and I take this very seriously, you know, the tagline is for the show, and I think I started this way, I think it's always been the tagline, I consider my job is to deconstruct world-class sales performers. So what you tell me your top 3 things are, as you listen to these conversations, may or may not be what I actually think they are after we we've really started to dig in. And one of probably the most important things that I've sort of picked up on, and this kind of broke some stereotypes that I, I had in my head coming into this process where I thought, you know, the, the top performers are selfish, ego-driven, you know, would, would run over their own mother because winning at all odds is, is sort of a thing. Right? I don't know that I've ever found that or, or had that conversation. Now, I think there's a self-selection bias. I think I've probably talked to some of those people and they won't come on the podcast because they don't want to be exposed that they're giant a-holes. But so the theme is there is such a strong component of servant leadership, and the reason we do this is to help us, is to help our customers get the outcomes and the things that they want, right? So, when I think about this myself, it's that, you know, changing the trajectory of people's careers. The things that you talked about, Patrick, just in terms of the empathy and impacting people. I think it really comes down, and a lot of times it is, it's that even though the vast majority of people that I interview are in B2B sales, We're in human-to-human sales and we're thinking about like the individual buyers and the individual stakeholders and what this means to them beyond, we're going to help your company make more money and save, save cost and, you know, whatever other stuff it is. It's bigger than that. Right. I'll say the third thing again, whether or not this is like self-identified, it is this theme of they have all figured out how to be the best versions of themselves. They figured out their style, their process, their approach, and they're… they've doubled or tripled down on that. That to me is, is like the secret ingredient. Like, it takes a lot of work, right? There's a lot of introspection and thinking and like, wait, what is it about me? And leveraging your, your network and asking your customers and your colleagues and your leadership, like, you know, what is it about me that people appreciate the most, that resonates, that connects? And leaning into those things, not worrying too much about your weaknesses. And, you know, if you need to shore those up and you need to hire a BA or 2 and other people to help you, that's great. Like, that's what ultimately does it. So, you know, again, whether or not that gets like truly effectively represented in what people say across, I mean, at this point I've connected what, 300 and let me see if I can do the math, 372 of these data points, right? Top 3 across 124 people. You know, they use a lot of different words, but to me, those are the top 3 things that ultimately end up kind of coming out.

2:09:49 Patrick Joyce: It's very interesting to hear your answer. And I think so to go back to the first part, when you were talking about how, you know, there's no magic formula to boil this down into 4 hours. I would follow up by saying go back to the 80/20 principle where when you figure out what the 20% of your input was that was the special sauce that like gave you all the results, you turn your whole day into that. And then all of a sudden you, you're, it's like a recursive formula. Like you're doing the formula on top of itself over and over again. So even if you do boil it down into 4 hours, you just do that for 40. That's right. Brilliant.

2:10:24 Scott Ingram: So well said. I love that. I love that.

2:10:26 Patrick Joyce: And that's is really what, what it is. It's like you keep finding the gaps, you keep finding the holes in the workflow, and you try to make it as efficient as possible. And then you just like redline it, you know? Like, that's, that's where success… and that's why successful people are successful, is because they don't stop at the 4-hour workweek and just do their job in 4 hours. They just do that all day, and then they do it again the next day. And then that's how they're getting so much more efficiency and effectiveness than other people.

2:10:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so good. And I mean, I think that theme shows up in a lot of different ways, right? Because some people will talk about that in terms of they're just ruthless in the way that they qualify, right? Like, I want to figure out as soon as I can in that conversation, like, can I actually help you or not? And if I can't, like, you're out. I'm not going to waste any more time here.

2:11:11 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And I was doing that instinctively, like, on the phone, you know, in my first SDR job. I didn't know… I didn't have definitions for what I was doing. And I wasn't like classically trained, so to speak, but I was just doing that instinctively, like getting somebody on the phone and figuring out whether or not they were gonna buy the texting thing. Like, you know, it's just… that's what my job was. I boiled it down on my own. Love it.

2:11:36 Scott Ingram: So yeah, what's next? What else you got?

2:11:38 Patrick Joyce: I guess the other question was why. You know, I like the stay true to yourself, but that's not an answer that I would have come up with. I would almost say that I have been successful despite the fact that I've been unafraid to just be myself. I'm curious how you think about that, either for me or anybody else. Like, how do you think that that plays into my success? Because honestly, I felt like it's something that I've kind of had to work around.

2:12:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I mean, that is interesting because you are… you're kind of an extreme case, right? I can imagine you would scare a lot of leaders. Right? Like, you know, in the interview process, they kind of figure out your style and your approach, and they're like, oh my God, like, I can't, I can't deal with that.

2:12:18 Patrick Joyce: Well, I have a good example. I once asked a VP of sales how he came up with the territories in the, in the quota plan, and I think his jaw was open for maybe 2 or 3 seconds on Zoom. You know, it was just like, I didn't think I was going to get that question today, you know, kind of a response. So And it's literally happened before.

2:12:39 Scott Ingram: Sure. You know, I think again, like, to me, what has allowed you to produce the results that you have are predominantly because of who you are and because of your approach. And sure, you might be overcoming some things, but you've also just kind of recognized like, this is what I'm about. I mean, and you did a great job. Like, you were super clear with me. Like, man, these are my gaps. Like, this is some of my stuff you need to understand. Approach and kind of like what you're getting into here. And that's important, right? But it is a balance, right? And that'll be our relationship going forward too. Like, I'll let you know when I'm like, you know, Patrick, this part is not working for me. Like, we're going to have to figure out another way to kind of work around this because I can't deal with X or Y. But yeah, you know, the fact that you called out and I think the vulnerability and the authenticity is another important thing that you're like, Look, I'm seriously diagnosed ADD. Honestly though, I mean, this is, I don't know, this is gonna sound weird. Like, I'm super into, my family and I are watching Atypical right now is kind of like the show that we're watching together. So we're, you know, we're typically watching like an episode together each evening, which is a lot of fun. And, you know, where you've got the main character on the spectrum and I look at that and I'm like, like, man, as long as you're willing to set up a scenario where they can succeed, right, where you're gonna have to help them work through some challenges that just aren't typical, like that just don't kind of fit into the, the normal box. But if you can create that environment, they have superhuman powers. So I want the superpowers. Bring me the superpowers and we'll figure out how to work around the other items. Like, do I love the fact that your day doesn't start until noon my time, which is like in my world 2/3 through my day? No, but it doesn't matter because I know what your superpowers are and what it's gonna mean.

2:14:39 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, yeah. And that's, I mean, that's pretty much why I was willing to work with you. I mean, we're really pulling the camera back, you know, pulling the curtain back at this point, but that, that's why I was willing to work with you. And Justin did the same thing for me. Like, he met me and he was like, Oh man, oh dude, this guy's a superhero. You just have to put him in a superhero costume. Like, just let him do whatever he wants to do and he'll make you $1 million. Like, you know, he was like, you're tortured as a rep because they're asking you to kind of like march in line and like you're way too smart to march in line. Like, you should be like one of the Green Berets that's in the Special Forces or something. Like, you know, it just… he saw that in me when nobody else did and allowed me to sort of almost like make a market for my own skill set, which you eventually found out about, right? Like, and you treat it the same way. You're like, oh dude, if I just let this guy go off, like, we're gonna do just fine.

2:15:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And I think, I think this is kind of part of the challenge of what I'm seeing, and I understand it, right? Like, it's really hard to scale this type of an approach in a really large sales team, but there's a lot of, you know, we're this management by numbers kind of stuff, and we're trying to put everybody into the same box and manage them the same way. And man, that's not it. Like, you have to help people kind of figure out their thing. And, you know, I'm gonna figure out like, oh, Patrick needs a phone booth. Like, I just, I need to make sure that he has a phone booth so that he can change into his superhero costume and then watch out rest of the world, right? Because it turns out he can fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes. Like, okay, that's pretty freaking awesome. Yeah, nobody else can do that. So, you know, it's in a lot of ways, this is so fun for me because I get to practice what I preach and I get to create my own laboratory and I get to show like, look, this isn't just like some theory that I have. Like, this is legitimate and real. And you wait until you see what, what we build and, and the level of growth and the level of outcome and the level of experience that we can deliver is going to be mind-blowing.

2:16:47 Patrick Joyce: It sounds like you're Professor X, like talking about the Mutant Academy right now or something.

2:16:53 Scott Ingram: I guess maybe that's what I'm building.

2:16:56 Patrick Joyce: Very funny.

2:16:58 Scott Ingram: I like that. It's fun to be able to kind of share that deeper philosophy that I kind of have around this stuff, right?

2:17:04 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. And if you, I mean, even if you notice, like in the chain of questioning, like there's no way that I could have had those questions lined up. Like I'm thinking about it on the fly, and that's how you dig really deep. Like, that's… you know what I mean? Like, I'm standing there with a shovel just waiting for you to, like, bait yourself out. You know, you make yourself… you know, you put some, some stuff out there, and then I could just go one deeper on it, and then we're there. You know, like, that's… yeah, that's kind of how I do that, man.

2:17:29 Scott Ingram: That was fun. I appreciate the questions. It's neat to be able to go a little bit deeper into some of this stuff. Again, this for me is I don't know, it feels like a little bit of a gift. I hope I'm not overselling it here, but, you know, to me, this is a little bit of a gift to the regular listeners and the deep fans who've been enjoying this content. And, you know, I just, I did want to share not only Patrick and, you know, all that you're doing and all that you've done. And I mean, this, this will be fascinating. We may have to do a round 2. And in fact, maybe that's how this works. I'm going to talk out loud here because this is, again, how I process and how I think. So now we're totally peeling back the, the curtain. You know, I would love for this to be kind of the model where there's a welcome conversation and we talk to folks as they join the team and, you know, kind of introduce them to the community and, and give them a feel for who this is. I mean, a number of the other folks that I'm going to bring on have already been on the podcast, so that'll be a little bit easier. But there may be like an exit interview, literally, where we talk about here's what we did and here's where you're going. And, you know, here's kind of what, what's next. And like I said, I think in your case in particular, it'll be interesting to see how it develops because something tells me that might not even be a full year from now. But, you know, that is what it is. I think we're going to have an absolute blast together. I think we're going to make great money together. I think we're going to drive incredible results and have a lot of the impact that ultimately drives both of us. And as you know, the way that I like to wrap up these interviews is with something really actionable, right? We've covered a lot of ground, talked about a lot of stuff. What would you challenge the listener to do over the course of the next 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

2:19:12 Patrick Joyce: The number one thing that you could do is mindful meditation. No matter who you are or where you are, what you're trying to accomplish, you know, I could give you a tactic about emails or this and that, but you can go read all that stuff. I put it out. It's in everywhere. If you could stop what you're doing in the beginning of your day and spend 5 minutes, 5 minutes meditating and just not thinking about anything, being really intentional with the overarching theme being trying to accomplish whatever your long-term goal is. If you can just do that, have a long-term goal in mind that you meditate on every morning for 5 minutes, you'll have a better life in 3 weeks.

2:19:51 Scott Ingram: All right, I want to resolve a piece of that though, because you just hurt my head. So you're gonna be quiet and not think about anything for 5 minutes, but you've got a long-term goal in mind. So that sounds… yeah, about something. Help me.

2:20:01 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, but, but just don't think.

2:20:06 Scott Ingram: Okay, here's a good way to explain.

2:20:08 Patrick Joyce: Yeah, you're planting a seed, but then anytime you go to think about anything, imagine a whiteboard in your head that's getting filled with ideas. Like, swipe the whiteboard, clear it off, and just only think about the whiteboard empty. As soon as something starts to get drawn on it, clear it out. Stop Right? If you can just do that… it's crazy, it sounds like a crazy thing to do, but we never spend any time with our brain like in neutral. And if you can just do it and you're trying to like, you know, you wake up and think about what's my long-term goal and then meditate, like that's, you know, that's what I'm talking about.

2:20:40 Scott Ingram: Brilliant, brilliant. Now if the apps that I use didn't automatically skip the silence, I might suggest that we leave 5 minutes of dead air on the podcast before I say goodbye, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna to do that to folks.

2:20:54 Patrick Joyce: That would be incredible.

2:20:55 Scott Ingram: That'd be awesome. You know, maybe, maybe, maybe we'll do it. Let's do that. In fact, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what I'm going to do. Patrick, you know that embarrassing outtake that I'm not a fan of that you kind of liked? We're going to leave 5 minutes of silence right now. This episode's going to like look like it's 3 hours long. That's totally insane. Not quite, but it'll be close. We're going to leave 5 minutes of silence. And at the end, we'll drop like one of those clips that that we threw out on, on the cutting room floor. And I think it's going to be the one about like your philosophy of sales, like your corollary was freaking hilarious.

2:21:28 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Yes. What you'll get is, is the secret to all selling from Patrick Joyce if you do 5 minutes of meditation at the end of this episode.

2:21:37 Scott Ingram: Patrick, you are amazing. Thank you so much for not only this, for not only spending 3 hours with me on your second day of work on a Saturday, Sharing, you know, just cracking open your, your head and your heart entirely and sharing everything. But thank you for joining this journey with me. It's, it's going to be incredible.

2:21:55 Patrick Joyce: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. I'm trying to figure out how much money you have, and then I'm trying to take it from you. That's my philosophy of selling. I mean that literally. I mean, you know, I've worked in retail. Like, that's what you do. You range the person's wallet and then you empty it. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and And for an invitation to our Sales Success Community, powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.