133: Passion, Dedication and Detail Focused with LivePerson's Melissa Gaglione

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Revenue Grid, Outreach, and Vidyard. To learn more about them and all of our sponsors, just click over to top1.fm/sponsors.

0:20 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve.

0:29 Scott Ingram: To learn more, visit us at top Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Melissa Gaglione. Melissa was the top SDR at LivePerson until very recently being promoted to an account executive role. Welcome to the show, Melissa.

0:47 Melissa Gaglione: Hi, Scott. Nice to be here.

0:49 Scott Ingram: Well, I'm really glad you're here. We are going to have a lot of fun in this conversation today, and I want to start like we always do with some immediate value and talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success so far?

1:03 Melissa Gaglione: Okay. Alrighty. So, top 3, that's hard because there's, there's a lot that has contributed to this. But to start off, number 1 for me is having people invest in you. So, there was a lot of people at my company who took to me, who liked me, who decided to invest their time to help me grow my skills. And to have people on your side is number one. You have to have people buy into whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, and they're going to help you get there. So number one for sure is surrounding yourself with people who are experts, who are smarter than you, and who believe in you. Number 2 would definitely be forming an incredible morning and evening routine. A lot of people have been talking about that this year. For me, it was something that I've always worked on, but really, when I mastered it this year, it really showed. It showed in my work ethic, it showed on how I performed every day, in my mood. So definitely forming some good morning and evening routines, especially in this super remote world, you just need to. And then number 3 is being yourself. So, I'm very creative. I wasn't a typical SDR. In all honesty, I didn't even make sense. Like, how was this girl booking meetings? I wasn't anything. I wasn't doing what every other SDR did. And I looked at accounts differently and I tackled accounts differently. And I did it by being incredibly creative, being myself, and really focusing on the person. So who am I like? Who am I really targeting here? What about them makes them special that I can pull into my outreach? So those are definitely the top three. You know, getting people to buy into you. Number two is forming those habits, and three just being creative and and standing out. So yeah, that's how I got to number one.

3:16 Scott Ingram: This is gonna be fun. So we will absolutely get to the ins and outs of all of your routines, and hopefully we can all. Also kind of get to how you were you and, and what some of those creative approaches are. But I want to talk about now kind of getting that buy-in, right? Getting… surrounding yourself with people who were invested in you. That doesn't just happen, right? You, you can't just wait for that to happen. How did you go about doing that?

3:44 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, it's pretty crazy because when I joined LivePerson, I joined… I was fully remote. This was the first time I was joining a company fully remote. The fact that I was able to do all of this from my office slash yoga studio is pretty crazy. So you have to get people to connect with you, but you can't force it either. You're naturally going to connect with certain people. You're going to have chemistry with certain people, and you're also going to look up to people who are, you know, that you could be. So there were definitely a variety of people at LivePerson that had a lot of different attributes that I wanted. You know, some were really great challengers and they sell with and they challenge. Another is really focusing on creating a good day-to-day system or morning habits. So if you're interested and if you see someone who you want to be like, or there's something about them that you want to develop, if you go to that person and you show an interest in what makes them a little special, then they're gonna want to learn more about you and find out what makes you special. So once I honestly would meet… I would meet people in Zooms and things like that, and I'd go, wow, like this girl, this one AE who I will talk about, who I, I fell in love with the moment I met her. I was like, wow, you are a rock star. I'm just gonna hold on to her. And when you meet those people that you want to hold on to, you have to try to find a way to be friends with them and to connect with them. So for this case, it was an account executive. So I just started putting as many accounts into Salesforce as I can and putting them under her name and putting them under my name so that way we would have to work together, which is silly, but whatever. It caused us to create a really good relationship. But really, when you're building people, to be your allies, you have to show that you're an ally for them as well. So getting to know people, you know, reaching out to them, maybe you're liking their posts on LinkedIn, maybe you saw a conversation or a pitch that they did on Chorus, maybe you see that they just closed a really awesome deal, and reach out to them, congratulate them, ask them how they did it, set up a one-to-one. I'm really lucky that At LivePerson, one-to-ones and, you know, spending time with other employees in other departments is really encouraged. So, it's not uncommon for people to even message me and say, hey, can I put time on your calendar just to chat? And I do that often across all different departments because you don't just have to look up to the people in sales. You can look up to the CSMs, you can look up to people in marketing, and you can pick their brains too. They have so much to offer as well. So, also going across different departments, learning about, hey, as an SDR, and if you're marketing, right, how can I support you? What can I do to make your job easier? And then you share what they could do for you. And just creating that open dialogue can also really help you build those allies because, again, you're showing that you're there for them, and they're going to want to be there for you as well.

7:27 Scott Ingram: Brilliant. I love this idea of allies and partners, and our sponsors are exactly that. They're doing so much to support this podcast and this community, and I hope you'll support them in return. Revenue Grid is absolutely one of those companies. Vlad and his team have been such incredible supporters. Do me a favor, but more importantly, do yourself a favor and check out Revenue Grid. Their platform does some truly powerful things, and you can get there real easily by going to top1.fm/revenuegrid. Now back to my conversation with Melissa. Well, let's contextualize this just a little bit. Why don't you talk about what your role was and kind of what it is? And I know we'll go deeper into what it is, because that's, that's actually pretty fascinating, but talk about specifically the SDR role that you were in.

8:17 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah. So I was an SDR. I joined in September of last year. It was crazy. It was so crazy because prior to that, I was… I had just started to get into sales. I was selling events. I was selling in-person corporate events. And when the pandemic happened, we were sinking. It was scary. We lost like 70% of our staff within a couple of months, and I survived that. But I didn't really know what an SDR was because I was just selling events, even though I was doing a sales development role. I was just selling events. And when I came to LivePerson, I learned about what an SDR was, which is embarrassing to even say. And it is because I joined an amazing company without really knowing exactly what I was doing, but it worked out so well because when I joined, we were in the middle of kind of transforming the SDR team, what that looked like, what did it look like to sell remote? What was going to happen, and it kind of gave me this timeframe to be creative and to try things that were a little bit different, to go beyond or to do things differently than what every SDR was doing at that moment. So, as an SDR, really, our job is to set the meeting. The goal is for us to educate the market while setting the meeting for our account executives. We want to make sure that those meetings are qualified. That way they sell. Not every meeting is going to sell, that is for sure. You could set, you know, 15 meetings for that month and maybe 8 of them will sell, maybe 10 of them will sell, maybe 2. You don't know until the meeting happens and the account executive says, okay, Melissa, I want to work this account, there's an opportunity here. So the quota for us was 8 sales per month. Quota had changed a couple of times because they were trying to figure out, you know, how they wanted to manage the SDR team, especially because, you know, sales was kind of changing. It was this weird time. They couldn't really… they weren't really sure how to do it, but that was the quota. And from then, we just figured it out. We got into more creative ways of doing outreach. We did have to educate the market, but The competition in the market also quadrupled in size from where they were, you know, even 2 years before that. So there was a lot of educating between, you know, what is chat, what is messaging. We are… we do messaging, and I'll get into that and the differences about that a little bit later, but it's a big difference. And being able to educate the prospects, but, you know, book the meeting. That's really what the goal was.

11:22 Scott Ingram: Excellent. And so when you say the goal was 8 sales a month, it really kind of 8 opportunities where the account executive had the meeting and said, okay, yep, I'm going to accept this. This is, there's something here.

11:31 Melissa Gaglione: Correct. Correct.

11:32 Scott Ingram: And how did you do against those numbers? Kind of put your results in perspective for us.

11:36 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah. So honestly, they're not the most crazy results. I'm going to be honest here. It was 108% of quota, which is nice. You know, I went above quota. I was, I was number 1. But really what made me stand out was that I wasn't all about, you know, I wasn't just booking meetings for me. I was finding ways to help my team book meetings. So even though I was an individual contributor, I believed in the power of the team. And if the entire team was doing good, sales was just way more fun. Like, it's just a way better environment when everyone's doing well and when we're figuring out how to create more opportunities together. So even though I only did 108% of quota, I was able to generate an additional 31 meetings for my team. So they were able to get those opportunities open for their AEs, collect those checks. And it was, it was a team effort, you know, it didn't have to be just me. We could all do things together. We can all learn and share and be successful together.

12:49 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that because I'm a huge fan of… we often talk about being on a sales team, but very rarely does it look like a true team. I'm going to interject and continue with this team, allies, and partners theme and acknowledge another of our sponsors who I hope you've heard of, and that's Outreach. Outreach is an incredible team selling tool, especially from a prospecting perspective, as it helps you determine what's working so that you can share those insights and learnings across the team to help everyone improve. To get Outreach for your team, just click over to top1.fm/outreach. And now back to Melissa and how she helped her team. And so I'm curious, when you say that you helped your colleagues, your peers get an additional 31 meetings, like what did that look like in practice? How were you doing that?

13:39 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah. So, it came about from a kind of crazy idea, and it wasn't really the plan. It just started to happen that way. And the team itself is very… we share everything. In order to be seen as a leader on the team, if you're not sharing, then are you leading? Are you helping? What are you doing aside from bringing in your own phone number. It's important to share. But the way that we kind of fell into this, and I'll kind of go into my story here, but those 43 meetings that were generated were all new logo meetings that the accounts weren't even in Salesforce before. Nobody had worked those accounts previously. And really where it came from was the vertical that we created. So me and my account executive We took an idea, which was let's break into the crypto and DeFi vertical and let's do something big here. We need to, you know, make it known in the market that we are the leaders. She had acquired the biggest, most amazing crypto brand out there. So when she closed that, we said, okay, there's so much in this market. And so from January to about April, I was just researching and digging and trying to find more of these crypto accounts that, you know, could use us, whether it's now or in 6 months from now. Because what was so wild with crypto and what made it so interesting was that their peaks in volumes. It was, it was unpredicted. And, you know, LivePerson, we look for that. We look for volumes because that's what we help. We help you scale your conversations, right? And we saw that in crypto, they weren't able to predict it. Like retail, we know volumes are going to go up around the holidays, but crypto, especially if it was a smaller account, all of a sudden everyone was on Everyone's using that one. So now all these people are going to that website, or they're, or they're downloading, you know, their app, and they're getting flooded with all of these, these customer needs. And it was this giant peak of, okay, if you're ready to handle all of these customers, then you're ready. But if you're not, those customers are going to get up and leave. They're going to go, this, this company doesn't have it together. They're not even answering my, my emails. They're not answering my form fills. I haven't heard back from them in 3 weeks. Where's my money? Where's my coins? Where did this go? And it's, it's a scary thing because people are trusting that these companies are going to take care of their money, and if they don't get a response soon, then they freak out. Then they go to Reddit, and Reddit has all the complaints. So The idea was, okay, we see this vertical, it needs help, they don't really know what to do or where to go. And as I developed and created this list of accounts, we started to tier them, we started to predict which ones would work with us, and we started doing these events again. LivePerson started doing these online events, and my previous background was You know, I used to sell events, but I also helped produce them because when we lost, you know, 70% of our staff, I got 2 jobs. So I was selling and producing online events and I was walking my dog. I was talking to my account executive and I was like, we need to do a virtual event for, you know, some of these brands. And crypto wasn't really at the forefront yet. We still weren't sure about it. But the idea of us hosting our own event for just me and her started. And we kept trying to get into this market. It was not working. We couldn't get the attention of the prospects. We didn't really have marketing materials. We couldn't really say the name of the company that we started to work with. So we were… we didn't really have much value to share with these accounts, and we were just hitting a all until we got our marketing team involved. We got other people to buy into our idea, and we officially launched a crypto DeFi vertical where marketing created all of these campaigns with us. We were leading these presentations, telling them exactly what we're seeing in the market, what materials we need, and eventually my accounting executive She's so smart. She took the idea of us all having some sort of an event, and she was like, we need to have this big dinner. And she hit it. She was exactly right. So we hosted these 2 big dinners, one in New York City, the other one in San Fran, and we brought in the founders, co-founders, CEOs of the top crypto companies, who all flew and traveled and came to our outside COVID-friendly dinner. And because of that dinner, and the way that we formed that dinner and the conversations leading up to it, I was leading a small group of SDRs to manage the project, and to book the meetings off of those dinner attendees. So literally, these meetings, we pulled them out of thin air. They weren't projected. Nobody thought to go into this vertical at all. And we were able to generate 43 meetings as a team. And that's 43 opportunities that my account executive and others get to work.

19:51 Scott Ingram: That's a great story. It's a great story. And while, you know, to your point, everybody in the SDR role is… there's a lot of sameness. You know, everybody's making cold calls and putting together their sequences and doing all of these things. And I mean, I've done this a fair number of times in my career as well. Inviting people to an event or a dinner where their peers are going to be, right, that has real value. It's a heck of a lot easier than, you know, here, take this meeting, we want to pitch you our product.

20:21 Melissa Gaglione: Yes. And what was interesting was that this was kind of new for them. A lot of the CEOs and founders, like, they were also away during COVID there wasn't much going on in the crypto community. So when we brought them to this dinner, to these dinners, they were just so excited to even be around other founders, other inventors, other people who were able to really sympathize and understand the challenges that they were going through this year. But also, what an exciting time for crypto. It was magical, the dinner. And to be honest, by the end of it, for both dinners, my CEO also went, who is a genius, and also he invented chat for businesses, and he's still our CEO. So he was able to really connect with all of the founders and, and all the people who were there from, from the crypto companies because We had been in their shoes before, but both dinners at the end ended up becoming a big brainstorm circle where literally everyone stood in a circle and we just strategized and we just thought, you know, what could be helpful, where are things going? Just having these deeper conversations was really important and it created a really great event. When everyone left, they learned something, they got to connect with other people, and they remembered that LivePerson brought them there and added them to our community. And so now we have a really great community of people that we can lean on to, hey, you want to go to this event? Do you want to speak at this event? You know, we have these opportunities open and they're very, you know, they're very happy to be a part of it.

22:17 Scott Ingram: I'm interested in how this all started, right? We talked about you spent some time in event sales. We talked about your transition into tech and into SDR. How did you start in sales? What's the origin story?

22:30 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, so I got into sales on accident, as most people do. When I was transitioning out of news reporting, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I couldn't get a job reporting in the state that I wanted. I wanted to be in Florida, and I couldn't do it. There was no way. I was running out of money. I had to get a new job. I had to move forward. And so, I started researching different jobs and I came across an event producer. And I said, okay, well, you know, I can produce, you know, a CBS show. I can do a newscast. So, an event can't be too hard, right? And I didn't get the job. They said no. But instead, they said, how about we put you in our sales department? And I was really deterred. I had this idea about sales that sales is stressful, sales is for people who, you know, they're not the nicest people, you know, they might be more stressed. And honestly, I felt that way because my older sister was in in sales, and she still is in sales, and she's a top performer. But we're so different. She's not any of those things. She's super great and super funny and, and kind, but she's very different from me. So I never thought that I would ever go into sales because I'm, I'm not like my sister. I don't really fit this, you know, description of what a seller is. But I felt excited about the idea of making some money. I felt excited about the idea that I had a little bit more control and the idea that I can finally work hard and be paid for working hard. In the other roles that I've had, I would push myself crazy hours every day, every week, and the paycheck was always the same. So the idea of being, you know, paid a little bit more for the amount of work that I was putting in made sense to me. And so I, I joined the sales team. I was selling digital events and I had a lot of fun. I rose to the top pretty quickly. I didn't have a choice. I had to. When the pandemic happened, we had gotten an email from, from our managing director who said pretty much like, I don't really know what's going on across the world, but I'm gonna get us hand sanitizer and see you tomorrow. And I read that email and I looked at my manager and I said, am I going to get fired? And she was like, no, no, no, no, no, you're fine, you're fine. Like, everyone's fine. And 3 months later, they started firing people and we started losing our staff because we were losing our business. People weren't traveling for events anymore. And I had to upsell everyone there. I had to… or outsell everyone there. But then I also took on the event producer role as well. So, I was selling and I was their number one seller, and I was also producing events at the same time. So, it was a little crazy.

25:46 Scott Ingram: Knowing all that, right, having been through all of that, having been… I know you were also an elementary school teacher before you were a news reporter. If you were starting over again, would you have done anything differently, or did those things, did those experiences really form your unique creative way of selling, and you couldn't have gotten there any other way.

26:07 Melissa Gaglione: I wouldn't do a thing differently. I am, in fact, so proud of the choices that I've made. It looks silly on a resume. That's fine, because it made me who I am today, and I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of who I am and the skills that I've developed and, and how I've I've been able to use them in sales. It surprisingly is the perfect combination in my eyes for sales. You need to be able to teach, you need to be able to do some really good digging and being able to do some good research that you'll get from reporting. You also need to be able to present and share information with prospects. And then when it comes to the event producing of it, I mean, I got to use it when we created those crypto and DeFi events. I actually got to be a part of the entire strategy from what accounts we're going to target to targeting the accounts to figuring out where we're going to host the dinners to what those dinners might look like, how many people, all of that. So to me, it was a perfect storm. Everything that I've done in the past added up. Those were skills that I learned from each different career that I had, and I get to use them all today.

27:28 Scott Ingram: That is so brilliant. And you're so right on. You're right. There's teaching, there's investigative reporting, there's production and program management and project management and all of those things. And you probably use a little bit of every one of those things every day.

27:42 Melissa Gaglione: Yes. Yes, I do.

27:44 Scott Ingram: So, what are you most proud of? I mean, you've, you've been on a really great run at LivePerson. You're starting in a new account executive role. What are you most proud of?

27:52 Melissa Gaglione: In all honesty, it was probably coming… first making the decision to join LivePerson. But in all honesty, when I joined, I was nervous about my background. You know, it was confusing to others. And instead of hiding it, what I'm most proud of is the fact that I took all of my skills and I took who I am as a person and I embraced it. You know, I didn't shy from it. I didn't hide the skills, or I didn't, you know, hide that, you know, I didn't know too, too much about sales. I didn't know much about the process, and I owned it. So, from an accomplishment perspective, if I didn't own the skills and the fears and the lack of understanding, and if I didn't take that on and say, okay, like, this is what I have, this is what I don't have, and really be real with myself, then I don't think I would have accomplished the things that I've accomplished. So number one, just being who I am, developing myself as a seller. What type of seller am I going to be while maintaining, you know, the person that I am, who is… I try to be kind, I try to put people before me, I try to be giving, I try to just be a good person, and I didn't lose that, which some people, they lose that. They get… they can be a little greedy and a little stressed, and they let it get to you. I didn't lose that. I maintained who I am, and I was able to get through the SDR role with grace, with a smile, while helping people and while preparing myself to be an account executive at LivePerson 12 months later. So my biggest accomplishment is, yeah, finally, finally being an AE, finally knowing exactly what my path is going to look like and owning my, my past.

29:48 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's fantastic. What's the hardest part? What do you find to be the biggest challenge or the thing that you struggle with the most?

29:55 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, I mean, honestly, this year got really hard. I think it got hard for everyone, and I fell in a really big rut where you know, I was having issues with the house. My dog wasn't doing too well. You know, everyone has all these external things. And what was hard was in order to be a good… or at least in my eyes, in order for me to be me, I needed to keep my motivation high, but I needed to keep my positivity high. And when you have all these things going on in 2020 and 2021, and it just a tough year for everyone. To be able to maintain or keep myself positive and motivated was really hard. And at one point I was totally in a rut when I had first started. And I'd say probably around like the 2-month, 3-month mark when I wasn't really hitting, I wasn't really, you know, getting many meetings. Team itself wasn't doing too great either. So it didn't look that bad on me because we were all just trying to figure out how to sell virtually and what that looked like for our company. But that was when I picked up my morning routines and I started taking that more seriously. And so that's how I was able to get out of like that rut. And really the challenge this year was honestly just, just doing all of this fully remote, not being able to turn to the person next to you and go, hey, what'd you send? Or, oh, did that work? Or this worked. Like, you are fully on your own in this role when you're fully remote. And never being an SDR, never not knowing much, it was really hard to balance everything and teach myself while being motivated during these crazy times.

31:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the routines and the motivation and I mean, you mentioned the motivation first, so maybe let's start there. What is it that ends up motivating you? What drives you?

31:56 Melissa Gaglione: I'm really motivated by what I can be, and I know, I know in my heart that I can be great. And what great means to me is being a good person, putting people, you know, before you, helping the world, doing whatever it is that you're doing and putting 150% into it. I don't do anything that's just halfway done. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it and it's going to be great. And so I have this idea of what greatness is, the way that I define it, and that's what motivates me because I'm not there yet and it's always evolving. It's always changing. Greatness is, is constantly getting harder and harder to accomplish because I keep making it, you know, I keep defining it as something I keep adding to the list, right, of what greatness looks like to me. So if you would have asked me a few years ago what greatness looked like, it's going to be a little bit different from what it looks like for me now. And so what motivates me is, is that this idea of who I can be, really being and really reaching my potential. Because if I'm not trying to be great or if I'm not putting in 100% or 150% all the time, then what am I doing.

33:22 Scott Ingram: Well, I have to say, that sounds pretty great.

33:24 Melissa Gaglione: So let's…

33:25 Scott Ingram: you talked about though what broke you out of the rut was really getting into your routines, and you also called those out as one of the top 3 kind of differentiators for you. So let's tear into that. I mean, this is one of my favorite things to really get into, and I know you've, I know you've listened to the show. So the way I always ask this is, your alarm goes off, talk to me about what time that happened, and I want the detailed blow-by-blow. I know you're good with the details until your head hits the pillow.

33:54 Melissa Gaglione: Okay. Okay. Can I actually challenge it to start the night before? Because that's really when my routine starts. It… before I wake up, my routine started 12 hours before I wake up. So when I go to start at the end of the day, right, I sit down and I have a morning Sidekick journal. It's by Habit Nest. It's amazing. I picked up this journal when I was in my rut and I'm now on my 3rd journal. I love this thing. It has fully transformed me. And so at night, before, before I go to bed at 9 PM, my night routine is at 9 PM, me and my partner, we will read the Daily Stoic. So we read that. It takes about 2 minutes. After we read that, we'll go and we'll do a meditation. And so me and him, we'll, we'll kind of decide like what type of meditation we want, if we want to do like more of a yoga meditation or if we just want to sit and meditate, whatever it is, we'll decide what that is. And we'll do that for 10 minutes, 10 minutes. After I do that, I go and I sit down at my kitchen table in the same exact spot every night, and I fill out my morning journal. So on the journal, I put when I'm gonna fall asleep, what time I'm going to wake up, and it will ask me like a question. So the question that I have here is, how can I grow exponentially in who I am as a person and reach a new level of potential? And I'll sit and I'll think And I'll respond to that. And then I'll go into the next question. And then after that, it's time to now plan out my morning routine. And typically they're all pretty much the same. Like I have a very similar morning routine, but it's flexible. I had to make it flexible for me. I needed it to be flexible because if it wasn't, then I wasn't doing it and I wasn't, I wasn't benefiting from it. So for me, it needs to be flexible. I need to write it that night. And I'll put out my 5 things that I'm going to do that next morning. And then I go to bed. I sleep, I sleep very well. And I have my early days and my late days. My early days aren't even that early. They are at 6:45 AM. That's my early day. And then my late day is at 7:15. So on an early day, that's typically when I'm planning to work out and shower or something like that. I just need to up a little bit earlier. But otherwise, if I can do a late day, maybe on a Friday or something like that, then I'll do 7:15. Typically it's an early day, but sometimes you just got to be a little bit good to yourself. And when you're traveling, having a late day option is really nice. So that's my routine starts at night. So I go to bed, I wake up, and I, I learned this from Brandon Fluharty. And I'm going to bring up his name a lot here because he really helped me with my routine. He showed me this app called… I don't know if it's called Kiwake, K-I-W-A-K-E, Kiwake. I don't know what it's called, but it's a really cool app that when you set your alarm and it goes off, and for me, you can set up how you want to wake up. So it goes off, I get up, I take my phone, and if I don't go and take a picture of this picture that I have in my living room, then the alarm won't stop. It will just keep ringing. And I don't want to wake up my partner, so I need to get out of bed and go take this picture in my living room. So it forces me to get up. So for me, that alarm completely changed my life. I wake up now before my alarm. It just naturally happens. Even when I'm trying to do a late Sometimes it's just hard. My body just wakes up now naturally for it. And so I wake up, I go into the kitchen, I take the picture of the picture, the alarm shuts off. And when I'm really good and the days that I'm really proud of myself and I've been doing it, I take my phone and I put it on top of the coffee maker. Like, I don't want to see that phone because the phone will distract you in the mornings. You know, you'll look at your emails, you'll, you'll scroll things. Like, just put it in an area that you know it's always gonna be there, but it's out of sight. So I put it on top of my coffee maker, I hit the espresso button, it's always a double, and I take that and now I go sit down and I start to fill out the rest of my morning journal, which is last night I slept at what time, I woke up at what time, and I fill that out. Then it asks me for my frog task, which is, you know, the frog task means you got to eat the frog. That's what it's called. It's called doing the task that, you know, that kind of sucks, the task that you're dreading. Just do it. Just do that one task. And then I'll answer the other question, which, for example, the one that was today was, what is one area I can approach with more enthusiasm and energy today? So I set myself up. Then I go through my morning ritual, which is always drink water and coffee. And then I do a 10-minute kitchen clean every morning. I have my Apple Watch and 10 minutes for me is really important. Brandon Fluharty had spoken a lot about a Pomodoro timer and it being 25 minutes long. For me, 25 minutes is great for deep work, but when it comes to just tasks around the house, I do things in 10 minutes. So I clean the kitchen in 10 minutes, right? If I don't set that timer, then I'll be cleaning my kitchen and I lose my entire morning. So any task that I need to do, I set a 10-minute timer and I get that done in 10 minutes. It's also how I take breaks throughout the day. If I'm like, okay, I just need a break, I'll set my clock for 10 minutes and I'll go do like the laundry in the 10 minutes, or I'll vacuum, or I'll do something else that is almost like a break but it's still productive and I can get done in those 10 minutes. So after I do my kitchen clean, then I'll go and I'll read. I'll do 15 minutes. I set that timer. It's pretty easy. And I read all different books, typically sales books. Let's be honest, I have so much to learn here. And then after I read, I go and I do my workout. So I'll either do strength, I'll do cardio, or I'll do yoga. I kind of rotate those days out because I want to keep a good balance of those 3. And then I always make the bed afterwards. And once I'm all done with that, I get ready for work. I have the same 7 shirts that I wear every day. They're just different colors. Same, you know, pants that I wear every day. They're just different colors. I bought like little packages. I call them like my little work from home uniforms. And I put those on. Just removing like that decision is, is a lot easier. I already know what I'm going to wear. It's so quick. It's so easy. You just throw it on. And it's good to also change out of your pajamas. Like people who work in their pajamas is crazy to me. So then I get to work and when it's time for work, I sign in. I have what I do in the mornings, which I go through my emails. I like to again set timers for these things. Otherwise, you could just die in your email inbox. Like, you can, you can spend so much time in there. So I do try to set the clock for certain tasks that I'm doing in the morning. What I also learned from Brandon was getting Sunsama, or Sunsama, I think that's how you say it. And it's a really, really, really cool scheduling system that you can pull in your tasks from Todoist. You can pull in your calendar, and when you go to fill out your tasks for that day, it will calculate the time and it will say, whoa, like, you plan to do 11 hours of work today. Like, what are you doing? And it will, it will prompt you to move some of those things over to other days. So I plan out my day, you know, I move things around, things are always popping up. As an SDR, this was really hard because my day wasn't necessarily fully mine. It was, I was constantly being pulled into other directions, other meetings, other trainings. It was like more of like, when am I going to do this? When am I going to do that? Like I have X amount of calls I need to make. I have to make this video. So having that application to be able to move things around and go, okay, at this time I'm going to do this for this much time. It really helped me. And then at the end of the day, when I was really struggling, I don't do this so much anymore, but anyone else who feels like they're not being productive, at the end of the day, I would take a Post-it and I would just write down all the things that I did that were like good that day. And And some days my list would be really long and other days my list would be really short. And the days that my lists were short, it was like, okay, well, why? Like what happened here? And I would go and reflect and figure it out. And honestly, the days that the list was short really did correlate to how my morning went. It was kind of creepy. So I knew that investing in my mornings and at night was really going to help me throughout my days. And then after I got through like that Post-it tracker, I started getting into habit tracking and it's like a calendar. I track about 20 habits, which sounds crazy because it is. Don't track 20 habits tomorrow. Like start with 2. And at the end of the night when I get ready for, for my night routine, I'll go and I'll color in the boxes of my habits. So that way I'm able to see my full month and it's, it's like a bar graph in a sense. So you color in like, you know, how many days in a row I meditated, how many days I did my yoga. And I break up that habit tracker. I break it up into a couple of different categories. So I do my mind, which is meditation, reading. I do body, which is yoga, cardio, strength, walking. I do space, which is, you know, my 10-minute cleans in the morning. Those are all 10 minutes. So 10-minute clean in the morning for kitchen, 10-minute vacuums, 10-minute dust. I take pride in my space because my space needs to be clear in order for me to have a clear mind. And then the last one is relations, which is calling my friends and family, making sure that I call, you know, my dad once a week, my sister once a week, my grandmother. I want to make sure that those relationships are continuing to grow. So I do track those, and it helps because I'm looking at it right now, and man, I really need to call my Nona. Oh my goodness, it's, it's been, it's been 2 weeks, so I gotta call her before I get yelled at. But this is what it helps me with, you know. It helps me maintain the relationships that I have. It helps me you know, remember, you know, when was the last time that I, you know, cleaned the bathroom, or when was the last time that I did strength, or when was the last time that I did cardio. And it helps me focus on a specific habit that I really want to grow. Like when I first started, meditation was number one. And once I got those every single day and my bar graph was completely filled, then I said, okay, now I'm gonna go and focus on taking on a workday break. And by the end of this month, I want that bar to be fully covered. And so each month I just work, I choose a specific habit that I really want to work on while still working on the others, but not putting that much pressure on all the others, more of like collecting my data and just, you know, understanding when was the last time I did this or how frequently am I doing this. But eventually when you do these things over and over again, it's weird not to. The days that I don't make my bed or the day that I didn't make my bed, it was like going back into bed like, oh, it sucked. It wasn't that nice. My bed wasn't made. And so you get used to these habits and doing things for yourself and for your space, for your mind, for your body, for the relationships that it makes your life better that you don't want to stop. So that's my morning, night, daily routine.

47:16 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. I love the detail. I have 2 questions and I suppose I should call out, if you're listening to this and you haven't heard any of Brandon Fluharty's episodes, he's been a huge contributor to this community. I talked to him the first time in episode 85. There was another episode, it's not numbered, We released it on June 8th, 2021. If you just go to top1.fm/Melissa-Gaglione, or if you don't want to spell that, top1.fm/this episode number, whatever that is, that will have links to all of the things, all of the different tools that Melissa has called out, links to Brandon's episodes. I'm also going to link to his presentation at this most recent Sales Success Summit. Lots and lots of stuff in there. Brandon has really, I think, impacted the way a lot of us have thought about routines and the way that we're taking care of ourselves and our bodies to perform at elite levels. And there's just so much greatness in what he has shared. But Melissa, you talked about like your 10-minute timer and cleaning and like cleaning on breaks. Like, is there something about… does cleaning… is like that a trigger? Does that relax you somehow?

48:29 Melissa Gaglione: I mean, I wish it did. I wish I could say that it totally does, but to be honest, I would not take breaks. I am so bad at stepping away from my computer because like, what was I gonna do, like go sit in the living room? Like, what, what am I doing? I didn't take breaks because I felt that it wasn't worth my time. And as an SDR, you only have so much time in a day. You have to to be constantly working. It's a lot. And not doing anything, just, I just wasn't taking breaks. So I said, okay, that's it. I'm going to start taking 10-minute breaks. And if I'm going to take a break, it's going to be productive. And it can't involve work because at one point I would read for 10 minutes and I would read more sales books. And then it wasn't giving me that space. But I also, I guess maybe cleaning does help me because Because when you have a clean space, it's almost like you have a clean mind. And I really want a clean space. I'm in here all the time. We're working remotely. I'm constantly here. So why not channel or why not take a break and make it into something that's going to be productive in the other areas of your life?

49:45 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. And then you said there's some flexibility in your morning routine, but you're defining kind of the 5 things? I imagine there's a lot of commonality or kind of the things you do the most. What are those typically?

49:58 Melissa Gaglione: So always a kitchen clean. By flexibility, I mean, am I going to do a strength workout, a yoga workout, or am I going to go on my Peloton bike? I'm always going to make the bed. But sometimes things come up, right? The other day, I wanted to bring my dog to daycare. He goes to this cute little camp And that was going to take time out of my morning. So I had to put that in. I had to schedule that in. Other mornings like this morning, I wanted to get an Instacart order in. We're going to have friends over for dinner tonight. I didn't have time to go to the grocery store. So I wrote down this morning, you know, spend 15 minutes completing the Instacart order so that way it works. So you have to also just be flexible and be mindful of you know, of course I'm preparing for my workday, but I can still use my mornings to do the other things that I need to do, right, that will make my workday a lot easier. So that way I'm not sitting here stressing like, oh my gosh, like, what am I gonna get for dinner? Like, are they gonna have that type of cut, like this beef that I want to make? Are they good? Like, I will sit here and think about that during my workday. So to schedule it into put on my morning routine so I get it done before my day starts, it really helps. So I mean being flexible like that, just being aware of the other things that you have to do that if you can add it to your routine, you can. And that's why it's important to do it the night before, because then I can look at it and go, wow, tomorrow's going to be an early day, or, ooh, tomorrow I don't have too much I need to do. I'm just going to do my 10-minute clean, make the bed, and do a yoga workout, I can sleep in till 7:15. Like, ooh, that sounds so nice. So having that flexibility is really good, but also it really helps because at least for me, when I was doing the same routine, I held myself to a perfect standard. And if that morning wasn't perfect, it like kind of crushed me. It almost would ruin my days when my day wasn't perfect in the morning. So, being able to adjust it a little bit and to make it so that way I'm going to succeed the next morning and setting myself up for success, for my morning routine success, was more beneficial than being mad at myself for not having a perfect morning at all.

52:27 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. And you only get to that place by doing and kind of learning those things about yourself through the process. Are there any other habits or routines that are really central to the way that you operate?

52:42 Melissa Gaglione: I do think that yoga is something that has carried into my sales, you know, approach. It's before I took… before me and you hopped on this call for a podcast, I'm not gonna lie, I did do some sun salutations. I did take my laptop lavender spray and spray it, and it puts me in a much more calming mindset. So before I would do cold calls, I would do that. Or before I hop on a call that could be a little, you know, maybe my heart starts to race, I get really excited, like this could be a big deal, whatever it is. I do use my yoga and my meditation practice to keep myself calm, to keep myself stable, to have more of a… because really with yoga you get this, you get this outside perspective. You learn to listen and you learn to really acknowledge the people around you and to be, to be observant. And it's really nice because that's very helpful in sales to just be able to listen and, you know, be able to respond after that. It sounds silly, but listening is a really important skill that is really, really, really critical in sales, and it's important to practice it. And so with yoga, I get to practice, and meditation, I get to practice silence, but like listening to that silence, and I bring that into my day-to-day. So I would say, you know, practicing yoga and meditation is a great habit. It's, it's a part of my morning, and It's forever in my life. And I really developed it and really went into it during the pandemic. So this is, it's not fully new for me, but it's different doing yoga for exercising, but doing yoga for, for throughout your day to just make you a better person is a whole nother level.

54:40 Scott Ingram: And do you use anything to guide either of those things, either your, your yoga or your meditation?

54:46 Melissa Gaglione: Oh yeah, for sure. So guided meditations are great to start off with. If you're new to it, I encourage you to do some guided, shorter ones first. It's hard to meditate for 20 minutes. People who just throw a 30-minute meditation on and without ever doing it before, if you can do it, that's great, but it's, it's very hard. So starting off small. And I of course am… I love Peloton. I love Peloton, Robin. I love Peloton. They do have good meditation and yoga classes. So when I'm home, I do those. But otherwise, when I'm just simply meditating, I light all my candles. I have my, my, you know, my little scents things that I put on. I have like a little routine for that and how I set up my space. And then I could just put on some music and you can just quickly look up, you know, meditation music and sit there and you could set a timer or not. You can just sit there and you can meditate. But I do use Peloton. I will go to local yoga studios and local yoga things outside, but mostly it's just me in my little yoga studio slash office that I'm in right now.

56:02 Scott Ingram: Very nice. And what's your Peloton username so we can start Pelo stalking each other?

56:06 Melissa Gaglione: Oh my gosh, Scott, I'm not ready for this question. But I actually sent this out to my friends because I was like, okay, we have to figure this out because I love it. But please, please, please do not make fun of me. But I am very Italian and I do love yoga. So my name is pastayogi, all one word, pastayogi. And that's me on Peloton. I love it.

56:43 Scott Ingram: I love it. Mine, mine is a little bit too literal. You will find me @SalesTechScott.

56:48 Melissa Gaglione: Oh, okay. Maybe I should change mine. I don't know. I'm nervous to say it out loud. I feel embarrassed, but you know, if you go on it, you're going to see I do a lot of meditation and yoga.

57:01 Scott Ingram: Well, there you go. There you go. Probably things I should add in. Perfect. Well, as soon as we're done, I will follow Pasta Yogi and we will learn from each other and find out what's going on there. But I'm curious, and I think I'm most interested in this question in the context of the way that you kind of set up your day when you were working in the SDR role. So we talked a lot about your routines and the morning and those, those components, but how did you structure your workday?

57:29 Melissa Gaglione: So structuring the workday, I use Sunsama. It's S-U-N-S-A-M-A. And that's the tool where you can pull in your Todoist You can pull in like your Todoist tasks. You can pull in your calendar and you can plan out your day, basically time blocking, but without putting it on like your Gmail calendar thing. I played around with this a lot because I was trying to figure out like what, what works for me. But after Brandon Fluharty told me about that, I bought it right away. I downloaded it, I added it, and I incorporated it into my everyday. So using Sunsama is really a powerful tool because you're able to put all of your tasks in. You have to, or the best way to do it is by assigning the amount of time it's going to take you to do those tasks. And every day I have my KPIs, right? I have a certain amount of calls I need to make. I have a certain amount of emails I need to send, but I'm really big into video, like huge into video. I was a previous news reporter. So like, that is, that is where I thrive. That's what I do. And then I go and I look at the prospects and I look to see, you know, who's reading my emails, who's engaging with me. What other people find crazy is when I say, look, I'm going to put in a lot of work, right, for these prospects. Of course. However, I need to see who are the prospects that have now earned my time. Which sounds crazy because I'm the SDR, right? So who has earned this SDR's time? Hmm. Who did it? But what that means is who is actually engaging with my content? Who is actually, you know, maybe they're following us on LinkedIn or maybe they, they are reading my emails or they're clicking my emails or whatever it is. And I look to see, okay, who is earning my time? Because if they earn my time, Man, I'm going to blow them up with personalization, with love, with some really cool ideas and stuff. And it's going to be relevant to them because they have taken a moment to already read the things that I'm sharing with them. So why not give them something so, so, so great that they can't say no to me? So when I go to build out my days, I very much look to see who are the people I don't necessarily go by accounts. I go by who are the people that I need to win over today? And I'll break it up. Okay. I have this many people that I need to make a video for. So let me put that in a time block. It's going to take me X amount of time to do that. I know how long it takes me to do a video or, you know, how many videos do I want that I'm going to build a bot? And we do this thing where we can, we actually build bots. We build examples of what bots could look like. And walk them through what that would look like for their company. We put their logo on there, everything. I make them myself. So I'll plan out, you know, how many of those I have to make. And then, you know, the other things, which is of course how long it takes to cold call, how long it typically takes to build out accounts, like all the other stuff. But I really do look at people and I go, okay, who has earned my time and how much time have they earned? Have they earned a full-blown video with all the bots and all the value, with all these things? Or do I need to still educate them a little bit and give them more of an event invite? Or maybe they need an article that could be relevant. And so I look to see who is the closest to booking a meeting with me in a sense, like who's the most interested in me? And then And once they are, then I just, I make them so they don't look anywhere else. They could only look at me.

1:01:22 Scott Ingram: Love it. And I am a huge fan of the video play myself. And interestingly, just in the last, I don't know, few weeks, I feel like my video game has just gotten a lot better. And I think it's partially because Vidyard's been a sponsor of this show for a long time, but just using it myself, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with it. But when you're not doing like the bot version, how are you structuring kind of a video outreach or a video message?

1:01:50 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah. So again, I'm really, I'm really into people. So an example would be, and I too use Vidyard. I love Vidyard. It's such a great tool when we got it because we didn't have it in the beginning and I was just sending regular videos in people's DMs and it didn't look that creepy, but you know, we were onto something. But what the way that I use Vidyard, and it depends on how much time I have, right? A quick video would probably take me like, you know, 15 minutes. It doesn't take too long, but using Vidyard. Okay. So let me look at a prospect, right? What do they care about? You know, what, what can I find? This is where the reporting skills come in. You know, what can I find about this person? Did they lead a project somewhere? Did they write any articles? Were they on a YouTube video or anything like that? There was one guy, oh my gosh, there is this one guy who did this podcast and he had a really cool background. He had this lava lamp and he spoke about it in the podcast. And I used that as an opener. I was like, I like lava lamps too, because I have one. Like, and I used that as an opener. Something that I can use that I can connect with them on that just kind of takes it to like a different level. But basically I'll go on their, on their LinkedIn. Maybe I'll start there. I'll get some sort of picture of them, right? It could be on LinkedIn. It could be on the company website, something, because I want them to know this is for them, right? We know this, we know this. And then I'll have a couple of tabs open where maybe I'll say, hey, I'm reaching out to you because of this. I see that, you know, you're responsible for this. They know what they're responsible for, but spend like 1 second on that, like 1 second on their title. Like, great, you are the Chief Digital Officer. Great. We know that. But why is that important? It's important because in this video at 1:26, you said this and I'll press play or in this report you said this and I'll highlight it, or in this podcast like you said this or you did this, whatever it is about that specific person that I can show them and say, I know you are the right person, not just because of your title, but because you've either said that you needed something like, like LivePerson Or you've done some sort of project that leads me to believe that you are a changemaker. And then I'll, I'll vibe with them on it. I'll cheer them on. I'll be like, that's great. Like, that's, you're so on the right path. I will encourage them to whatever it is that they do. Right. I want them to know that it's very specific. It's very much for them. There was a prospect that I very much focused on how much she wanted to focus on social change. She was a huge advocate of social change. And I really wanted to pull that because I wanted to show how we can help her customer, not necessarily her customers, they're more members, but how we can help her members who are in poverty or who are in these challenging places, how they can connect with them for some help. And I really wanted her to know how much I cared about the same things that she cared about. And so I really dove into who she is as a person, right? And added the value of what we can provide and how that helps her with her personal mission of social change. So I really dive into the person, who they are, what they've said, what they've done. And I get so into it, but not, not too creepy. You know, you don't want to be creepy, but I look at it as like, Wow, like, look at you, look at what you've done. Like, you want to do something even greater together? And I'll show them a quick sample of what we can do. Like, I don't spend much time on it. It'll be like a quick webpage or a quick, you know, customer story that could be relevant. And I spend like not even 10 seconds on it. It's like a value mixed with a call to action towards the end. But I really want them to know like, hey, I'm reaching out to you specifically. This is why, like, we got to work together in a sense. And people feel very compelled. I would say that out of all the videos that I send, I at least get an 80% response rate. Like, it's probably higher than that. It's high. People respond to me. They like that I've taken the time to get to know them. And it's nice.

1:06:39 Scott Ingram: That was about the easiest sponsor setup ever. Vidyard really is an amazing tool. Now, I'm not going to promise you you're going to get 80% response rates when you use Vidyard. I think that's happening for Melissa because she's doing such a great job of making her videos relevant and personal. But if you could get a 40% response rate, wouldn't it be worth doing? Get your hands on Vidyard today. Just click over to top1.fm forward slash Vidyard, or if you're lazy, you can just go to top1.fm forward slash V. That works too. I love it. That is so good. So we have talked about a ton of the different apps you use so far. We talked about your Morning Sidekick journal and Sunsama and Todoist and Vidyard and your, your alarm thing. Are there other apps or other tools that you just can't live without?

1:07:30 Melissa Gaglione: So of course my Apple Watch. Just saying things out loud like I don't want to say it because it might pick up on me, but you know, you know the robot's name. Yes. And then you say, you know, whatever it is, like timer for 10 minutes. So having that on my wrist is really nice because I'll just say that out loud and it's very helpful. Other things that I like to use, some people might like this. For me, I had to get the physical one. There's a really great app called HabitShare. And I was using this with another SDR to encourage us both to work on our habits. And it's actually an app where you can write out your habits, you can plan how many days you want to do them, and you can share those habits with a friend. And so they can see when you achieve those habits, when you don't achieve those habits, they'll get like a notification, like, and it will pop up like, Melissa did her workout this morning, and your friend can be like, wow, good job, girl, like you did it. Or like, Melissa read for 15 minutes, like habit done. And so someone can keep you accountable. For me, I do like the bar graph itself because I can really see what I've done that month. And I like that. I like the physical coloring of it. And then other things that I use as many of us during this time have potentially struggled with some anxiety. I started getting into the Anxiety Skills Workbook. You can get it on Amazon. It's by Stefan G. Hofmann, and it focuses on like cognitive behavioral therapies and just doing mindfulness strategies. So pretty much you go through an exercise and maybe it's like a self-monitoring form where, you know, throughout the week you're thinking about, or you track like like, you know, why am I worrying about these things or anything like that. If you're someone who gets a lot of anxiety attacks or things like that, this is a really great book. It's for me, I think that anxiety is something that, you know, I do have a little bit of and it's something that I like to have and be on top of, especially in a sales role. This role can be crazy. It's ups and downs, it's ups and downs, and I want to be able to maintain myself there. So learning those strategies is definitely very helpful, and you can also share them with other people and help them as well.

1:09:58 Scott Ingram: Love it. Great stuff. All right, so let's work on making our show notes and list of links even more robust. What does your information diet look like? And I know you talked about reading a lot of sales books. I'm curious about what are you reading, what are you listening to, what are you watching, which of those has been been the most impactful for you?

1:10:16 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, I actually try not to watch too much TV. I don't mean to, but I try not to, so, which is a good thing. But when it comes to other things that I, that I do, when it comes from information, the Daily Skimm, I mean, come on, it's so easy to read and it's so quick. It's part of my email. Do you know what the Daily Skimm is? You must.

1:10:36 Scott Ingram: I don't do the Daily Skimm. I mean, I mean Morning Brew and the Hustle email newsletter kind of guy.

1:10:42 Melissa Gaglione: Oh, okay. Okay. Well, I love the Daily Skimm. They also have a money one every Friday, which was super helpful, especially when I was developing and working on the crypto vertical because Grayscale actually sponsored them. So a lot of crypto news in that, that was helpful. And then, so I do the Daily Skimm every day. That's part of, that's part of like my samsama. It's built in there, read Daily Skimm. I shared The Daily Stoic. Of course, read that. I got that idea from Brandon Fluharty. Information diet, what I'm currently reading right now is The Challenger Customer. I just finished The Challenger Sale. I pretty much have a whole list of books that I… if you tell me to read a book, I'm just going to either buy it right away or I have a long book list that I keep, but I'm going to get to it eventually. Like, it's… I'm just going to get it and I'm going to get to it eventually. So Combo Prospecting is pretty good by Tony J. Hughes. I know that Justin Michael is a little bit of an influence in here. I'm not sure if he helped it or if he did Tech Powered, but he is also a really, really great source for resources and knowledge. He has some good stuff out there. So once I'm done with the Challenger Customer, then I'm going to go into Mastering the Complex sale, because as an SDR, I didn't do too much of, not too much reading about the sales process. I did, I had to prepare myself, but I was also really doing a lot of learning when it comes to the SDR role. I was a part of SDR Nation. So I would read that, you know, probably every other day. I should have done it every day, but I would go into the community and read and catch up on those things. So I would get information from there. And of course, podcasts. You are a podcast that I listen to. I was so excited that I'm on it. It's kind of crazy. This is crazy to even think about it. So of course, your podcast. I also listen to Make It Happen Mondays, of course. And then Jay, I think his last name is Shetty. You know him? He has a really good podcast on just like mindfulness and relieving stress and all of those use the other sides of me, you know, the yoga side and, and, you know, the communication side and all that. The side that's not sales is the pod… that's the podcast that when I'm not listening to sales, that's the only thing that I'm listening to.

1:13:11 Scott Ingram: Love it, love it. Great list. I'm gonna have to send a few extra dollars Kevin's way while he works through all of the links. So again, top1.fm/this episode number is the easiest way to get there and you'll have a complete comprehensive list and links to all the books and all the stuff and SDR Nation and everything else. So I love that. I love that. So maybe we already touched on these, but I wonder if there's something you believe that the average sales professional or the average SDR would think is crazy.

1:13:40 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, well, that's what I say. It's when I say, hey, I don't know, that prospect didn't really earn my time, or that prospect earned my time. And people think I'm literally crazy when I say that, but why am I going to work and make these crazy videos and put in hours and hours of work for someone who's not going to read my email or who isn't going to answer the phone or who keeps declining my sales, my LinkedIn requests, or, you know, like who just is just so unresponsive and so uninterested. And I see salespeople putting too much time into those prospects that are just not going to budge. I get account hunting, but I'm just more into people hunting. I focus on people. I just need one person to say yes to me for, you know, a couple of minutes and that could lead to something really, really big. So if that person is just constantly like, you just can't break through to them, someone else will say yes. So knowing when to walk away from a prospect and come back later, You know, come back later. You can get them in a couple of months. Like, you can try again. But maybe now, right now, they're just, they're just not budging. So they haven't earned your time. And we only have so much time in the day. My work is also important too. I value what I do every day. I value my time. I can't, I can't give it away. I can't like work for free in a sense. I have to be strategic with my time. And I have to invest my time in the prospects who are actually going to make a change for their organization, who want to change their organization, who have the power to change their organization, not the people who are just going to take the meeting and, and not do anything with it. They're just gonna, okay, thanks, that was great. Like, thanks for the call and leave. You know, like the true opportunities come in when, when the prospects are are coming in and they're, they're excited, they're eager, they have something to gain from the conversation.

1:15:47 Scott Ingram: It's great. It's great. It's so good. And I especially love just kind of the mindset piece around, look, what I do has value. I think way too often SDRs in particular, you know, see themselves as I'm a nuisance. I'm somebody that interrupts people. It's like, no, no, no, you bring value, right? You, you have worth as part of this. So maybe there's something along those lines. Is there something that the average SDR believes that you think is crazy?

1:16:15 Melissa Gaglione: Something that the SDR believes that I think is crazy is hustle culture. Hustle culture is crazy. Why do people do it? I mean, I did it. I'm gonna be honest, when I was a teacher, I was teaching full-time and I was getting my master's at night. I kid you not, I had pillows on my bed that said hustle on it because I was so in the zone. I was so into hustling and I didn't understand that hustling constantly all the time, all day long, it's almost like you're running around with your head chopped off. Like it's not sustainable. I didn't learn that until I came to LivePerson and I saw Brandon, our top seller, sleeping, naturally sleeping. Like he was normal. He was normal human. And because of that, it did help me see, hey, I don't need to go crazy here. Like, I don't need to just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Like, I can do deep work. I can really learn these accounts and these people. I don't need to move that quickly. What I do need to do is protect my time, right? There's a big difference between protecting your time and just you know, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Like, that's silly to me. That's silly. You just, you lose energy, you burn out, you lose yourself. And when I was teaching and doing my master's at night, like, and I was hustling, and that was the big move because after I taught and got my master's, then I, you know, taught and then went to journalism school at night. So I was hustling for a long time. Those pillows lasted a long time. And I was burning myself out in all these different careers. So I see as SDRs who are just thinking that the only way to succeed is to work like 70 hours a week or just to keep, just to work more and work more. And I thought that in the beginning, and then I realized it's not about working more. It's about, you know, taking a look at your day and going, okay, well, what do I need to do today? What is the most or the best use of my time? And that really wasn't a concept until it was modeled for me. And I saw how successful Brandon was. And, you know, me as an SDR and him as a VP of, you know, strategic accounts, like we have very different roles, that's for sure, but we have the same amount of time in each day. So like, if he can sleep, I can sleep, right? Like if he can do deep work, I can do deep work. If he has time to go and take care of, you know, his body and his mind, then I can do that too, right? I don't need to just burn myself out and go crazy. I can actually, you know, relax, you know, use my yoga practices during the day, keep calm, like, you know, take my… not take my time, but be very purposeful with my time and actually shut off my computer when the day's over and to walk away from it without stress. Like, just, just to walk away from that. And hustle culture doesn't let you do that. Like, you're just constantly on high alert, constantly. And I see it every day with SDRs, and I know which ones do it, and it breaks my heart to see them falling apart in front of me.

1:19:40 Scott Ingram: Let's continue on that theme then, right? What advice do you have for those, you know, brand new SDR or even folks who are thinking about making that jump to sales like you did, right? It looks a little bit different from the outside. The reality is a very different thing of what the sales profession really is. What advice do you have for them?

1:20:01 Melissa Gaglione: So, going into sales, at least when I first started, I was kind of scared of it. You know, sales has this idea that it's super stressful, that it's it's crazy, that it's hard, that, you know, you're, you're constantly going and all these things, but for new SDRs or anyone just starting off with sales, if you're able to control your emotions and if you can practice that and treat every day like, like it's the same, then you're going to be able to just last a lot longer. So what I mean by that is when, you know, you're, you're riding the highs and you're falling on the lows and every day It's like you're on this roller coaster and that's not healthy. It's not healthy to be on this super crazy roller coaster every other day or every hour. Like if you're, if you're constantly letting your job give you mood swings throughout your day or throughout your week, then you need to make a change because that's just not healthy. So the sooner that you can first understand your emotions, how do I feel when this happens? Or how do I feel when this happens? And just be able to control them and have like a practice for it. So maybe if you get really stressed or something like that, like what I said before, where before I came on this podcast, my heart was a little bit racing, my emotions heightened. I was excited. I was giddy. I was, but my emotions heightened and I wanted to control them. I wanted to keep them low. Like I wanted to not be too excited on this, on this podcast. I wanted to keep it conversational, keep it just us, keep it casual. And to do that, to maintain my emotion, for me, I did a quick sun salutation and I sprayed lavender oil on me. And I smelt that, I got that scent and it brought me back down. So some people, to control your emotions, it might be standing up for 10 seconds or maybe doing a jumping jack or doing the plank, or maybe it's a certain scent that you like, or maybe it's going downstairs and getting a glass of water. Whatever it is that you need, like when you're feeling a certain type of emotion that is too high or too low, take a step back, get yourself together, have a practice that maybe you can lean on and do to get yourself in the right mindset. Because going up and down is just not healthy for you. And doing that throughout your day, you're going to come off to prospects as, you know, with your head, it's gonna, it's gonna seem like you're running around with your head chopped off if you're coming in after being super sad about something and then you're going into this prospect and you want to be super happy and it's just, it's too much of a mess. So for new sellers, just learning to be able to control your emotions and to practice that, you're going to be a stronger seller and you're going to be able to do this job for a lot longer. The sooner that you're able to control that.

1:23:03 Scott Ingram: Great answer, great answer. I love it. Now, I know you already do a lot of this, Melissa, with the way that you surround yourself with great people and you're having them invest in you, but what do you want to know, or what do you want to know next from the top sellers in other organizations?

1:23:21 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, so I mean, I have my practices and I thought that they were really good before I came to LivePerson, like I would wake up and go to the gym, but I only focused on my body. I didn't focus on my mind. I didn't focus on my relationships. I didn't focus on my space. I only focused on that. So when I learned from Brandon, even though I thought that I had it down, I didn't. And when I learned from him, I started changing the way that I was doing my morning habits. So in all honesty, right now I'm trying to work on What are the things that I can do outside of the, outside of work that can still add to my success? So, you know, of course right now it's yoga, but what is it that other people do? What is it that other sellers do outside of work that helps them as a seller, that helps them achieve success? Everyday normal things. What are those things? Because I can do them or I can find something that's similar to me in that way. Something that, whatever that is, that that means to them, I can do that for me. You know?

1:24:28 Scott Ingram: I like that. That's, that's a really, that's a really good question. All right. Choose your channel between LinkedIn and email. Which do you prefer?

1:24:35 Melissa Gaglione: Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, let's be real here. LinkedIn, but LinkedIn with a video. You have to do combo prospecting. There's no way around it. If you think that you're, I mean, Maybe, maybe you could, you could just use one channel. You can't, but you could, but you can't. You have to use all of the channels for sure and mixing them up. So often what I'll do, and when I was in event sales, I would make little posters for people and I would put like, hey Scott, like super big and super bold and put in a picture and put pretty much my call to action or, you know, the value value and call to action of what I was doing. And I would send those through LinkedIn. But anytime that you can send a raw video or raw clip, which means that you are connected with them, it's the best way to connect with them, I think, because I can see when they read it. I could see if they watched it. If you are using Vidyard, that's also very helpful too. I do like when it's a little bit more raw and they don't have to click a link to go somewhere all the time because if they are connected with you, then they can just click it. But with Vidyard, you can track it. So there's give and take. There's a preference there, whatever it is. But LinkedIn with a video is number one, the best tool for me. And then of course emailing, and you do have to call to check in and make sure that, you know, they're there.

1:26:05 Scott Ingram: All right. You set the bar very high because here's why I asked. What I want you to do, you're listening to this right now and you have a thing that you do outside of work that makes you better at sales. I want you to record a video of you doing that and Vidyard's app will do it and then create a group chat in LinkedIn with Melissa and I. So connect with both of us. Create that group chat, send the video, and show us you doing that thing that you do that helps you kind of get to that next thing. So I want to see some Peloton videos. I want to… that's, that's probably my thing. That's probably my biggest thing is I'm also just a huge Peloton fan. I learned the hard way over the summer that walking, even up lots of steep hills, is not enough. I have to elevate myself more than that to get my head fully in the right space and kind of take care of of my body. So for me, it's a lot of Peloton stuff, but I want to hear from folks that are listening. So take a video, reach out to Melissa, and I promise if you do that, like, that's, that's a strong level of effort. You're, you're gonna get a reply. I will not ignore anybody that does that.

1:27:17 Melissa Gaglione: I will love it. I will be so excited. Please, please, please do. It's a great challenge. I'm gonna pass it on to my team and people that I work with because I want to see them because I really am curious. Really though, like, what is it that other people do? Because I want to learn from you guys as well. So great challenge, Scott.

1:27:37 Scott Ingram: Brilliant, brilliant. Well, we're going to keep the challenge thing going in one more question here, but I, I want to make sure that… I mean, we've covered so much ground. This has been such a great conversation. I know people are going to be eating this up. I know… I think this time of year is is perfect to be thinking about, you know, setting up these routines and setting yourself up for success and, and making sure that you're, you're taking care of yourself and not doing it in a harmful, hustly kind of a way. But is there someplace that, or some story that you had hoped to tell, and I just, I didn't quite ask the, the right question, and it's really important that we cover it?

1:28:16 Melissa Gaglione: Oh man, I'm gonna be honest, I feel like we covered a lot here. I really do. I don't have any that really come to mind, but I would like to just reiterate on the importance of leaning on the people around you and learning from the people around you. And don't be afraid to put time on someone else's calendar and like, don't be afraid to, you know, reach out to that VP that, you know, is super busy but successful, but you want to learn from them too. And don't be afraid to reach out to other departments and learn about those other departments and pick their brains. I mean, I had such a long conversation with legal and it was so nice. Oh my gosh, they are so great. And that's me as an account executive saying that I love legal. But putting, you know, your time into other people and learning about what they do, they're going to invest their time into you and you're just going to be so much stronger. We are all stronger when we work together.

1:29:18 Scott Ingram: That is so good. That is so good. And, you know, lean on this community as well. You know, I mean, the best thing you can do, if you have listened to this, and you're still in it, you are our people. It's really interesting. I will say this here, because I won't offend any of the other folks because they won't have listened long enough. We have actually kind of found… I mean, there's… I have 2 podcasts, right? So there's Sales Success Stories, which these super deep dives. And then I have the literally the opposite show in Daily Sales Tips, and it's every day, and it's usually… oh, it's almost always 5 minutes or less. We've actually found through talking to a lot of our listeners, there's not a ton of overlap. There's the deep dive Sales Success folks, and there's the shallow skim the surface everyday kind of Daily Sales Tips. Now, there are some who are all in, and they listen to all all of it, and I love you the most. But there is a group where they only listen to Daily Sales Tips, and we just find that they don't get into these episodes. And what I have found through that is it's really the Sales Success people who are my people, right? Like, they want to go deeper. They want to have like this whole understanding of asking all the questions I'm asking. And like, I need to know the nitty-gritty detail of, of how you're building that routine and when you get up and, and all of those kinds of things. So if that's you, if you're one of us, you have to get involved in this community. And the best way to do it is sign up for the Sales Success Summit. Go to top1summit.com, because one of the things that we're doing is every month we have an attendee networking call, and we bring together all of the folks that are registered for the summit so that you can start to build those relationships before you get to be together in Austin in October. And here's the thing, there's a lot of people like Melissa and Brandon who are on those calls because a lot of people who've been on this podcast, surprise, surprise, they're the ones that are continuing to grow and continuing to advance themselves. And they find a lot of value from the community and a lot of value in contributing to the community. So it is an absolutely incredible thing. And, and the only way you get on those calls is, is you've invested in yourself and you've invested in the summit. And as soon as I finish talking with Melissa, I'm going to put her in a chokehold in a very loving and gentle way, and we're going to make sure that she is involved in that and joins us at the summit next year and on some of those calls. So, Melissa, with that, the last question I always ask is one to really make this as actionable as we can, right? We heard all of these great things, but now it's time to do something. So, what would you have our listener do after they've recorded their video doing their extra thing and sending us the LinkedIn? What would you challenge them to do over the course of the next week or 2 to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:32:11 Melissa Gaglione: Yeah, so I'm not gonna tell you go pick up 20 habits tomorrow because that's, that takes a long time to do. But instead, the first step is first, so maybe the first day, treat it normally. Have a normal, basic day, whatever it is. But as you're having that day, check in with yourself and be aware of, you know, what are you doing? How are you feeling? What are you saying? How productive are you? And at the end of that day, when you reflect and you write it down and you think about, you know, was this a productive day? You know, was I happy or sad today? Well, what did I do? Did I do a lot of work? Did I do a lot of busy work or did I do a lot of deep work or, you know, what was it? After you're able to really take a step back and think about how your normal basic day went, you have to make a change. Just one. You don't have to change your whole day, but maybe at one point of your day you recognize that you weren't that productive. And maybe it was, you know, right after lunch you just ate this really big meal and you just were sluggish right after. Okay, so the change there is maybe we should do a different type of lunch, or maybe we should walk after we eat, or something like that. It's just an example, but whatever it is, just make that one change. And then whatever that change is that you've made, like, monitor it. And be like, okay, I made this change. I made the change to drink water right when I wake up, or I made the change to take my cell phone and put it on the coffee maker when I wake up so I don't touch it before 9:00 AM. And then just track it, track it, and just see, you know, after you've done it for a week, like, think back. Okay, was this week a lot better? How did this impact me? How did this small change, this small habit that I didn't really realize that I could do, that just this little change, it doesn't have to be anything crazy. How has it impacted and made me either a better seller or a better person? And once you realize that little habits and these little changes like drinking water or making your bed or putting your phone away, or maybe it's going going for a walk during the day, whatever it is that that changes, if it is helping you, then you're going to want to pick up another habit. And then, you know, a couple months later, you end up with 20 habits and on a podcast with Scott.

1:34:52 Scott Ingram: So, there you go. There you go. And that is the goal, isn't it? You know, you got to get on the show. So, Melissa, this has been an absolute blast. Thank you for taking the time to share your story with us. I know it's It's going to impact a lot of people. I appreciate you.

1:35:07 Melissa Gaglione: Oh, I'm so happy. I've been cheesing so hard my face hurts. My face has been smiling so much throughout this. I am so thankful to be here today, Scott. This is truly a dream come true. And, uh, well, I'm just going to have to be back after I close millions and millions of dollars. So that's just what's next. Okay.

1:35:28 Scott Ingram: There you go. There you go. Brandon Fluharty, be warned.

1:35:32 Scott Ingram: Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.