139: $13.4M ARR in 5 Months! Becoming a World Class Sales Athlete with LivePerson's Brandon Fluharty

0:08 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.

0:24 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, I have a bit of an encore episode for you. I originally shared this follow-up interview with Brandon Fluharty as a bonus episode in early June of last year, but because it wasn't one of the numbered interview episodes, it's been a little hard for people to find. So because of that, and because Brandon just released his 7 Steps to 7 Figures ebook, I thought I'd share this again officially as episode 139. So for all the links and resources, you can just click over to top1.fm/139. Here it is. Brandon, welcome back.

1:01 Brandon Fluharty: Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me back.

1:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So I am just so excited to dig into this conversation. So where we left off, our first interview together was episode 85. We released that in January of 2020. This is kind of fun from a bookend perspective because in our naive, carefree days back then, I don't think we had any idea that we would all be under house arrest for 14, 15 months and have to wear masks all the time. And now we're starting to get to the other side of that. And at that point you had sold $11 million in ARR over the 2 previous years. And it seems like you have kind of put those numbers to shame recently. You want to, you want to bring us up to speed on what you've been doing lately?

1:48 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, it's definitely been a fun 4 or 5 months since the end of 2020. Yeah, we ended, and I ended what felt like a monster year, 2019, closing $11 million in ARR over my first 24 months at LivePerson, reached the 7-figure club, annual earners club for the first time, which was exciting. And then, yeah, we were all hit, slapped in the face with COVID And it was funny. It was, I mean, not funny. It was just big change of pace, just crickets. It was quiet, new business, which I'm focused on. Just went to a screeching halt. A lot of the businesses actually I was speaking with, some in the hospitality space, kind of the travel and hotel industry, and unfortunately a lot of the folks I was engaged with were actually furloughed. Luckily they came back, but really something happened in December. It was just an acceleration of new business, and I was able to really from December to the end of Q1 of this year, close, and then you actually add April, I was able to close $13.4 million in ARR. So yeah, I could sort of put the first 2 years to shame in 4 or 5 months.

3:10 Scott Ingram: Amazing. Amazing. And so what we'll do today is really just dissect that as much as we can. So first off, how many deals is that? So 13 points… I'm sorry, 13.4, 13.5?

3:22 Brandon Fluharty: $13.4 million. Okay.

3:23 Scott Ingram: So $13.4 million, 5 months. How many distinct deals is that?

3:27 Brandon Fluharty: 4 deals.

3:28 Scott Ingram: 4 deals. Awesome. So let's just start real high level. I mean, what were the biggest learnings from that? I know you maybe had a little bit of a mindset shift in your approach through that effort as well. Yeah.

3:42 Brandon Fluharty: The big thing for me was moving from being on a plane every week or every other week to starting in March, April of last year, just throwing my hands up and saying, okay, there is a new way of selling that certainly I haven't been accustomed to for many years, and I need to adapt to being remote first. So first thing I did was just upgrade some equipment, got a good front-facing camera, tried to change the background a bit, updated my microphone. So I wanted to look good, sound good, make that first good impression the best I could, even if it was purely digital. That was step 1. Step 2 was like, well, I'm going to take advantage of this time. And it wasn't so much more downtime, it was just repurposed time. And what I wanted to do was focus on Okay, if I'm not going to be on a different time zone constantly, I want to really take care of my body. And even on our last episode, we really geeked out on the concept of treating ourselves like professional athletes. I've always believed in that in sales. We geeked out on some productivity stuff. And so I doubled down on those things, really started tracking some non-common sales metrics. So my sleep, hours of sleep. And I was getting that from a wearable called Whoop. I've since added Oura Ring, who tracks similar metrics. The quality of my sleep, the sleep debt, which I measured through an app called Rise. So it was really front and center for me of understanding, hey, when I am less than 3 hours of sleep debt, and I started, when I first started using the app, I was 13 hours of sleep debt. Crazy. And I think that would be common for a lot of people. We get accustomed to running, almost getting numb to the fact that we're in constant sleep debt, and we don't really know how much it's affecting us until we start putting a spotlight on it and becoming a bit more aware of it. So that brought a lot of awareness to me around something that's kind of really core pillar to my approach now, which is having a foundation of being well-rested and sleeping well. And then I started correlating. I started tracking things like how many meetings I was in a day, not in the sense that I wanted to have more meetings so I could sell more deals. It was actually, I wanted to start getting out of meetings, because I was reading a book at the time by Cal Newport called Deep Work. That was profoundly insightful for me because what Cal lays out is that if you want to be hyper-successful in today's modern knowledge worker era, you need to dedicate time for deep work. So in this simple Google spreadsheet, I would just sort of track Here's how well-rested I am. Here's how I'm sleeping, what my sleep debt is, how many meetings I would need. I got to a sweet spot, an understanding of no more than 4 hours a day meetings, because then the other 4 or 5 hours a day, I wanted to dedicate towards going deep with my prospects. It was necessary in 2020, because we weren't getting the amount of leads we did the previous year. So we had to go deep out of necessity. I had to go deep. I had to think really creatively for my prospects, think about some really creative ideas that could fundamentally help with their business, especially since I'm selling a transformation. How could they be super smart with their budget? How could I unearth problems they might not be considering? How can I get that business to think about moonshot ideas when it's seemingly impossible. So I was trying to paint the dots and then the final piece would be just overall how I felt for the day and just my mood, my overall satisfaction. So we look at these tranches of things of my health data, my productivity data, and then my overall satisfaction. I called it a Thrive Score. I wanted to understand what are the trends that make me feel satisfied at the end of each workday, and then building the routines to, well, let's repeat whatever it is that makes me feel happy and satisfied in my work and also produces good results. And I do it in a way that's not constantly hustling and working. Well, that sounds like utopia to me. And what I learned, it was not about the perfection of it, having the perfect day. It was more about the progress of getting to a perfect day because since I was tracking it for the past, whatever, almost a year now, very rarely have I had a perfect day. But I committed to myself, no, it's not about being perfect every day. It's about the pursuit of that and measuring the progress. And can I take incremental improvements and then bring that in as a steady habit and routine to my day. And it's obviously produced amazing results, $13.4 million in annual recurring revenue in less than 5 months. I'll take it.

9:28 Scott Ingram: I was going to say, it sounds like this utopia of yours is awfully profitable.

9:34 Brandon Fluharty: So far so good.

9:35 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

9:36 Brandon Fluharty: This month's paycheck will be quite nice.

9:38 Scott Ingram: Well, it's a dang good thing that I don't have any sort of hangups about short podcast episodes because there's, there's a lot to dig into here. We'll just kind of break down each component starting with the sleep piece. And I guess the element that I'm not as familiar with is the sleep debt. Like, how is that getting calculated? Yeah.

10:01 Brandon Fluharty: So I first downloaded Rise on my iPhone and they have a really cool widget that I can keep on my main home screen. So it's like one of the first things I look at. And without connecting, and I think you'll be happy to know that they actually do integrate with Fitbit, integrate with Apple Health if you're an iPhone user, I think now Google Health for Android as well. So anything that's feeding into, say, an Apple Health, like an Oura Ring, it'll pick that up. It'll pick your, your actual sleep up. And then I don't know the secret sauce, their algorithm. I'm going to trust that their algorithm, because I have seen it over time go down and it makes sense, right? You know, I'll obviously get maybe a little bit more sleep on the weekends than I do during the week, and I see it fluctuate. And there's sort of their guidance around once you get over 5 hours of sleep debt, that's when you're going to start noticing some major cognitive disadvantages, and you're gonna feel it. You're not gonna be as sharp in front of your prospect in your meeting. You're, you're gonna really feel it in that afternoon dip, and you're gonna feel that lull. You're going to not be as motivated. For me, I've kind of found under 3 hours, I'm gonna have a pretty good day. If I'm zero and I'm in the green, like, I'm going hard, I'm pushing myself. So that was fun, you know, being a former athlete, aspiring professional soccer player, you know, really into cycling now, now that I'm older and a little easier on the knees, that stuff. I love that, you know? So I love that sort of the gamification and kind of then seeing that direct correlation of like, put in the good work. If I put in good habits, if I'm, you know, and then it becomes obsessive about not, not in a bad way, but it's really fun to then tweak and say, well, what's going to give me a good night's sleep? What's going to help me pay down that sleep debt quickly? I've learned things like eliminating caffeine in the afternoon, stuff we all kind of know, right? But until it's in front of you and you can see it, and then again correlate that to your real performance in sales, you know, you just… it's harder to stick to it. I need that coffee because I'm really tired. I got to push through, get this proposal done, or get this quote out. It made me be really deliberate. I also learned eating no later than 3 hours before going to bed and really being conscious of food that's easy to digest. Those things have a positive impact on my sleep. It was really fun. Being even able to experiment and test different things and learn, like, it was invigorating in a, you know, normally, you know, very stressful, you know, odd time for that the whole world was going through. Difficult time.

13:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. So I still want to just totally geek out on this stuff. And I shared with you before, you know, I've always been a Fitbit guy and went back and forth. I can't tell you how many times after our first interview I went and I looked at the website. And I was like, do I want to do this? Do I want to do this? And I guess I was just worried about, I'm going to look like Wonder Woman. Like I'm going to have bracelets on both arms. This is ridiculous. And then more recently I became aware of the Oura Ring, which looks like it's doing a much more like finite detail job of looking at kind of heart rhythms and where you can kind of judge recovery and things like that. So I'm interested in kind of What data are you seeing and using from Whoop? What data are you seeing and using from Oura? How are you using those different components? And I'm excited to hear that Rise integrates with my Fitbit. Now I'm totally trying that.

13:55 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah. So I do wear both, which is kind of weird because I'll have… I have my… the audience can't see it, but I have my Apple Watch on my left wrist. I have my Whoop on my right wrist and I have my Oura Ring obviously on my finger. I have to admit, I gravitate towards Whoop as I really do like its ecosystem. What I'm gathering is first and foremost is my sleep. The sleep data that I get from Whoop is very consistent with Oura Ring. They're very similar in that regard. To be fair, they're similar in what they track. A lot of it is coming up with a readiness score or a strain score. So readiness is Oura, strain score is Whoop, but similar concepts, which is like how much… or recovery score, like how well recovered are you based off of how much strain that you exhibited the previous day? So like your exercise, how much sleep and quality sleep you got that night, and then 2 distinct things like your resting heart rate and your heart rate variability. Those are core things that both platforms are measuring to give you, hey, Brandon, go hard today, or no, Brandon, take it easy. If it's telling you to take it easy, well, then you can dive in a little bit deeper into what were the habits, right? Did I go really hard on a crazy CrossFit workout yesterday afternoon or in the evening and my body just hasn't recovered? Or did I have maybe a glass of wine too many? So it really unearths your habits that show it in a very visually pleasing way. For me personally, I like the data, the way it's presented in Whoop is a little more useful to me. Oura has a cool UI. Again, they're measuring similar things, but I keep gravitating towards Whoop as it just feels more of a useful tool overall. So I would rate it slightly higher.

16:13 Scott Ingram: Got it. Got it. So I had a giant epiphany this morning and it was confluence of a couple of things. One, I knew that we were going to have this conversation and so I was looking forward to that and thinking about that, but I started a new program on my Peloton. So they have, for those who are on Peloton, I'm almost an exclusive like Power Zone guy, which is very fairly scientific, like very well-designed workouts that are really optimized to do certain things rather than just killing yourself and racing everyone like a lot of the other classes are. At least that's what I kept doing in them. And, and so what was interesting about this is, so this program is called like Build Your Zones or something like that. And I had kind of this interesting recognition because the way they structured it, it's basically 3 days a week for 5 weeks or something like that. And it's kind of a progressive build and load sort of structure. And I recognized that I was making kind of an interesting trade-off and there's probably a lot of correlation to all of this, you know, all of the athletic stuff to the way that we are structuring our, our work life and the work that we're doing. And, and that for me was, I, for all of this year, I'm not quite sure when this started, but I had kind of this recognition that I almost need to work out 6 days a week, first thing in the morning, just to keep my head right. Because if I don't, if I don't get that workout in the morning, it's not there. But what I realized in this program is I'm shortchanging my opportunity to really improve, which isn't it, which isn't the goal. So it's okay. But because I'm not getting enough rest in the way that I'm structuring my training, I'm sort of shortchanging that opportunity to improve. And it just, I was thinking about that from a work perspective, a deep work perspective in terms of how are we thinking about our clients. So anyway, I'll just set that up as kind of a primer and let you speak to that and maybe share some of your own observations in those same lines.

18:24 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, lots of fascinating things because I have a lot of thoughts of where I think the evolution of sales could be and where truly world-class sales teams start to mimic what you just described and we start to really operate more like a world-class sports team. I think we talked about this last time and it's starting to become much more apparent. The need is there, looking more holistically, looking more broadly because I've ditched personally, really over the past year since I really started honing in on this kind of data, I have looked more at those as my driving KPIs for performance. Like, okay, sleep debt heading into this week. If I'm kind of in that less than 3-hour range, I know it's going to be a good day. It's going to be a good week, right? And I can build. And how many deep work efforts? And I measure that through something called the Pomodoro Technique. How many Pomodoros do cycles, which is a 25-minute concentrated effort. And then the timer goes off and you take a 5-minute break and then you come back and do it again. Not multitasking. I'm not going, I'm not doing 25 minutes of emailing and then responding to Slack. And then, you know, maybe dabbling a little bit on a quote. No, it's concentrated, deep, deep efforts of turning off everything else, all the notifications and really focusing on a single task. I think that type of approach and starting to track those types of performance indicators will, will be a much better guide to results than, oh, how many calls did I make? Because you can make 100 calls, but if you're not saying the right things, if you're, you're just, you know, keep operating like a robot, well, you just had 100 calls that were 100 times ineffective. So is call, you know, are call metrics, email volume, number of InMails that get sent, are those really truly good metrics? How many meetings, you know, that you've run so far on a big complex deal cycle, are those really, or could it be, we think about the human optimizing the human being first. And that's sort of the hypothesis that I want to get to and to kind of expose to the world and show like, listen, it took me 2 years, you know, building $11 million a year business, 5 months to build a $13, almost $13.5 million a year business on top of the $11 million a year. So I think that there should be things to explore here. And the other big thing that I've noticed And another insightful book for me was Dan Pink's When.

21:27 Scott Ingram: Here's what's crazy about that. I was on a trip in California. I'm trying to think when this was. It was probably not too many months before you and I talked, and I did a ton of driving on that, on that trip. So I got to California and then I was all over the place, and I read or listened to, in order, Daniel Pink's When, followed by Cal Newport's Deep Work. There you go.

21:51 Brandon Fluharty: Great minds think alike. Not to be cliché, but yeah. So, and then to sort of tie back that work and highly recommend both of those books, and I'll drop another couple of great books I read over, over the quarantine that all relate to this. But when you think of when, it's, it's sort of aligning, obviously when you do things can be just as impactful, if not more impactful than what you do. And I really embraced that because the other cool thing that Rise as an app does is it helps you to align your tasks based on your natural circadian rhythm. So what I've learned about myself is I didn't really know how to think about myself because I'm like, I'm kind of a late… my brain starts ticking at night. I can get creative if I really allow myself to get creative. But I wasn't quite like a full-on night owl. My wife's a night owl, but I'm not quite a night owl and I'm not quite a true early morning person, even though I love early mornings. I love that quiet period. I love that. But what's called a third bird, sort of in between that lark early bird and the night owl. And what I just allow myself to do, again, more of a human approach to selling is just like let myself align to my natural circadian rhythm, stop trying to force myself to get up super early, be a, you know, 5 AM clubber. Nothing against that, but it's just like, it's not for me. Like, my chronotype is not built for getting up and operating that early. So I allowed myself to just align to my natural circadian rhythm. And what I tried to do is block off the first 90 minutes before a meeting. So I started scheduling my meeting later and later in the morning so that I had a ramp-up period. I built a really… what's worked for me, like a powerful daily… I call it daily start routine. And I try to just get myself warmed up for the day and get my brain literally primed for good work. And then I'll do my meetings throughout the day. And then when I'm in an afternoon dip, that's obviously when I switch over to the more, you know, checking email, getting a clean inbox, admin type of stuff, cleaning up Salesforce, and then maybe break a little bit. Maybe even a workout works around that period. Still trying to figure out where my workouts should ultimately be. And then in the evening, that's when I love doing my creative stuff. That's when I love doing a little bit of writing and I'm okay, like working until 7 or 8 o'clock. Right. Cause I've, I've, allowed myself to take advantage of when my brain is ready for that kind of work.

24:37 Scott Ingram: And I'm…

24:38 Brandon Fluharty: so I've just aligned with my chronotype and my natural circadian rhythm. Rise helps with that because it shows very visually when I'm gonna, you know, peak in the morning, dip, and then rebound. And then it even like recommends tasks like, okay, stop working, you know, a couple hours before bedtime, or, you know, so No screen time, no more food, you know, 3 hours before bed. So it's really helped to just be a partner, be a buddy in my pocket that kind of guides me to these good habits. And I'm just overall happier, more satisfied when I'm more aligned to my natural rhythm.

25:21 Scott Ingram: I think we're going to need to send Rise an invoice for sponsoring this episode, because I think everybody is going to be trying that app. After this, let's dig a little bit deeper into you. You said that you've got this like 90-minute daily start routine. How does that work specifically?

25:38 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, so I kind of do this again. I sort of gamified it. I've tweaked it and it's about an hour and I don't know, 8 or 9 different tasks. And what I try to start with first thing and not reading any emails, looking at social media. I'll sort of kick off Whoop and Oura and get the sleep data calculating. That starts to become the first thing that I take a look at. But my actual first task is I wanted to build something that had proper sequencing. And I learned this from Atomic Habits by James Clear, another… I call it a neoclassic. It's just a Again, all the stuff we probably know inherently, but packaged in a really easy-to-read book that just like, ah, that makes sense. The idea is I wanted to build on one habit on top of the other so they layered well. I start with breathing, deep breathing for 5 minutes simply outside, get a little sunlight on my face. Also good for your circadian rhythm. Then I do my reading. So I'll read Daily Stoic, very quick, something just kind of get inspiring. And then I'll just read an actual book, usually set a timer of 15 minutes or just whatever feels right. Then I get into… so I breathe, read, and then I listen. So I'll listen to a podcast. I'll listen to something like Knowable. I want to learn something. I've been really into design thinking recently, so I've been really obsessed about that. So I'll listen to something. Usually at that point, I'll grab like a second cup of coffee or something, and then I come back. So breathe, read, listen, and now it's time to write. So I'll use an Evo planner or any kind of planner, or even just a good old journal. Just start writing things down. The first thing I like to write down is what I'm grateful for that day. I think just starting with gratitude is a very good place to keep yourself humble, keep yourself grateful for the good life that we have in Western civilization. And then from there, then I start getting myself ready for work. So I'll put in, like I said, I use this just a Google Sheet that I've built for myself. I call it ThriveSpace. And if anybody in the audience wants it, Connect with me on LinkedIn and I will send it to you. And I can send it to you so you can share it, Scott, with this. I'll add my sleep and recovery score into that tracker. And then, then I start preparing myself for sharing a discovery. So that's just posting on social media, very active, particularly on LinkedIn. I'll usually have it already written out. And then all I'm doing is tweaking and posting it. And then, you know, thinking long-term, like what are important things to me? I want to write a book, so contribute to my book. And then finally, the last thing is like organize. I've already planned out my day the night before. So now it's just about triaging. I've already blocked off my calendar for the day. And so it's just a few little finite tweaks and 2 apps that I use there, Todoist to capture all my to-dos. That integrates with something called Sunsama. And if you are a fan of Deep Work, another one that I'll promote… I mean, I'm not… I don't have affiliation with any of these companies. I just, you know, I'm an evangelist of, of the right tools. Sunsama is a great one for integrating Todoist, a task manager, and particularly if you are in the Google Suite, Google Calendar and Gmail. It integrates all of that so that basically you can map out your day in chunks and tasks and then assign time to it. So it'll even track like how much time you're spending on those tasks, like build a proposal. How long is it going to take me? Do I think an hour?

29:45 Scott Ingram: Okay.

29:45 Brandon Fluharty: I can set a timer and then focus on that when it's that time to do that, that task. It has all of my calendar events. It has all my tasks that I need to do. It kind of gives me, hey, you've got over 8 hours planned. Are you sure you want to try to take on all of this? Then it will suggest, well, maybe you want to move a few things, so I can move it over to the next day. I have all that primed and ready to go. Then by the time I'm done with that, I've been through about an hour of work. I'm ready to get to work. So call it 8:00, 8:30 at that point, I'm hitting the ground running and I'm ready to do my first big task, get my first big, most important thing done. And then I start getting into my meetings. And that's been tremendous change in routine that I love the consistency of that.

30:43 Scott Ingram: Man, you are pushing all of my buttons. How do you spell Sunsama?

30:50 Brandon Fluharty: S-U-N-S-A-M-A.

30:50 Scott Ingram: Perfect. I have all the other tools you mentioned, so that sounds like it'll tie it all together. Yeah, our morning kind of organization… I guess yours happens in the evening, but I do mine in the morning… that, that structure is very, very similar. So I look forward to experimenting with, with that as well. So I also want to come back to… you talked about your Thrive Score, the health, productivity, and satisfaction. How are you How are you tracking that? What is the score? What are you doing with that?

31:18 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, long-term ambitions, to be quite honest with you, I think that that can turn into a product. If we think about our lives, it's like we have all this data in disparate sources. What I've been trying to do manually is bring it together so that I can look at something like my Thrive Score, and when it's high, I can look back and say, well, what did I accomplish that day or week? Why was it so high? And there are things that are contributing to it. So first main area that's contributing to it is health data. You know, how well am I sleeping? How well am I recovered and ready to take on strain? What's my sleep debt? So I built like a calculation of those things, right? If I'm over 7 hours of sleep, if my recovery score is in the green zone, my sleep debt is low, I'll get really high score from the health data. Then I… the second main area is deep work. How much deep work am I doing? As a strategic seller, it's not about activity, it's about deep work. That's what's most important to me. Maybe if I'm an SDR starting out my career, it would actually be more of the activity stuff because that's what's generating business. For me, I don't need a whole lot of deals in the year to make my quota and make a lot of money. So for me, I want to go deep on these really large transformations with Fortune 10 level brands. So I track that. And then again, like I said, I usually track that through how many Pomodoros I complete. That's a good gauge for me because I'm only going to hit that Pomodoro timer when I know I'm going to do a focused effort. I don't count things like when I'm on phone calls or I'm doing email, that doesn't get in there. Then I track how many tasks that I complete, which again can be checked off when I'm in Sunsama. Kind of feels like I'm a pilot when I'm operating in Sunsama, gives me this zen-like quality and flow state. And so as I hit a task that's done in Sunsama, it'll check it off in Todoist. And then, you know, I kind of score, hey, based off of how many tasks you built and scheduled for today in Todoist, did you complete all of them? Yes or no? And then there's something also in Todoist called Karma Score, and it goes up obviously over time. There's different levels you can achieve. So it's sort of capturing all this data from a productivity standpoint, particularly on deep work. So that's a part of the Thrive Score. And then 2 more parts, total time worked. I just want to understand how much time, and I try to make 8 hours my sweet spot. 8 hours of real work, not an 8-hour workday. My workday is probably spread closer to over 11, 12 hours because I'm working a bit more asynchronously in line with my circadian rhythm, but real work. And again, that's going to come from 2 sources, your meetings And, you know, the Pomodoros, like the real efforts. And then I use Timeular. I think we talked about that last time. It's just something I can flip over and that'll track my total time of work, even like the emails. And so that gives me a little sense of like, okay, are you staying in what you really want to do? Like, so you don't get burned out, stay in that 8-hour zone. Don't work too much less than that and don't go over it too much. Keeps me in check. And then how many meetings, right? Are you going over that 4-hour mark? That seems to be my personal sweet spot. And then my last thing is sort of tracking my mood. And I actually use my Evo Planner. There's things that you can, you can pull from that. That's like, you know, did you show gratitude for the day? Did you complete your most important task? Did you Have wellness, basically, did you work out? Did you share a discovery? And then you can set up specific monthly ritual. My monthly ritual is meditating just for 5 minutes, the deep breathing for 5 minutes I do first thing in the day. So I score that. So there's like a total score of 10 points on just that portion, but it relates a little bit more to my mood. 'Cause if I'm doing all 5 of those things, 2 points each, I know I'm in a good mood generally. And then that calculates my overall Thrive Score, taking health, productivity, time, and mood, and mashing it up all in a relevant score for me. And then I just write down my significant milestone or takeaway for the day, and that's it. And then that's sort of my guide, my blueprint, of, hey, here's how well I did this month or this week, this day, and what keeps that Thrive Score high. Let's do more of that and double down on it.

36:18 Scott Ingram: Love it. So sign me up for the focus group or the beta or whatever on that. What's so interesting is I've always been into this kind of quantified self sort of, of space. And I mean, you have exactly articulated the challenge is, well, I've got great data, but it's in 6, 7, 8 different places, and there's nothing that really does a very good job of bringing it all together. And frankly, I don't want to, you know, build it all into a spreadsheet and everything else. I'm going to pile on to that and suggest a book that I read that was like, okay, well, okay, I don't mean the pun here, but game-changing. It's a book called Reality Is Broken. And it's written by a woman, and I'm forgetting her name, but we'll, we'll have it in the show notes. We're gonna have a lot of good stuff in the show notes on this one. So I don't know what number episode this will be, but if you go to top1.fm/Brandon-Fluharty and the number 2, we'll have everything there for you. It's written by a PhD in game theory, and she basically looks at the way that video games are designed and all the gamification. Education and stuff like that, where it's, it's always, it's progressively harder. It's always a little, it stretches you a little bit beyond your current skill level. And she talks about how life just isn't like that, right? And I think if we can start to find ways, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna circle back, and I don't know if we've come to this place independently, or I don't remember if you were on the last call when I brought all the folks that have been on the podcast together. But the thing I have been obsessed with this year and decided to make the theme of the summit in October is world-class sales teams and world-class sales performance. And so much of what you are doing and working on and thinking about… and one thing we didn't even get to yet, which maybe now is a good time to talk about… is, I mean, you're really setting yourself up to be a world-class sales athlete. And you mentioned kind of a mindset piece around that that was a big differentiator for you. You want to talk about that?

38:28 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, that's exactly it. I want to go into every engagement, every deal that it's winnable and I can win it and really feel confident about that. Because previously in my career, as all sellers face, you are primed, taught, you know, it's a numbers game. You're not going to win every deal. And perhaps that's true in more transactional type of deals and sales, you know, maybe at the local SMB level, even mid-market, true. But in the strategic space, I feel very confident Because I'm also selective, right? I want to, you know, it's not just about saying yes to every opportunity that comes my way. I want to be selective in that. And when I can align up all these things, right, measuring what's really important to me, because I know it drives real performance, not necessarily what my company wants to see from a metric standpoint. At the end of the day, they're super happy, right? Because I'm, I'm over-indexing on bookings. But for me, I wanna feel engaged and satisfied, healthy, invigorated, excited about that, that particular engagement. And when all that lines up, why not? Why not feel like this is winnable? And then it becomes more of a sport and When it's a sport, then you can work with a coach, you can work with yourself, you can work with all of these great pieces of data that are available at your fingertips, and you can fine-tune. Just like when Michael Jordan, you know, went from not winning a championship to winning 3 in a row and then taking a break and then winning 3 in a row again, His game evolved to, I need to take the last shot at the buzzer every time, to, you know what, I'm going to get double-teamed, so I'm going to look to find my teammates, especially when I'm tired in the 4th quarter, so we win the game. When you make those shifts, right, or if in soccer you're naturally a right-footed player and you work so hard on your left foot and being able to be clean at striking the ball, you add a new dimension to your game. Now you can cut inside versus always going to the outside. So that to me is invigorating and knowing and having the confidence. That is, is how I feel like a GOAT, a world-class athlete approaches their craft and their profession. And to me, we need more sellers feeling like this truly is a craft. And not just something we happen into. At one point, one day, like my North Star ultimately is getting to a point where young kids, teenagers say, when I grow up, I want to be a professional seller. That would be a game changer for me. And I think it takes elevating us to a caliber where we operate like these professions that are idolized, like professional sports or a musician or, you know, artists. We need to treat sales the same. And it takes this more humanistic but focused and professional lens to the profession.

42:19 Scott Ingram: I love, I love that. And, you know, unlike maybe any other role, I think it's perfectly suited for it just because there's so much freedom in what we can do and how we do it, unlike probably any other role in the organization.

42:34 Brandon Fluharty: Absolutely. We are performance-based individuals in our role. And it's, you know, I posted about this on LinkedIn today. You know, you don't have to be in sales for the money, but you need to respect it. Because it's ultimately an output of our efforts. And it's not meant to be taken that that's how we define ourselves. We shouldn't define ourselves as human beings based on how much money we deliver to the company or we make.

43:06 Scott Ingram: No, no, no, no.

43:07 Brandon Fluharty: It's not about that. It's about actually making sales more human and objective, because if you take the emotion out of the money portion, and say to yourself, it's not a, oh, I need this deal to meet my quota, I need to make X number of dollars a year. Take that out of it and focus more on, like that analogy I used, is instead of me sinking the winning shot, I've gotta be President's Club, I've gotta be number one, to more about, No, I'm gonna find the open teammate who is best. It could be me taking the shot, but it could be somebody else when I get tired in the 4th quarter. When you can look at it objectively like that without emotion, that's when you can start fine-tuning the important things of your game. And it becomes fun and it becomes exciting. And it takes us back to childhood when we were learning new things and we were just starting a sport for the first time or picking up that instrument and learning it. Yeah, there were moments of frustration, but it's also, it feels novel. It feels interesting because we're progressing and sales is so well suited for that constant feeling of progressing and learning. And then ultimately it's just like, well, what's the output? What's the end result? Well, it's money. It's how much money did I deliver? I look at my W-2 that, you know, at the end of the year, like that shows me how well I perform, but it's not, I don't do those things because of it. That's just the output. So that's the mindset I think we need to adopt. And you're absolutely right that sales is so well suited for an invigoration and evolution of the real metrics that matter. And I hope to be proof point that it's other things. It's Mental Health Month, right? It's those things, you know, being the holistic person, be a good human first, optimize that. And you'll naturally be a better seller. Let's revamp our operations around that, our sales enablement around those things more so than MEDDIC. You can't MEDDIC your way in life. You know, there are other things that need to, to be comprised of making you, you, like health and wellness and deep work and satisfaction. We need to look at all of it.

45:47 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. I love this idea of it's, it's at the end of the day, it's really about progress, not perfection. I mean, it's in pursuit of perfection, but I don't think anybody ever gets there.

45:58 Brandon Fluharty: That's exactly it. Yeah. Like I said, I've had, you know, since tracking this, almost daily. I've missed, you know, a handful of days, and I'm fine with that. I'll throw out another term that I've coined over the past year. I call it flexipline… flexibility plus discipline. And the idea is, if you're on one extreme, if you're too flexible, right, you're gonna miss out, right? Because you're just too much, uh, go with the flow, whatever happens happens. Hard to be predictable, build a predictable business that way, hard to like really go after concrete goals. Same thing on the other end of the spectrum. If you're too disciplined, you know, you're gonna miss out on opportunities. You're not gonna connect well with people because you're so focused on, I've gotta operate in a certain way. So somewhere, you know, there needs to be a balance between those two. And sometimes you need to be a bit more Sometimes you need to be a bit more disciplined, but it's through this tracking and this awareness and daily consistent routines where you start to do that. That's where, again, you start to become your own coach because we know we're not going to get it from our organizations anytime soon, at least at the caliber of a professional sports team has their mindset coach, their nutritionist, their performance strength and conditioning coach. All those things. You have to be it for yourself. By developing these routines, using the right tools, using something like ThriveSpace and tracking and being more aware of these habits, that allows you to understand, actually, I need to be a bit more disciplined next week to really get where I need to go or want to go. Now I was, I can look back and say, oh no, actually I should have been more flexible there. I missed out on something potentially fun or big by just not going in. So you start to develop that intuition and that just makes you a more interesting person. Being a more interesting person, that's like a flywheel, makes you a better seller, better seller, you know, crush my quota. I make a lot of money. But it's not because I'm focusing on those things. I'm focused on being an optimized human being. And part of that's happiness and well-being and satisfaction. All of it needs to be looked at and you need to be aware of what is impacting all of it.

48:36 Scott Ingram: I think we have tackled this in exactly the right way, in the right order, in the right priority, right? So we spent the first half, maybe, we'll see how this goes, of our time talking about managing yourself, right, and making sure that you have set up your, your body and your mindset to be a world-class performer. Let's talk about now, how are you managing the deals, right? So if now the mindset is, if I've done a good job on the front end of really kind of qualifying and making sure that this does have a really strong fit, and there's a great potential for to have a transformational impact in this opportunity. How are you managing the ins and outs of the deal and that process from there?

49:31 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, this has been the exciting stuff. And this has been fun because I have all those things solidified as a strong foundation. This is when I can apply creativity. And I think that's what's missing in sales, a lot of it's a robotic process, especially sort of tip of the spear, you know, especially the business development, sales development level, or more of the transactional deals. But when you elevate and eventually get to the enterprise and strategic space, this is where separating yourself with creativity starts to lend the real big deals and the real results. So something like I mentioned earlier, I've been getting obsessed. I think this is something missing. What's been helping me is using design thinking. And I'm at a place now where I'm starting to challenge these really major brands, a major airline, a major retailer, major bank, and going in and showcasing to them, hey, let's suspend reality for a little bit. Let's think about those moonshot ideas. And let's just think about the possibilities, not think about how we're gonna get there. That'll come later, but let's just capture what could be possible. And I've been fascinated with this, this quote, and honestly, I can't remember where it came from. Maybe one of my Knowable sessions. If you can talk about the dream, you can design the dream. So I think it starts first with the outcome. And starting with that, bringing that up front in every call, discovery call, meeting, presentation, workshop, that's been really powerful because it gets the people on the other side in a different mindset. One, it differentiates you. Not many sellers are confident enough or willing to think that big. 2, it just cracks through with that crocodile brain and gets them like leaning in and like waking up like, whoa, okay, this person's serious. And then 3, it starts to help shape like, wow, I want you versus me needing to chase you as the brand, as the prospect. I get, I feel like it flips the desire to them wanting to say, hey, I do, I want to learn more. And the way I've structured it is, hey, we've done some really amazing work that we can point to. We're a small little group. We don't have the capacity to work with everyone. I'm almost offering this as an exclusive to you to work together, but we need to be aligned very early on that you're ready for a moonshot. You're ready to go after something big. Otherwise we need to take these resources and go to someone who is willing. And by sort of making that move, you make a power play of like, holy shit, I want to be a part of that. Like, this feels like some sort of exclusive VIP club that if I don't take you up on this offer, I'm going to miss out. So leading with design thinking, leading with the outcome first. Especially when you're talking with high-level leaders and C-level executives, they need to hear that first and get, get through the clutter, get through the bullshit. It's, it's not about tons of slides. It's less is more for sure. And just have a really strong, powerful conversation and be confident that you can get them there. Then, The next meeting will be about the how. And then that's where, you know, you gotta be buttoned up. You gotta rely on a good team, your teammates there. And I think we talked about this last time, or we've had conversations about the concept of a PR FAQ, a press release frequently asked questions. And that can be a really, really powerful 3-page document that gets somebody to really lean in because you start with the future. And you show what it would look like working with your company as partners and what the future state looks like, and then you use the FAQs as the how you'll get them there. It's a great lead… leading piece or a leave-behind and even an operating document that you can co-create with your champion and stakeholder as a way of like, here's how we're going to buy this transformation and deliver it.

54:18 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that was the piece. I think you're using a different nomenclature with the PRFAQ idea. I mean, it really changed my operating structure once you introduced the idea in your episode. We were talking about it in terms of an executive memo.

54:34 Brandon Fluharty: Executive memo, right?

54:36 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So just like this, this written artifact, can we tell the Story in written form and not in slides in a presentation that we all see dozens of every week and are forgotten before they're being before we're done delivering them into something that really stands out and is really way more memorable. I mean, that for me, Brandon, I mean, has really changed my own approach and has been massively impactful. So I don't know that we need to spend a ton of time there because I got kind of obsessed with that in our last. Interview, so folks can go back to episode 85 to really get that component. I was going to ask if you were still using that and leveraging that, and maybe I will let you just say, like, how else has that evolved? And maybe the PR FAQ is sort of the evolution of how you're now sort of breaking that out and thinking about it.

55:29 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, when we spoke a year, year and a half ago, it was more of an executive memo. So now the evolution is more of this PR FAQ. It comes from Amazon. Amazon made it famous. Anybody can Google it if you want to get a sense of where it came from. It's actually for products people. So more on like the technical side of, hey, we're thinking about a new product. This is how we think about bringing it to life. Let's think about the consumer first. Let's think about the future and then work backwards about how we get to that future state. But it's so good. To use in sales. Again, because it's a differentiator, it's a way to show how a big brand, a big company can buy a transformation. It's in such a neat package that everybody can relate to it, from the CEO to your champion, to people implementing the solution. It's such a digestible thing, and you just keep coming back to it. Iterate on it, co-develop it. So you're getting that extra level of engagement with your prospect or client. And it's just, I've found it extremely useful and it requires deep work. As you can imagine, it requires iteration after iteration and your brain will hurt after really creating. And that's how you know it's good when your brain is fatigued. But imagine trying to do that level of deep work when you're on back-to-back-to-back Zoom calls, you're constantly under pressure of like, get the next deal done, get the next transaction done. It certainly would not be conducive in that environment. So, you know, you're going to have to take personal responsibility to change it up and go out on a limb and say, you know, actually I'm going to do less, right? I'm going to, you know, maybe not do as many calls, maybe not do as many meetings, But the meetings and the calls that I do have, I want them to be meaningful. So I'm going to do my research. I'm going to know who I'm talking to, and I'm going to do it in a way that I don't… I'm not tied to a presentation that marketing created. I'm going to speak from me as a person, and I'm going to do it in a way that will resonate because I understand their business. And can I even The diamond standard would be, can I know their business better than them, or at least their consumer experience? That we're a B2B2C company. So I really look at that being something important for me. Can I understand their consumer experience, their customer service experience better than they do and show them things that they may not even be thinking about? Not lead with my company, but lead to it. I don't need a whole lot of slides to do that. In fact, I'm trying to get away from slides. Just have a conversation and then agree, whether it's in a discovery call or after a demo, hey, I'm going to share this thing called a PRFAQ. Have you heard about it? We have a conversation about it. Then they always like the idea. It's a great idea. We use that as our guide for buying this transformation. It's helped really speed up deals.

58:44 Scott Ingram: Well, and I have found it to be a super powerful pandemic tool because, you know, what we're not able to do is get everybody in the same room and have a whiteboard and do the deep dive workshop type of work that we used to be able to do in the past. So now I can draft and craft an initial pass at this document and sort of codifying what we're talking about. And then just hand it to them in Word and say, look, you know, tear this thing apart, redline it, add your comments. And it really becomes that asynchronous collaborative tool that, you know, doesn't take any like super whiz-bang technology to pull off.

59:24 Brandon Fluharty: Exactly. Low tech. You bring up another great element of modern selling today, especially for the complex deal. This idea of asynchronous-first work approach. It's different now. We have to adjust as strategic and enterprise sellers, video is important. So video can be inserted in the process too, of educating them on, hey, I wrote this using Loom and Vidyard and all of the great tools out there. Hey, I'm going to just take 30 seconds, walk you through this. That could be done over a very casual video, but professional video, obviously. And you're kind of walking them through in less than a minute Here's the PR FAQ. I'm highlighting some very specific things, calling things out. This is what we talked about. Is this important? If not, mark it up here. And you're right. Now you're giving them the power. They could share that video and the PR FAQ. And now you allow the work, good work to be happening asynchronously, right? That then you can come back to. And that is, that's speeding up the deals behind the scenes. You're putting these really cool tools and something like just putting a PR FAQ down in a Word doc or a Google Doc that can be shared, not a whole lot of effort that goes behind, like, in a… from a sophisticated tooling standpoint, but it can be very powerful about speeding up your deals and less meetings that you would need to get that deal off the line because you have this really quality thing that both sides of the table can come back to versus this ethereal thing of like, I've presented and demoed a bunch of slides that you've all forgotten about and we have to come back and reeducate you on all that thing. That traditional buying-selling approach, selling, that really is a selling approach. One, it's ineffective. Two, it's stale. It's not differentiating. And it's long. This is, is more of a sophisticated buying approach that ironically doesn't use a whole lot of sophisticated tooling.

1:01:32 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so fascinating. So I mean, the way I would boil this down is I, I think the important part is the way that you're setting this up, and it's what you're talking about to kick us off here, was around just helping them understand and giving them a vision, right? Giving them this like moonshot transformational type of concept, making that power move that's like, look, we're… this is a huge investment. This is a huge effort to do. And we, we only have so many of these cycles within the team. So if we're going to do this together, I need you to be committed to it. And then having the conversations, doing the collaboration, doing the documentation, creating the PR FAQ. Is there anything else that you're kind of doing as you work through these processes that is, that's making a difference? Because obviously, your sales cycle time is relatively quick here as well, to have done these 4 deals in just 5 months. I mean, I would imagine in ordinary times, it might have taken 12, 18 months to get done.

1:02:32 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, for sure. And I think the other couple of things that are super helpful is, you know, you have to be selling a good product, obviously, like as effective as that process is, I just wouldn't be able to get the deal velocity done if I wasn't selling something impactful and cool and enterprise-grade and secure. So all of those things help make my job easier. So being able to bring some emotion to it, even if you're not selling a sexy technology or a sexy product, you can still bring an emotional factor to it. I was actually talking to somebody last night about exams, exam technology relative to the bar exam. Typically, that process is very RFI, RFP-driven, very commodity type of base. We were just collaborating on how do I bring this to life in a more emotional way. We landed on a few things that can help differentiate this, this particular seller and this particular product. His brother is an attorney. It's probably the most emotional time in an attorney's life. Maybe your wedding day or the birth of your child might be equal to that, but it's highly stressful. And so we were trying to incorporate that emotion to it, thinking about the end user. Right? And not just features. Thinking about, again, bringing a vision to life and bringing that up at the very beginning of the proposal, the very beginning of a presentation. Then you're not burying it towards the end after you talk about all your products and features. If it's that important, bring it all the way to the front and start with that. That's how you're gonna wake people up, cut through the clutter, and really talk to that C-level executive. Who wants to do big things. They don't want to just maintain the status quo. They want to do big things. They have big targets and goals. Talk about that, bring it to the front. They're going to do a video, you know, bringing again some of that emotional element to it. And then the final piece I would say that's been helpful for me is I just can't do this alone. I have to rely on really good people who are smarter, at understanding my products, our products, understanding the ins and outs. Bringing in people, not to just bring in more bodies, but bring in people at the right times who can help accelerate, answer the right questions, build a layer of credibility. I think that's been really important. All those things combined have been just really tremendous. I'm fortunate to be at at a really great company at a really great time, a leader in the conversational AI space, that has certainly helped. And then, you know, last conversation we talked about this, I was deliberate in choosing to join this company, even though I wasn't looking to leave where I was, but now, you know, totally different level. I kind of feel like now I'm at a level where, yeah, I can be super strategic with my time and selective. And now it's kind of the challenges. It's the fun part. It's almost the challenge is, what do I say no to at this point? I think that's a good sign that a seller has reached… I don't want to call it a pinnacle of their career. We're always evolving, but a good place where you really can sustain and make an impact and really feel satisfied in your career that this is a craft and not just a job. And I'm fortunate for that.

1:06:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's why we call it the Sales Success Summit, Brandon.

1:06:16 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, there you go.

1:06:17 Scott Ingram: It has many meanings, but that is certainly one of them. I wonder if you can talk just a little bit more about the internal resource component and just managing that effectively, right? How are you deciding when to bring in different individuals? How are you making sure that they're prepared and understand kind of the role that you need them to play and keep everybody well coordinated as you're executing this process.

1:06:43 Brandon Fluharty: Actually, that's where the PR FAQ document is not just valuable externally, it can be just as valuable internally. So when we're sort of aligning and again, as it's evolving, that's fine. But when it's this document that's sort of acting as the blueprint to success for that account, from not just winning the account, but then implementing the vision, it's easier to get people rallied behind that. And, you know, we at LivePerson, we've accelerated this way of working asynchronously because we sell asynchronous communication. So we were easy and much faster to adopt asynchronous way of working, especially because when the pandemic hit, we ditched all of our offices. We're not going to go back to offices where, on a daily basis at least, you're going to have that type of session-based, real-time collaboration. We wanted to build a way to work asynchronously and a PR FAQ document that can be worked and read and reviewed. Even if you're going to meet with somebody, take the first 5 minutes and everybody reviews the document in silence and quiet and comments in the tabs. That's kind of a great way to work. And then you can use video. Again, another effective way we've been using Vidyard, and it's just a great way to call out certain things that they need to read because, you know, a meeting with 5 people for an hour is not an hour, it's 5 hours. You're taking away that time. So can you be more efficient with how you work? And by using an asynchronous mentality, You can be much more efficient. That tooling, that framework, way to operate is a good place to start. Then it's more natural to see, like, okay, on this next meeting, solutions consultant is the perfect person. Okay, check that off. All right, they've done a very thorough demo, very clear on the products. Now we're going to need to dive deeper on the security aspects. Okay, well, I need a security consultant. SME. Part of it is tribal knowledge of who to go to, but also just, again, going back to the steps and what needs to happen in the FAQs. Okay, we're at the security portion. How secure is this? Here's our security SME. We're going to do that. If we can combine things, great. If we can't, then it's just you're going through the steps of the FAQs. That's sort of how I've been using it, right or wrong. It has been effective. And that's the way I view the world.

1:09:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, such good stuff. And I'm glad you called out the Vidyard usage internally, right? I think a lot of people aren't considering that, look, this isn't just a prospecting sales tool, it's a communication tool. And that internal communication is so, so key when, when you're working on deals of, of this level of complexity, because there's just a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of people. And while this written documentation is good, it's also helpful to just, you know, convey the enthusiasm and the excitement and get some of that energy transfer going on. And to your point earlier, like bringing in the emotion to the deal, because I think we overlook that way too much.

1:10:09 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, that's a great point.

1:10:10 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:10:10 Brandon Fluharty: And video is super effective about that. Not only is it more easily consumable, but Yeah, you can transmit that energy. Had this the other week, just talking internally with the team, and it's very easy to get bogged down on the day-to-day with an account, and you're at a certain level with them, and it's all about just solving issues, not solving big problems per se, but more about we can't get over this because the client needs this, this, and this. And when I was with the internal team, it was refreshing to take a step back and talk about, okay, well, let's put that to the side. Let's think about big picture. And so they left energized and then they left thinking, oh wow, this is going to be great. Let's build a PR FAQ. Let's think about rethinking this business from the ground up versus just the little minute things that we need to fix and get right, which is easy to do in the day-to-day. So absolutely transferring that, that energy, getting the client excited, getting your internal teams excited. When both happen, and video is a great bridge to that, that's when the magic really can, can happen.

1:11:30 Scott Ingram: Speaking of energy and emotion, we must have like seriously disturbed the force in the course of this conversation. In the last 10 minutes, I've had 2 people who've been on this show texting me and they're asking about the summit. So I'm not sure what's going on here, but this is pretty exciting. So Brandon, I'm not quite sure that I've got a great direction from here. So is there anything else that in this kind of follow-up round to your dominating the world conversation you were hoping to just impart to kind of inspire the future or the emerging world-class sales athletes who are on their own journey and progressing and making their way to perfection? What else would you want them to know and be thinking about?

1:12:15 Brandon Fluharty: Yeah, I think it takes not being afraid to have conversations. I think conversations, both business conversations, but more broadly, just with peers and like-minded people. And, you know, so much has occurred over the past year There are things that are probably on our mind that traditionally weren't there because of so much going on. So talk to others. I think you'll just feel better in doing that. But I think if we really want to elevate, as we were talking about earlier, sales to the degree of these aspirational crafts and careers like professional sports, we do need to have broader conversations. So I suggest whether even you're an individual contributor, you're a leader, Let's have those conversations in the forums that you provide. The Sales Success Summit's a great place to do that. Your podcasts are great places to learn. I know from the first podcast I did with you, I still get people pinging me literally today, you know, over a year and a half ago. Hey, I remember you on Scott Ingram's podcast. I think, you know, you would have a great… it would be really good for you to have a conversation with this person. It was a 3-way. LinkedIn message. So not losing sight that we have to… we're a part of a community, but we have to make it a vibrant community through collaboration and communication. So having these conversations, pinging somebody and saying, hey, I think it's worth listening to this or being a part of this conversation, because we can't go off and do things on our own because we're going to lose all this great knowledge. We have to now build it, and we're at a place where the technology allows us to do it much, much easier. I say, go have conversations on the business front with your peers. Learn from one another. Let's keep elevating our career in sales so that, again, one day we get young people saying, the next generation saying, when I grow up, I want to be a professional salesperson like you, like me, like the person listening to this. That's what we should strive for.

1:14:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah, we need to make that happen because right now what the kids want to be is YouTube stars. Yeah. So let's create a more realistic vision. Yeah. And path for them. Brandon, I, I really, I couldn't have said it any better than that. What we're building towards with this year's summit is going to be next level, complete with… we will literally provide you with athletic apparel to wear to the, to the, to the event. It's going to be something special. So you can learn about that at top1summit.com. Brandon, thanks again. Every time I talk to you, it's game-changing for me. And I know that's going to be true for lots and lots of people that listen to this. Yeah.

1:15:07 Brandon Fluharty: Thanks for having me, Scott. And if anybody wants to connect, Brandon Fluharty on LinkedIn, that's the best way to get ahold of me.

1:15:13 Scott Ingram: Wait, wait, wait, wait, stop the music. Just one more quick call out here. Again, if you'll click over to top1.fm for 139, we've got links to all the tools and resources that Brandon just mentioned, and most importantly, to his Seven Steps to Seven Figures ebook. Do yourself a favor and grab that right now, and then I'll talk to you again next week. Thanks for listening.

1:15:36 Brandon Fluharty: 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.