140: Feel Great About Sales: A Race Between Me and Myself with Deel's Luke Floyd

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of QuotaPath and Outreach. To support them and all of the sponsors who support this show and this community, click over to top1.fm/sponsors. You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit Visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Luke Floyd. Luke was the number 1 AE in North America last year for Deel. Welcome to this side of the show, Luke.

0:46 Luke Floyd: Thanks, Scott. I have been a longtime listener, as you know, and it is so great to be able to come on and give back to the community in the same way that it gave to me, just by passing along some lessons learned.

0:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And we have been chatting here just a little bit. In fact, maybe I'll share some of those excerpts.

1:01 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:01 Scott Ingram: Having an opportunity here at South by Southwest to get together in person, and you have listened to every episode of the podcast.

1:08 Luke Floyd: Yep. Yep, exactly. The ones, you know, car sellers, you know, the, I think you had a door-to-door guy on in the early ones, all the way to the B2B folks even. I thought it was a great hire you made with Alex. I was really impressed by his episode as well. So I thought it was, yeah, I've listened to a bunch of different ones.

1:22 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, let's dig in like we always do. Immediate value, top 3 things.

1:27 Luke Floyd: Yeah, so my top 3 that helped me get to the top of the leaderboard. Number 1, sales is a craft. So it takes years of practice to achieve true greatness in any craft. Sales is no different. Invest in yourself and your craft for incremental improvement. Number 2 is sales is leadership. It's a marathon, not a sprint. As a salesperson, you are the runner and your career is the race. And so any monthly or quarterly quota represents just 1 mile along many. So settle into your pace, find love and joy in the process. Otherwise it's a miserable run. And then finally, everything starts with mindset. So I actually have a mental frame I use, IGST, which stands for intention, goals, strategy, and tactics. So if you don't have clear intention, you can't set decent goals, which should direct your strategy, which in turn dictates your tactics. So your intention and goals matter. The highest, you know, opening rate subject line for an email really doesn't because it changes every 2 weeks. So. That's kind of one thing that I do differently.

2:27 Scott Ingram: I love it. I love it. Concise on it. You know what the answers are. I want to talk about the sales as leadership piece a little bit more, because as you probably know, that was kind of an epiphany that I had a year, year and a half ago.

2:38 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

2:39 Scott Ingram: What all does that mean for you? How do you kind of execute against that?

2:43 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So this is actually one area that I'm really passionate about in my career. So I am an intentional individual contributor, as you have coined the term, I believe. But basically I'm a salesperson through and through. This is what I'm going to be doing for a while. So when I think of leadership, anybody can be a leader. You don't have to be a manager to be a leader. And that's one of the biggest misconceptions in the corporate world. I learned this just from being in the military where there are a lot of different leaders in the chain. So while yes, you might be a leader as I was, I was an NCO. At the same time, you have a leader and they have a leader, right? So exerting leadership is, I think, could just comes natural to me. Obviously I joined the military. Spent time for 6, actually going on 7 years now as an NCO. So I'm getting out this month, thank goodness, as an E-6 Staff Sergeant. So I both had troops, I trained troops. And what I found is that the thing about when stakes are high, whether you're downrange or whether you're in a really dangerous training environment, if you don't do your job, blame doesn't work. Like if a vehicle rolls over and somebody dies because you didn't call out something correctly. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. There's still someone dead right now. Luckily in sales, we don't have that level of stakes involved, right? It's not people's lives necessarily, but the same thing still applies. You can blame somebody all you want for something messing up, but if you're not taking extreme ownership, and that's a book I'll recommend multiple times, as many of your guests have, if you're not taking extreme ownership to lead yourself, you definitely can't lead others. And as we know, some organizations aren't exactly organized and maybe have some internal dysfunction. And when you see a project that's really worth taking on, it's your job to lead them to the promised land, whether that's helping them navigate their stuff, you navigating your stuff internally, or some combination of the two.

4:36 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Let's contextualize this just a little bit first before we really start to dig in. So talk a little bit about your role, about Deel, about, you know, what did it take to be number one in that context?

4:46 Luke Floyd: Yeah, so I started at Deel a little over a year ago, about a year and a month. And so in 2021, I did 225% of my number. Now my number at that point was based on a headcount quota. We were really focused, the business was focused on attaining users and our users being end workers. So what Deel does is we're kind of a blend company between, some of your folks might be familiar with PEOs, payrollers, except we have a different twist. We do it all over the world. So the goal of Deel is to help companies hire and pay and manage anyone anywhere. So if you needed to go hire somebody in Brazil to edit this episode and wanted to do it compliantly as a contractor, we could do that. Or if you wanted to open up, you know, EMEA operations when the sales tech EMEA kicks off and you need to hire somebody in the UK, let's say, to help you run that thing as an employee, we can do that. And then finally, the global payroll option we're just rolling out. So basically helping folks hire and pay. So that's originally why I was comped on a headcount quota. Now the business is kind of pivoting a little bit. So they put us on a revenue quota. But yeah, in 2021, I did 225%, which equated to about $1.9 million in revenue. Specifically, I'm in the mid-market segment. So we define that as companies, I'm in North America, that are 200 to 2,000 employees. So lots of great tech brands. In there and growing brands to work with.

6:08 Scott Ingram: And truly riding a rocket ship. You shared with me what stage you brought in, what the growth has been. Talk about that because that kind of blew my mind. Before I have Luke talk about Deel, let me quickly talk about QuotaPath because it's the perfect tool to manage this type of situation for yourself and for your team. And if you're still using spreadsheets at any point in your commission and compensation tracking process, you really need to look at QuotaPath. Check them out at top1.fm/quotapath and let them know that you heard about them on Sales Success Stories. And speaking of Sales Success Stories, let's get back to Luke and what's happening at Deel.

6:46 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So Deel, you know, had one of the fortunate parts of the unfortunate thing called COVID. A lot of people went remote. And if you're hiring somebody like, let's say, a graphic designer to be remote or an engineer to be remote in, you know, Reno, and you live in… your company's in Las Vegas, why not have it be Buenos Aires? In Argentina. So a lot of folks realize the global potential in team and talent. And so initially when I came on, we had filed our Series, just gotten over our Series B, just raised our Series B. Deel, just for the software nerds out there, Deel went from Series A to D in less than 18 months. The run rate is just absolutely incredible. You can see some of the graphs. It is an absolute J. When I came on, we probably had, you know, 800, 900 clients, something like that. Today we have over 7,000. It was a really interesting experience. Those types of growth, you know, 12x, 15x year over year, just quarter after quarter after quarter puts the company in a very high stress test a lot of times. So it's been really fun. It's not been always easy, but on the flip side, I've learned so much from that role that I might not have learned at a lower growth company. So it's been really cool.

7:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And you were number 87?

7:59 Luke Floyd: Yeah, I was employee 87 and we just crossed 750 and that was a year ago. Right. So. We also hired all those people, most of them anyway, without even a chief of people or like official HR function. So we just…

8:11 Scott Ingram: But you had a great platform to onboard them into, right?

8:13 Luke Floyd: Exactly. So we just used our own platform, made it happen. But yeah, so I have many clients that are also hiring quickly and can definitely understand their concerns about building the plane while you fly it. It's never easy. It's a question of priorities, right? And so yeah, it's been a wild ride. This is why I got into software sales though. You know, I mean, to… this is the ticket. So getting in when we were valued at, you know, a little over $300 million, now to $5.5 billion, and our next one will be, you know, 3 or 4x that. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. But at the same time, this is why I made the switch to get into software sales.

8:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Heck of a deal.

8:48 Luke Floyd: Exactly. Eventually you stick around long enough at any one of these companies and it pays off. You know, you find a ticket.

8:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially when you're performing the way that you are and creating the opportunities for yourself that you are. And we'll get into that. But first, let's kind of look in the rearview mirror. Yeah. How'd you get into sales in the first place?

9:03 Luke Floyd: Yeah, so it's a long story. So I did college and high school debate and speech. So I'm very familiar with chatting with people, talking with people, performing. And then I went to college out in Idaho. I grew up out in Idaho as a teenager, lived in Atlanta as a small child. We moved out to Idaho as a teenager, went to school for 2 years, decided I was somewhat bored, but also effectively my father had been arrested. And so I had to take care of my mother, or at least at the very least not have her pay my bills. She's got to do her own thing, right? So kind of dissolution of this family element. And up comes a recruiter for this guy. It's a pest control company in Jacksonville, Florida. And he's like, hey, you can go door to door selling pest control in Jacksonville. Everybody's got roaches. You can make like $60 grand this summer. And of course, the dollars in my eyes, I hopped into a car with my roommate and we probably had $80 to our name collectively. And we set off across the country to Jacksonville, Florida and lived there for a summer and sold pest control door to door.

10:00 Scott Ingram: Everybody's got roaches.

10:01 Luke Floyd: Yeah, well, when you're in Florida, right? But I mean, the obvious horror stories. I did make it the entire summer. I didn't do it any further than that. A guy sprayed me off of his doorstep with his water hose. Like, a lady called the cops on me, so I sold the house across the street from her just to piss her off. Like, you know, just the standard stories of door-to-door. Never thought I'd get back into sales. I was actually, again, did college debate, and so I thought I was going to be a debate coach. But the problem with being a debate coach at that level, collegiate level, is you are an academic. The problem with being an academic is you gotta go get your PhD to make like 80 grand a year. So I could not, you know, keep up with my priorities and goals of taking care of my family. My mother has a disability or 2. My sister doesn't quite have the earning potential, so it kind of just fell on me. So I got a call from a life insurance company and I happened to be, it was my senior year. I was looking for a transition after I graduated and I didn't take it at first. And I was like, nah, I've been down that route. My wife was like, why not? Like, at least go see what they got. So I went and did that for 10 months. Apparently I'm just super gullible. I started with pest control sales and then went into life insurance, but both were 100% activity. Both taught me to trust a process. It might be Saturday night. I mean, we work 6, 7 days a week, but if it was your 13th call and the numbers say that in 13 calls you produce X amount of premium, magically on that 13th call it would happen, you know? So I just really learned to trust the numbers in the process. Through those more B2C-focused ventures. From there, switched over into software, had a buddy at school that was selling for a small SugarCRM consultancy shop that also had like a startup on the side. I was an SDR there for about 6 months and then moved into a closing role at a small GovTech company for 3 months. It did not work out. I quickly made the transition when I realized selling to the government was not for me. And great lesson learned. And then I went to Pipeline Deals CRM as an account executive. Great environment to cut my teeth as a closing rep. So a lot of inbound leads, qualification, who do you spend your time with? How do you read intent? And also CRM isn't something you do willy-nilly. It's a pretty decent sized project. So I got some good project management chops while I was there. At that point, they brought in some leadership and it was time for me to move on. And so I happened to land a role at this company called Granular. Now, I didn't know anything about farmers and Granular sold their goods and served farmers specifically, like corporate farmers, like beans and corn farmers, or like the people that make the cotton that Levi jeans come from in America farmers. And so it was a wild ride. It's effectively an ERP for farmers. And so learning a brand new skillset of relating to these folks, you know, going from sitting behind a computer, chatting with a VP sales, talking about CRM to standing out in the middle of a cornfield, counting corn plants. You know, talking about satellite imagery, it was just wild. But I had a couple of mature guys in the organization that we were acquired by take me under their wing. These were seed salesmen. So they had grown up in farming. They did farming on the side, they sold the seed. And basically they were the company's face at the end user, at the farmer. So something went wrong and that corn, like, let's say fell over in a July windstorm. It wasn't corporate that was getting called. It was that seed sales rep. So their reputation meant a whole lot to them. And so they kind of took me under their wing, taught me the vocab, helped me relate to the farmers a little bit better, and then started introducing me to these folks and basically just put me down on the, literally the kitchen table with some of them, with the, you know, the moms and the wives that ran the books there and said, look, this is something you need to buy. And so to have that kind of faith trusted in me really was a boost. Eventually I decided I wanted to get out of direct sales. At that point, sales was still not a great path for me. I was very up and down riding the roller coaster. End-of-month tension headaches. I didn't have the right perspective. And so I went into basically a channel enablement role. So working the digital tools for those guys that sold the seed. And it was great. I got a company truck and I had covered the Delta and Southeast of the United States. So I got to see and eat and go to a lot of different places. But it also left me a lot of windshield time. And that's how I found Sales Success Podcast. So, you know, I live in Atlanta and I'd have to drive over to Natchez or Greenville, Mississippi, or, you know, Boothill, Missouri. These are long drives, you know, 7, 8 hours. And I would listen to podcast episodes and I went through some of the other sales podcasts. There's not really any I listen to regularly other than this one, because I don't need another, you know, trainer trying to sell me something. I get enough of that on LinkedIn. So yeah, that's actually where I decided, wow, I can do this if I get back into it and really define the way that I want to sell. There's people out there that are making money. They're living their lives the way they want to. And so being able to see those examples, I just kind of built a plan of this is what I want to do. I want to get back into this. And as it turns out, the head of sales for North America for Deel, Chris Lee, was my first director at Granular. And so I opened up the South for him, helped us move upstream in some ways, building up the ACVs, did some really innovative go-to-market strategy work with him. And so this is about the time that he was looking at maturing the function at Deel. At Deel, it was, you know, the SMB AEs had 8 to 10 demos a day, back to back to back to back. You know, it was one call close ideally, like, and they were trying to move upstream. So there was a lot of work to be done. And we had some mid-market reps at the time. We had some folks that were a little bit decent, but Chris had history with me. He knew that I could come in and kind of be more self-sufficient because I want to build my own stuff a lot of times. So that's how I wound up at Deel and took the job last February. Wow.

15:50 Scott Ingram: So many places I could go. Where I want to start though, and I don't want to wait to get into this because it was the thing that really got me interested in kind of your story and what you were doing. So you just said kind of in listening to these episodes, you heard people who were living the lives that they wanted to live and We were on one of our attendee networking calls, I think in January, for the folks that hold tickets to the summit in October. And I think the topic, I think we were talking through was really just kind of the vision for the year and what we were hoping to do. And you said, you know, I want to do this again. I want to do my 200%, 225%, but I want to do it and work a lot less. Talk about that. I just think that's such a great perspective that, you know, oftentimes we only define success by I'm number one or I did this percentage. But if you kill yourself in that process, that's not so cool.

16:37 Luke Floyd: Yeah, no, absolutely. And this is something that I've been making a large transition. You know, when I first got into sales in the door-to-door and then in selling insurance, there's a lot of what I would call, just my personal opinion, negative influences in the sales community that I listen to, the hustle 10x culture, right? And so the problem is some people can afford to do that because if you burn out, You have people there to help you stand up, right? Not all of us can afford to burn out in that way because like if we can't sell, then like people's bills don't get paid. So I had to be very careful. And so when I came in and I thought of sales as a craft, like, hey, this is what I'm going to get back into. I thought, okay, what do I really want to do? I want to sell. I enjoy selling. I don't want to go into management again. I can be a leader without being a manager. So knowing that I want to sell. And knowing that it's going to take me 10 or 20 years until I can retire at the earliest, right? Like, I'm in this thing for a minute. What kind of life do I have to be selling or have to be doing so that I can sell for 10 or 20 years and not burn out? Because I'm not going to do the roller coaster thing over and over again. So it was really designing that. And what I have had to do over the last year in achieving that, there's actually a really important inflection point that, that I want to call out. So And I think I even messaged you about it at some point, but like beginning of December, basically, I had had a vacation scheduled. And so it was like I was coming up on this vacay, I was at like 190%, and I was like, I can really push hard through the holidays, I can hit my 200% goal. Because when I came into Deel, I told Chris, look, I don't care what number you put in front of me, I'm gonna do 200% because that's what we do here. Exactly. And so I was gonna have it happen. And in that moment, I just realized, you know what, if 190 was my best, I'm just going to let that 200% go. And I'm going to do what I know I need to do, which is Q1 planning and transition to '22. So let's just go take care of business. We missed. Oh, well. And then had a meeting the next week. Turns out my numbers were low. I was actually at 225%. Like, you know, so it really worked out. And I was proud of myself that rather than get distracted by the end result, I focused on the process instead, and it wound up being okay, right? Like the world didn't… nobody died and the world didn't fall apart. So yeah, that's kind of one area I've worked on is the anti-hustle culture. And obviously Brandon Fluharty talks about this a lot and he's been on the podcast and his episode was a great one to listen to. The other thing that I've been trying to think about is what does mastery and craft look like? And I know this is something that I grew up as a kid in the '90s watching Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez and Tiger and these people that were just literally some of the best athletes, some of the best competitors, and how they each changed their games. And one thing, if you listen to Tim Grover's book about Michael Jordan, Relentless, he talks about that winning is not the time that you put in. It's not the trophy. It is literally everything. It is all that people at that level think about. I have no desire to think about business 24/7, but I figured, well, hey, if I have, if I can put my brain to use, let's say 30 hours a week and have it be really focused work, surely I can do the same amount as took me more, right? Like surely I can trim the fat and process and distraction and anything else. So that's really where the focus is now is not only how do I trim the fat, make sure that I keep my organizations and systems in place moving quickly. But also, how do I transition from thinking of my end goal as 200% and instead thinking of my end goal as the pursuit of mastery in sales, knowing that I will never get there, I'll never be a master, but still pursuing that because it feels good when you hit those milestones along the way. Like when you run a disco demo call that's really complex, you have an aggressive, you know, C-level person on the call that you're having to wrangle, and then you have, you Your champion backtrack, like, and then it all turns out okay. And it's all because you kind of kept your head and executed it well. That feeling, that high walking away from it is, I'm more interested in that than 100% or 200% or 500%, because that's winning. That is in itself everything that I've worked towards, the freedom to be able to sell the way I want to sell, the freedom to be able to, you know, pay bills on time and have enough money to Take my wife to do nice things, the freedom to go get a new job if I need to, because I know my skills, I'm capable of doing that. So that level of freedom includes defining what the end goal looks like. So that's where I'm switching from 200% to, I bet I can do a whole lot better than that. Who knows? By just focusing on doing my job so that it feels better when I'm doing my job.

21:23 Scott Ingram: Yeah, the feels better part I want to come back to, although this is really interesting. I mean, what you talked about in terms of, you know, just knowing that you needed to take that little bit of time. Over the holidays and do that break. I mean, the timing for me right now as we're recording this, and we'll release this within about a week, so it's going to be a pretty quick turn. I'm getting ready to go on vacation for a week, and it feels like this is a really bad time for that, right? I've got a big event that we're working to produce here that we'll host in just over a month. And at the same time, it's spring break. This is a trip for my wife and I, and we haven't you know, been on a trip just the two of us in, I don't even know how, I mean, years.

22:03 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

22:04 Scott Ingram: Many years. It's kind of disturbing, honestly. And I know it's kind of trust the team, trust the process, right? Like we've done all of the work, they've got the ball, right? This is gonna work out. But in the car, I mean, I think it was, it kind of came down to qualifying, but some of it ties into, I think, the mindset that you're talking about, but it's also not riding the roller coaster and just protecting the way that you feel about things. Yeah. And you're really looking for the deals at Deel that feel good, right? Where you can enjoy the process.

22:34 Luke Floyd: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the growth, like I said, comes with its own obstacles. And so, one of those was, you know, I started in February. By July, there were only 2 mid-market sellers and we were just covered up. I mean, I had 75 or 80 opportunities in my name, which is just an awful way to live, frankly, as somebody that wants to do as best as possible for every single opportunity. And so I started to think, I don't want to sell this way. So it was like, okay, I got here. Okay, now let's keep iterating. And just recently I have gotten down to below 25 open opportunities, which is good. And I'm going to try to get it down even further because my end goal is I just want 5 at any given time in any quarter that I'm going to go deep on, that I know if I go deep on, I'll win, you know, at least 3 out of those 5 and have big enough opportunities that those 3 a couple quarters in a row, you know, makes my year and plus some. And then everything else is just extra, automate everything else away. But to your point about who I want to, you know, defining how I want to work, it's still not there. It's still not perfect. I was on a call the other day with a brand I won't name, but let's just say that like the CEO and the CFO get on this call and effectively demean and bully myself and my legal resource that I brought on. And I had worked with this, you know, internal person who set this call up. I had worked with her for like, you know, 9 months at this point, 8 months. And this is our first time getting access. I made a lot of mistakes in this deal. Long story short, they come in, they come in firing hot, not knowing what the context is. And I just kind of walked away from that deal telling one of our junior reps that was on the call. He just started a couple months ago. I was like, look, you can have it if you want to. Totally fine. I'll send my follow-up email. I don't work with people that talk to me like that. Just that easy, right? They can, or more importantly, don't talk to the legal resource that I brought in that didn't have to spend his time with me. Right. So that's really what I'm trying to get to is can I get to a level where I can pick and choose which opportunities are really worth investing the time? Because, you know, it's especially over the last 2 years, you'd never know what's going to happen tomorrow. I mean, with everything going on right now in Ukraine and Russia, you never know literally what is going to happen. So ultimately, is this the way I want to be spending my life getting berated by some CFO when he doesn't know what he's talking about? Like, not really. So I'm not going to do that. Yeah.

24:54 Scott Ingram: Good for you. You know, I think one of the lines that just grates on me is this idea. It's not personal. It's business.

25:02 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

25:02 Scott Ingram: I call absolute bullshit on that.

25:04 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

25:05 Scott Ingram: Because it is personal. All of it is personal. We spend, unfortunately, we spend most of our time in business.

25:11 Luke Floyd: Yep.

25:12 Scott Ingram: And there's no reason for those types of experiences to happen. And so, I love it when people hold the line in that way. I'm fond of and work for an organization that we will fire customers. I mean, if you're going to treat my team who's trying to serve you like garbage, we will take out the garbage. Thank you very much.

25:30 Luke Floyd: Exactly. And I immediately after, I basically sent him an email and was like, well, clearly we're not the right fit. Best of luck. Let us know if we can help on anything in the future, just to make clear. And then of course, you know, they can…

25:39 Scott Ingram: and then they come running back, right?

25:41 Luke Floyd: It's funny how that works. So yeah, the ultimate end goal is that… I mean, I feel like that stuff rubs off. How do you not take that home to your kids and wife? Or like my wife and my dogs? Or like, how do you… you know what I mean? And so it's like, if I can choose not to be around people that live that way, that have that type of energy, and instead can focus on… because here's the other thing I know, people that act that way aren't there to help you, right? They're not going to help you mobilize to get a big transformational deal done. So that's not the type of people I need to be spending my time, whether they talk to me great or not.

26:11 Scott Ingram: So yeah, yeah. Let's look back one more time and just kind of your career journey and your career evolution, you know, given all that you have learned now. I mean, if you could go back and kind of start the sales journey over again, what would you do? How would you think about that differently?

26:26 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So I would spend more time as an SDR. I know that's not a popular comment, but I really would have. 6 months was not long enough. It was enough time for me to get my feet wet. Luckily, in my next closing roles, I did my own prospecting as well. And so I, like others in the community right now, believe that AEs should be getting their own business. Even if they got a lot, you should at least be earning referrals, right? So. I fundamentally believe in that. I've always believed in multichannel prospecting and still try to do it to this day. But I would've spent more time as an SDR. And then secondly, I would have been more deliberate and taken the same care and attention and level of detail that I learned in the military and applied it to sales sooner. Because the great thing about the military is, you know, everybody's given all the same information. Everybody has the same TMs. Everybody has the same manuals. So me and 30 other thousand people that have the same rank on my chest technically should all be the same, right? But not, but based on the effort you put in. And so I would say that knowing that now, I would put the effort in as an SDR a little bit longer. Secondarily, I would pick one industry and stick in it. So this is my first time selling to HR and finance. It took a while for me to get in and understand what they care about. Previously, it was a lot of sales leaders that I sold to. And then farmers, as we discussed. So I'd stay in an industry, but otherwise I don't know that I had the opportunity to do much differently. I know there's a lot of people out there that are like, just wait for your, you know, find the best fit company. Sometimes you got to go to where you got to go, right? You got to get bills paid and you got to get food on the table. So if that higher paying role comes along, I totally get it. So I don't regret any of the moves because moving to that corporate role helped me realize I needed to be on this level. But at the same time, I definitely would have, I think, pursued my first couple of roles a little bit differently and, and maybe had a little bit more mentorship and stayed as an SDR a bit longer. I think that would have helped my business acumen.

28:29 Scott Ingram: All of this talk with Luke about consistently executing on a process and treating sales as a craft has me thinking that the best craftsmen have the best tools. And whether you're an SDR or you're an AE who believes you should ultimately be responsible for your own pipeline, one of the best tools in the business is Outreach to help you consistently execute against your multichannel prospecting efforts. If you're not already using Outreach, you've gotta take a look. top1.fm/outreach. Given some of that need, right? And, and sometimes you can't be as patient as you wanna be. I feel like that kind of ties to the underlying motivation and what drives you. And I, I feel like you've probably given a couple of hints, but what is that?

29:13 Luke Floyd: Yeah, I mean, ultimately my motivation is that I have a family to take care of. And, you know, when I was growing up, my parents were technically married. My father was fairly absent as a figure, but he was actually disabled. He had busted his knee. So he was technically disabled. So my mother worked full-time to care for us. And she, while my father brought in some income, my mother basically managed drugstores growing up. So hourly work, you know, just working really hard, cleaning the place, doing all this stuff. And so I watched her work for decades. And decades with just a very Protestant work ethic, we'll say. And it's, you know, gotten her effectively nowhere in one of those dead-end types of roles. So I knew immediately that it wasn't enough just to work hard. You also have to play your odds right. You got to be in the right spot so you can get lucky. And so ultimately, my everything that I set up working long-term so I can stay working right is for to take care of my family. Hopefully, you know, having the equity pay off somewhere like Deel, taking care of my family, and then ultimately after that, taking care of community. I'm pretty okay. I tell my wife often that like if she left me, I'd probably just go live under a bridge. Like I can make do with most things, most places, right? Like I'm not a particularly high maintenance individual, so I don't need things as much as I need to feel like the folks around me are taken care of. That's really important to me. I've realized rather than trying to change that part of myself, I'm just gonna lean into it.

30:38 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that. It's no wonder that you have found this community and really leaned into it and gotten involved in it.

30:44 Luke Floyd: Exactly. Because you have people like Abel that just talk about helping service. You know, you have, that's a common theme that comes throughout is always put those folks ahead, your customers ahead. So that's one thing I definitely picked up as a common theme across the other episodes.

30:56 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What are you most proud of?

30:57 Luke Floyd: Funny enough, it's actually professionally, I'm most proud of having the chutzpah to get back into sales directly. Right? Because I had to take a pay cut. It wasn't easy. Had to give up the company truck. It was not certain at all. It was definitely a bet on myself. I'm proud that I got back into it and did it right. In terms of just overall, I'm also really proud of my time in the military. You know, there were a couple of situations when I went to Iraq. I was just a young person. I had no responsibilities other than to myself and the team that I was handling. So while it was a scary situation, certainly it wasn't anything like when my unit had previously gone during the surge, it was much worse for them. But there were some training situations and, you know, even domestic that are super scary. I'm a combat engineer, so we blow stuff up, so shoot stuff. So, I mean, inevitably you're on demo ranges and you're on events where, you know, live ammo and rockets and demo are going off. I mean, it's a deep feeling of pride to know that you have the capability to keep everyone safe. And so that also is something I'm very proud of, that nobody ever got hurt. That everybody was safe. I didn't ever push anyone and hopefully inspired some folks along the way. So that's, I would say broadly what I'm proud of professionally, the fact that I got back into sales.

32:08 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I don't think I said it before. Thank you for your service.

32:10 Luke Floyd: I appreciate that.

32:11 Scott Ingram: What's the most challenging part?

32:12 Luke Floyd: Oh man, definitely internal relationships. It's something I'm fairly good at. I'm pretty good at understanding people, reading people, what they want, what they need. But Deel has been, has tested me a bit. You know, Deel doesn't. Still and didn't have much of like a sales culture. Our founders are incredibly talented. They're you know under thirty. Both of them went to MIT, but they're product people. And so being able to navigate and explain as kindly as you can get out of my business and let me do my thing, right? It's not always easy. On the flip side, you can't come in like a bull in a china shop to build teammates' trust, right? So. Understanding what motivates them, what language do they speak, and trying to cater so it matters to them is really the most difficult thing. I recognize I have high standards for myself. I don't transpose or try not to transpose those standards on anybody else, but it's still… I mean, doing that level of performance, wanting to perform at that level requires your teammates give extra sometimes simply because of where you want to be. So recognizing that that's like a sacrifice they're making and honoring them for it is one thing that I'm really… internal teammate relationships, most difficult, but it is what I'm working on.

33:25 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, we also talked about, you know, your longer-term vision is to stay an individual contributor, move up into more complex, more enterprise types of sales, and how important just kind of the role of project manager is when in managing deals. Talk about that. I mean, because you're doing that today and that applies to the internal team relationships and leading from that perspective as well.

33:49 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So that was one thing I definitely learned while I was selling farmer software is that you got to tell them the who, the how, the when, and get it done, right? If you want that commission check to come in, you got to make sure that they get that thing, the check sent and that everything's set up right. Because if you don't set it up right and you don't make sure that they're having a good time, they're going to go tell all their buddies and then nobody's going to buy from you. So I learned early on, not that you can't trust people, but that in Jocko Willink style, you should try to influence everything that you can possibly influence. So for example, right now at Deel, my job as a salesperson is not done until the first payroll is made. Now, in order to get people paid, you got to get them in a system, you got to get them logged in, you got to get them trained. There's a lot of steps, and steps I don't have permission to do, steps I have to involve other people to do. We got to get a legal review just like everybody else. So there's a lot of steps along the way that have to be managed. Initially, it started just as rudimentary and we had a really big opportunity come in. And so I whipped out a mutual action plan that I had used previously with farmers. And I told the customer success manager like, hey, this is how we're gonna do big, you know, onboardings in the future. We're gonna use a mutual action plan, shared accountability. Everybody's gonna be on the same page. Went smoothly. They liked it. Now it's gotten to even more complex as we move upstream, you know, taking, you know, you have groups of cohorts of people that are on an existing vendor onboarding at the same time as cohorts of new hires. And so there's a lot of complexities when you deal with employment, visas, pay, benefits. So making sure that all the T's are, you know, crossed, all the I's are dotted across a whole myriad of things is really difficult. And it's something that effectively, like I told you, I think of my job in 2 parts. Number one, I'm a detective to find out which cases are worth spending time with. And then once I decide it's worth spending time with, we're going to do this thing. And it's going to happen. And here's every single step that's going to happen. That can be great if you're the client because you get the end result. It can be annoying if you're a customer success manager that has Luke telling you every little thing to do, you know, but on the flip side, helping establish process, like we mentioned, building the plane while you're flying it, we're still establishing and building a lot of those processes. So it's also been great to have that kind of impact on the project management side to be able to say, this is how I want onboardings to go. Phase 1 through 10, this is how we're gonna do it. And then that's how we do it. So it's also gratifying in that way.

36:10 Scott Ingram: It sounds like once you do that detective work, you find somebody that you wanna work with. More than anything, it sounds like you're probably selling the process.

36:18 Luke Floyd: Yeah, exactly. So how are we gonna change? It's effectively just a gap analysis. What's your process state today? What's the end state we're going to? And what is all the stuff in between that's gotta get changed? Maybe that means mapping the integration correctly in NetSuite so things update. And so now you gotta bring in the engineers. Or maybe it means our people in Brazil with our last, you know, vendor had a really rough transition. Can we hop on a call? And now I got to get the Brazilian country manager and we hop on a call to assuage fears. So there's a lot of different change management, technical requirements, as well as working on consistent timelines because these are people's paychecks. It can't be a day or two late because somebody didn't want to sign something, right? So a day or two late, I should say. So ultimately there's a lot of moving parts to keep track of. For sure, but at the same time, it's a very rewarding feeling because at the end of that project, you all feel like a big team. There's one client I'm working with right now that's an enterprise client that we've been on a proof of concept together since end of September. And, uh, they happen to be in South Africa. So like my morning Thursdays, their afternoons, they're getting off work. They're excited. They're happy. It's just great. And we were just talking, you know, the proof of concept's wearing down. We're expanding. We won't have these weekly meetings anymore. We were saying, you know, it's like we're our own team. So being able to feel that way makes all of the little detailed stuff that I'm not good at worth it.

37:39 Scott Ingram: Have you started to build in the celebration into the mutual action plan?

37:43 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So I need to get something like a Domino's pizza party or like, or like something. But there is a little… the final step is always people get paid, you know, but then it's always the question of that's great for everybody. But, you know, what about a celebration on our side to kind of step back and go, wow, It used to take y'all a week and a half to get that done, and now it just took you 7 minutes. That's incredible.

38:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

38:04 Luke Floyd: It was like, to be able to sit back and think through that with the client would actually be super powerful. It also reminds me of something that Brandon suggested to me, and I think maybe he had mentioned on the episode, kind of working backwards from almost like a product release or something, saying like a press release memo, this is the great thing that happened, and then working backwards, envisioning it in that way. Yeah.

38:26 Scott Ingram: And that was the reason I asked. And, and actually I've fallen off of this just because of the virtual way, but I I often would start engagements and start my relationship with an executive sponsor or a champion and asking them the question, imagine a year from now, or imagine we're at the end of this project and we're all together, we're celebrating, we're raising a glass. What specifically are we celebrating? But what you just made me realize, and I haven't done this and I'm thinking about it, is explicitly putting in a celebration step. In that mutual action plan so that we really, as a team, we're building towards this and we are planning to celebrate and here's how we're going to do it.

39:05 Luke Floyd: Now, that's a great idea. And especially if you're in the type of segment that can do any sort of customer event, you know, I mean, that would be a great way to build goodwill and trust. I think the biggest thing that I do right now when it comes to celebrating or navigating that delta mostly is just making sure that they have a good handoff to customer success.

39:21 Scott Ingram: Sure. Yeah. But, you know, it's something that can happen virtually too, right? It can be, hey, we're all going to get together, all going to be on this Zoom. It's such a great opportunity to bring in your leadership too, right? Who has supported the deal and was perhaps involved early on and their executive sponsors and just say, hey, look, we did it. We're in this good place. And what a great way to set up a solid referral ask, right?

39:41 Luke Floyd: Exactly. And so that's something I have planned for this one that we're, you know, going into expansion Monday, fingers crossed, should be getting the answer. But it's, you know, bringing on the leadership, like you said, introducing account management at that point, being able to say, here's the future, you know, And then also looking back on where'd we come from, how long did it used to take us to do these meetings? How long does it take us now? So being able to share that success is an end goal in itself. That's a good feeling, right? Like, and that's when you look back on your career, it's those feelings that you remember. Even with the accolades, it's about what they make you feel or the situations they put you in where you felt calm and relaxed on a beach for President's Club.

40:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and one of the things that I often kind of work with my clients on, because we're working through big complex, you know, projects with a lots of moving parts is kind of the change management components. And part of what you want to think about when you're thinking about change management is what are those little wins? What are the things that we're going to see and allow everybody to feel like, oh, we're actually making progress, right? This isn't some horrible slog that we have to endure for the next 12 months, 9 months, 18 months, whatever it is, is really thinking about what's gonna feel like a win even though we're not Done.

40:56 Luke Floyd: Yeah, I think that also just goes back to what you're saying earlier. At some point you start selling the process. Yeah, right. And that's also… I really agree with some of the discourse on LinkedIn lately about reclaiming and not being afraid to say that you're a salesperson. You know, I am a salesperson. That's what I intend to do for my career. But on the flip side, yes, you could look at me as a vending machine for demos and discounts. Or on the flip side, you could look at it and be like, wow, he's probably done this quite a few times. I wonder what might be the pitfalls. So proactively leading earlier in the sales cycle, we talk about giving value or providing value, adding value. That word has become incredibly meaningless, I feel like, recently. But what I do know is valuable for my customers to hear, whether you'd move forward with me or another vendor, here's the stuff you gotta watch out for.

41:43 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

41:43 Luke Floyd: Here's the way you need to run this because that's helping them in their job and making sure that it gets executed well. Which at the end of the day we want, even if they choose a competitor, we don't want things to go badly.

41:51 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, and I think being proud of being a sales professional and helping reframe that for people and helping them understand what I keep coming back to in my head right now is this idea of trust the process. Yeah, right. I'm selling the process. The reason we have this process is we have learned what works with dozens of other clients so that you don't have to step in a bunch of potholes and fall and trip on your face, like might happen if you don't have somebody like me shepherding through the process. If you choose somebody else. And those are the opportunities where you become the differentiation. And even if you have an inferior product, you can outsell somebody else because they make me feel like a number. They don't show that they care, that they've thought through these are the steps that we're going to need to go through. These are the things that we need to think through in order to be successful. I mean, I work with my clients super early on. Now, this serves them, but it also serves me. I need to figure out who is our executive sponsor.

42:48 Luke Floyd: Exactly.

42:48 Scott Ingram: Because if we don't have that, the odds of your project succeeding, especially when we're involving multiple divisions, multiple geographies, yeah, it will not work because of the politics and everything else if we don't have somebody upstairs who we can, you know, help us shepherd this through that has that type of alignment. And if nobody else asks that question, Yeah.

43:12 Luke Floyd: Yep. Somebody's got to.

43:13 Scott Ingram: I stand out a little bit, don't I? Right. So it's those kinds of things. Well, process. Let's dig into the process and we'll start with my favorite process question, which is walk me through the day, right? Alarm goes off. What time are you like Jocko level where it's 4:30 and you take a picture of your watch?

43:29 Luke Floyd: No, thank goodness. I'm not. No, it depends on the time of year. I've gotten better. I was very regimented at the beginning of quarantine just because I wasn't traveling as much. And so I was trying to keep up a schedule. Now I would say it's somewhere between 5 and 6. Either the alarm goes off, dogs wake me up, whatever it is, get up, make coffee. I work with global clients and have a global team, so I will basically do a quick triage of, is anything on fire? No? Okay, great. Now I can relax. I find if I don't do that step… I know some people say don't look at your phone first thing in the morning… if I don't do that step, I can't do the other things that I want to do in a full present mind. So I do that. I try to get some kind of exercise in, whether it's walking the dog, going to the gym. I lift, you know, 3, 4 times a week, or just again, taking the dog on a nice long walk, listen to an episode of this, whatever it might be. And then my mind's kind of ready to go. I'm very much a morning person in the sense that I wake up and my mind is going, my creativity is going. So I try to do a deep work block in the morning. So that's technically on my calendar for 8 to 9:30. Sometimes that means that I'm still walking my dog at 8:30, really thinking through a tough problem. Sometimes it means I'm, you know, doing a backlog of follow-ups and, and everything, getting 'em knocked out before the day starts. And so after that, I have obviously internal meetings, external meetings, somewhere until I always try to certainly eat well. I started using a service that's in Atlanta and they have another office in New Jersey, but it's effectively ready-made meals. So like meal prep, but if you just have to heat it up in the microwave. It's not a chain though, so the food's like actually made and, and good. Um, but it's anyway, so I make sure to grab one of those in the afternoon. It's real quick. And then I will try to wind down. I've been going earlier and earlier. Previously I was working till 6, 7, starting to get burnt out. So now, um, my goal is to have my laptop closed by 5, which means I can't take calls at 4:30, right? Which means I now gotta block some things out. So that's kind of my day by day. Um, and then, you know, after work, mostly just spend time with my wife. Maybe take the dogs for another walk. My wife and I have developed a bad habit of going out and getting a milkshake or some kind of drink every day during COVID because we needed to get out of the house. That's normally when that happens. But yeah, that's kind of it end to end. Try to keep every day as similar as possible until it's the weekend and then you got the weekend routine.

45:44 Scott Ingram: So yeah, so just that one kind of 90-minute deep work window when he's nodding his head. Yes. When do you kind of define what's going to go in that window?

45:53 Luke Floyd: Yeah, so that's something that I haven't been great at previously. So previously it was, I actually have 2 different 2-hour blocks during the week to do follow-ups because again, when, and not with the pipeline I have now, but the pipeline I had previously, like you have to, if you're in back-to-back meetings and your calendar's open, it's going to get back-to-back meetings all day. You got to protect your time. So I would do those follow-ups. Right now it is the deep work. So what I'm doing right now, commercial insight development. So being able to read through, okay, I have named my 5 accounts that I'm going to win over the next, you know, quarter or 2 and trying to find some sort of commercial insight that I can put into a proposal deck that I can, you know, whatever it might be. So preparing materials like that, anything that takes creativity, writing my executive briefs, getting outreach done. So like if there's prospecting I'm doing, I'm catching up on any kind of client, if I have a bunch of starred emails. The way that I keep track of my emails, I'm very forgetful thanks to being around too many explosions. So I star anything in my inbox that has to get done. I star it, Gmail, and then I'm able to come back at the end of the day and, or like if I check my email at 6 AM, I just star it. I know I'm going to get to it when that deep work block comes up. I don't have any starred emails left. So just kind of knock out all that work. So it's a mix of client service and then also those ongoing MEDDIC reviews and QBR prep and all that really heavy creativity work you have to do.

47:20 Scott Ingram: Talk about the commercial insight development piece a little bit more, right? Just end to end that thing for me.

47:25 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So a lot of people, I first found the Challenger sale when I got into my last role with Granular. So selling to farmers, the most antiquated and traditional industry, you know, as you might imagine, you really do have to lead strong with, no, the way you and your dad and your dad's dad did it isn't going to cut it anymore, right? There is a big, nasty, scary change coming and All this. And I have found that Deel is very similar in the sense that we're doing something new. And a lot of folks feel comfortable with just staying and doing things the same way. And so being a disruptor in the industry, doing things different than other vendors, that's part of the reason why we have the premium we do. So I really need to, I don't know if you've ever cracked a geode with your kids. It's a fun activity. You get a geode, you like hit a hammer, it like pops open, there's jewels inside. I need to find where's the little crack on the geode for me to insert my hammer and my chisel and what's going to be my chisel. So right now I'm really thinking about the employee experience, unified employee experience. You know, when I was selling to VP sales, what they care about is, you know, days to close, increase ACV, these kinds of things, activities. People leaders really care about the employee experience. Finance leaders care about cost compliance. So it's basically around unifying the employee experience that I'm trying to develop most commercial insight right now. A good example of why I'm doing this. I don't particularly like to respond to RFPs, but I did an RFP response the other day and it was not a great call, right? High talk time. It was very much the RFP had me off my game. It felt like we were having to answer the RFP questions more than like having just another discovery call, right? And so we got another call with the COO and then the director of international and my colleague who's senior, he's been in the industry for a while, came in and just said, look, we just want to tell you a little bit about what we're seeing happening in your business line right now. And he just showed up on the screen, you know, he had a deck prepared and said, these 3 trends are affecting you. Are you noticing these? Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing it in this and that. And it was just such a different level of engagement. And he said, you know, we got all the basic stuff out of the way on the RFP call because this is really where we think that there just shouldn't even be an RFP. Like we understand these insights, we have the talent and then the platform to make this transition need to happen happen. So being able to leverage that because of the way I want to sell, I don't want to be reactive. I want to be proactive, go pick my people, be able to open up those accounts easily. In case you didn't know, there's a lot of automation tools these days, so it's not exactly easy to open up those conversations, right? So yeah, developing the commercial insight that actually brings some executive presence Frankly, I mean, that's where I'm at struggling the most is coming from, you know, much more of a folksy sale with farmers and having not historically had a ton of C-suite exposure, just building my executive presence as a seller is what I'm trying to focus on.

50:13 Scott Ingram: So yeah, it's interesting your RFP callout, right? Is if you really think about that, the RFP is playing their game.

50:21 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

50:21 Scott Ingram: And what we really need to do is figure out how do we pivot this back into playing our game?

50:25 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

50:26 Scott Ingram: Right. And selling them on our process.

50:28 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

50:28 Scott Ingram: Not I'm B, I already just got sold on your freaking process that You know, ultimately doesn't serve them very well.

50:34 Luke Floyd: Exactly. Because that assumes that they're the experts, right? And they're not. That's why they're paying you.

50:39 Scott Ingram: Right, right.

50:40 Luke Floyd: And I mean, then also just, I might be, you know, paranoid, but RFPs are always written by somebody. Yep. It's either by somebody internal that has previous exposure with a previous vendor, or it is a current vendor writing the RFP. That doesn't bode well for organizations like Deel where we're doing things in a fundamentally different way.

50:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

50:57 Luke Floyd: That just answering RFPs doesn't work out well. I mean, we've certainly won them, you know, but Certainly, if anybody ever asks me to be involved on them, I usually say no and pass them off because unless I'm writing it, it's usually a waste of time.

51:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Usually you're just column fodder.

51:11 Luke Floyd: Yeah, exactly.

51:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So we've talked about your daily routine. Are there other kind of core habits and routines that fit within that?

51:21 Luke Floyd: Yeah, this is the part where I get real nerdy. I love this part of sales. So I like acronyms, obviously being a military guy. So there's a couple that I have. But when I was listening, you know, to all these podcasts as I was traveling across the Southeast, it wasn't just sales-related material. It was also, there's a couple other great podcasts. So like Finding Mastery is a great podcast with Michael Gervais. He is a sports psychologist for the Seattle Seahawks. And basically he just talks about people that are like masters at their craft. So when I think about the little things I'm invested in, I like to listen to what they do for their career. So like, how does MJ or how did MJ handle his career? What was he focused on development? How did he think of it? And number one is I don't ever compare myself to other sellers at the organization because this isn't a race between me and them. It's a race between me and myself. So being able to frequently review my goals, I do this on a monthly basis, obviously mostly quarterly though. Every morning I have a notebook and every morning I write down my intention. My intention is to achieve personal, professional, and financial freedom through focused and authentic sales excellence. I've written that down every single morning just about for the past year. Under that, I have 2 goals, what Stephen Kotler in Art of Impossible, a great book, would call a high hard goal. One is to, you know, 2x quota. I think I'm kind of shifting that now to more embracing mastery today. Like, how do I be a master at something today? And the second one is to be a better husband through being present, presence. Um, so those are kind of what I write down every day. And then I start off with, hey, here are the 3 things I gotta get done, 3 action items during my deep work block normally. So like every morning I start that. Many mornings, although it's a habit that comes and goes, I will do a breathing session. So this is the number one thing that if I could tell anybody to do to be a better seller is just learn to breathe. Is if you can learn to breathe, you can read people better through exteroception, read yourself better. And, you know, pattern interrupt yourself better through interoception. You can think through problems, your emotions. A lot of people need years of therapy to get to a point where they can breathe, or years of yoga practice or whatever else. But, I spend some time breathing in the morning. So there's a couple of, there's like actually a playlist that I have that has a couple of different of these breathing exercises, visualization exercises on them. So that's a daily basis. And I do one of those every day. And then on a month, obviously at the end of the month I go, okay, what worked? What didn't? On every quarter I try to do just kind of a quarterly review. So I just got done wrapping up what am I gonna do for quarter, quarter 2. So Q2 for us. And so those are kind of my other habits outside of the daily. I would say that I have my daily mindset thing and then quarterly and monthly. The only other 2 things that I think could be helpful for the listeners, one, That I talked about at the beginning, this IGST… intention, goal, strategy, tactics… that's how I'm pursuing my job now, and it's really changing things for me. So if you're only focused on tactics, i.e., how many steps do I need in my sequence so I can get somebody to take a demo? If you're only focused on tactics, you're just going to spin your wheels. So I start with clear intention. Like I said, I write that down every morning. That determines my goals… 2x quota. And so I can come in going, okay, well, if I'm going to be twice as good as what they expect me to be, how do I need to do things? That determines my strategy. And then my strategy determines the tactics that I use on a day-to-day basis. So I happen to be very account focused in my strategy. So I spend a lot of time on those daily or weekly or quarterly cadences, thinking through accounts, plan, doing account plans. When I'm breathing, I'm thinking about creative problem solving. So spending a lot of time in the mental aspect through that acronym has helped me. And then also that things happen in the way that they do. So I'm also really big on brain, body, mind. So basically your body is the core of it. If you don't take care of your body, if you're constantly stressed, or if you don't get some exercise sometimes, or if you eat poorly, then your brain can't work well enough. Your body is, you know, feeds your brain through these signals, electrical signals, synapses. Which in turn affect your thoughts, your mind. And so because it's all one big system, you can't have one part out of whack. So that's really the only things that I focus on long term, that IGST, because that keeps me basically only have to update it every couple years. And then secondarily, if I focus on keeping my body good, that'll keep my brain right, and that'll keep my mind right so I can keep up in these conversations where I'm way out of my league sometimes.

56:00 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice. And I'll grab some of those breathing resources from you. We'll put those into the show notes. So top1.fm/140. I actually know the number. 'Cause I just looked, I cheated. Or top1.fm/luke-floyd. You will soon have your very own page.

56:14 Luke Floyd: Yeah. And in that, I'll also include, there's a specific visualization I do with imagery. I know the consensus is out on the science on whether imagery works and all this, but it's been helpful for me around goal setting. Just to be able to, you know, take a second to breathe, visualizing yourself achieving your goals. What are you wearing? Who's around you? What happened to get there? It's amazing how the more specific you are, the more likely you are to achieve those things. So. Yeah.

56:39 Scott Ingram: I feel like we're already halfway down this path in terms of the information diet. So let's keep going with that, with some of the podcasts, all the stuff that you're reading, listening to, and watching. And when that happens, now that you're not driving in a truck for 8 hours a day.

56:50 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

56:51 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

56:52 Luke Floyd: I'd say I actually don't listen to a ton of podcasts outside of this one. I will listen to 30 Minutes to President's Club just because it's practitioners. I really try to keep a high bar to only listen to what practitioners have to say. And that's no offense to Jeff Bajorek or any of the trainers or anybody else that's in the Sales Success Community. I just really like to hear it from the horse's mouth, people that are doing things similar to what I'm doing. So that's really all I listen to on the sales side. On otherwise, I listen to like Finding Mastery. I listen to, you know, the typical entertainment podcast, Last Podcast on the Left Network. We're big fans. In terms of the books I read, I really loved recently Jamal Reimer's Mega Deal Secrets. I mean, that's literally, anybody can go buy that. It's a blueprint. To make a whole bunch of money. I mean, it's just, he was as explicit as he could be, right? So I like that. But from a foundational perspective, a couple of books that stand out to me, Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. Flow is really important to be productive, to like, you know, achieve these peak stakes. And he talks about flow, how to build your life to get into it and all this stuff. A second one we've talked about a lot, Extreme Ownership. Jocko Willink actually just breaks down And ultimately the biggest thing to take away from that book is, again, just because, just because you don't control something doesn't mean you can't influence it. In terms of sales books, obviously already called out Challenger Sale. I'm reading through Challenger Customer right now and realizing those 2 are not complete without one another. You really need both. And then also the one I always come back to, Strategic Selling by Miller Heiman. It just, when I talk about that intention, goal, strategy, tactics. It's on the level of strategy. There's not many sales books written these days that are on the level of strategy. A lot of them were about tactics. And so it's nice to be able to have a resource there. But so I don't read a ton of other new sales books. I've read, you know, a couple as they come out, a couple related to my roles. When I was an SDR, I read pretty much anything that Jeb Blount wrote about prospecting. But in terms of what I limit now, I really try to focus around Stuff that I know is coming from people that are at their best, number one. And number two, industry resources. So all of whatever a CFO is going to be listening to or reading, I read or listen to. Same thing with CPO, chief people officers. So all the email digest and, you know, the Google Alerts and podcasts, that's the first thing I did when I got to Deel was set all that up because I didn't know anything about them.

59:17 Scott Ingram: So nice. Nice. What about the tools and apps? What does your tech stack look like?

59:21 Luke Floyd: Yeah, so we have Salesforce, obviously at Deel. I try to not live in spreadsheets, but inevitably when you're in sales, you use a lot of spreadsheets. I actually use Dooly for opportunity management, so it kept me sane when I had, you know, 70+ ops open at any given time. We have a next step field and a next step date, and I was just able to just churn through a lot of that there. I use Notion heavily, so I understand that there are some tools that plug into Salesforce that help with account-based selling. My organization does not have those tools. So instead I use Notion. So basically, if you think about everything you would do for an account plan, like who's who, executive brief materials, 10-K thoughts, you know, high-level messaging, all the text and research and everything you need to store to be good at your job. Salesforce isn't great at storing that stuff. So I use Notion. I think even Chris had mentioned that he uses it as well in a similar fashion. And then we use Gong. I use that very frequently to go back again. I have a terrible memory and I'm not great at note-taking, so can often go back there and help and, you know, make sure my chat ratios are in line and all that. But yeah, basically in terms of Notion, the way I use it, I only use it for key accounts. I have an accounts like template that has, again, everything I need, negotiation prep, my MEDDIC scorecard, all that. I just create a new template and fill it out whenever it's time to, you know, start on a new key account. Obviously not all accounts get that treatment though. Yeah.

1:00:46 Scott Ingram: Nice. So maybe it came from one of the books you described, but I wonder Do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy or approach?

1:00:54 Luke Floyd: Yeah, I don't actually. We have a new director of revenue enablement, and that was the first thing he asked me is like, oh great, you're a salesperson. What's your favorite sales framework? And I was like, I don't really have one. So I use MEDDIC currently as my rubric of deal health. I use Strategic Selling to help me with my strategies that determine what tactics I need to get. So the great thing I like about Strategic Selling is basically it was one of the first books to talk about the consensus cell. So being able to take temperature around the various folks, I don't necessarily have that. I am building my own. I have my own process written down step by step, exactly everything that happens. So that was crucial for me when we talked about sales being leadership. If you can't lead yourself through your own buying process, you can't lead a prospect, right? So being able to write it down and even, okay, for the negotiation call, proposal call review, what prep steps do I need to take? And can I automate those? So that's kind of, yeah, that's, that's the way I use them.

1:01:53 Scott Ingram: Nice. And as you're executing kind of that, as you're leading yourself through your process, what's your style?

1:01:58 Luke Floyd: I would say that I am very direct. And I am also, I have more grace for myself than I used to. So I try not to beat myself up if things get missed, right? Like you forget this one thing, or you forgot to involve somebody that needed to, try to have a little bit of grace. Mostly I am just as direct as I can be. I value my prospect's time. A lot of people talk about giving value. I think the best thing you can do for another human being is value their time. So, um, the best thing I can do is help them get their project done quicker so they stop having the pain, um, and, or so they can get the win quicker. So, um, basically that's, you know, that's that.

1:02:34 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. Is there something you believe? That the typical sales professional would think is crazy?

1:02:41 Luke Floyd: Yeah, less is more. Like I said, I could still have 70 ops open, you know, and obviously a lot of those accounts that I worked as a mid-market and one of our only people taking enterprise deals, like we have a lot of those come back. There's opportunities that accidentally get routed to you that, you know, should belong to somebody else that, you know, you're tempted to… less is more, right? Stay in your lane. I give away, I'm at my limit. I'll give away opportunities all the time on the rotation that Rightfully belong to me. I just don't have the capacity. I'm in a growth mindset. I know that if I'm doing my job at a high caliber, that the results will take care of themselves. Whereas I think a lot of folks are in a scarcity mindset. I have to hold on to every deal. I have to keep it in Salesforce. I might be able to win it. I might, might, might. And you might, but that might also might cost you a lot more too, right? So less is more. Number 2, sales is leadership. That's basically the fundamental, I think, flaw in modern selling is that it's Nobody's leading anybody, which is ultimately why buyers have had to step up and lead themselves with procurement departments, departments that basically block out sellers fundamentally. And so I think if more salespeople were leaders themselves, they wouldn't be doing a lot of the salesy behavior and they wouldn't be wasting their time or the buyer's time because they would just be upfront and honest with themselves about it. There aren't good or bad leaders. There are only effective and ineffective leaders, right? So. If something's not happening, then you're just ineffective. You gotta change. So that's something I believe, sales leadership. And finally, I think individual contributors, if you're in this game long-term, you should manage yourself like other top-tier performers in other industries. I've heard this theme a couple times. Obviously Brandon talks about it a lot with sleep and mental prep. But like I said, I invest in a meal prep service for us so that I don't have to spend those hours on the weekend and I can spend those hours on the weekend relaxing, getting my head right so that I'm able to roll into these hard conversations I have to navigate every day. Similarly, you know, I have a sales coach. Shout out to Meg Meshack. She's worked with me for the past quarter and it's been great. It was out of pocket. Deel didn't cover it. Same thing with the Sales Success Summit. I went to, you know, paid my own ticket to go to that this fall. Deel didn't cover it. So I am no different than I have a hobby on the side of building banjos and I'm not particularly good at it, but I can see how good some luthiers, people that build instruments are. At what they do, right? It is just next level at what they do and the way they manage themselves and their craft so that they love their process every day so they can be at the top of their game. It's not about being at the top of the game at that point. It's about they just love what they do every day, right? If we manage ourselves more like that, I think that top-tier performance would come easier.

1:05:19 Scott Ingram: Such good stuff. Such good stuff. What about the flip side? Are there things that the typical sales professional or just kind of the dogma of kind of sales training these days that you think is crazy?

1:05:30 Luke Floyd: Yeah. Number one, that quota's relevant. Quota is the number that the board, AKA your investors, have given to your leadership to give to you, right? That's ideally somehow based in reality, right? Theoretically capable. But ultimately it is just what a rep should do at that company if all the calculations were correct. And one of my fundamental values as a human being is tenacity. And for me, that means anything worth doing is worth overdoing. So what does quota have to do with what I'm capable of doing in this role, right? So everybody else is supposed to do X million, $1.2 million. Why can't I do $2.4 million, right? So quota is irrelevant. If you're not at least hitting quota, you're either in the wrong environment or you need to assess, you know, how you're doing things if you're having that problem consistently. Because quotas should be a benchmark. Second is inter-team competition, being cutthroat with your own teammates. Miss me with all that, especially when there's AESDR conflicts about who sourced the meeting, right? Like, we've all been there, but ultimately a rising tide lifts all ships. So, you know, I've always thought sales should be more of a team sport. And then finally, that hours worked or the hustle harder culture is equivalent to effort. And it's really not. Working smarter is absolutely the way to go. So those are the 3 things.

1:06:51 Scott Ingram: Good stuff. From an advice perspective, what would you tell somebody that's just kind of getting into sales today?

1:07:00 Luke Floyd: Yeah, since you're still new, since you still are somewhat fresh, not quite jaded, develop the ability to listen to the middle of your stomach or your chest, because that'll tell you if you're about to do something icky that your sales manager is telling you to do and you just it doesn't feel right to do that, to push the deal so you can get it in by the end of the month, because it just doesn't make sense other than you being salesy. Listen to your gut. And it's not, you know, mumbo jumbo. There's been a lot of great studies about, you know, financial traders that have better interoception, the ability to perceive your body. And if you can, if somebody is telling you to sell in a way that goes against your gut, don't do it. Because we all can be great sellers as who we are, just like In basketball, yes, there was MJ, but there's a lot of different styles of great players. And that way, if you are being fake, you're not being yourself. And one thing I did learn from selling life insurance is that has stayed with me. That company taught us first they buy you, then they buy the company, and then they buy the product. And so we would set up our calls in that order, do some rapport building, then talk about the company, then talk about the product. And so as you think about, if you're not being you, if you're not being authentic, if you can't be who you really are in that environment, it's going to feel off. Whether you're being or trying to be inauthentic, it's just going to feel off. Something's not right there. And given that we deal with people making, what do they say, rational decisions with emotional implications or logical decisions, emotional decisions justified by logic, you are dealing with people's emotions. Humans in our lizard brains can feel when somebody else isn't being authentic or real, right? So I really think the quicker you can figure out who is that inner seller inside of me, how do they want to work, and work towards that, you'll be great at being an SDR, being a sales manager, an AE, whatever.

1:08:50 Scott Ingram: Well done. Well done. What about somebody that is either struggling or, you know, they're just at their number, but they know there's more? There's certainly more greatness ahead. What's your advice for them?

1:09:01 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So the first thing is you gotta break down, you gotta get it outta your head onto a piece of paper. So write down every step of the process. So I'll give you a vignette. When I was in the military, we were going to do this really complex training around shooting live rounds from moving vehicles. And like our company had never done this and the reserves had never done this type of training before. And when we got there, things were not going well. I wasn't assigned on the team that was doing this training. Um, one of my teammates was though, one of the guys that was, I was responsible for. And so they were, had a lot of like safety issues and showing up not prepared. And so he just ran and grabbed me and was like, hey, you need to just come like run this. And I was like, okay. So I just showed up. The first thing we did was we took everybody's gear and we sat it out line by line. What do you have? You know, at the end of their vehicles, what do you have in yours? What do you have in yours? Everybody's gotta get the same thing. So basically breaking it down, what's the smallest step where something can go wrong? Break it down to that smallest step and then try to work through and understand if that's the best way of doing it. Because if you don't, what that exercise will do is help you take ownership, whether you think you're an owner or a leader or not, because you'll see steps are like, oh, I don't need to be doing that. Or, oh wow, I could really be doing that a lot better and save everybody time and energy. So that's the first step is you got to lead yourself and breaking everything down and understanding it fully, what you do and why you do it. Is really important so you can lead yourself, so you can lead your customer. In terms of the motivational advice, your success in sales is almost 100% about where you're selling. So if you're not in an environment that's supported, if you don't have teammates that are also succeeding at high levels, maybe it's not you. And so unfortunately these days, people that are long-term individual contributors have to kind of live in a fend for yourself world, you know, and kind of try to learn the tricks and the games. So realize that if you feel like you're just getting there and you just haven't untapped it yet either, there's more for you to unlock internally and think about on your process and improve. And you can trust the process then, or you can find a new spot that maybe gives you the, you know, authenticity to be there. At Granular, I did about 107%. At Pipeline Deals, the previous role, you know, I hit quota. But I was never a high performer. It wasn't until I sat down and said, I'm tired of being around people that don't share the same values I do, and I'm tired of not being able to control my destiny. I want to be the person I want to be at work and be authentic, be myself. That allowed me to show up fully and try to own as much of the process and do it my way as possible. So it's not an easy answer, unfortunately, because oftentimes doing more of that type of work is actually really tiring. Much less if you're like just trying to slog through just to hit your normal number. So it's not easy. Recognize that it's not easy at all, but it is worth the investment anytime you can sit and think.

1:11:56 Scott Ingram: It goes back to where you kind of opened and talking about this is a long game. Yeah. It's an endurance game and your career is the game, not the role.

1:12:06 Luke Floyd: Yeah, exactly. The career is the game. And so at the end of the day, you know, do you want to be in the league for a couple of years? So you can get paid and move on. And if you do, that's great. You know, being an AE, you can move over to a bunch of different roles, move up into leadership, whatever it is. But if you're a long-term seller and you only have so many seasons, and you know, the thing you have to really start to protect yourself and you have to work like the best in your business. So in my business happens to be knowledge work. I'm a seller, sell to HR and finance people. So I need to be able to be sharp as a tack. So I didn't always have routines and schedules built so that I would be at my best during calls and prioritize myself in that way. But I didn't know I was missing those things until I broke down my process step by step. So I think that's really step number one. If you feel like you're not where you need to be or want to go, is look at what you're actually doing. Don't worry about what Salesforce says. How do you want to get your customer from where they're at to where they need to go? And that process, if you can bake that process, repeat it, and then iterate on it, now you have sales principles that it doesn't matter what manager you work for, doesn't matter what company or product you're selling, you know what it takes to change humans.

1:13:21 Scott Ingram: Nice. You've listened to every one of these episodes.

1:13:24 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:13:25 Scott Ingram: Is there something you wish I would ask that I don't typically ask?

1:13:28 Luke Floyd: Yeah. So basically, how do you not burn out? And the reason why is I don't think that we work for you know, terrible, awful companies that want us to burn out. I think the problem…

1:13:39 Scott Ingram: we do this to ourselves.

1:13:40 Luke Floyd: Oh, 100%. You don't have people on here that are satisfied with enough. Right? Ultimately, that's part of why you get here. So on the flip side, when can you turn it off? When is it enough? And that's part of why I'm trying to change my focus from being a metric as an end goal And a feeling that comes from an action as an end goal that will eventually lead to those metrics. Because I feel like if I come off of a call and I'm hyped up because I just ran it really well, I can ride that high for a couple days, you know, in the face of some bad stuff. But if I don't take the second to celebrate that as a burnout strategy, anti-burnout strategy, it's easy to get caught in the weeds and get run down and feel like you don't have autonomy and like people don't listen to you and Those are all the things that kind of, on top of crazy working hours, that kind of cause burnout. So I would say that's number one is what have you done to like future-proof your, you know, career in that way? And then the other thing I would say is how do you be a good teammate to people that don't hold themselves to the same level of standards, right? Because everybody here that I've listened to, or most everybody, they're not in this for themselves. They're in this for their family. They're in this for their clients. Like, I mean, just thinking about back to like Irfan or, you know, Trong or Evan, these people live and breathe their clients' business. Like it's not about them and the trophy. That can push you to have high standards. So how do you get everybody else on your team either to, you know, perform at that same level or at least understand and come to acceptance that not everybody's going to have the same standards as you do? And I'm not an asshole teammate by any means. You know, I'm supportive, but it's something that I struggle with right now is how do I find a team that I can elevate, that I can rely on at this level? Because I don't feel like that's necessarily around me.

1:15:41 Scott Ingram: So much interesting stuff. And I'm kind of unpacking what you've talked about here in the last couple of questions. And we may have to debrief this at dinner. I always try and develop a little bit of a theme for each summit.

1:15:52 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:15:53 Scott Ingram: Right. And it's often something that just kind of emerges in these conversations and what's kind of pinging around in my head right now and whether this becomes the actual thing or not, we'll see. But this idea of feeling great about sales.

1:16:04 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:16:05 Scott Ingram: Right. So one, enjoying the process, enjoying the journey and the day-to-day, but also not burning out, right? Like the mental side of this and making sure that, you know, success isn't just the numbers you put on the board. Yeah, I mean, that is meaningless if you kill yourself in the process.

1:16:24 Luke Floyd: Exactly.

1:16:25 Scott Ingram: And what's cool, I'm just loving in these conversations, is how many people I'm able to talk to who are performing at that level, are number one on their team, and have not killed themselves. Yeah, you know, and but what I'm hearing in so many of those conversations is it is really intentional work. In order to do that, you have to think about that.

1:16:49 Luke Floyd: And normally you think about that because you hit the bottom. So in Ian's and Brandy's episodes, this is something they all allude to. And so basically I was able to listen to their trials. Thanks, guys. I was able to listen to every… all that advice ahead of time and be like, wow, this isn't… it is going to be taxing. You know, it's not going to be easy. So trying to set up some of that from the beginning, I will say a great example of what you're talking about, just to put it very concrete in case anybody's wondering, what does it feel like to feel, you know, good about sales? I had been at Deel for maybe 3 months, and we had cold-called into an opportunity that was roughly a third of the total user base of Deel at the time. And it was me on the call. It was about 15 minutes before the call. I had looked it up. We had talked about it like we understood the stakes. And I was debating on whether to bring my manager into the call because I was still pretty new. Big opportunity. And I just said, nah, I got it. I can do this. And I was still running 30-minute calls at the time and to do discovery and a light demo and everything in 30 minutes is absolutely a circus trick, basically. And I got off of that call. It was executed absolutely flawlessly. And that was the first time that I had ever felt like professional pride. I mean, I was like literally riding a high for the rest of the night and I felt pride. But what's interesting about it to me is that earlier in the morning I had done my little breathing routine and listened to my little visualization thing. And in the visualization exercise, they were talking about how do you feel when you achieve your goal. And I had never associated… I had felt proud of my military and the accomplishments and some of the awards I won and things I'd done. I had never felt proud as a seller. So I imagined myself, what would it feel like to feel proud? And then that evening I do. Right? So there's something between this visualization, being able to work to a feeling, not some company's metric of you, that is just jet fuel for human performance.

1:18:45 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that. That is so good. So second to last question, we've talked about a lot of stuff. You've listened to all of them.

1:18:54 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:18:54 Scott Ingram: What is the thing that you were hoping to share that I just haven't gotten to?

1:18:58 Luke Floyd: Honestly, we covered everything and, and you cover everything in these episodes. I would say the only thing that I would pose that we haven't gotten to, and it's more of a question or maybe a community discussion point, is what does the future of intentional individual contributors look like? I have a vision. Who knows how long it is in the future, 10 years, 20 years, whatever it is. If this is what this is unlocking, and you know, for me it was 225%. You've had on people that have done a whole lot more than that. If this is what this type of training and intentional focus is unlocking, I imagine a world where there are individual contributors that can go from company to company because they have the power, because they have these records of performance, but also have people like LeBron James has a nutritionist, has an exercise coach, right? Like, why don't salespeople have the assets around them to have a mindset coach, to have a performance psychologist, or to have a sales coach or whatever it might be? Or to not go to that company because it's supposed to be rumored to be not a great place for sellers that want to do what I want to do, right? Like, so being able to build some sort of stable or collective of just these individual, you know, intentional individual contributors, I think would be really interesting. So what's that community like? Obviously we have it at the Sales Success Summit Slack. We have the meetings we do, but I think what's really exciting about it And why I think it's more of an open discussion than anything anybody has found is there's not really anybody that's built it into, this is the way I do it every time, or this is what helps me. You know, Brandon just dropped his, and that's definitely like an operating system to live by, but that's just like one part of it. So what else could folks use help with? What other parts of our lives are we not yet elevating that if we elevate it could take us even further? In the sales, if I just got my mindset right and it did this, I didn't really improve my sales skills. I just got a better mindset and did this. What else am I missing out on?

1:20:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:20:58 Luke Floyd: So like, that's what I'm interested to hear from other individual contributors. Is there anything that I've mentioned that you think would be an unlock or that I haven't mentioned that you think would be unlocked that I should try? It'd be cool to use. And I know the Sales Success Community has a lot of people that value working towards high performance. So it'd be good to hear some of those more anecdotal in the trenches feedback. And be able to have a community of those folks.

1:21:20 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think you and I both value… I mean, I do this all because of the community. I love… there's nothing more fulfilling for me than the messages that I get from folks who've listened to the podcast and who've done what you've done. I mean, you're one of them, right?

1:21:36 Luke Floyd: Like, yeah, I messaged you.

1:21:37 Scott Ingram: I went in, here's what I did. This unlocked… I think that's a great word. Like, this unlocked something in me.

1:21:44 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:21:44 Scott Ingram: And I have found this whole other gear.

1:21:47 Luke Floyd: Oh yeah, because like last summer I messaged you, was like, you Yo, I just wanted to say thanks for doing what you do with the podcast and the community because it did allow me to do this. And I would love to be on the podcast just to give back of everything that I've learned after listening to all of them. And it was fuel to the fire, to the motivation to be able to perform well, to come on the podcast. So there's an environment here where we have been given the example. And so I'm looking forward to how you continue to build out the Sales Success Community and how also other micro-communities arise up, because I think that This is the way of the future. I think poor salespeople are going to be automated or just not have the headcount coverage in the future.

1:22:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I mean, it's not something that I've talked about very recently, but you know, part of my bigger vision is really creating this space and finding… unfortunately, I think you brought it up before, I don't know if we were recording yet, but you know, there need to be more people that listen to this podcast. The problem is The people who listen to this podcast who are still listening at this point, yeah, yeah, pretty much in the top 10 or 20%. Yeah, because it is a craft. Yeah, because you care, because you want to be better. Most salespeople don't care. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's just the way that it is. Like, this is something they do, this is their job, it pays pretty well, whatever, don't care. Similarly, I think companies are the same way. Yeah, there's also a small subset of 10 or 20% of the companies that are out there that truly care about the humans that make up their sales team. Yeah, and they're investing in them and they want them to have the opportunities to grow in whatever that looks like, right? Even if it means You're probably going to outgrow us in 2 or 3 years, but we're going to value the time that you're with us and that's going to add value to the organization. It's going to add value to you. It's going to be great. That's ultimately what I want to try and kind of boil down is how do we continue to find our people to build this community? Because it is the most supportive thing. It's absolutely incredible. It blows my mind.

1:24:03 Luke Floyd: Well, like you said, I mean, it comes back to the shared values that everybody has. You know, no one gets to the top by shit talking other people, by pulling other people down, by pulling the rug or burning bridges. You know, you get to the top because you learn to be great at collaborating and helping and bringing resources to people. And that's why, like, you know, we have these monthly calls for the Summit networking group. It's great just to hear a refreshing perspective because of the shared value. Because I don't think anybody that's been on the podcast really is interested in like stealing a lead from a teammate. That's just not the type of people. That we have here.

1:24:35 Scott Ingram: That's right.

1:24:36 Luke Floyd: So to your point, part of it is by definition, if you hang out in this community, you'll probably get there at one point or another just by being around. But I do think having the other part that you mentioned, being able to connect those people with trusted resources, whether that is coaches, whether that is frontline managers at organizations or organizations themselves that are safe to work at, because there are a lot of places that just straight up are effectively emotional abuse in the form of employment when it comes to salespeople, right?

1:25:01 Scott Ingram: So yeah. Yeah. Well, and what's really cool is the number of people who are creating their own assets and resources within this community, right? David Weiss just released his MEDDIC Masterclass. Jamal's got… oh man, I'm in trouble now for forgetting the name.

1:25:15 Luke Floyd: Mega Deal Secrets.

1:25:15 Scott Ingram: Mega Deal Secrets. Thank you. Oh my gosh, Jamal, I'm sorry. And, you know, Brandon's putting out his book. I mean, and there's others who you've mentioned who are, I know, are kind of working on books and working on resources. And, you know, to me, I'm fond of saying I want to learn from what the doers do, not from what the sayers say, right? So that being important, but also it is this like-minded people. So, you know, before we got together, I met up with Scott Barker. We're working on this event in April and I said, hey, you know, I don't have a relationship with Manny. Outreach is a great sponsor of ours, but I've not had any conversations with their CEO. And I was talking to him about, you know, the value proposition for him to be at this event. And I'm like, you know, I know there's the give back thing, but that feels like weak sauce to me.

1:26:01 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:26:01 Scott Ingram: And Scott turned around and said, you're underestimating how powerful that is. And those are, again, those are our people.

1:26:08 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:26:08 Scott Ingram: You know, when it's… no, I would be happy to be there just to share what I can share.

1:26:13 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:26:14 Scott Ingram: From my journey. And if that helps somebody, that's the most rewarding, valuable thing there is. Like, that's what this is. So I'll turn this into a pitch. It wasn't really meant to be, but if this is resonating, we really need you to be in Austin in October, and you need to come join us at the Sales Success Summit, and you need to do what Luke did. And if your company won't pay for it, you need to pay for it. You need to invest in yourself.

1:26:41 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:26:41 Scott Ingram: You know, and frankly, I've said this before, and I seriously mean this. I kind of don't like it when companies pay for it.

1:26:48 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:26:49 Scott Ingram: Because it's just, it's a different level of investment. It's a different level of commitment.

1:26:53 Luke Floyd: Yeah.

1:26:53 Scott Ingram: And this is not about… I don't need thousands of people to come to this event. I don't want that. It's not what we're doing here.

1:26:59 Luke Floyd: Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think it's also the reason it's important for a commitment is that I also think of it as like modern tradespeople, right? And this is also something, you know, with Deel, we work with a lot of contractors and a lot of people in the tech industry are contractors, developers, product managers, even salespeople can be, you know, 1099 independent contractors. And although the language hasn't updated to conform necessarily to the digital and and tech industries. In many ways, we are what masons used to be in terms of building structure for the world. We just happen to be building infrastructure that is digital or whatever it is that we're delivering. And so when you invest in yourself, you're investing in your tools. You know, if you had a carpenter and hired them to come build a porch for you and they showed up and their tools are all disorganized and rusty, like, good luck, right? But if you invest in yourself your number one tool, and do things like this, or like getting a gym membership or a sales coach, or going to yoga so you can learn to breathe, or going to therapy for years. Like, there's all these ways that you can invest in yourself, and I have never regretted any investment I've ever made myself. I was dumb and took out loans to buy sales leads when I was selling insurance. I did not regret it. You should always bet on yourself, because if not, what's the point? I mean, like, literally, what are we doing on this earth? Yeah, we're not, you know, hunter-gatherers going out and taking down wildebeest by ourselves anymore. But like, you can at least bet on something. You can give yourself a primal edge somehow.

1:28:28 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. All right. Let's wrap this thing up. What's the challenge? What are we gonna have the person who's listening to this right now do? What are they gonna do over the next week or 2 to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:28:39 Luke Floyd: Yeah, absolutely. I would encourage you to go write down your intention and whatever that intention is, it can evolve. It's gonna change over time. Just write down a sentence. My intention is to XYZ. It can be this year, it can be 5 years. Then once you have your intention, go set a couple of really hard goals that are going to help you get there. Once you have your goals, it's going to require some kind of strategy, and that's going to determine your tactics. So if everybody can walk away with this knowing that they need to get some kind of intention statement and set some goals, I think that's a good spot to get you on your way at least.

1:29:12 Scott Ingram: Love it, love it. And then we've got tons of resources for you, top1.fm/luke-floyd. Check it out.

1:29:18 Luke Floyd: There we go. Appreciate it, Scott.

1:29:21 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.