181: Taking Risks, Problem Solving & Impacting Culture with Rob Morris

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you by the 2024 Sales Success Summit coming here to Austin on October 7th and 8th. Grab your ticket today at top1summit.com. That's top, the number 1, S-U-M-M-I-T.com. And if you enjoy this episode, be sure to stick around to the very end for a super special announcement.

0:30 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:46 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Rob Morris. Rob is the top large enterprise service account executive at Dell out of Nashville. Welcome to the show, Rob.

0:55 Rob Morris: Thanks, Scott.

0:57 Scott Ingram: Rob, really excited to be having this conversation. Quick shout out to Leon for getting us connected. I know he is a mentor of yours, big part of the Sales Success Community, the Sales Success Society. And like we always do with this show, I like to get into some just immediate value. So let's start with the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales.

1:20 Rob Morris: Yeah, sure thing, Scott. And really excited to be here. A special shout out to Leon as well. He's best of the best. So a lot of what I've learned learned is from him and a number of notable other mentors. Yeah. But to start off, I think especially for someone relatively earlier in my career, having an insatiable hunger to learn is critical. If you can learn to enjoy what you're doing and just soak up the information, seeing the importance to how it applies in your day-to-day role, I think there's really something to be said for the speed at which you can learn and the ability to apply it. We're both Elon Musk fans, Scott, and the way he's described that concept, you know, I listened to him on podcasts, is if something's important to you, and for him it's saving the world, you're going to remember it. So trying to find ways to push your learning and deem it as important is critical. The second piece I'd say is constantly doing a gap reflection of where are your blind spots? Where are your weaknesses? Having mentors, leaders, peers point things out to you that maybe you don't realize, and being open to it is critical, especially early on. Just taking feedback and actually trying to implement it. And then the last one I'd say is really push yourself, pursue challenge. The image for me that comes to mind is building a calloused brain, pushing yourself in areas that maybe you're outside of your comfort zone, but you build the muscle memory to be in those spots, whether it's presenting in front of a large group or building a strategy that you don't fully know how to implement. Those are really big keys to kind of learn as you go and develop those skills. So that's what I'd say for my top 3.

3:08 Scott Ingram: Nice. We're going to have to think about something different than a calloused brain, given I was just reading an article this morning about how to protect yourself from dementia. And I think that's essentially what Alzheimer's is. So Maybe not that, but I totally understand where you're going, right? Definitely a grit approach. Like, how do you kind of toughen up that ability to continue to push yourself? I'm most interested in kind of the gap piece and 2 pieces. The first being, how are you setting up and opening yourself up to getting feedback from kind of those different angles? So let's start there.

3:41 Rob Morris: Yeah, I think you just have to go out and ask. And for a lot of people, maybe it's not something they're used to. I try to really be open with my peers and it's easy to say the things that you're doing well and give kudos where kudos is due. But I like to go to the people, Leon's even a great example, that know a lot more than me and have been around longer and share with them my strategy or how I like to go about a certain problem. And then hear from them, what would you have done differently? Or what would you do differently? Those are going to be the building blocks that make you successful. I've heard you say it on the podcast before, reinventing the wheel is not the goal. Use the knowledge of people who have been successful to build your own brand and your own strategy. So that's a big piece for me.

4:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think especially if you can ask somebody to focus on a particular area. So coming back to kind of this gap idea of like, hey, I'm working on this. Will you listen to this particular dynamic? I'd like feedback on that. What's the current gap or the most recent gap you're actively working on?

4:46 Rob Morris: That's a really good question. I would say in a lot of the clients I'm working with now, we've got a good footprint and we're making strides. We're being successful, but the next step is, okay, how do we expand our footprint? How do we reach new people in an account? And I have ideas on how to do that, building out references and trying to get recommendations from people internal to a client. But that's where I want to lean on someone who has a great track record of building relationships, knows how to fully expand across a client base. My clients are… there are hundreds of people I can meet with within my clients. So how do you figure out who to meet with? How do you time it? How do you identify those spots where someone can actually help you make a change within an organization? That's probably a big hurdle that I'm trying to overcome right now. And I've taken all the feedback and recommendations I can get there. So if you got any, Let me know.

5:44 Scott Ingram: This is gonna be fun cuz you and I sell in very similar spaces, right? We're both kind of in the professional services space. Most of my work is focused on marketing, and one of the things I'm constantly working with my clients on is helping them remember that they have to market themselves. I think about marketing, marketing, and how do we help them tell their stories and share the wins and the successes that they're having internally so that they can get more budget is a big key factor, right? It's like, hey, when you've given us opportunities before, here's what we've been able to deliver. And it's again, just kind of socializing more broadly across the organization. So that might be they're socializing these wins upward to more senior levels and more senior budget holders or across departments, divisions, geographies. Most of my clients are very, very large organizations. So one win in one space is something that, hey, we could potentially replicate this many, many times over. And I think it's one of those things where I think a lot about how do I help the individuals that I'm working with inside of my accounts win? What are they after, right? What would it mean for them if I can help them get a big bonus or I can help them get that next promotion that they're after? And this is one of the ways that we can do that. And it's very mutually exclusive because if they can introduce me to an executive sponsor who can help us go faster and drive the initiative that we're trying to drive because we've got more senior support. We both win in those kinds of things. Or have you been doing those kinds of things? Because you've got the same thing, like so many people that you can work with across the organization.

7:24 Rob Morris: Yeah, I think you nailed it, Scott. And you're right, sharing the services background, the service consulting mindset, we're not product focused. That gives you liberty to think in terms of What is the outcome you're driving for your client? I don't care about the speeds and feeds and things I'm telling you you're going to get. I want to know how is this going to affect you in your role and the way your leadership sees you or the way the organization changes? I mean, I've got a few clients right now that they're trying to rebrand their entire organization as market-leading universities or hospitals that do things differently and If we can integrate ourselves as part of that vision, then the nitty-gritty, hey, this is going to give you a much better product experience, that's no longer important. It now becomes you're achieving this new outcome and it reflects for you personally, your organization. People within an organization want to introduce you to others. They see you're trying to change them from the inside out and they want to put you in front of new people, whether it's someone in charge of AI strategy or We just had an interesting conversation about a virtual reality room for new students at a university. So it's like all these things, the doors just open up if you adopt that mindset.

8:41 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. And again, like done right, it's them helping themselves. It's not like you're begging and asking for a favor. It just happens to help you. But it's really about, hey, we're able to extend what we're doing. Let's contextualize a little bit more just to help put this in perspective for folks. So talk about what is your role and maybe quantify your results for us a little bit.

8:59 Rob Morris: Yeah. So I am a service sales exec at Dell Technologies. I run a territory region between Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. I've got about 75 enterprise-grade clients where the framework we have, and maybe you guys have something similar, is called As Is To Be. So the way we go into a client base is to determine where they are today. What is your as-is state? Where do you want to be? What is your organizational vision, your business objectives for the next 3 to 5 years? And then how can we get you there? And the beauty of working for a Fortune 50 company that's got global backing like Dell is we can do anything. We can bridge that gap from their as-is to their to-be state and put the pieces in place to get them there. The challenge is, okay, how do you do that? And Does the organization even know where they want to go to begin with? That's a little bit of context on my company and my role.

9:59 Scott Ingram: And then talk about your results. I know you're having a pretty solid year. Yeah.

10:03 Rob Morris: So it's difficult to break down, but I will say, so I manage a spend of about $115 million in annual service spend. So across those 75 customers, they spend about $115 million and that revenue is split into 3 buckets. The first is support services. So when you purchase any sort of hardware, data center, laptop, got to support it. The second bucket is deployment. So how are you going to install, you know, the equipment you purchased? And then the third bucket where I spend almost all of my strategic focus, which is the most difficult one to grow, as you know, is professional services. So typically my region In years past, we'll do about $2 million annually. Since having stepped in, we've done about $13 million this year, which is near a 500-600% increase, and recently came off win with the Global President's Club for my role. So we've been able to grow relatively quick and successfully. Now sustaining it is a different thing, but we certainly had some good success.

11:08 Scott Ingram: Yeah. We talked about your success factors. What do you think some of the key success factors in that result are? What's allowed you to get to 500-600% year to date too, right? We've still got a lot of time left in the year. We're recording this mid-September, and I know the Dell year, you get an extra month, right? So you're going to run through the end of January. What are the factors that are really helping you make that impact?

11:29 Rob Morris: Yeah, there are 2 really big factors that come to mind for me. The first is learning how to navigate a team. The Dell animal is massive. We've got tons and tons of specialty resources and technical folks, so learning how to line up a successful strategy with different experts is where you make or break your success. And then the second side of that is understanding how that fits into what your customer is trying to do and almost making their problems your own. So being really curious for me has been critical, asking the right questions in front of the right people. And then once we have enough information to go in And build that as-is-to-be framework, build the roadmap, then it becomes, all right, I've got the team set up, ready to go. Here's how we want to execute. And it's also important to note, strategy is going to change when you get into a customer. You're going to learn more things as you uncover one thing, things pivot. So being able to adjust strategy is really important. And then I guess the last thing is knowing what our own competitive advantages. Again, it's easy to cite speeds and feeds and what we do really well, but knowing like why we're a market leader and how you can translate that to a customer and their own unique challenges, that's critical. Yeah.

12:56 Scott Ingram: Love that. I mean, so many good points, especially I think we don't emphasize this enough is the idea of how do you essentially wield your organization on behalf of your clients, right? And especially when you're in a large organization. It's the embarrassment of riches kind of thing, right? There's so many levers that you could potentially pull, but it's having the relationships. It's knowing, hey, who can actually help me pull this off and do this that are so, so key.

13:22 Rob Morris: Yeah. The analogy I like to use, I mean, we're both sports guys. Everyone plays a different position on the field, right? If you're a goalie, you shouldn't be up trying to score goals, or if you're a defender, you shouldn't be trying to play in the midfield. So having almost a healthy sense of humility in that as well and knowing, look, I'm not going to be the strongest person for this spot here. We need someone else. And then reorganizing to build the team around that plan is key.

13:49 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I think you set up kind of the perfect transition because I wanted to get into your origin story and I think kind of playing a certain position in the way you see your role is sort of key. So how did you get into sales in the first place?

13:59 Rob Morris: Funny story. I really consider it pure luck. So I was a college athlete. I played 4 years of soccer in Memphis, and my junior year I was elected captain and I actually got benched pretty early in the season. And so I had this very challenged mindset where I felt I needed to be on the field, whatever. And instead of getting overly upset, I just told my coach, hey, let me take a day here. And there happened to be a career fair that day, and I'd spoken with an advisor earlier in the week and she told me to go. So I went to the career fair instead of practice, got in trouble with my coach, but it was worth it. And as I was leaving the career fair, I had met all of the main Memphis organizations, FedEx, ServiceMaster, AutoZone. As I was leaving, my advisor caught me and said, why don't you go talk to those guys over there? There's Dell and I knew what Dell did, but I didn't know much about anything other than hardware laptops. And 10 minutes talking to the Dell team, they brought me on for an interview later that week. And immediately I wanted to join the services organization. I saw kind of what they were trying to accomplish and where they were placed in the market and I was a perfect fit. So interned there right before COVID and then got a full-time role out of that internship. And I haven't looked back since. I mean, sales, I think, can get a bad rap, but I have absolutely loved it and it fits a lot of my characteristics and my strengths. So it's one of those things you kind of walk into, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Didn't expect it, but here we are.

15:38 Scott Ingram: So if you were starting that journey over today, is there anything that you would do differently in the way that you approached it?

15:44 Rob Morris: Yeah. And I don't have much to say here yet. I'm still relatively early, so I'm very happy with the way things have gone for me. I wasn't super intentional in undergrad in trying to determine my track, and that almost worked out well for me because I just wanted to take as many high-level business courses as I could and figure out what stuck and what didn't. Everyone around me was doing finance and accounting, and for me personally, I didn't get it. It wasn't me. So sales again just kind of hit me over the head as where I was supposed to be at that time. And like I said, I haven't looked back. So it's not a direct answer for you, but here we are.

16:22 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I mean, the show is called Sales Success Stories. I feel like we should talk about a successful sale or at least a really good story. Maybe it was even a loss, right? And something that you learned a lot from. What's your favorite story to date?

16:33 Rob Morris: Sure. So I live in Tennessee and there's a lot of farmers out here. There's one organization in particular I work with. They sell tractors. I'm not going to give the name away, although you might've already figured it out. This client had been not necessarily a challenge, but we just didn't have much going with them. And we learned that they spent about $120 million annually in IT, and we were just getting none of it. Couldn't figure out where we were going wrong, where our relationships were missing. And just through some internal relationships I had with other folks in Dell, I was able to meet a few key players at this customer and had a few deals actually early on with this particular person that just fell flat, but we had built some decent credibility. And just by simply showing up and taking a shot at trying to solve problems they had, they actually ended up calling me and sharing they had a new problem around a new toolset in the Microsoft stack. And I just said, this probably isn't going to be the biggest deal I've ever seen, but to push myself and see what we can do and how quick we can get it done. So over the course of 2 weeks, I met with this particular individual who then brought in his leadership, a few of his peers. We met 5 times, got lunch, dinner, met in the office. And through that, actually was able to win the deal just really by the simple things like showing up and caring and not giving up when things maybe with the broader account strategy weren't going our direction. The other big lesson I learned was knowing your people, which is what we talked about earlier. I knew the exact engineer I wanted to bring in for the conversation. I knew he was going to want to be a part of this customer journey. And so it wasn't a large deal. I mean, it was about $50,000, but we were able to get it done quick and we broke through for a customer that really didn't do much with us. And since then has built a stronger relationship with our organization. So not the prettiest win, but one where I hang my hat and said, we worked really hard, efficiently, and solved a problem that we didn't even know existed for these guys.

18:48 Scott Ingram: It is such a good example. I feel like we have lost sight of the bigger picture in sales. And some of this is the way that we're organizing territories and things like that, right? Where maybe an account executive hands off to an account manager or things like that. But I feel like the really big opportunities, it's actually rare that you do a massive opportunity right out of the gate or, hey, we've got this really small footprint in this account. It's not like overnight you are going to paint this amazing vision and they're going to spend tens of millions of dollars with you. It really comes from the little stuff. It comes from, hey, let's nail one project and build some trust and show them, hey, we can deliver. We will go out of our way for you. And that paves the road for the million-dollar, the multimillion, the tens of millions of dollar deals. It's very rare that you don't take one giant leap. It really is. It's a staircase level that gets there. And it's amazing to me how few both individuals and organizations sort of lack the patience and the understanding to see that. Like, we have to put in the work, we have to serve this client, and then the opportunities open rather than this weird pipe dream that everybody seems to be smoking.

20:03 Rob Morris: Yeah, it's the old saying, people don't buy from organizations, they buy from people. And it's that personal relationship, it's the face-to-face, it's showing up. And when you do show up, don't just push product, just sit there and listen, talk to them, get to know their role and be interested, be genuinely interested in what they're trying to do. Because then you can have a part in it. That's where the fun starts.

20:26 Scott Ingram: For sure. And again, like the deeper you get into those projects, even though it might not be the biggest, most profitable thing, it becomes one of my favorite sayings that came out of this show from Katie Jane Bailey is this idea that discovery is a lifestyle. It's not a stage. The more that you get to work in those deals, the more you understand, the more you get visibility into, oh, now I understand why they're challenged here and why things stick here and why things things move really well over here because of this particular stakeholder and budget holder, whatever it is. You can never get to, even if you ask the most brilliant questions in a discovery stage, you're never going to get to that stuff.

21:01 Rob Morris: Exactly.

21:02 Scott Ingram: Rob, you've had a pretty good run. What are you most proud of?

21:05 Rob Morris: Yeah, I've got the awards, the trophies. I've had the incredible experience of presenting in front of global audiences of 500+ people on sales strategy. But what I really fall back on, and I'm a huge philosophy nerd, there's a guy today, his name's Robert Greene. He's just a popular author, but I subscribe to his ideology that instead of being truly proud of the trophies, the awards, it's really your habits that you should be proud of. Because those are the things that produce the awards at the end of the day. Those are what I fall back on for myself personally. Also the accomplishments of being recognized by peers as opposed to leaders, because your peers don't really owe you anything. They don't have to share like, hey, I wouldn't have done this before you were here, before I met you, or you've changed my mind on this thing. I don't have that hanging up on a shelf, but it's the little things where you gain that deep-built trust from the people around you. And the last thing I'd say too is I'm proud of taking swings at things that are really challenging and not caring if I fail. Because more often than not, you do better than you think, and not trying at a missed opportunity is worse than trying and failing. So for me, that's where I like to hang my hat.

22:28 Scott Ingram: What's your favorite example of that? What's a big swing?

22:31 Rob Morris: Oh gosh. I mentioned earlier, we've got so many different resources and specialists. I had the opportunity to speak at an EBC for a notable hospital in the Nashville area. We could have brought in an executive or global resource, but I told my counterpart, I was like, hey, can you give me a crack at this? I'll spend an hour. It's a room full of PhDs and very technical people. And I said, I think I can deliver a good message here. I spent an hour working with a number of just really seasoned, smart individuals, talking through technology challenges, sharing my opinion, sharing where I think our organization was headed and how that fits into their overall strategy and was able to present to them. So that was an example where I didn't have to sit in that seat and stand up there and potentially risk just falling flat on my face and being nervous, all those things that come with it. But I just said, screw it, let's take a shot. And this experience regardless is going to carry me forward. And it has. That actual example, we've yielded Numerous big opportunities, had a few significant wins. I've built relationships with people that I never expected to be in the same room with. So it's fun, but you got to take that step. You got to take a swing.

23:47 Scott Ingram: It's such a good example. And at the risk of completely leading the witness here, my guess is you just had a really good business conversation. I think a lot of times, especially when folks get in room with very technical individuals, they feel like, oh, Well, I need to be super technical when the reality is it's not that at all. You need to be very simple. You need to speak plainly and talk about the impacts of this. I mean, is that kind of what you did? Like, what was your approach in doing that?

24:16 Rob Morris: You're spot on. And it's really about, you can take so much pressure off yourself by putting the spotlight on your customer, on your client, and trying to understand, okay, well, what do you guys actually trying to achieve here? And for them, they're a large hospital, they're very deep in research, they want to be a technology-first organization. And so, okay, well, what does that look like? What's your vision for that future? And how do you see it unfolding? Those are the types of questions you ask. And then once you understand and let them almost get the air out of the balloon, you know exactly where to tailor your messaging. They're telling you what you need to say back. And We say internally, if you know your brief, if you know what your value to them is, then you can just nail it and you go from there. You continue to evolve.

25:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And then what happens, and you called this out, now you have credibility. Now they're like, oh, Rob is somebody who understands us, who we can talk to. And you're able to further those conversations long after that meeting. You're not having to then lean on some other counterpart who are like, oh, well, hang on, let me bring the smart guy because I'm not good enough to do this. It's just not true.

25:25 Rob Morris: Exactly. Or even your counterparts see you in a different light. They see you as, oh, this guy wants to be part of the team, like he wants to contribute. And then it becomes you're going after challenges as a collective and you're not running in different directions. That again, that just makes it more fun. You build stronger relationships and you can find much more success.

25:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah, love that. It is a team sell, right? I'm not saying you should put everything on your shoulders, but a lot of times when I'll take that kind of approach, I will call out the other people who can go deeper in those areas. And I like to joke, I'm like, hey, Emily's gonna be my lie detector. I think I understand what you're trying to do. Let me try and articulate this. But if I get any of it wrong, I'm gonna have Emily like jump on the fire here and help kind of better articulate. So again, like you still have that expertise as a bit of a backstop and then can kind of keep going. So you mentioned the habits in what you were talking about. What are the most important habits? What's core for you?

26:22 Rob Morris: Number one is never stop learning. And the visual I like to paint is when you find something you're genuinely interested in and you want to learn about, it's like a thirsty man finding water. You just can't get enough. So finding what those things are, and again, if you can apply it to your role, I know I mentioned this earlier, but that really can help you learn faster and be more efficient at your job. The other piece too is doing things that are challenging even outside of work. I won't reiterate the callus visual for everybody, but doing things that you are personally challenged by. For me, so I actually started doing mixed martial arts. So I do Muay Thai kickboxing, jiu-jitsu, really for fun, but it's also like, it's really hard and it takes years and years and years to become good at it. So it teaches you that delayed gratification mindset. And what I've learned over time too is everything you do affects everything else. And what I mean by that is the habits you have with diet or with exercise or with sales, they affect everything else, your relationships and how you perform at work affects how you treat others. And learning that everything's kind of connected and pushing yourself in those challenging areas can really benefit you all over the place. And so for me, I pick something random and hard, MMA. I've learned to love it. And you just realize you're a lot stronger than you realize. And then another, I don't know if you call it habit, maybe it's more of a routine, but I like to find ways to decompress. I'm a huge comedy fan. So if you've heard of Shane Gillis or Mark Norman, some of those guys, when I finish an intense day, I love listening to podcasts that have nothing to do with my day-to-day. And just some guys goofing around. That kind of helps keep me grounded and balances the hard work effort with something fun.

28:14 Scott Ingram: Love it. Rob, I think it was you and I that were talking about using AI to deepen and accelerate learning. Was that you?

28:21 Rob Morris: Yep.

28:21 Scott Ingram: Talk about that.

28:22 Rob Morris: Yeah. I like to go down random rabbit holes. So what's my most recent one? Well, my most recent one is probably around diet. I mean, there's so many different schools of thought and philosophies out there. But if you want to get the latest and greatest up-to-date research, you can just go ask ChatGPT or I think, what was the other one? Perplexity?

28:44 Scott Ingram: I've got my own story.

28:45 Rob Morris: Perplexity.

28:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I've been deep in Perplexity lately.

28:48 Rob Morris: Yeah. I need to check that one out. I mean, you can learn virtually anything. The way I see AI is it's like the ultimate library now. You can tailor fit subjects or something you want to learn more about and just spend as much time as you want consuming information, how you want to consume it, where you want to consume it. It's really, really cool tool beyond the really technical stuff that it can do. It just gives you better access to new content.

29:15 Scott Ingram: I heard a thing, I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about learning in general and the more intentional you are about it, right? The example they gave, and what's funny is I think they were referencing a textbook and my oldest daughter just started college, like they don't have textbooks anymore.

29:30 Rob Morris: Oh, wow.

29:31 Scott Ingram: But their suggestion was, oh, well, skim ahead a little bit and then think about what do you think you're going to learn as you read the next few pages and maybe ask yourself some questions that you might be able to know after the fact. Literally the same article. So funny that this keeps coming back. It was something about 7 things you can do to prevent dementia. I swear I'm not that old, but I've been on this like super health kick lately and really just mindful of all of it, right? Thinking about my cardiac health, my brain health, all of these different things. And one of the things they called out was air quality. They're like, oh, the worse your air quality is, the higher this impact was. And they talked about something, it was like PM2.5, which was some air quality measurement. In the middle of this article, I go over to Perplexity. I'm like, hey, what's the PM2.5 in Austin? And how does that compare to other areas? And I've asked half a dozen questions just to contextualize, like, well, how does that compare to other areas of the country and what cities? And It was so fascinating. And I think that's the way, right? Like rather than passive learning, like I sit there. Yep. Sure. I read this book or I read this article. It's really, are you asking more questions about it? Like, are you going deeper into the things that like, oh, that's really intriguing. I've never even heard of that. Like that's a new framework for me to try and understand. And now I'm going to remember that. And now I'm talking to you about it. Right. So now I'm reinforcing my learning.

30:50 Rob Morris: Exactly. I will say though, it's a double-edged sword. You don't want to like get too stuck down something because then you get freaked out and now Testing air quality.

31:00 Scott Ingram: I promise I won't go there too. But the good news is y'all should come to Austin. We got good air.

31:05 Rob Morris: I don't know if I can say the same about Nashville, but I'm intrigued.

31:08 Scott Ingram: I know where I could ask the question. We'll find out afterwards.

31:11 Rob Morris: Exactly.

31:12 Scott Ingram: So Rob, let's keep going kind of deeper into the habit piece because I love to kind of dissect the day. So walk us through a full day in the life, right? Alarm clock goes off. What time did that happen? And give us the blow-by-blow till your head hits the pillow again.

31:25 Rob Morris: You got it. I'm a huge believer in the new term now is neurohacking. So the Andrew Huberman stuff, which again, you go down an AI rabbit hole and learn all about what he says. But getting sunlight early in the morning is critical. It sets your circadian rhythm. So that's what I try to pop out of bed and do initially. I also just do a quick devotion, just kind of set myself up. Faith is important for me. And then After that, I do a quick mini workout routine. So I've got a pull-up bar in my room. I'm sure my neighbors hate me, but I'll just crank out some pull-ups, do some push-ups, squats, nothing crazy, but get the blood pumping. And from there, I'm a huge believer in cold showers. I started cold showers probably 6 years ago, and the first 2 years are terrible. It's the worst. But once you get used to it and acclimate, It's incredible. I mean, you feel like you can run through a wall when you get out of the shower. I mean, since starting it, I don't even know if I've had a cold or a sickness. It's really, really good for your immune health. So again, that kind of keeps you consistent and moving forward in your work.

32:31 Scott Ingram: Robert, are you 100% cold? Like cold water all the time?

32:35 Rob Morris: Yep. First drop of water I feel is cold. So hop in, hop out. 2 minutes is what you got to aim for to get the benefits.

32:42 Scott Ingram: I'm sure you're in a hurry anyway, so 2-minute shower probably works out.

32:45 Rob Morris: Exactly. Yeah, it's great. I'm looking to invest in a tub or something at some point, but for now the shower will do.

32:51 Scott Ingram: Cool. Keep going. So you get out of your cold shower.

32:53 Rob Morris: Yeah. Hop out. Early in the week is a lot of team planning, team sessions. So like I said, I've got 75 customers and each one of my customers, there's hundreds of people I can meet with. Internal to Dell, I align to what we say 10 core reps. And so those individuals are responsible for the entire portfolio. There's thousands and thousands of products we sell. Getting my plan aligned with what those people want to do is huge, especially for that week. And each of them have different customers, different objectives. So trying to understand their goals in relation to the actual customer is really important. So I almost do kind of 2 sales roles, like an internal and external. And then from there, I manage a team, not directly, but I've got 20 to 30 specialty reps at any given time. So we're also spending cycles early in the week to figure out, okay, what's the opportunity? Where do we need to go? What does our focus need to be? I'm a huge proponent of like the 80/20 rule, which I'm sure we'll get into later, but setting that strategy. Evenings, like to work out, do something challenging, play soccer, martial arts, so forth. I actually just finished an executive development program. So I started that, I finished that, but I was doing that in the evenings and adding an extra hour or 2 on top of my learning. Middle of the week, that's when we're actually sitting down with customers. So whether it's face-to-face, virtual, and then prepping for those… preparation's everything. If you don't know what you're doing in these conversations, you can really get yourself stuck. And then also post-call. So where do we need to go next? Having those conversations. And then late week, I go back through, manage my business, kind of see how far we made it. Set up for next week, but I also spend a really significant time networking and meeting new people, exposing myself to new ideas. I think that's almost, if not more important than the actual job. That might be a hot take, but networking is critical for my own success. That's my week in a nutshell.

35:02 Scott Ingram: Okay. So 2 threads I want to pull really hard. Let's start with the networking one, but I also want to talk about just, I'm amazed I haven't ever done this on the show. Like this could be its own thing, but if you work in any of these very large organizations, the way that you navigate multiple people kind of up and down that are touching the same account, right? So if you're at Dell, you're at Microsoft, you're at Oracle, you're at any of these, Salesforce, I mean, any of them, you might have a core rep, you've got all these specialists and everything else. We'll come back to that, but talk about the networking piece. Like, what's your aim there? How are you kind of strategically tackling that?

35:41 Rob Morris: Yep. I have a number of mentees and I tell them 3 things. I learned this from a number of different people, definitely my dad, but there are 3 questions you need to be able to answer before you go into any networking conversation. The first one is, who am I? Kind of similar to what we did. What is my experience? How am I branded? What have been my successes? The next question is, what do I want? What are you trying to get out of this conversation? And especially if you're meeting with executives or people who really don't have the time to just talk in the middle of the day, you have to know what you want out of the conversation. And people appreciate that. People appreciate that you're not just here trying to waste time. And then the last one is, what can you do for me? So going that extra step and Maybe that person already gets an idea of how they can help you, but give them a clue. What can you do for me? And a lot of times it's, who else can I go learn from, at least at my level? Who else should I talk to about XYZ idea? And then from there, you just kind of spiderweb out and you don't realize how many cool people you can meet. And if you adopt a posture of, I can learn anything from anybody, whether they're a president of a company or an intern or some random person, you'll really open up your mindset just from a professional standpoint. So that's how I think about it. And going beyond even your immediate company and just trying to understand the broader business network and the broader business world is fascinating to me. So I love the practice and definitely think it's a skill as well to have that.

37:16 Scott Ingram: What resonates with me the most is that opportunity to learn in every conversation. Which is I get hung up on, and not really, but like the idea of a mentor, a mentee. To me, both of those things are happening in almost every conversation I'm having. So hopefully the person that I'm talking with is learning something, is finding something that they can take away. But even if they reached out to me for help with something, it's very, very likely that I'm also learning something from them, or they're giving me a new perspective or something that I need to ask Perplexity about or whatever that thing is. It's just like discovery is a lifestyle. Learning is a lifestyle too. And just taking that sort of approach, like, again, hopefully there's something I can give to you. I know there's something that I'm going to be able to learn in the process that's going to be really valuable. Let's dig into this, just navigating the inside of a big organization and whether these directions are correct or not. Let's set that aside, but let's think of kind of the core reps as being up. How are you managing up in those relationships? How are you choosing where to allocate your time is maybe even a better question, right? If you've got 10 people that you're working with, how do you decide where to put your energy?

38:32 Rob Morris: The big principle that stands out to me that I fully abide by is the 80/20 rule. Being maniacal about what your objectives are. What does leadership want to accomplish? And if you can go a step further, Where is the organization headed and how do I fit into that vision? And then take that. So, okay, you have your objectives. All right. Where's my time best spent to achieve those objectives? And you have to spend significant time upfront getting to know your people, understand what they're trying to achieve, what their customers look like. You can relatively quickly find out where your best opportunities are going to be and where your time is best spent. And from there, that's when you start building your strategies. You identify those 20% or so spots that are going to yield the 80% in results, and you go all in on those pieces. And the pieces that maybe you don't have time to get to, that's where you can lean on a team. Or for me, I've got an inside rep that helps me and can take care of those other things that maybe I don't have the bandwidth to get to. So being… the word I use is maniacally focused on those objectives and seeing everything through that lens. Another way to describe it is if you're spending 30 minutes with somebody or someone, how is that going to affect your progress towards the objective? Is it going to move you forward? Is it not going to move you? Is it going to move you backwards? You can pretty quickly weed out a lot of time, a lot of wasted effort by thinking through that lens, like, is this going to make me money? Is this going to get me closer to those objectives? If not, then you should probably throw it out. And being focused around that is key.

40:16 Scott Ingram: I mean, it's the Pareto principle that is the 80/20. I wholeheartedly believe in that. And for me, I apply that both to the people that I'm working with, right? So I don't quite work with Core Website. It's not inside my organization, but I certainly do do that in the way that I collaborate and co-sell with others. And I think this applies to your network too. There's some people, and sadly I think it's a minority, who are really good collaborators, who are really good networkers or connectors. And when you find them, they're gold. You're gonna get return on relationship when you invest in those. There's others where it's a black hole, it's a one-sided thing. You're like, I give and give and give and I'm never going to get anything back. And frankly, I don't have time for that. I think coming to that understanding, coming to that conclusion and being cognizant of it. I spent 3 hours on this last Friday evening reconnecting with a friend who I'm kicking myself for us having not gotten together. I mean, it's been a long time since we had connected, probably one of the most connected connectors that I know. I mean, just absolutely incredible. She'll be at the summit. You'll have an opportunity to meet her. I mean, the ways that she can open doors. Are insane, are completely outrageous, and she loves to do it. So it's finding those people that you can build that kind of relationship with. And again, when you're working with even internal reps, if you're supporting 10, there's probably 2, 3, maybe 4 where you're really going to be able to lean in. Some of them are nearly toxic. It's like, yeah, you know what, you're a user. Like, this isn't going to help me. I mean, it's hard to balance because your job is to support them. But at the end of the day, your success is going to come from that minority and just understanding who they are. I mean, it's probably the reason, Rob, this is what, our 3rd or 4th conversation in a pretty short amount of time? There's a reason for that.

42:07 Rob Morris: Yep, exactly. And then taking what you said a step further, once you do identify those 2 to 3 individuals and you've got your strategy rolling, then it becomes, okay, how do I keep this going and what got you to where you are now isn't going to get you to the next step. So always be thinking 2 steps ahead, I like to say, and setting up other relationships and keeping that individual engaged with you so that they keep coming back is critical.

42:33 Scott Ingram: Let's talk about the other side, right? So working sort of across, you said you have 20 or 30 kind of specialists that are supporting you. So let's call that kind of your core resources. How are you thinking about and managing those relationships?

42:46 Rob Morris: To me, it's all about inspiration. These people have 5 times as many accounts to support as I do. I learned this through sports. Everyone wants to be a part of the team that is winning and has fun doing it. So that's the culture I try to create and continuing to build people up. I would hope my peers say I'm very positive and caring so that they're always feeling like they have a place on the team and they're wanting to move the ball forward because that's what's going to get the win. I really push that mindset with them. And then also just taking an interest what they care about as well. Everyone has objectives. Everyone has something they're pushing for. So the more in tune you are with those people around you, the better you can speak their language and get them on board with the team.

43:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I love that. And again, just really specifically calling out these are really 2 different things.

43:44 Rob Morris: Yes.

43:44 Scott Ingram: One, you're supporting and you kind of need stuff from them. You need them to participate. And then on the resource side, you're competing for their time. I think if you almost frame it that way, and it's what are you putting into those relationships? Are you in the 10 or 20% from a Pareto principle that they want to work with? Do you set yourself up from that perspective? Are you getting them what they need when they need it, or are they constantly waiting on you and having to hound you? And again, like you're competing with everybody else they support. So how are you setting yourself apart from that or their group? And to your point, it can just be as simple as like, I actually care. I know what you're interested in. I know what you value, and I'm going to do whatever I can to help you get that.

44:27 Rob Morris: Exactly. Yeah. And making them feel like they're part of the group, like that's all part of the goal and they don't owe you anything. No one owes you anything.

44:36 Scott Ingram: I don't owe these people a report to you. You're not their boss.

44:37 Rob Morris: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They can tell me to go pound sand if they want. But you got to build a good culture around them. Yeah.

44:44 Scott Ingram: I mean, to me, this is why I say sales is leadership because you have to lead your clients, right? You have to help them either see their vision, clarify their vision, whatever it is, and sort of bring everybody together around that. But the hardest part is those internal things. Like you really are leading if you're bringing people together around a client, when you have no authority over them. You can't tell them to do anything. You're not their boss. That's a different order of challenge.

45:16 Rob Morris: Exactly.

45:17 Scott Ingram: Let's keep going with kind of the habit stuff as it relates to learning and talk about your information diet. What are you reading? What are you listening to? What are you watching? When is that happening?

45:27 Rob Morris: Sure. So first thing, I'm really big into just health and wellness. So I'm a huge fan of Peter Attia and a lot of the cutting-edge research that's coming out. I also just finished, I mentioned earlier, a year-long program for executive development. I probably read 20 books over the course of a year on development, leadership, executive presence. So constantly trying to improve myself there. I'm also a huge, I mentioned it earlier, psychology and philosophy nerd. So I love Marcus Aurelius and Stoic philosophy, and I think it especially applies in sales. Because outcomes are so uncertain. And that's at the core of what Stoic philosophy is, is that you can't control what's going to happen. The only thing you can control is how you treat people and the effort you put in. And ideally the rest takes care of itself. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. So just constantly reminding myself, do the right things, build the correct habits, the rest will take care of itself. And then of course, faith is critical for me. That's just how I view the world. And then I really try to stay away from politics too. I think it kind of pollutes my mindset and can get you focused on things that really just you might not have control over. And that goes back to even the philosophy point.

46:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. There's no good there. I don't touch it. Like 50% chance you lose.

46:50 Rob Morris: Yeah. But if it's your thing, great, go for it. But for me, I got other stuff I want to learn and focus on.

46:56 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. What about the tools and the apps? Like what is kind of core to the way that you operate?

47:01 Rob Morris: I get made fun of so much for working in a top tech company in the world. I'm not a techie guy. I struggle to figure out my Outlook email sometimes, and I get people to help me all the time. But with that, I'm on YouTube a lot, watching TED Talks. We mentioned AI, but other than that, I don't have any good recommendations. There's some networking apps that I've learned about. They're subscription-based, but you can actually input all the different contacts you have in the professional world, your personal world, and track when your last touchpoint was, what you talked about, and then it'll send you even reminders to keep up. And as somebody who believes being around people is just the best part of life, that's really appealing to me. I haven't gotten the application yet, but I'm probably going to. Nothing too crazy for me there.

47:51 Scott Ingram: It's so interesting that you call that out because it's an area that I'm really starting to explore myself. I was on another podcast, actually, I think I shared it here talking with Chris Bussing. And he was asking about the way that I manage my network and I realized it's broken. I broke LinkedIn a few years ago when I started accepting connection requests from people that I don't know. And now there's 20,000 people. So LinkedIn by itself isn't really a tool that I can use to proactively manage my network anymore. I do think that there's some tools that we can layer on that again, I'm kind of starting to explore. So we'll share some notes. On that, when we see each other at the summit, maybe we'll talk specifically about that. I know that that'll be a topic for sure. Do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

48:37 Rob Morris: I kind of mix and match a bunch of different ones. There's a handful of books, and we've talked about this too. Selling to the C-Suite is a good one. The Challenger Sale. Those types of books are really solid. I enjoyed the MEDDIC framework, and I don't want to go through every single letter of the acronym, but Look it up. It's definitely a great way to identify where you are in a sales process, in a sales cycle, and what you still need to uncover. And we're both in service consulting. So the ITIL certification, I'm actually going through that right now. That's based around where do you create value for your clients? And the 4 parts of that are how do you shape an org structure for a company? What can your service do? To give strategy around an organization structure, the processes you improve. So if you see it takes 10 years to get a memo out for something, you can improve that through the ITIL framework. The IT infrastructure, that's the third pillar. So are there technologies that you can improve on to get better business outcomes? And then the partner network, which I think is understated, especially with a large company like Dell. Part of our value in relation to that, this ITIL framework is our network with different partners and our ability to wrangle those players for a client. There's, especially in the AI world right now, I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of vendors and players. How the heck do you navigate that as a customer? That's part of our approach. The other one we have internally, so it's kind of similar to ITIL, is called People Process Technology. With people, it's How are you helping a customer upskill to get ready for the future? How are you helping their, their processes? That's the second one, which kind of overlaps with ITIL and then the technology. So where can we improve someone's technology? I think that's probably a very different mindset being that it's service consulting and not product selling. Maybe you have some ideas there as well, Scott.

50:43 Scott Ingram: I think the partner network piece in particular is super interesting because, and we kind of sit on opposite ends of this. Part of the value that I see myself and my organization delivering is when we're working with an account, it's likely that my team is spending hundreds of hours inside of that organization, like literally at a scale that you could never possibly get to. We have insights and relationships that, again, are unmatched. I think of it as I have much bigger eyes and much bigger ears deep inside this organization, and we can kind of bubble up some of the things that we're hearing and seeing inside of these organizations. I would think from your perspective, and maybe you can speak to this, is if you see those partners that are in that space, how do you work with them to kind of pull out this, hey, what are you seeing? What are we missing that we could never possibly get to that you can? So maybe talk more about maybe some of your best partners. I know that's Pareto too.

51:43 Rob Morris: Yeah, no, that's great. We should team up. I like that idea. But I always say our best seller is not me. It's the actual service when we get in there, because those people, whether we farm out an opportunity to a smaller partner or we do it ourselves, those people are going to learn way more than I could ever learn having had conversations at the C-level or other folks, because they're on the ground day after day with the customer. And they may uncover things that the customer doesn't even know. So their critical selling mechanism, we call it our delivery organization. So that's huge. In terms of partners, we have so many different products and lines we can go down with our clients. I don't even know if I could list off specific names because it just depends on what you want to talk about and what the topic is, but AI, there's a lot of big ones, and maybe you have some insight there as well. The cloud partners, that's a whole mess right now of like, where do we need to be from an infrastructure standpoint, from an on-prem, off-prem? Security as well is a mess. Like Dell, Dell has our own internal security company that we own called SecureWorks, but we also partner with a number of different other big organizations there as well. So It's hard to say.

53:06 Scott Ingram: And maybe this is a follow-up conversation. So if this is interesting, hit me up, hit Rob up. Maybe we do a follow-on to talk specifically about partnering from both sides, because I think the other challenge, if you are a partner, if you partner with big organizations like, like I do, right? You work with a Microsoft, you work with an Oracle. Part of your challenge is how do we develop these relationships with the account teams that own the client relationship? And then how do we stand apart? I mean, Rob, you must have literally hundreds, if not thousands of potential partners that you could work with. So how do they set themselves apart and have the opportunity to be able to work with you, I think is the conversation that may be worthy of a complete kind of sidebar thing. So if that's of interest, hit me up. If enough people kind of express an interest in this idea, maybe we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive because it's a whole thing. I'm sure we could talk about it for an hour. And I think, again, having kind of those real-world perspectives of, hey, I'm in this, I live this, here's how partners are effectively getting my attention.

54:10 Rob Morris: I should have added a caveat to a lot of those partners I don't even know about because I'm busy selling a vision essentially and saying, okay, we're going to accomplish this outcome. And then I pass it off to a team of part of that 20 to 30 people that handles going and finding the partners for me. So I don't even know behind the scenes sometimes who we're using. I mean, we've got a few that are on contract and are consistent, but it's not necessarily my job to go find those people, which moves something off my plate. It's great not to have to manage that, but it's a whole other kit and caboodle, like you said.

54:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, we talked about your sales philosophy a little bit. Talk about what is your style? How would you describe your approach?

54:51 Rob Morris: My style changes depending on who I'm speaking with. So like we've talked about managing up with your account execs and those quote unquote core reps. Horizontally with specialists. With those individuals, I try to be incredibly positive and encouraging. People just want to be around someone who is trying to do the right thing and staying positive despite all of the inevitable roadblocks you encounter in sales, and having a mindset of, I will go figure it out. I don't care what your problem is, let's talk about it, but we'll find a way through this. And Moving yourself to their side of the table. There's so many smart people that we can take advantage of. Let's go use them and do it together. So that's my style with what I'd call my peers, my counterparts. With others who, like where I'm reporting business, I'm, I'd say executive leadership, that level, I'm incredibly structured, organized, and very direct with what we're trying to accomplish. Executive communication is absolutely a skill. So Knowing that language and how to report financial metrics and how the business has grown, that's its own style. And through it all, maintaining a collaborative approach. I don't want anything to be hidden from anyone. I want my peers and my counterparts to know exactly where we're at, what we're doing. And same goes for the leadership that I report to, really just trying to overcommunicate even to the point of annoyance, because it's better that something is said, then it goes unsaid. All of the problems I've encountered in the workplace have been around communication gaps. It's never somebody's out to get you or there's some negative reaction coming. It's always communication.

56:38 Scott Ingram: Such a good call-out. Such a good call-out.

56:40 Rob Morris: Yeah, absolutely. And then keeping everyone inspired. I don't know if you've seen the show Winning Time. It's about the LA Lakers and how they've basically started from nothing and now have built the franchise to where they are today. And Gary Buss is, is the main protagonist, and he describes his role, the metaphor of his role, as a duck above water. I don't know if you've ever seen or heard this before, but a duck above water looks really smooth and they're gliding, everything looks comfortable. But if you take a camera under the water, they're paddling like crazy. That's kind of the mindset I take, is I'm going to work like crazy behind the scenes. Stuff may be going wrong, stuff may be going sideways, but on the surface, you're calm, cool, and collected, and you're inspiring confidence in those around you. That's how venture capitalists and startup founders have to operate. Nothing ever goes right in a startup, so you have to put on a front of, I've got this under control, but behind the scenes, you may know stuff's going all over the place, But you're working towards it. I love that visual.

57:44 Scott Ingram: I do too. I'm a huge, huge fan of that particular metaphor. And it's one of the things every now and then I'll talk to just other people that surround the sales process where they might see the meetings and think, oh, sales is really easy. And what they miss is what's happening beneath the surface is like, you don't understand how many conversations and how much prep and how much other work went into… like, all you saw was this one on-site or this 1-hour meeting. You missed the 5, 6 hours of action and paddling that surrounded that particular action that made it look so smooth.

58:26 Rob Morris: Exactly. I'm sure you can relate to the fact of when someone asks you like, hey, what'd you do today? I'm like, man, I don't even know. Like, So much. I can't even tell you. That's how it is.

58:36 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about kind of the inspiration and just how it applies to you. Like what, what motivates you? What drives you?

58:43 Rob Morris: I would say there's 2 sides of it for me. And I mentioned I'm a big psychology guy. So motivation in my mind comes down to 2 sources. One is fear of not… fear of failure. And then on the flip side, it's not reaching your full potential. David Goggins is a funny guy to me. I really enjoy some of his stuff. And he has a line where he's like, when I die and I'm sitting in heaven next to God and he shows me this person that walks up to me and I turn to God and say, hey, who's that? And God says, that's you. And David Goggins is like, no, that's not me. And God says, well, it could have been you if you really pushed yourself and you achieved your full potential. That mindset for me of like, man, I don't want to leave anything on the table. I want to not just be the best externally, but for my internal self and know that I've, I've exhausted my own life, my own success. That helps you get through the mundane day-to-day bumps that you go through in a sales job or any job for that matter, is, is, you know, you're playing a metagame. You're something broader than what's going on in front of you. And then the other one is like thinking of yourself like you're writing a story. Everything that's happened in my life up until this point is I'm writing a book. And how do I want that to end? Where do I want the story to end? And what happens in between? Those are the things I remember. Steve Jobs is a mentor of mine, as much as he can be. And every day he reminds himself, he's like, if I died at the end of today, would this have been a day that I'm proud of and that I achieved or moved towards my goal? And I'm like, man, you can't get fired up more from a Steve Jobs or David Goggins thinking that way. So Those are my internal motivators. Externally, family, wanting to have a good group to live life with and achieve all I can to support them as well. So having a mixture, I think, on both sides is key.

1:00:36 Scott Ingram: Man, so much good stuff in that. Although I don't think I've ever heard somebody use the adjective funny to describe David Goggins. Maybe funny peculiar, because that guy's on a whole different level. It's fascinating. So Rob, is there something you believe that the average or typical sales professional would think is crazy?

1:00:57 Rob Morris: For sure. Maybe not. We'll see. The principle that I, and I think it's backed by research as well, is that it's not what you say to an individual, especially in sales, but it's how you say it that delivers a message to somebody. So often we think my ability to rattle off XYZ is what's going to make me successful. But there's a lot of psychological research out there showing that it's how you present a message and the way you deliver it that actually gets somebody bought in or believing in what you're saying. I mentioned earlier, I'm not a political guy, but one of my courses that I took in this program, we actually did a case study on Trump. And for him, the content may not be there, the backing may not be there, but the way he says it and his repetition and his ability to just deliver a message confidently is what's made him successful. And I'm sure people have all sorts of different opinions, and I don't mean to stir up some political debate, but that's a fact that I think is underappreciated, especially in sales. And then the other one is when you're trying to innovate and think of new ideas, whether it's in sales or business, consensus on ideas is actually a bad thing. If everyone at the table agrees, it's probably not an innovative idea. And what's interesting is Michael Dell, I think, is a huge champion of this principle. He's a big believer in creating a company that puts his existing company out of business and constantly innovating. And so he's putting out ideas and things that maybe seem a little out there or maybe beyond the curve, but in his mind, He doesn't want to fall victim to the competency trap and have an organization that is really good at one thing, but isn't good at the next big thing. Those are my 2. Maybe people don't think they're crazy, but I think they're underappreciated at least.

1:02:57 Scott Ingram: I'm most interested in like, how intentional are you about the how you're saying, or maybe the why you're saying that you're ultimately kind of trying to put across? And do you think about that? What is that?

1:03:10 Rob Morris: It's hard and it's a skill I'm trying to build, especially in the virtual world. A lot of times you're not on camera, you can't see the other person, so that makes it really difficult. But in person, you can really take advantage of that. Like simple things with how you're standing, how you're using your hands, your ability to pause in between phrases and change inflection. There's all this crazy research, which like I said, I learned about it through this program. I'm trying to implement, and it's not easy to do because you have to break some old habits, but you look at all of the best leaders in organizations, and we did case studies on this, they all can deliver a message succinctly, clearly, with confidence that you wouldn't second-guess what they're saying, whether it's crazy or not. Their ability to deliver, it's differentiated. Yeah.

1:04:01 Scott Ingram: You're absolutely right. And the other thing I'm just thinking about here, having had this experience just a couple of days ago of reconnecting with a friend and getting together, for what on paper was going to be an hour and us spending 3 hours together. And just that never would have happened virtually. There's so much that gets lost when you don't have that face time, when you just can't be with somebody else. I mean, to the point where I think the value of really pushing for getting back in person, it's gotten too easy to just default to the Zoom Where if you can find the time, if you can really connect human to human, if you can break bread, it's orders of magnitude more powerful than that Zoom session is ever going to be.

1:04:47 Rob Morris: You're spot on. And you have an advantage as a seller if you're willing to do that, because people aren't. They've got, like you said, they've gotten comfortable. So recognizing that and going for the opportunities is a differentiator.

1:04:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well, a huge part of the reason why I'm super excited to see you in a couple of weeks here at the summit coming up. And that's what it is for me. It's being able to spend real time. I mean, I love these conversations, right? But to actually meet, to actually be together, to have those serendipitous conversations where you're having conversations, somebody else walks up and 1 1 8 situation, right? Because of what's happening. I love that. Let's talk about kind of the flip side of that idea. I wonder if there's something that the typical sales professional believes, or that's just part of the sales dogma these days that you think is crazy.

1:05:40 Rob Morris: I think we've already covered this one for me, and it's that customers don't buy product, they buy the experience that the product is going to produce. And it's a simple equation in my mind. It's customer is doing X to achieve Y. I think so many sellers spend time on the X. They want to talk through what it is that they're purchasing, but your customer's not thinking about that. They're thinking about why and how is this going to differentiate me as an individual within my organization, or how is it going to differentiate the organization or drive some sort of outcome? I think that's a mindset you can apply beyond services to any product really for that matter. But focusing and really trying to get in the head of your customer. And that can be an internal customer like I've talked about before as well. The people that I work with, those account executives or those engineers, you have to be thinking the way they're thinking to get the mindshare and to get the buy-in.

1:06:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:06:39 Rob Morris: Yeah.

1:06:39 Scott Ingram: Good stuff. Good stuff. So you're huge on learning. What are the most important lessons that you've had to learn? That have really helped you find the next level as you've built your career?

1:06:51 Rob Morris: Yep. I'll give you 3. So the first is persistence is everything. Talent's overrated. You can absolutely learn and outwork any objective. The second is, and this actually is a quote from Whiplash, a movie about a drummer, and this may be a controversial opinion too, but I think good job is not always something you want to hear. And I look at a lot of the top athletes of my time, at least the Mamba mentality. There's an interview with Kobe Bryant after the Game 2 Finals, and a reporter asks him a question and says, you guys did a great job tonight. Where do you think things are going to go next? Where's the team going to head? And Kobe looks at the guy and he's like, what are you talking about, man? Good job? We're on Game 2. The job is not finished. We're in the middle of a fight right now, and it's almost a bad thing that we're thinking we did a good job here because we're still exposed. We've got stuff to do. So having that internal motivation and kind of staying above praise in some sense, and that's an interesting one to say, but the third one is get at-bats. And the analogy I use here is a sophomore can have more experience than a senior in any given sport. And what I mean by that is If you're getting at-bats and you're sitting at the plate taking swings, that's going to pay dividends in the long run. And especially as someone like me who's early in their career, I think experience is fully relative in how much you put in day to day and how much you learn and take those shots. Like I talked about speaking in front of the doctors at the hospital and all these other examples, that builds experience and years in a role can't speak to that. Those are my big 3 for you.

1:08:37 Scott Ingram: Love it. That last one for me is where I've been thinking a lot is I think it's about repetitions. And this for me was one of the big lessons I had to learn because I'm a consummate overthinker. And early in my career, I felt like I had to, I had to have the perfect, I had to just have it all figured out before I could start to execute. And it took me a long time to realize, wait a minute, no, Execution is what gives you the formula. It's kind of like you could read about weightlifting until you turn blue in the face and figure out like, let me build the perfect program and figure out like the right way to do all these things. But you're not going to see any gains until you lift a frickin weight, right? Like you have to actually freaking do it and go, oh, okay, this works, this doesn't work. But you have to get those repetitions in. And the thing that I'm thinking about the most from a repetition standpoint, that is still probably the most relevant thing for me is it's conversations. The more conversations I have, those are my reps. The more conversations I have, that's where I learn the most. That's where I build the deepest relationships. That's where I earn the most trust. That's what's going to lead me to the next exercise because you're going to suggest, oh, hey, I need to introduce you to this customer. You're going to be able to help them. It's not… for me, it's not the cold stuff anymore, ever. It all comes through those conversations. I get smarter. It's how I actually think and process. By talking those things through, it helps me in my understanding and in my learning. So maybe I'm testing out a hypothesis like, hey, given what I know about your organization, I think this. Is that right? And I'm going to learn so much more through having that conversation versus polishing the hypothesis before I introduce it, if that makes sense.

1:10:36 Rob Morris: Exactly. And I think you can take that a step further. And those days when you don't want to have the conversation or you don't want to take that step, that's where persistence comes in and just knowing that it's going to lead you somewhere and almost trusting the process that you're going to get to the endpoint you want to get to. And maybe you don't know where that is, that you don't know where that next conversation is, but you have to take the step. Because otherwise you're definitely not going to get to that next stage.

1:11:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, let's get into… I love this section. This is like the advice-giving section. So what advice do you have for somebody that is just getting started in their sales career today? What do you tell them to kind of help them build a foundation of success?

1:11:16 Rob Morris: I always share with my mentees, and I've spoken at a few college classes as well, really try to think of your first few years. I even say first 10 years. Purely as learning as much as you can so that you can build a foundation towards learning what you actually want to do and then being successful with it. If you're just constantly chasing the next big thing or the money, you may miss out on some critical nuggets that could really reinvest in your own success later down the road. The next one is don't compare yourself to other people. Success, especially in the short term, is impossible to measure objectively. We know this better than anybody being in sales. There's a lot of luck involved. There's a lot of things just happened to go my way or things didn't go my way, even though I did everything right. And that goes back to even that Stoic philosophy point of just don't be outcome-focused, be habit-focused. And you can't compare yourself to others if you do that. And then the last 2, I guess, is mimic the best. A quote from one of my favorite professors through this program was, when you were born, you didn't know how to walk, but you learned. So having a growth mindset and applying that to the best of the best. I mean, Leon's a great example. He's absolutely best of the best. So how can I take his skills and what he's distilled from a knowledge standpoint over 20, 25 years and make it my own. That's key. And then the last one is just don't listen to negativity. It's easy to be negative. It's easy to see things aren't going your way, but block it out and keep your eyes forward.

1:13:01 Scott Ingram: Nice. So if folks want to go back and listen to my conversation with Leon, that was episode 155. So Leon Baumann is amazing, and he's actually been just fantastic in making some connections for me here recently where Rob, like you, We've just had some really, really incredible conversations, some super thoughtful people that he has surrounded himself with. I realized my setup here is a little bit broken. So I want to take a step back and talk about like, when in your career were you the most challenged? Like at what point did you struggle the most?

1:13:32 Rob Morris: For me, I don't know if I could pick a specific point because every point is challenging, but I'd say the biggest challenge I've come up against is my age, especially having conversations with folks who are 20 to 30 years in the industry. They're really strong in what they do. And what I've had to learn through that is for me, almost using my age, which I don't like to mention, but as a value add. And what I mean by that is I'm somebody who is going to work. I want to be part of the team. You want to be on my team. I'm going to drive new value. For you with energy that maybe other people don't have and using that as kind of my in with some folks. And it takes a little bit longer, but having that fresh mindset has helped me overcome that. That's probably been the biggest challenge for me.

1:14:26 Scott Ingram: It's a good one where it feels like a weakness, but I think you can turn it into a superpower, especially if you lean to the curiosity side of things. Nobody's going to buy this 20-something-year-old has all the answers and knows everything. Right? Right. But really more the opposite of, look, I'm willing to work, you can see that. But I'm also, I'm curious, I want your perspective, I want to learn. And obviously, you have knowledge to impart.

1:14:53 Rob Morris: Exactly. And the other thing I forgot to mention is, like, almost like Trojan horse your ideas. And what I mean by that is, use the credibility of others that you trust and that you're on the same page with to express ideas to other people. And working in smaller settings helps to do that. It doesn't matter how you get the win. It just matters that you get the win. And I don't have to be the center of attention or running the campaign, but using your resources and the people around you effectively is critical.

1:15:23 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I mean, there's a whole rabbit hole we could go down there, right? Which is kind of like, I don't care who owns the idea. Doesn't have to be my idea. In fact, your idea might be the best idea. How do we champion that?

1:15:34 Rob Morris: Exactly.

1:15:35 Scott Ingram: How do we leverage that? Or how do I take what you've started with and how do we improve it together and move it forward? So with that context, what advice do you have for folks who are a little bit further into their career? They're going through the struggles, right? They keep hitting those walls. How do they break through? How do they go from this good to great level, whether or not we're willing to acknowledge that as great or not?

1:15:59 Rob Morris: Sure. It comes down to, for me, questioning your activity and those habits. It's the Pareto principle all over again and copying what the best people are doing. And it starts with a healthy sense of humility and saying, look, I'm not where I want to be. And I have that conversation with myself every day. It may be painful too, to see, look, this is where my weaknesses are. This is maybe how I'm actually being perceived in these scenarios. So taking that inventory of where you are today is key. And then going towards those activities that are going to make you successful. And if you don't know what those activities are, like I said, go copy the people around you who are successful and learn from them. You can't gain knowledge if you don't ask for it. You can't learn from others. And I think it's especially important if you're further in your career, because you're probably more entrenched in your habits and the way you've done things, and you're less likely to change. That's a point against you and you have to actively fight against it yourself.

1:16:58 Scott Ingram: Man, that last point is so good. I never want to get to that place where I feel like I got this, like I know what I need to know. I think there's so much value in, you know what, I've never tried it this way, but that's intriguing. Like, let me give that a shot. To me, it's these little things. If I could get just 1% better in a few areas, those really compound. And if you can just keep that going. So I think this is the perfect setup given we're just a few weeks away from the summit. You're going to be there. What are you hoping to learn from the top sellers in other organizations, knowing that you're going into this place where you're going to get to have these conversations?

1:17:33 Rob Morris: Oh gosh, everyone's going to hate me. I'm just going to ask way too many questions. I would say the first one is I'd want to know why someone works where they work. If you're truly a top performer or somebody who's had success, you clearly know why you're doing what you're doing. So Why are you where you are? You could go somewhere else. You could jump ship. You could do something completely different. What drove you to your current state? The other one for me is about process. Like, how did you create your success as a top seller? What's your playbook, so to speak? And I think the best leaders, the best salespeople can explain that. They can make sense of their past success and tell you Like how they did it. Maybe in the moment they didn't know, but everyone's got a playbook of some sort. So I'd want to know down to the detail what that looks like. And then lastly, just how do you think about problems? At the end of the day, that's what we do, whether it's consulting or whatever else. Like, how do you break something down? How do you think about it? And what's your path to resolution? You can apply that anywhere.

1:18:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Let's talk about 2 pieces of that for you. So when we think about your playbook, What's an element that we haven't touched on that is like a key component?

1:18:51 Rob Morris: For me, maybe we have touched on it, but always pushing back on yourself with a healthy sense of humility and knowing that your success is not independent from others pouring into you. So yes, you may have hit these objectives and gained the trophies, but knowing that the people around you, parents, friends, coworkers, teammates, all help shape you to get to where you are, really helps you wake up on the right side of the bed and be confident, but also know that it's not just you. And I think that's where you can almost pigeonhole yourself is if you really do think I've created this myself. So that has been really critical for me.

1:19:36 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So fascinating. You know, I'm sitting here thinking about exactly what you're describing, kind of the people around you and what I've been leaning into a lot more, and this is why I love the podcast because it's such great practice for this, is the questions that you ask. I don't have all the answers, and the better I can ask questions, the more detail I get. I'm actually… this will be like a very, very subtle nudge for the summit. So if folks aren't signed up, I'm telling you, you've got to come. So top1summit.com is where you find the details because I've got several questions I want to ask you. I don't want to get you in trouble and put you on the spot. Like they're very personal, private things that would probably get you in trouble professionally. So those to me are really the conversations that we get to have. I mean, one of the areas that I lean into really hard, and now I've just figured out sort of a new angle in sort of how we can discuss this in a really, really important way in this year's summit, which is just around The setup is essentially this. As B2B sellers, we know that single-threading is bad, right? But how many of us are single-threaded professionally and in our income? And we're not talking about how risky that is and how to overcome that. So that will be a big topic. And again, I won't say more. There's pieces of conversation that you and I have already started to have. That I know we'll be able to continue. And I just, I'm not going to pull on that thread anymore, but let's go back to, to your emphasis on like, how do we solve problems? What is your approach? And maybe you want to give like a specific example that can kind of give us a better framework for that. Or maybe you've just got sort of an overall, like, hey, every time I hit a wall, here's what I do.

1:21:25 Rob Morris: Good question. It certainly depends. The big thing that I'd go back to is, I mean, it depends on who you're trying to solve. The problem for, whether it's yourself or a counterpart in sales. I mean, a lot of my work really is with those, those internal account executives. So I really try to adopt the mindset that their problem is your problem, and you have to see where they're trying to go with whatever objective is in front of them and build a plan accordingly there. So I could probably break it down better over a longer conversation, but it's… if you make something your own, if you make a problem, someone else's problem your own, you're gonna find a way to solve it by putting yourself up against a proverbial wall, so to speak, and not giving yourself a side door to back out. Yeah. Okay.

1:22:18 Scott Ingram: Okay. I get it. I like the approach. I think it's really smart. We covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that you were hoping we would?

1:22:27 Rob Morris: I would say we did talk about motivation, but understanding what you want from a personal standpoint and even a professional standpoint will drive your action. And so what I even encourage others to do and what I've even done is like build a… it's almost called like a future authoring type mind map. You know, what do you want from a sales career or out of your personal life and map that out. Draw what are the 10 things that I want to achieve, and then try to reverse engineer the habits that get you there. And if you don't know, then you can go use Perplexity or whatever to figure out how to get there. But that's… and I guess maybe I'm going back to your, your previous question because I wasn't super succinct there… that's how I almost solve problems as well, is trying to reverse engineer where you're trying to get to and build the habits that ultimately will hopefully get you to that outcome. Again, it's not guaranteed, but you can apply that all over the place.

1:23:30 Scott Ingram: Love it. Such good stuff. I'm not going to keep going because I think that's a really good point to end on from that perspective, but we still have to make this really actionable. So what would you encourage our listener to do over the course of the next, just call it 1 to 2 weeks, to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:23:45 Rob Morris: Sure. I would say one thing I really learned from this program I went through was you have to go out and ask for what you want. No one's going to know and no one's going to give it to you, especially if they don't know. So the first thing is try to identify where you want to be professionally and then go out and find the people who can help maybe get you there or give you advice to do it. And I'll give you an example. I took a negotiation course and action was the crux of the course. We actually had to go out and negotiate fixed-price items. I actually went to a liquor store and asked for a discount on a bottle of bourbon that I wanted, and I got it. They gave me $5 off. So you never know what doors are going to open or where you could be if you don't go out and ask. So first piece is figure out what it is you want to achieve, and then try to, again, reverse engineer and go out and ask for how to get there or ask for the very thing itself. You never know what'll happen.

1:24:46 Scott Ingram: Brilliant. Rob, this has been a blast. Thanks for the time, man.

1:24:49 Rob Morris: Pleasure, Scott. Thank you. 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.