191: Finding Your Why: How Mike Sullivan Became TriNetX Top Seller

0:08 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:24 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Mike Sullivan. Mike is the top-performing seller at TriNetX out of Boston. You might pick that up from his accent. Welcome to the show, Mike.

0:35 Mike Sullivan: Thanks. Thanks so much, Scott. Pumped to be here. So thanks for having me.

0:38 Scott Ingram: And huge shout out to Brandon Fluharty, who got me connected with Mike. Mike is one of Brandon's top clients, so that says a whole lot. And I've gotten a little preview of this, know some of Mike's backstory, and I cannot wait to get into this. But before we go there, we always try and lead with some immediate value. So Mike, let's talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales? What are those?

1:04 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, I love this question. Thanks, Scott. It's honestly really hard to narrow it down to 3. As I was thinking about this, my top 3 have little to do with sales actually, and more about the things that really anchor me, that are foundational really to my core. So, I'll list them and then we'll talk through each kind of one by one. So, the first is mental and physical health. The second is environment, and the third is my why, my reason, and my purpose. So we'll go through each of those. Physical and mental health. This has been probably the biggest unlock for me in turning my life around and really using sales as the vehicle to do was really conquering my own mindset, learning how to manage things like imposter syndrome, building confidence through experiences I've been through. I'm a big believer that Success in sales or anything for that matter is truly a mindset game. The idea: don't focus on what you want, focus on who you want to become, and the results take care of themselves. Setting high standards, choosing your identity, and then reaffirming that identity with your daily habits and routines that are in alignment with who you want to become with that identity. I'm a big believer that greatness is a choice; it's a mindset. So mental health is really kind of one A for me, and then a close. 1B is physical health. So for me, choosing to do hard workouts has been a complete game changer for me. I say my secret weapon to sales is my air bike. Before a hard call, I'll get on my air bike, and then that call is not so hard because the air bike sucks. And the whole point behind that is when you consciously choose to do hard things as your normal internal environment, you're equipping yourself to handle the unexpected things that come up throughout your day from your external environment. And when you commit to having discipline in the gym, for example, for me, it's just carried over to every other area of my life. And nothing builds confidence like doing hard stuff, committing to doing a Peloton, committing to swimming, running, the gym. It's just a complete game changer. So physical and mental health is 1A and 1B for me. And the thing is, it's what sucks is it's rented and it's not owned and you got to pay that rent every darn day, right? So every morning, Start my day with a mindset ritual. Then I work out in my basement. During COVID and gym shutdown, I bought a bunch of stuff, put it in my dungeon downstairs, right? It's cold. There's no windows. It's like going in there. It's like going to war with the voices in my head. Those things are really foundational to everything I do because if you don't have a healthy mind and a healthy body, it's going to be very hard to find success really of any kind in sales or anything for that matter. So, that's number one for me, physical and mental health. Number 2 is environment. The way I define it is work environment and home environment, right? So, home environment, it's really important to have good sound relationships with your spouse, with your kids in order to be able to focus on the deep work and the marathon of strategic sales. Sales is really hard. If you have other stress coming in with relationships, it's going to throw you off. It's going to be distractions. It's a really hard game, the sales game. So having those relationships intact, having your home environment intact is really important. It's also important to me to remove things like cheap dopamine, doom scrolling. My wife laughs at me because I'm not on Instagram. Maybe it's because I'm in my late 40s. I'm a Facebook guy, though, although not on there all the time. She'll tag me on Instagram stuff and I'm like, I didn't even see it. I have no idea what you're talking about. Things like that really help protect the inputs coming in because there's so much information coming to us all at once. Just protecting your home environment and your brain. And then work environment. To land big deals, you got to be in a big deal environment. It took me a while to find the right fit to be able to pursue and land larger deals and partnerships. And you got to have the right leadership, the right support team, the right accounts, the right product-market fit. The right comp plan, all those things if you want to have a high level of success in sales. So, environment, work and home environment, that would be my second success factor. And 3 is my why. So, this is where sales is really personal for me. I told you a little bit about my backstory when we met. I won't go through the whole thing now, but about 8, 9 years ago, I made a lot of bad career decisions early in my life. I was afraid to take risks. I played it safe and I paid for it in a big way later in life. My back was against the wall. I had a lot of debt, bad career moves, a lot of kind of financial turmoil, was laid off, was unemployed. And at the same time, we started to navigate an autism diagnosis with my daughter. And all this adversity was coming to me at once. And I had a lot of dark thoughts. I had a few suicidal thoughts to be completely upfront, but looking back, I needed that pain and that adversity in order to transform. In order to grow into the person that I was meant to be, not just the seller I was meant to be, but really the human or the man that I was meant to be. Ryan Holiday's famous book, The Obstacle Is the Way. That was definitely the case in my life. The obstacle became the way. So keeping my family in the forefront as my why really got me through everything, especially my daughter. So those are my big 3 things. Didn't talk a lot about sales, right? For me, those are the things that are core. Mental and physical health, work and home environment, and just having a really strong why and purpose.

6:39 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. And we will go much deeper and unpack that why, because I think your story is super incredible. I will also just… I don't think I've talked at all in the recent episodes about this year's Sales Success Summit. I want to actually take the opportunity here to give a little bit of a preview for that. And Mike's very connected to this because in our first conversation, Brandon introduced us. We had a preliminary call and on the spot I was like, okay, you get to be on stage. Stage. Like, this story is too important and also fits into really what I'm trying to build. The bar for the summit is so freaking high. And the challenge for me is at this point, I compete with myself to deliver a better and better experience. The question I always ask at the end of every summit, we do a more formalized survey. And the first question is, was this the best sales event you've ever attended? And the only ways you can answer that are yes or no. There's no gray area. It either was or it wasn't, that number is always over 90%. It is a ridiculous number. The people who say no, the reasons are hilarious. Ian Koniak is, look, you will never be it because I went to a Tony Robbins event where I met my wife. I'm like, okay, yeah, I can't compete with that. This last year we had the lowest number or the highest number of nos. But the most common answer was, oh, I just liked last year's summit better or 2 years ago summit better. Right. So I've become my own competition. And what I'm trying to do this year is make the outcome more impactful. I want it to be more actionable. I want everybody to walk out with a draft of… this will not be final form, but they should walk out with a draft of their personal playbook and kind of what's going to happen from here. And Mike, what you said aligns so perfectly because of course we'll talk about sales. But it's not the most important thing. And the way that I'm building the structure of this year's event, I'm calling it Scott's Sales Hierarchy of Needs. So if you think about Maslow, it's very aligned with that. And I've made it alliterative. So if you think about the layers, the first level is self. And Mike, just like you called out, right? If you don't have your mindset and health and core family relationships and those things just dialed in, you're gonna struggle. That comes first and foremost. Do you have your personal core and foundation dialed in? The second level is situation, basically your job. And Mike, you talked about this, and I know Brandon works on this a ton in what he talks about and working with his clients. You talked about it being the big deal environment, right? Essentially, can you achieve your goals that you want in your current situation. And I think I want this to be an opportunity for us to all step back and take a look at the bigger picture and think about, am I in the right company? Am I in the right industry? Am I in the right role in this company where I can get the level of success that I want? Or am I at least on the right path, right? If I spend the next couple of years and I'm successful here, can I take the next step in my career that I want to take? So really being mindful of that situation. The next level is sales. But I think of that, we're going to really focus on the pipeline side of sales. So, you might determine through this process, actually, my situation isn't right. Then your sales pipeline might need to be, I need to create an opportunity pipeline for myself. I need to get into the right situation where I can be wildly successful. And then the tip of the pyramid for me is style. And this has been a huge theme in the summit over the years, which is really digging into what is your personal superpower, right? What you hear in all of these interviews. And for those who aren't familiar with the summit, I only invite people to take the stage who have been on this podcast. And in order to be on the podcast, you need to be an outright number one top performer, or I'm willing to settle for top 1%. So when somebody's number 3 on a team of 800, I call that good enough. And we'll do that. Bringing folks back together. My latest win as I start to plug people into this structure, Lynn Powers is going to be coming back. Lynn is next. Next level, absolute rock star. She'll be talking about some of these pipeline things from a variety of perspectives. So really excited about that. Just a very intentional experience that I always put together, always very intimate. We'll have between probably 150 and 200 people, absolute max. You can find the details at top1summit.com, T-O-P, the number 1 summit.com, or top1.fm. There's always a link on there. We'll take you there. The real secret to this thing, yes, I'm super intentional about the agenda and the structure and what we are going to do, but really it's just about bringing the most amazing group of individuals I can find together into one place. And then magic just happens when you're in a room with a bunch of guys like Mike, like Lynn, like some of the OGs that have been to every one of these experiences over the years. It's just a next level thing. Doesn't hurt at all that it's in Austin and it's really easy to deliver a great experience here. Again, if this is at all of interest to you, if you want to be intentional about your career and where you're really going and to surround yourself with this level of greatness, then you go to top1.fm, you click on the summit link and you sign up and you join us. That was a way longer commercial than I usually do, but I haven't talked about it at all and kind of what the plan is for this year. And I'm getting super fired up about it as the pieces start to come together. Mike, with that, let's start to contextualize a little bit. Let's talk about current. What is your role and what did it take to get to number 1 in this role? And then we'll go back into kind of the deeper backstory, which is so fun.

12:45 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, absolutely. I've been in the life sciences tech space for about 15 years now. So currently at a company called TriNetX, I'm actually at my 7-year anniversary in about 5 days, which I'm really proud about. It's really tough to find the right company to work for, especially in this economic environment that we're in. And I've just been fortunate and blessed to be able to find this company about 7 years ago. We're a health data and technology company. So I sell solutions to pharmaceutical organizations that help them solve clinical trial challenges and equip them to conduct research to essentially help get their products to market. Faster. So I started as a sales director, got promoted after about 2 years to senior director, and recently promoted earlier this year to executive director. My role hasn't changed. I don't manage people. I don't have anything against managers or whatnot. It's just not my thing. I just love carrying a bag. I love being an individual contributor. I love owning my own destiny. I love the freedom that it gives me to be with my family and whatnot. Maybe eventually in my career, but not anytime soon, staying as an IC. So I sell to mostly top 20 pharma companies, combination of SaaS data licenses and also services, research projects as part of our offering. When you're new in a role, you're like, I got hired, but do these folks actually believe I can do it and be successful? That's always the anxiety of joining a company, being in a new role that we all have. I was fortunate, the folks that hired me, Tim and Brian, I still keep in touch with them nowadays. And within the first 6 months, I was able to close a $3 million deal. So I started in July 2018, before the end of the year, I closed that big deal. And then a second one shortly thereafter was about an $800K deal. So I got my first taste of what a significant commission check looks like. And again, at that time, I was still on a lot of financial thin ice and I didn't have any belief that I could get out of that. I was just honestly and transparently going paycheck to paycheck until I got that big commission check. And when I did, I said, holy crap, I can actually dig myself out of this world of pain and adversity and years of imposter syndrome and self-confidence, mental health issues if I commit and go all in on this sales thing. And I did. And I was able to fortunately maintain that level of performance through present day. And really the key for me is not chasing every opportunity, but the right opportunities. I have a really healthy relationship with another guy on my team. His name's Scott. We're always neck and neck. Either he's number one or I'm number one. That's been that way for a couple of years. I think he beat me last year. We don't compete against one another. I'm never trying to be number one. It's always me against me. I'm always trying to be better than I was yesterday, but we always push each other and support each other. So shout out to my boy Scott, who pushes me every day.

15:42 Scott Ingram: Brilliant. Brilliant. Let's get into the backstory. So give us this origin story. And I usually ask it in terms of how you got into sales in the first place, but you tell this how you want to tell it.

15:54 Mike Sullivan: Yeah. How long is the podcast? Do we have 90 minutes?

15:56 Scott Ingram: It's long, man.

15:57 Mike Sullivan: Let's go for it. It might take the whole night.

16:00 Scott Ingram: No.

16:00 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, this could be the whole session. This story, I've been telling this story as of when I met Brandon about a year ago, started working with him. I told him this story and sales is very personal for me. I won't go all the way back through being a college grad and every job, but basically early part of my career, I graduated with a degree in finance from a great business school. Babson College in Wellesley. And I was afraid to take risks. I had very low self-confidence. I don't know. All this stuff stems from when we were children back in the day, which doesn't make much sense to me. I had awesome parents, a very great upbringing. My dad worked for himself. He was in the shoe business. I had the best role model to follow in his footsteps, yet I made very safe choices. After college, I went in, I was working at a local gym during college. I kept working at that gym. I would interview at State Street or Fidelity and didn't get those jobs and would be down on myself. And I identified as an underachiever, and that identity stuck with me for quite some time. My resume was just a mishmash of blue-collar jobs. I worked retail selling shoes. I thought I was going to get into the shoe business. That was my first sales job. So I was an Al Bundy, and get this comp plan, guys, 100% commission. No base salary. So to make $100 in a day, I'd have to sell $2,000 in merchandise. That was my first sales job. Pretty tough, but I cut my teeth. I was good at it. I was like, wow, I have a knack for building relationships with people. And they were like, you're not even trying to sell me these shoes. I'm like, I don't care if you buy these shoes. They fit or they don't. They're comfortable or they're not. Then I went and sold used cars. Second sales job. I still joke to my boss today. I'm always like, hey, you used to sell used cars. And they're like, We know, Mike, that's fine. We don't care. We care about what you're doing today. So those are my first 2 sales jobs. So used car guy, right? But I had a knack for working with people and communicating and helping people make decisions, right? So from there, I decided to try and get a real job recruiting, and I couldn't pick up the phone and ask for job orders. Was fine talking to candidates, couldn't pick up the phone to a company and ask a hiring manager, hey, give us that job order. I was just paralyzed. Fear of failure, imposter syndrome like you read about. After 3, 4 months, I got fired. Moved back home, mom and dad's basement, unemployed for 6 months. Now I'm in like my late 30s and I'm like, wow, great job. Your resume is garbage. You're not gonna be able to get a real job. This is the inner voice, the inner demons in my head. I got into… my brother-in-law owned an IT services company. He brought me in, hey, let's learn project management. Or… and I distinctly remember telling him, I don't want to be in sales, don't want to be a slippery sales guy, I have no interest in being in sales. I remember sitting in his car having this conversation. He's like, all right, let's do project management. So I was with that company for 7 years, went from project management and then into account management because they realized you're not a great project master. You're actually better with customers. And they gave me the title of account manager. They're like, you're not a sales guy, you're an account manager. Then eventually got moved, or that company went under. It was a bootstrap startup. I was out a lot of money in back pay. We tried to make it work, we didn't work. Was unemployed again. So another rock bottom. Then I got a job as an AE at OpenClinica. For about a year and a half selling EDC software into pharmaceutical companies. Was there for about a year and a half and 3 kids. My OTE wasn't over $200K, wasn't making a ton of money. And I could feel this financial hourglass over my head and the sand that ran through it was just the cash that was going to run out. I took a personal loan out just to pay bills to try to bridge me. Until I found a level of success. So taking on debt, autism diagnosis with my daughter, remortgaged my house because we were in a lawsuit with the town that we live in to fight for her special ed program. And I didn't have any money to do that, but I was like, this is my daughter. She has autism. She's nonverbal. You'll have to kill me. She's going to get the right program. I don't care what I have to do. Remortgaged my house to be able to fight for her program. Then I got into this role, and the way I did it was I rewired my mind. I was driving to and from my job at OpenClinica, listening to podcasts, listening to mindset tapes, listening to Gary Vee, listening to Jocko Willink, listening to Andy Frisella, Ed Mylett, you name it. Tony Robbins. I went to the Tony Robbins UPW event right before I started at OpenClinica. People say Tony Robbins, woo, he's the godfather of personal development for a reason. If you see him in person, Holy crap, life-changing, right? I found this one video from this guy, John Assaraf, as I was driving to my job, and it was how to train your brain to make more money. John Assaraf, very successful entrepreneur. He was featured in the book The Secret. I just came across this YouTube video and he said, if you want to make more money, you can train your brain to do so. And I was like, oh yeah, sure. Here's another one. How can you possibly do that? So he talked through this exercise. What you say sounds woo, so bear with me for a second because this worked for me. So the exercise was, what you say is, I'm so grateful that I make a certain amount of money. So I wanted to get to $300K OTE. I would say to myself on my commute, I'm so grateful that I make $300,000 because it allows me to provide for my family. It allows me to dig myself out of this debt, this financial thin ice that I was on. My dream was to take my kids to Disney World. So I have 2 daughters right now. They were really young at the time. My son, I think, was just born. And I was like, there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to pay for Disney World. How am I going to… but I would say this to myself all day long, over and over. And there's neuroscience behind that because you're opening up the reticular activating system in your brain to attract things into your life to make that happen. So I was sitting at work one day and I was like, I just hit a wall. I was like, I've had enough of this imposter syndrome. I've had enough of feeling like a loser, to be completely honest. Now I'm almost 40 years old, right? I live paycheck to paycheck forever. It was just my normal. I'm like, I am done with this. I'm elevating my life. So I reached out to the Chief Commercial Officer at TriNetX, company I'm at now. I knew of the company. And some work I did at the IT services shop I was at was relevant to their technology that they had. So I DM on LinkedIn, DM the Chief Commercial Officer, Brian, and they brought me in for an interview and I knew I was going to get the job just from meeting these guys. They were just awesome. And they could see the fire in my eye that I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work. And they made me an offer and the OTE of that offer was $300K. And I was like, oh my God. I was like, this mindset stuff actually works. And I haven't looked back since then. I've just rewired my mindset, rewired my identity. And yeah, I've been on a 6-year good streak, 7-year good streak of closing big deals. And I've dug myself out of that hole that I was in. And the way I can describe it, I just sold my way out of that career, financial, and personal hole. Just redefined my identity and transformed as a seller, as a man. So that's the story.

23:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Such a compelling, interesting story. There's so many pieces of it that I love. I think one of those things is it's never too late. You floundered for 2 decades. Yep. Really didn't find it until you were 40. I think that's always the case or just the life resets, right? Sometimes you're like, okay, yeah, I've been doing okay. I've been on this path. But I talk about it a lot. It's like finding that next gear. If you don't realize, wait, there's a big chainring here. Sorry for the cycling reference, those that don't get it right. But there's a whole nother way that we can really fly. And if you don't find that, man, are you pedaling really hard and not going very far.

24:15 Mike Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. The way I can best describe it, Scott, is I needed that rock bottom. I needed that rock bottom and I played it safe for so long. The universe came and tested me all at once. The financial career turmoil is one thing. Going through the unknowns that autism brings, a whole nother world of stress. This was all happening all at once because I'd played it safe up until then for almost 2 decades. And the universe put me to the test. What are you made of, Mike? I would hear that voice in my head. What are you made of? What are you going to do about it? Everything's your fault. Once you accept that your situation is mostly your doing, It was all my doing, is the decisions that I made or didn't make. So once I owned that responsibility, I knew I had the power to change it, just make different decisions. So that rock bottom forced me, that desperation forced my transformation. So I'm now looking back, I'm so grateful for it because I wouldn't have… if I'd had a safe job and made a decent income, would I have put myself out there? Would I have taken huge risks and made bold moves? Probably not, because it's human nature It's human nature to stay small, to play safe. So I needed that rock bottom at that point in my life.

25:28 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. I think my guess is, and I'll have you articulate this, but I think your why has shifted, right? First it was get out of pain, get out of this debt and this challenge. You accomplished that. What's your why today? How has that evolved? I know it's related, but it's a little different.

25:46 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, for sure. So Brandon, when I discovered him a year ago, his content resonated with me in a big way. I knew I was going to work with him and I wanted him to help me from a sales perspective, but I also wanted to tell this story. I've been feeling called to share my journey in a very transparent and raw way because I know there's other people out there that have gone through what I went through, feel what I felt. I still do. I still work on myself every single day, even though I've changed my life, my career. I still battle those demons every single day down in the dungeon, down in the gym, right? Going to war with myself. And my why shifted because I want to pay that forward. I feel called to share my journey to help other people navigate the struggles that I've been through. So Brandon has been helping me with that. And the first struggle I had was I can't tell this story while I'm still a W-2 employee. What is my boss going to think? So I procrastinated on that for 2 years, literally 2 years. Brandon introduced me to a performance coach named Taylor Johnson, and I worked with Taylor for a few months late last year, told him what I was struggling with, and he was like, what's the worst thing that's going to happen? And he got me into action to reach out to my boss, tell them that I'm going to tell this story starting on LinkedIn and so forth. And they were thrilled. I work for awesome people. They were very happy. I was like, what? That's the mindset again. I was in my own way. Limiting beliefs. You're not worthy enough to tell this story. So that's the new journey is really to start coaching on the side a few hours a week, taking a few clients and helping them through the struggles that I've been through. So I'm excited to do that.

27:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Talk about the evolution of your why because I know that has evolved around your daughter as she has grown up.

27:36 Mike Sullivan: Yeah. Oh, thank you. The castle. You're talking about the castle, I think, for G. So my daughter, she is nonverbal autism. She has nonverbal autism. She communicates with what's called an AAC, so a device. She has an app on her iPad and she touches pictures and that communicates for her. She's 12 years old now. She's the best thing that's ever happened to me. She's the reason I elevated my life to where I am, my career where I am. You have daughters as well, right? When you have a family and you're doing it for other people, your purpose changes. It's a complete game changer for those that have kids. You know what I'm talking about. Now, when you have a kid with special needs like we do, my wife and I, it's scary. Your emotions, the future's unknown. She won't be able to live on her own when she grows up. So that's scary as hell as a dad. So my why is to build a castle around her to protect her when I'm gone. That's why I work out every day. I need to live till I'm 95 is one thing or older, minimum 95. But that's my why is it's all around her. She has been… I don't know if you've ever had anyone cry in your podcast. This could be the first time, but she's meant everything to me. She's the reason I do what I do. She keeps me so grounded. Even getting on this podcast, I was like, oh, I'm nervous. Never been on a… it's the first time being on a podcast. Hopefully that stutter that you used to have and that you were made fun of when you were younger doesn't pop up. But I'm like, you have no right to be nervous because your kid doesn't have a voice. So who the hell are you to be nervous to use your voice? Yep, got it. Yeah. So I want to build a castle around her so when I'm gone, she's safe, she's protected. And I've also learned with putting myself out there, there's a lot of other sellers out there that have kids with autism. I don't know how I'm going to connect those dots of Sales, personal development, special needs autism community, but I'm going to figure it out. So that's a vision that I have. I don't know what it's going to lead to in the future, but that's the why.

29:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Here's the crazy thing, because I think this has happened since you and I talked and I've done sort of a series of interviews, how these get released and the timing is all complicated and confusing. We'll see how it plays out, but I've interviewed another person that has a kid with autism. So it's happening. I'll get you connected.

29:57 Mike Sullivan: Okay. Please do. That's awesome.

29:59 Scott Ingram: To your point, it's one of those things you just put it out there. And stuff starts to show up, right?

30:03 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, it's amazing. I put it as my LinkedIn title, Seller Coach Autism Dad. I've had people reach out, some really well-known like sales influencers in the space have reached out. Oh, that's really cool. My son has autism. I was like, wow, there's a whole community out here that should be talking to each other, that should be supporting each other and whatnot. So that's really cool. Yeah, I'd love the connection. Thank you.

30:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll get people. Part of what I think is going to happen with this year's summit too, just given some of the interviews that I've done this year I think there's also gonna be a big kind of parental theme in this, right? Whether or not you have kids with special needs, but when you're selling, when you have a family and just balancing all of that stuff, to me, that's also just part of that foundational self. And maybe you don't have a family yet, but you want to have a family, right? So that's on the goal or whatever it is, navigating that and just the way that your life and career and job and all of those things evolve. Is wild. This is a crazy time for me because I'm on the very tail end, right? Here we are, it's the summer of 2025. My youngest daughter… so I have 2 daughters… is starting her senior year in high school, right? The game is about through for me with kids being home full-time all year. It's wild, right? And so it's a lot of, like I did with my oldest, I will be there At every damn activity, knowing it's the last time with all that stuff. And we're working with her now on college applications and all the things and all that big decision. Man, it goes fast. It's crazy. I have to disclaim this. If you don't want to be triggered about how fast life goes, maybe skip forward 2 minutes. But I heard this when I was probably in my 20s and Andy Rooney said that life is like a roll of toilet paper. And the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. And it freaked me out when I was in my 20s because I was already feeling it. And now how it's possible that I'm going to have 2 kids in college and not even at home and the whole empty nest.

32:14 Mike Sullivan: Holy crud.

32:15 Scott Ingram: So yeah, life comes at you fast like they say, right? Brace yourself and do all this stuff. Mike, I want to go back to… you already maybe answered this a little bit, but I'm just curious about the perspective. So this idea of, with all that you've been through and just your journey, and I think a lot of it had to happen, happened for a reason kind of a thing. But if you were starting over today, so if you're coming out of Babson with that degree right now, how would you approach your career? What would you do differently?

32:47 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, that's tough. When I was going through those struggles, I wanted to change everything. It's like, why did I make that decision? Why didn't you do that? Looking back, I'm glad I didn't do… I'm glad it happened and played out the way it did. It because I love my life the way that it is now. My wife's able to be home with the kids and really takes a lot off my plate so that I can focus on my day job. She does the hard work so I can do the easy work. I wouldn't change anything looking back, but if I was to do things a little differently, and they don't teach this, and they don't teach personal development, they don't teach mindset in high school, college. It's just such a miss.

33:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah, really anywhere. Your job's not going to teach you. You have to figure this out. Yeah, you have to go get it for yourself.

33:34 Mike Sullivan: Exactly. That's why I sought Brandon. I wish when I started at TriNetX, when I started my sales career, just get training in sales. You can't get an MBA in sales, I don't think. It's more business. Maybe you can now, but the coaching is so crucial. I just started working with coaches a little over a year ago, and I've worked with 5 in the last year. I've invested a crapload of money because it makes a huge difference. You can save an incredible amount of time, save yourself from making some fundamental mistakes. Of course, it's important to make mistakes as you go, but working with sales coach like Brandon, working with performance coaches like Taylor Johnson… Amber Deibert is another one that I work with. Who I think you know as well. Huge difference. I know how to deal with imposter syndrome. Then I talked to Amber, I talked to Taylor. I'm like, wow, I actually didn't. I was actually burying a lot of that. Burying stuff is not a way to deal with it. But yeah, getting the right coaches, the right mentors, working for the right person. We've all heard this before. Working for the right people is really important, especially early on. I was very lucky at TriNetX to work with great leadership. Leadership changed over. The leadership is great here that we have, because if you don't work for the right leaders, especially early on in your career, you're impressionable. Sometimes if you work for the wrong leader, that might not be the way to do things, so to speak. There's not the way, there's a way. So it's really, as you gain experience, it's learning to make decisions on your own, trust your gut, and so forth. So a long-winded answer, I think, just having the right support system, mentors, coaches is so crucial.

35:17 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. And that's the other piece that I'm really changing the way we approach the summit from a sponsorship perspective as well. Traditionally, we've had a lot of the big tech sales tools, right? The Gongs and Outreaches, and they're great. They're amazing platforms. But when you look at this audience, probably 80% of that crowd is what I call, we're intentional individual contributors. We're selling, we're in that role for a reason. We're not leading teams on purpose. And I'm like, I can't buy Gong. They won't sell less than 3 seats or whatever it is. So if I just want it for me, that's not even a thing. And I'm really looking to… I've got a whole plan. I won't get into the details of it because it's going to be a grand experiment, but usually my experiments are pretty good. Just helping people connect with those kinds of resources, finding the coaches and the programs, because what I'm realizing about what we offer, like the summit's once a year. Yes, it's a good solid investment in yourself, but that's not enough. You can't do something once a year and expect it to have a lasting impact. And yes, we've got the society, we've got this ongoing, fairly intentional online community, but that's still relatively passive. If you're really gonna go to the next level, you need to proactively invest in yourself and you need to find that coach or coaches and those programs, whatever it is that's gonna help you get to that level, cuz I feel like It's just hard to do on your own. If you're going to try and get everything on your own, even if you've got good mentors and you've done a good job of surrounding yourself with people, even that…

36:52 Mike Sullivan: the self-led type of courses, they're so hard to stick with. I don't know about you. I've purchased so many courses and I've got 3 kids. It's summer vacation. My schedule is an abomination. Every day is different. I want to do my RGAs, my writing, working on my new coaching business, spending time with my wife and spending time with my kids. It's just a crapshoot over the summer because the kids are home. But the courses I've bought, sometimes I don't go into them. I'm like… and I will spend quite a penny on them and I don't even go into them. I have it on my calendar. I'll move it to the next week. Yeah, that's the dopamine fix. I moved it. So I actually… but you didn't really do anything. But yeah, having a community that holds you accountable, that you show up for, whether it's in person, online, is just… makes such a difference. So I love what you do and I can't wait to meet these other 150, 200 people at the summit. It's going to be amazing.

37:48 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. And I also realized I didn't call out the date. So this year's event is October 13th and 14th. So Monday, Tuesday. Again, details at top1summit.com. Mike, the show's called Sales Success Stories, and my favorite part of that is your story, but you've gotta have a good sales story. What's your favorite sales story?

38:10 Mike Sullivan: Won or lost? Yeah. Just give me, give us, give us one. Can I give one of each? Is that okay?

38:14 Scott Ingram: Yeah, let's do that.

38:15 Mike Sullivan: I'll start with the loss. I might cry again, but it was a few years ago, a big pharma company came to us, not to get technical, but we have a real-world data network. We get EMR data from the US, from different countries around the world. And this company came to us to get a whole boatload of data from different countries, a really complex undertaking. Our company is the only one that has relationships with hospitals in different countries that could really pull this off. We got… it was probably a 12-15 month sales cycle. We got all the way through having agreement on an SOW. Talking to procurement, talking to legal, talking to the business. This was, to give you an idea of a magnitude, this was a 5-year, $25 million deal. And it's very dangerous to start calculating your commission on a deal before it's closed. We've all done it. It's very hard not to do. And this was so big. I was like, I think it was a Sunday. I was like, what will that be for me personally? And I was like, holy crap. That's life-changing. So it didn't happen at the end. I think it was the end of 2023, December. They were waiting on final approval. We're talking about who's going to sign this thing. Didn't happen by the end of the year. January, of course, over the holidays, I'm panicking. We all know what happens when the year changes. Priorities can change and whatnot. And January turned into February. February turned into March. March turned into April. Now I'm panicking. And they're just like, yep, we're all… I'm like, any issues? They're like, nope, we're all good, just waiting on approval. And then they scheduled a meeting and I had a just a pit in my stomach, bad feeling. And the CEO pulled the plug on this program. So there was no deal to be had. That was the only time I ever cried when losing a deal. I literally cried. It was an insane amount of effort and work to scope that thing out. And it taught me a lot because I had to work across multiple different teams internally. So I learned a lot from that. I tried to use the mantra, we don't win or we learn. So I learned a lot, but that was painful. That was a world of pain.

40:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What are your biggest learnings from that? What did you take away since you got a little shortchanged on the check?

40:34 Mike Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. I would say the biggest learning on that one was how important it is to have internal alignment. Sometimes it's harder to sell internally than externally, right? This was a very bespoke services project. I sell software and licenses to data, and also we sell research projects where we do a scope of work and whatnot. This had no software component. This was all services. This was all man-hours. It was really hard to scope out. I was working with our chief scientific officer who's brilliant. And he did most of the scoping. It was hard to work across internal groups to really get that thing in alignment. But, and the advice I would have is just to get all the right people in the room, making sure that you're keeping product and engineering, science, whatever, keeping all those cross-functional groups in alignment, getting all the head nods before you're putting the proposal forward. So that was the biggest takeaway. Can I talk about my win? Let's get off this one. Let's get off this one.

41:36 Scott Ingram: Seems like you're eager to change the subject, Mike.

41:38 Mike Sullivan: Let's change the subject. I wanted to start with the bad news. Yeah. So the largest deal I ever closed, I think is probably my favorite. It was a $3.75 million ACV deal. It was a multi-year deal. This was with a big pharma company. What I love about this one is that it didn't follow the best practices of… to sell a deal of that magnitude, you've got to be talking VP SVP, C-suite level. I was not. It's hard to get into these organizations, so I had to find a way in. So we got in through the director level. We built… this pharma company was in multiple different disease areas. They were in oncology, rare diseases, neurology were their main ones. And I just built consensus. I showed our solution to a director in this group. He introduced me to a director in another group, and we just Built a pilot. We scoped a pilot out for 6 months. At the end of 6 months, they weren't ready to buy. And I convinced my boss, can we just do another month? Can we do it? And they're like, we trust you. At this point, I had closed a few other larger deals. They trusted my instincts. The pilot ended up going 9 months. We didn't engage with VPs, SVPs until the very, very end. Now this goes against… Jamal Reimer will kill me on this one, right? Is the approach of getting high in the account. It's true. For most opportunities, right, to close of that magnitude. Each opportunity is different and unique in and of themselves, right? So this one, I didn't engage with senior leadership, CTO, several VPs until the final pilot readout meeting. They said, you've got 10 minutes. It's a go or a no-go. And I'm like, oh my gosh, all this pressure. Our CTO, our chief commercial officer. So the 10 minutes went 30 minutes. I had my slides so dialed in. I had my talking points so crisp. It went 30 minutes. We got the deal done. I think it was a record ARR deal in the company at that time. But it just taught me that every deal is different. Some of these companies, even if you have your C-suite reach out to their C-suite, sometimes it's not going to happen. It's going to happen when it's going to. Each deal is different. Of course, there's best practices with get high in the account early, etc., etc. But this one wasn't for me. I didn't get high until the end. And it still worked out in that way. So that would be my favorite win.

44:03 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Let's talk about the internal sale because I think it sounds like it was a big component of both of these deals, probably even more so on the first one. The first question I'll ask is when you think about the kind of allocation and percentage of work that you do, how much of that is external, truly customer-facing versus work that you're doing that is internal sales, if you will?

44:26 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, I don't know if I could break it down in a percentage. Another example, a deal that I closed in April, it was, this'll make you laugh, April 1st, 7:00 AM. So I missed Q1 by 7 hours. It was with a, obviously in this space of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, we can't name names and so forth, but this was a custom API gen AI project. And we hadn't done one like this before. And we put the agreement together as co-creation. We had to do custom development. We're not a custom software shop. We're a product shop. We sell SaaS, we sell licenses, et cetera. So we want to sell product mainly because that's how we do business. Also because we want to book it as ARR. That's very important as a SaaS company. The customer contacts that we had know us really well. It was a contact I had that moved from one company to another. And I was like, he's leaving my other customer. And I was like, oh no, this is horrible. But he went to another one of my accounts. So I was like, this is the most beautiful thing in the world. I actually presented on this as a case study in Brandon's community, actually in the Purposeful Performer, which was great. Yeah. But long story short, the internal alignment, I had to work closely with our CTO. Bring in CTO, product, engineering, commercial leads, legal, because it was co-creation. We were doing some GenAI LLM stuff on our end. They were doing some on their end. Who owns the IP for that? We had to get everyone involved from the early stage. Putting the SOW together with procurement was very difficult because procurement's, this is a custom development. Where are the deliverables? Where are the milestones? We're like, no, you're buying software. They're like, yeah. You better deliver X on X date, Y on Y date. So we had to put together the SOW really carefully. Every revision, I think we had 10 meetings between our legal and their procurement in a 3-week time period, 2 a week to get this thing over the line. It was a very fulfilling deal, but it was probably the most complex one that I've worked on because we licensed them a product that we had to still deliver and build. But what's cool is that I actually had a meeting this morning with another client about the same offering. So now we're turning that into a product to provide value to other customers. So working internally, it was probably 70/30, 70 internal, 30 external, if I had to guess on that deal specifically.

46:56 Scott Ingram: Any tips or tricks in terms of managing and coordinating those internal relationships? Yeah, that's tough. Very tough.

47:05 Mike Sullivan: Just transparency. Just full transparency, not holding anything close to the vest for any reason, and just quite honestly being a little vulnerable. I was like, I'm the quarterback of this opportunity. I have no idea how we're going to pull this together. Okay. Are we in agreement that we want to figure out a path forward? Everyone nod yes. But let's sit around the room and figure out what's the best way to scope this. What's the best proposal? What's the best Offering, pricing, and we were all over the place with a few of those things. So we use Slack, like many people use Slack, right? I would updates from the customer. I would just paste it in Slack because I wanted to avoid Mike, what's going on with that deal? Mike, what's going on with that deal every 5 minutes? So here's the latest update.

47:51 Scott Ingram: Boom.

47:52 Mike Sullivan: Here's the latest update. Boom. And some people, some sales folks, they get worried about, oh, bad news. Leadership's gonna freak, we can't be completely transparent. It's just be transparent. I've heard you say it before, right? Just be honest, be transparent, because you never have to second-guess. Just always be upfront. And that's how I roll. Yeah, yeah.

48:12 Scott Ingram: Again, this is one of those topics that we don't spend nearly enough time talking about. There's no training on it. And the more enterprise-scale complex deals you get into, the work is internal to stories or examples from my side. I think for me, you just have to have those relationships in place. And it's like managing any relationship, right? It's ideally you've got that established and you've done some favors and made some relationship deposits before you're asking people to do unnatural and very difficult things. And to your point, having that level of transparency, and if the order of operations, the way I heard it was, You build a lot of trust that way. And even if like you do the work on a $25 million deal and you lose it, if you've done it right along the way, you still have trust. Mike's not trying to lead us to slaughter, right? His heart is in the right place. He does the right things because I think you have to have that trust in order to ask for crazy, weird, bespoke, out of the ordinary things to make it work for your client. That's the ultimate role, is we're monkey in the middle. So how do I get my organization… do I have the relationships to do these things in alignment with the things that my client needs? And if I can do a good job of making all of that work together… but you can also be in a position where it sounds like you basically did this. If we do this right, I might create a new product. Like, there's a new offering. And yes, this was one-off this one time, but Now we can package it and not just me, but others on the team can sell it.

49:57 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, 100%. And the other thing that I learned, the biggest thing is we've all heard this kind of, I think it's the Marine Corps mantra, slow is smooth is fast, right? Could not be more true when it comes to working on strategic enterprise type deals. And in this last deal that I described, we were asked for a proposal. I think it was in May. I delivered the proposal in September. I intentionally slowed down because the initial scoping, it was way off.

50:28 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

50:28 Mike Sullivan: And I was like, I'm not putting this in front of the customer.

50:31 Scott Ingram: Yes.

50:32 Mike Sullivan: I'm not putting this in front of the customer. And they were like, if I was a greener salesperson, it was like, customer wants a proposal, get it out as soon as possible. Who cares what the numbers are? They asked for a proposal. We're going to lose the deal. We just slowed way down because I knew This was a different type of co-creation opportunity. I risked missing their budget window. Budget windows are like, in my world, mid-year, June through June, July, August. We went 3 months and my contact was like, where's the proposal? I'm like, we heard what you said. We know what it's going to take. We know what you're looking for. I'm getting internal alignment with CTO, product engineering, legal, everyone under the sun to be able to put a proposal that's gonna resonate. And we did. The proposal review went phenomenally well, and we ended up getting the deal done. But it's so hard to… I've only learned that recently. Yeah, sometimes I still fall victim to that proposal, get it out. It's like, no, slow the hell down. What are they asking for? Where do we need to be? And just slow is smooth as fast. That has been huge for me.

51:36 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Now, this is very much my world. I see this all the time. And one of the things I will do frequently that works extraordinarily well is, and again, I work for a services business, so this is a little bit different, right? If you're selling license, this may not always work, but I will basically sell a scoping project. So the beauty of it is now my entire team is involved and we're getting paid to tell you what you need. And Again, depending on whether or not this is an existing relationship or not, it allows us… now we're interacting full team to team. You're experiencing my solution, essentially. You can almost think of this as a proof of concept. Do you like working with them? Are you finding them to be smart? But it fixes everything because if we jump straight to that proposal and I'm like, you don't even know what your scope is. How the heck am I supposed to scope it? So it is really that idea of, yeah, actually I'm going to take a smaller deal off the table right now. But I've put the rails down. And a lot of times, here's the other thing in terms of getting a first agreement done. It's much easier to do, to negotiate like that master services agreement when it's little and nobody cares. You're like, oh, it's only $50,000. It's below all kinds of thresholds. So it's way easier to put the rails in place than it is when we're trying to do the multimillion dollar deal. And now it's got all kinds of eyeballs and we're getting really picky about the commas and of the pieces, right? So you can lay down the whole infrastructure. And a lot of times the net result for me through that process is oftentimes a second project is 2 or 3 times bigger than they thought it was in the beginning because we've had an opportunity to like, hang on, let's unpack this whole thing. I've got implications here and there and over there. We need to account for that. The other real quick story I'll tell that for me is a huge hack in terms of getting to power. Is I will ask, do you have an executive sponsor for this project? 9 times out of 10, they don't. So I'll work with them to understand, A, why they need that and why that's really valuable and who it should be. Because if this is going to happen across, it's a multi-department effort, you need somebody that sort of sits above that fray that can make decisions. And the way I describe it, because I tell the story of the greatest executive sponsor I've ever had, my job is just to call balls and strikes. So that we can make decisions and move things forward. It's the education on why you need this, but then working with them on who do you think that should be? And then we go meet that person and we get them up to speed and we get them bought into, hey, I need you to take on this role and support this project. And now I'm the only one with that relationship. So from a competitive standpoint, I've already won. My odds of losing at that point don't exist. And they look at us and go, oh, these guys really are strategic. They really understand the change management side of this, that this This isn't just this project or this tool or whatever it is that we're trying to do. They're thinking about this very holistically and they're going to get us to be successful.

54:47 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, love it. Makes total sense.

54:49 Scott Ingram: Steal that.

54:50 Mike Sullivan: I am. Thank you.

54:51 Scott Ingram: It's a superpower thing for me. I use it so often, it is not even funny.

54:55 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, I just made a mental note. Thank you.

54:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, Mike, let's unpack your just day-to-day. Like, how are you structuring your day, the core habits, the routines, all of those things? So I think you've listened to the show. The way I like to ask this question is your alarm goes off what time and give us kind of the detailed blow-by-blow of a typical day. I know this is probably different in the summer versus regular, but give us the average or a good typical day.

55:21 Mike Sullivan: Yeah. A good typical day for me is I'm up between 4 and 5. The reason I get up at that hour is I want to beat the kids before they get up. I need like my golden hours. A lot of people call it, I need that kind of alone time. To focus. If we want to really get granular, I drink one of those big Stanley water bottles. I drink 3 of those equal like a gallon. So hydration, super important. Again, back to health. Everything is anchored by my health.

55:51 Scott Ingram: Just to be clear, you do that over the course of the day, or are we bringing a new definition to golden hour?

55:56 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, I know. That's great. Golden day.

56:00 Scott Ingram: The golden day. I couldn't resist.

56:01 Mike Sullivan: I know. I know. Oh, that's great. So I drink, I keep one of those full of Stanley full in the bathroom. I drink that whole thing right when I wake up, right when I brush my teeth, before I even go downstairs. So I'm hydrated. I go downstairs, I put the phone far away from me. Again, I'm not on Instagram. Sometimes I'll scroll LinkedIn or Facebook, but I don't do that for a couple of hours. I try not to do it first thing, not because I can't, because I don't want others to take my attention away right when I wake up.

56:33 Scott Ingram: Up.

56:34 Mike Sullivan: If I'm working on a big deal, one of the deals I just described, the kind of co-creation deal, this company was based in Europe. So when I would wake up, there would be emails. In that sprint, I would pick up those things I needed to do because the end of their day was going to be about 11:00 AM. So I needed to jump on. My golden hours were used for working on that big deal. But typically what I'll do is I'll get up, I'll drink that water, go downstairs. I'll do this mindset meditation that I've done. Call it a prayer, an affirmation, what have you. I have this thing that I say to myself, takes a few minutes just to wire my brain and put it in a positive state. Okay. The things that I say are very personal. I'll write a LinkedIn article about it at some point. So I dial my brain in and then I'll have a cup of coffee. I will occasionally work on some creative work. So some writing, potentially an idea for a LinkedIn post. And I'll try to work out as soon as possible, as soon as I can after I wake up. That can range… when my daughter's in school, I have to bring her to school at 7, so I'll try to get that workout done before I have to bring her at 7. It's really hard to do that. If I get up at 4:30, I'm working out starting at 5:30, I'm done by 7. It's the best feeling getting that done first thing in the morning because it sucks, and doing things that suck make you better. That's why I do it. 80% of the time I don't want to work out, but I make myself do it because it builds the confidence, it builds the mindset. It's the core to everything that I do. And I'll bring my daughter to school, come back, spend time with the other kids, my wife. They're off to school at 8:30, and then 9 o'clock I'm into my day job typically, if I'm not in one of those big deal sprints where I have to pick that up right away when I work out. Out. And then by mid-afternoon, I'm toast. When the kids get home from school at 3 o'clock, my son runs upstairs. For this podcast, I made my wife take the kids out of the house because they'd be in here, when are you done? When are you done? They don't have any concept, which I love.

58:39 Scott Ingram: No cameos allowed.

58:40 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, everyone's got kids, so they're great icebreakers when you're on client calls. I use them strategically to lower people's guard. But really, the things for me is doing the mindset work, doing the mental work, Doing the physical work, going to war with the iron in my basement. Those are my anchors. Those things never change no matter what I have going on. I will always get that in. Non-negotiables, period. I don't care what's going on in my life. Non-negotiables. I'll get up at 3:30 sometimes. I had a flight one time at 6. I got up at 3:30 to do like a 10-minute workout because it's reaffirming your identity. For someone that doesn't miss workouts. I think that's a James Clear from Atomic Habits line. When you do those things, you're reaffirming your identity of someone that doesn't miss a commitment. And then the balance between my day job work and the creative work that I've started to do, that new road I'm going down, those things vary throughout the day depending on priorities and what's going on, meetings. So I do that work around my schedule. Late afternoon, I'm trying to spend as much time I can with the family. They're growing up quick, as you alluded to earlier with your daughter graduating high school. So I never want to miss those moments of my son, hey, will you pitch to me in the backyard? I'll just shut down what I'm doing and go do that for 15 minutes. And then I probably shut it down at night between 9:30 and 10:30 occasionally. The one wildcard is my oldest daughter's sleep schedule can sometimes be erratic. So if she's up late or up early, sometimes I'll get 5 hours of sleep. The other night I was up at midnight all night because she didn't want to go to sleep. So sometimes there's that wild card. Sounds a little all over the place because it is, but I try to make sure that the non-negotiables get done is the point, and have the structure but the flexibility within the structure, if that makes sense.

1:00:35 Scott Ingram: What are you listening to? What are you consuming in whatever forms? And then when does that happen?

1:00:41 Mike Sullivan: I would say the information that I'm consuming, I'll just rattle a few of them off. Andy Frisella, he's got a daily email. I don't know if you know of him or who he is. He's got a podcast, it's called Real AF. The AF isn't Andy Frisella, it's what you can imagine it is. He's very upfront, in-your-face style of communicating. He's a super successful entrepreneur, personal development guy. He's got a daily email that is Concise. It takes me 30 seconds to read. In every one of those, it just hits me in the face.

1:01:17 Scott Ingram: Boom.

1:01:18 Mike Sullivan: So look him up, follow him. Andy Frisella, he's the man. He's not for everybody, but he resonates with me. James Clear, Atomic Habits, obviously famous book. His 3-2-1 newsletter on Thursdays is just the way he packages it. Again, concise, crisp, takes no more than 3 minutes to read, process, digest. And I'll take my favorite things that I read or that I consume. I use Evernote, and I'll have a notebook for like my favorite content with a flame emoji. This is my favorite stuff. And I'll refer back to those things if I'm having a rough day, if I'm having a weak moment or whatnot. So this path that I've tried to think about, like, where am I going in 5 years, 10 years? And who am I going to be? Am I going to still be an individual contributor? Am I going to be a solopreneur? I don't know where that's going to lead, but along those lines, Justin Welsh is a LinkedIn guru. I love his kind of lifestyle design, the way he thinks about life, the way he thinks about side hustles and solopreneurship. I read a lot of his articles. He's on Substack now, so I get a lot out of his content. Jocko Willink is another one of those kind of in-your-face guys. I saw him speak live in Boston. My wife was like, where are you going on a Friday night by yourself into Boston? I'm like, I'm going to see Jocko speak. And she's like, who? You don't know who Jocko is? You've heard his podcast. Live, he is just… there was not one, ah, hesitation. It was just like, he is the real deal. I saw Tony Robbins live. That was incredible. I'm drawn to like the personal development stuff in terms of like books. So Ryan Holiday, I mentioned it before. I read Ego Is the Enemy recently. Great book. You don't realize how often your ego shows up in your day-to-day, but reading that book, I was like, wow, that's just my ego talking. It's incredible. One of my favorite books, The Four Agreements. I don't know if you've read The Four Agreements. It is a pretty famous book. David Goggins, big David Goggins guy. Can't Hurt Me, all-time great. All-time great. I'm really conscious about what I'm taking in and also what I'm not taking in. I don't watch a lot of TV. So I know listeners can't see behind me, but behind me I have a Red Sox World Series Reverse the Curse bat. And I grew up Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins. I'm so embarrassed to say I don't even watch sports anymore. I always have a Disney movie in the background that my daughter loves. She's obsessed with The Greatest Showman. Which I've probably watched 12 to 15 times a week. And I just don't have the energy for it anymore. I don't watch a ton of TV. I stay away from the news as much as I can. So I'm really critical about protecting the information diet and not exposing myself to what I call like energy vampires. And they can be people too. Proximity is power, as we know. So yeah, I'm really conscious about the information I'm consuming or not consuming. The final point I'll make is I've made the mistake of consuming too much and not creating enough. Like, you're a creator, right? You've had your podcast for a long time. Maybe when you started, you second-guessed yourself, or you were studying other podcasts, and how should I position myself? Should I do it this way or that way, or copy this person, not this person? That's one thing. As I start to write on LinkedIn about my story and share more, I have to stop reading other people's stuff that I love and create my own stuff is what I'm trying to balance now.

1:04:49 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll link up all that stuff. So all the links to the podcasts and the books and all those things. So if you go to top1.fm/this episode number or top1.fm/mike-sullivan, you'll find all the details there. What about just tools and apps and things like that? What are you using on the day-to-day from that perspective?

1:05:10 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, I'm not a big app guy, to be honest with you. Evernote, I mentioned, it's like my virtual notebook. We use… we're not a Google shop, we're a Microsoft shop, so I'll use OneNote as like their note-taking thing. So I'll have an account folder. I have 10 accounts, 10 named accounts, and I'll have meeting notes and all of my stuff in there. Only recently I started to use ChatGPT a little it. And I was like, oh my God. And I didn't want to use it at first because I didn't want to rob myself of the thinking process and the kind of the creative tension. But it is so powerful if you use it the right way and you prompt it the right way. I've just probably a few months… over the last few months, I've started to use it more and more. A new tool that I'm exploring is Wyzer. So Jamal's new tool called Wyzer.

1:05:59 Scott Ingram: Say more. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

1:06:01 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. It combs across public information sources, so SEC, reports, quarterly reports, 10-Ks, and it pulls together some really concise information. I'm just new in my journey with that tool. I'm meeting with Jamal in a few weeks to get a more lay of the land and provide feedback, but it looks pretty slick. Some of these tools can be like a ChatGPT kind of wrapper, but it doesn't appear to be that. It looks really slick, and the whole idea is to help create customer-centric POVs, points of view, and to help with the research that you would do looking at all those materials can take hours and hours. So it's to save time combing across all the public information to create those kind of concise, compelling points of view. So I'm excited to lean into that tool a little bit more.

1:06:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah, very nice. Definitely on my list. It's W-H-Y-Z-E-R.ai. So wyzer.ai. Again, we'll have a link in the show notes. I may need to adjust my question. We're going to need to start talking about what AI people are using. I think my ChatGPT experience is a little bit similar just from a learning perspective. I don't think it robs you of learning at all. I think it is such a powerful tool to accelerate because you can essentially have a conversation about a topic. You're like, oh, that's interesting, but what about this? And what about that? And the ability to dig into it deeper without just going on an Easter egg hunt on Google. It's amazing what you can do going down that particular path.

1:07:32 Mike Sullivan: Yep, no doubt, no doubt.

1:07:35 Scott Ingram: All right, I think we've checked the box on all of habit and structure and tools and all of those things.

1:07:40 Mike Sullivan: What about…

1:07:41 Scott Ingram: let's talk about philosophy. Do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy or approach?

1:07:49 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, you're gonna hate this one. I haven't read one sales book, and I don't know what MEDDIC stands for, to be complete. I don't know what MEDDIC stands for. I don't mean to be flippant. The way I learned is through experience. I got thrown into the fire in this role. I didn't have time to sit down and read a book on best practices. It was just, here's your account list. I was like, okay, I better figure this out. I had great leadership when I first joined here. I obviously still do. And they brought me along and really coached me and mentored me on how to close bigger deals. I learned by doing. My sales philosophy is be a human, right? Dan Pink's book, that's what it's all about. Corporations aren't selling to corporations. Deals are done between people. Be a human. Be a human. Don't be a jerk. Treat customers like you would your friend or your mother or your relative. Listen. We were born with 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason. Ask thoughtful questions. Be curious and listen. And try to help people solve problems. Sales is not rocket science. It's really not rocket science. There's pressure, of course, with quotas. There's forecasts that we have to provide. There's numbers that run up the chain of command all the way to board level that we're all accountable to, that we contribute to. But I ignore my quota. I want to build a legacy. That's what I'm about. And my why is my daughter. My children, my wife, the future for them. That's what I'm trying to build is legacy, not quota. So if I show up as a high performer, someone who has strong habits, disciplined in all these areas, I'm confident the results will take care of themselves if I just show up as who I want to show up as. So that's my philosophy. Some of the things is have a client-first mindset. Many sellers have a commission-first mindset. I've heard the term commission breath before. Forget about that stuff, right? Pretend you're dealing with a friend and you want to help them solve a problem. Be a human. That's really the philosophy. And be bold. Don't be afraid to make bold moves. Don't be afraid to make bold asks. The old adage, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. You got to shoot your shot. Be a human. It's really what it's all about. Deals are done between people, not companies.

1:10:12 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. I so agree with that. I guess my controversial take would be, I think sales success has almost nothing to do with sales techniques and strategies. And it's why, again, if that's what you're looking for the summit, you're gonna be disappointed because it's like the least important element. I think what's more important is exactly what you described. Look, my job is just to help you and let's just dig in and figure out out how that's going to happen. And then I need to work within my organization and wield that power on your behalf. It's as simple as that.

1:10:47 Mike Sullivan: It is.

1:10:47 Scott Ingram: And I'm either going to help you or I'm not. And if I'm not going to help you, oh, let's figure that out really fast because I don't want to waste your time. I don't want to waste my time. But it's not the specific thing that you say. And I think honestly, it's a trap because everybody sees that and feels that coming a mile away. It feels very manipulative and that erodes trust. If you can't trust that I'm here to help you and like genuinely that's my purpose, then it's not gonna work.

1:11:11 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, 100%. 100%. When I was called the anti-sales guy, I thought it was the best compliment I ever received in my life.

1:11:20 Scott Ingram: Nice.

1:11:20 Mike Sullivan: And even this morning I was on a call with one of our biggest clients and we're doing introductions. There's some new people on the call and I was like, my title is sales director. I'm just here to help you guys. I hope it works out. Let's figure out what you need, what we can offer, and let's see if there's a fit. When you start in sales, and because of all the stereotypes, you think it's about trying to convince someone through a tactic to achieve an outcome, which is your commission check. That's not what sales is. It's what you said. It's helping people solve problems and just to be authentic, true, As well, right? I used to go into a presentation rehearsing, having the perfect pitch, writing down notes almost like a script within slides, and I would read that and I'd be like… I'd try to make it conversational, but it was too forced and too structured. The people you're selling to feel that. They want to deal with a human. When you stumble, it just makes you more human, more trustworthy, more authentic. Embrace your weirdness, your uniqueness. It doesn't have to be as polished like some folks have made it out to be in the past, I guess, is another controversial take.

1:12:35 Scott Ingram: Totally. Let's keep going with the controversial takes. Is there something you believe that the average or typical sales rep would think is crazy?

1:12:43 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, that's a really good one. I would say that being number one on the leaderboard is what it's all about. To me, it's not. When I first started here, I wanted to be number one because I wanted to prove myself. And then when I got to that level, it was empty. It was lonely. And I learned that this is not what it's all about. Your ego wanted that title, but that's not really what it's all about. It's not my focus. What I am now focused on, what I would encourage others is to be And no judgment if that's what you're after, I get it. But what drives me is not really being better than someone else, it's being better than I was yesterday. It's always me against me, it's always against the guy in the mirror. That's why I have that kind of mindset ritual affirmation I say in the morning. That's why I work out every day. I still have those demons from my past, they're still there. I've just been able to learn how to conquer them. And the fear, the uncertainty, the doubt, it's going to war with those guys every day. The person in the mirror is who I'm against. I don't care what anyone else is doing. I care what I'm doing and I want the best for everyone. You know what I mean? Again, my buddy Scott was number 1 last year. I wasn't. I was, I don't know, number 2 probably. And I was so happy for him. It's not what it's about. It's about being better than you were yesterday. Me against me is my mindset. Controlling the controllables, if you've heard that. Attitude, actions, effort. Just focus on what you can control. You can't control being number one, so why even worry about it? Be better than you were yesterday, 1% better every day. That's the thing that drives me crazy, isn't it? And I get it. Everyone wants to be, but it's really about being the best that you can be as an individual because that's all you can truly control.

1:14:37 Scott Ingram: Yep. That's the one thing I hate about my structure and, oh yeah, it's all about the number one and the top 1%, but the reality is if you listen to these conversations, that's never the driver. It's never, oh, I want to be number one, or it might be like, I want to make a lot of money, but it's more about that's just the result. That's an outcome. And it's more about, look, I just want to be the best at serving my customers. I want to be the best version of myself. It's always competition with self, right? It's not competition with somebody else. Like, I want to be as good as I know I can be, which is a very high bar, doing those things consistently, the W-2 happens, right? The big commission checks come. The being at the top of the leaderboard is because of that, not because that was the goal. It's just the way it tends to work out. What about the flip side? Is there something that the typical salesperson believes that you think, that's dumb, like you're wrong?

1:15:37 Mike Sullivan: I would say the number of hours you put in does not equate to your W-2 at all. I found the less I work, the higher W-2 that I have and the more efficient that I am. Some weeks I'll work more than 40 hours a week. A lot of times I won't. Sometimes I'll work 30 hours a week, but the amount that I can get done in that 30 hours is more taking intentional breaks. I've started to use a Pomodoro timer, right? Set 25 minutes, do some focused work. I hate getting up for 5 minutes and then resetting it. Sometimes I'll just bang through 2 25 minutes. Yep.

1:16:16 Scott Ingram: Yep.

1:16:16 Mike Sullivan: Because I'm like, ah, that was too short. But yeah, it's not about… and Brandon Fluharty preaches this too… it's not about the grind at all. It's just not. It's hard to see that. When you're new, you have a lot of accounts, but if you step back and focus on 3 to 5 main accounts, you go as deep as you can in those, you set up a strategic plan to approach those accounts, you're working with leadership and whatnot and bringing all your resources together. Some of the deals that I've closed, it's probably been 10 to 12 deals that have been in the higher ARR multi-year range, 10 deals, like in 7 years. It doesn't sound like a lot. These are multi-year, multi-million dollar deals. And I only had a couple of those in my pipeline at a time. It's like even the 3X pipeline is such an old-fashioned kind of thing. It drives me crazy. I'm like, no, I don't need that because that deal, my gut is that's 80% because of all the intel I've collected. I'm not gonna have 3 of those in my pipeline. It's just not… I have 10 accounts. It doesn't work that way. That's the other thing. It's not about the grind. I love working my tail off. Trust me. Sometimes I'll put in a long week and it feels good. If I'm in a big deal sprint, I'll put in whatever hours it takes, weekends, nights. Don't get me wrong, but over time you're gonna burn out without question. So it's really being intentional about your time. And your energy.

1:17:50 Scott Ingram: Mike, do you think that's something that you earn though? Do you believe that to be true if like you're early in your career?

1:17:57 Mike Sullivan: That's a great one. Yeah, I think part of it is earned, but I think even if you're starting out earlier in your career in sales, it's all about just being intentional with your time, not chasing every shiny nickel, not chasing every deal. I'm in strategic accounts. I can't chase I'm teamed with account management. We work together on a lot of opportunities, but I can't focus on 15, 20 deals that are, I call them singles or doubles. If I'm trying to hit a few home runs, I've got to focus like 80% of my time on those bigger deals. So I think part of it is earned, but also not. I think if you're intentional with your time and you set up, you have the right expectations with your leadership as well. Is important. I guess the way I'd say it is you have more trust internally when you have a track record. You'd certainly have more trust to being able to self-manage and having a better work schedule.

1:18:56 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I think my perspective is it's totally nuanced, right? Because I am a huge fan of being intentional, being thoughtful, being strategic. At the same time, I think particularly early in your career, I was a consummate overthinker. I would have benefited a lot more. It took me a really long time to figure out that I actually learn more from just doing it and getting the reps in than thinking about, well, if I lift the weight this way, like just lift stupid weight. But that being said, I think over time as you progress, for me, sales has gotten a lot easier. It's gotten a lot more fun, but that comes because I have so many reps under my belt and the relationships that I have, the knowledge that I have, it's just easy for me to ask the right questions and I can understand really quickly kind of what's… so I don't know, ability to diagnose and just all of those kinds of things. So I guess what I'm trying to avoid is let's not give the wrong idea to somebody that's like in the second year of their career going, yeah, just dial it back. You'll be more successful. Maybe not quite yet.

1:20:03 Mike Sullivan: You answered your question better than I answered it. I love the way you put that. It's true. It's all about the reps. Early on in my role here, I had to learn a lot on the fly. I would second-guess myself, and it's… you need the reps to truly find your groove, to settle into the right cadence and so forth. So I love your answer much better than mine.

1:20:21 Scott Ingram: I'm going to give you another shot here. As you think about, especially the… I'm really interested in the pivot point that you had. Consume it underachiever, two decades of just middling to like you found your groove. What were the most important either decisions you made or lessons you learned that helped you almost flip that switch? Did it feel like that? Did it feel like oh the light's on? I get it now.

1:20:50 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, back to that what I said before: the desperation caused my transformation. My back was against the wall in a big way. You know me, I'm right from the cuff. I had $80K in debt, not a ton of money in the bank, a few thousand dollars, looking for a job. And in my late 30s, I had a ton of doubt. There was no answer. There was no way out. It was just kicking the can down the road. I thought about, should I sell my house? I thought about, should I jump in front of a train? Literally, that was an option that went through my head. And back to my daughter, back to G, I owe her everything because looking at her, I could not fail her. I could not let my wife and my kids down. And you can hear my voice shaking. It was just… I go back to that time, my back was against the wall, and I simply just bleeping had enough. I bleeping had enough of feeling that way. I bleeping had enough of feeling down like a loser, like a failure. I remember when I was in my 20s, my ex-girlfriend's mom called me a loser or something like that. All those like chips on my shoulder. In my head, I did flip a switch that I wasn't going to feel like that anymore and took ownership that this was all my doing. I put us in this hole. So if I put us in this hole, I have the power to make decisions, new choices to get us out of this hole. How am I going to do it? Need to make a much better income. I'm in sales. What job can pay me the most money the fastest to dig myself out? Okay. Enterprise sales, strategic sales. And again, that cold DM to my boss, Brian, at the time and Tim. I owe them a ton because they gave me the opportunity to be here and to work on big deals. And it only took a few deals to really change my life, to be honest with you. And they were hard, they were difficult, but once I saw that I could sell my way out, that's what I did. I sold my way out of that hole and I created a new human by doing so. I transformed as a human, as a seller. Was all about mindset. I forget the question. I apologize.

1:23:12 Scott Ingram: But I think it was the perfect answer. There is one thing I want to talk about because you've mentioned it twice in passing, but I think it's really important and something that I've been really intentional about talking with my daughters about. I won't get into the details, but had some challenges with my oldest this last year and just instilling in them that there is nothing so bad that we can't figure out that's worth ending it, and especially financial, man. Look, it's a temporary situation. What you can't overcome is never being there for your daughter again. I want to call this out. If you're feel… if you're listening to that and you're feeling that and you're feeling this pressure, you're feeling that being pressed against the wall, man, And call me, seriously. Go listen to the Dave Schwartz episode where we've dug into this and specifically had some of these conversations. But I want to be really explicit and really clear that there is literally nothing that you can't overcome. And no matter how you feel, like, there are people around you who will help you figure it out. I will help you figure it out. Call me, seriously.

1:24:25 Mike Sullivan: Yeah. Call Scott or call Mike. 100%. Those are temporary problems. Money comes and goes, as we know. Most problems can be solved. So yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.

1:24:36 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Again, just wanted to be explicit about that. And like I said, if you're feeling that, call somebody. There are absolutely resources out there and all this money stuff, it's all bullshit anyway. It's eminently overcomeable. Mike, what about career advice now, just beyond yourself? What would you tell somebody that's just getting started in their career in sales?

1:24:59 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, this is a great one. It's the best job in the world when done right. When it's going well, there is nothing better than sales, right? Yep. You can make a greater income than some doctors and not have all the debt of going to medical school, right? It's a great job when done right. Best job in the world. When done wrong, it's probably the worst job in the world.

1:25:21 Scott Ingram: Yep. It can suck.

1:25:22 Mike Sullivan: I don't know who said this. I'm stealing this from somebody. I'm not taking credit for saying that, but I truly feel that. And it goes back to carefully choosing the right leadership and company to work for that has the right culture is so important because a lot of companies still subscribe to the quote-unquote grind mentality. Well, they'll just grind through reps and reps deal with it. And because it's all they know, they think it's normal and so forth. But yeah, it's never compromising on your values and your principles and choosing the right folks to work for. Investing in coaching is really important. As I mentioned, nothing has given me a greater ROI in terms of investment than investing in coaches. I think I have 3 right now. There's just some awesome people out there that just want to help. Brandon, I work… I've known him for a year now. It's like he's reading my mind when we get on a call. We talk about sales, we talk about personal branding, we talk about life and being a purposeful performer. And he's just made such a difference in my life. And the other coaches I mentioned, Taylor and so forth, are just awesome. It's important to have the right coaches. Overall sales, it's a roller coaster, right? You can't get too high, you can't get too low. It's really hard to do that. It's important to celebrate deals, to train your brain to crave kind of the next one and the next win. You don't want to shortchange yourself. So when I close a big deal, it sounds corny, but I go out back and I pop a bottle of champagne or wine, something with a cork. And also my kids can see that. It's important for them to see victories and success and what hard work does. And I keep the corks on my… it's like my little cookie jar. David Goggins talks about the cookie jar. It's like my little cookie jar. I only celebrate for a few hours. Then the next morning it's okay, what's next? When's the next one? But staying even keel, not getting too high. Don't cry if you lose a big deal like I did in the past. It's really hard, right? But if you stick it out, like I stuck it out for… I was tempted to quit and go back to get a regular job. There's nothing wrong with that, but I needed a job where I could really turn my life around, and sales was the vehicle to do that for me. So it's a great career. It'll teach you everything about yourself. It'll teach you what you're made out of. But I love it. You get in what you put out. It's the oldest cliché in the book. It couldn't be more true in this profession. But yeah, I'd love to hear your take on it.

1:27:53 Scott Ingram: You've prompted 3 ideas. So the first one is the roller coaster. You know what? As much as we talk about it, I think the only way to figure that out is you need to ride the roller coaster. The earlier you are in your career, the higher the highs are going to feel, the lower the lows are going to feel, and they're going to come at you fast and you could be sick to your stomach. And I don't think there's a way through that other than you just need to go through it enough to go, okay. Okay, let me just chill out a little bit and level this out. So that's the roller coaster. I think you have to be patient with this. Finding your stride in sales is not an immediate thing, and there's a lot of variables here. There's not only your own personal growth, I think it's also finding your spot. I'm an awful, like, B2C consumer salesperson. One of the worst things I am is like selling the summit. I can't. I'll tell you about it and it's for you or it's not. And that's as good as it gets. I'm not good at just digging into the emotional of that and just selling that. But I'm so good at selling to big companies because I'm good at dealing with their dysfunction and helping them through it. Like, it's a thing. And I think think even that, the distinction between consumer sales and business-to-business sales is one thing, but also different parts of the organization. I'm not good at selling to finance. Like, those are not my people. I don't understand them. I can't connect with them in the way that I can with sales and marketing folks and more strategic executives and things like that. Not to say that there aren't strategic finance folks, but yeah, let's be real, that's a very small minority, right? So, I think just being patient with yourself and knowing there's very few people on this show who haven't been fired. Like Mike, how many times have you been fired or laid off, whatever we're calling it?

1:29:52 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, 2 to 3. Yeah, easily.

1:29:54 Scott Ingram: Yep. So like the most successful people, like I had to be very intentional about the way I told the story. But if you pick up the First Sales Success Stories book, there's a chapter on me getting fired and telling that story and all the lessons learned that come from that. And then the last piece is I actually wanna do a component on this, so here's the dry run of this concept that I'm playing with. I'm calling it the Hyperloop of Help. If you imagine sort of an infinity sign, and there's a great clip that I'm totally going to play in the summit. Balaji Srinivasan, he talks about his philosophy is win and help win. And I think that is so much at the core of what sales success is. We found our stride, right? We have found success, and now there's a lot of pay it forward. It's a lot of, hey, let me now reach down and help somebody else get to this level. But that doesn't end. It's not like one step, like I take this step, I help other people get to this step. There's another higher place that I want to get to. And there are people who are going to help me get there. It's a cycle that repeats infinitely. And the beauty of people like you, Mike, is recognizing that. Wanting to be parts of both sides of it. Like, I'm getting the help, you're hiring the coaches, and at the same time, people are hiring you and you're helping people through their journeys and taking that next step. So that the Hyperloop of help is…

1:31:26 Mike Sullivan: I love that.

1:31:26 Scott Ingram: I love alliteration, right? It's got to be repeating letters.

1:31:30 Mike Sullivan: Was that ChatGPT that came up with that, or was that…

1:31:32 Scott Ingram: that's 100% like pure natural Scott.

1:31:34 Mike Sullivan: It's great. Very creative. Yeah. Yeah.

1:31:37 Scott Ingram: We'll play with that a little bit.

1:31:38 Mike Sullivan: Bit.

1:31:39 Scott Ingram: So we talked about the early career. What about somebody that's further in? Maybe they're 2 decades in, they're like, Mike, still feel… and maybe they don't have the pressure though, right? Because I'm guessing you don't want to recommend get yourself into a super bad position.

1:31:54 Mike Sullivan: Yeah.

1:31:55 Scott Ingram: And use that to push you up.

1:31:56 Mike Sullivan: Don't take my role. Yeah. Don't do what I did. Mine was not by choice, by force. But I was talking to someone recently and they were in a great role making a solid income, and I was, what do you want? What are you looking for? Are you looking to make half a million dollars or up to a million dollars a year? Then are you in the right environment? What is your goal? Start with what are you after? Maybe being a $250K, $300K seller, that's what you're looking for. Great. That's a crapload of money. You make a great living. Are you happy with where you're at? Yes, I'm happy.

1:32:31 Scott Ingram: Okay.

1:32:31 Mike Sullivan: Then maybe you don't need to change. Maybe there's something else, some other fulfillment angle that you're looking for. To get your creativity or whatnot out there. That's what I always start with in talking to people is, how you doing? What are you looking for? What are your goals? Are you happy where you are? For folks that are trying to level up, it's all about you're in a role, you can either accept it like I've described, you can try to change it, or you can leave it, right? You've got 3 options and pick one that feels right. There's no right or wrong answer. Everyone's different. And there's a lot of people out of jobs right now. That can come at any time. It could happen to you. It could happen to me tomorrow. Everyone is replaceable. It's a scary thing. What I did is I reached out and called the company that I wanted to work for. So I wanted to work here. I sent a LinkedIn DM to the chief commercial officer at the time. Now we've got things like Loom. Loom videos, voice notes, record a voice note, record yourself on Loom, send it to all the companies you want to work for. It doesn't matter if they're not hiring, right? It doesn't matter. There was no job opening for a sales director when I got here. I just picked up the phone, picked up the LinkedIn DM rather, and cold contacted the hiring manager and put myself out there. You just got to put yourself out there. And when you do, you never know what kind of opportunities are going to come your way. But yeah, let's say if you're in a role and you're looking to elevate yourself, the components are really, to me, back to the environment, the work environment. Are you maximizing your comp plan? Do you understand your comp plan? Do you have a fair comp plan? Are you maximizing that? That drives behavior. It drives everyone's behavior. Everyone who says it doesn't is lying. Of course it does for the most part. And your accounts, maybe you need a new mix of accounts. Maybe you've had a stale list of accounts. Talk to your VP of sales and maybe there's an opportunity to explore some other accounts or some other verticals. There's always an answer. So, you can always adjust where you are today in your current role. You can leave it to try to get a new role or you can accept it. The answer is different for everyone.

1:34:43 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. Beautiful. I'd like to ask, what would you want to learn from the top sellers in other organizations? Maybe we'll tilt it a little bit. What are you hoping to learn when you're spending time with those folks at the summit?

1:34:54 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, that's a great one. I'm a junkie with what makes people successful. It was different for me. Everyone has their own hero's journey. Everyone has their own. I love to hear people's personal stories, their own hero's journey, where they're at in that journey. What kind of habits and routines do they have? I'm a lifelong learner in sales, and it's important to be a lifelong learner if you want to be successful in anything. It's especially true for sales. What's great about sales is you never know everything, ever, literally ever. No matter how successful you are, you don't know everything. Sometimes I wake up and I'm like, man, I don't know crap. And then I'm like, no. And I remind myself a few wins that I've had. I'm like, okay, you've done well. Repeat those things, go learn some new stuff, and kind of give myself a pep talk. But there's always more to learn. So I'm excited to learn from others what makes them tick, what coaches they use. Just what makes people tick, what makes them successful. I'm just pumped to get involved and learn from others.

1:35:52 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. Mike, I knew this was going to be good. We covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that you were hoping to touch on that we didn't?

1:36:02 Mike Sullivan: I think we covered it all, man. I think the big one is, you said it earlier, it's never too late. You know what I mean? It truly is never too late. I didn't find my way until 40 years old. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. The past is the past. All we have is the present, and you just got to focus on that. I went from broke, unemployed, living in my parents' basement to closing 7-figure enterprise deals with Fortune 500s, and I had no business doing that because of… I didn't do anything the previous 20 years to earn that, but I just put my head down, got to work, got in the right environment, I wasn't born with any sales talent or confidence for that matter. Again, I battled depression, anxiety, imposter syndrome, the weight of repeated failure. And it's all about taking ownership of your life. You just gotta take responsibility, take ownership, get ruthlessly disciplined about your mindset and your habits. Brick by brick, you can build what you want. You can build a new life like I needed to. You can transform. That would be my biggest kind of takeaway.

1:37:08 Scott Ingram: Brilliant, brilliant. Let's make that actionable. So what would you challenge our listener to do over the next week or two to improve themselves, improve their results?

1:37:18 Mike Sullivan: I love that. I would say the biggest unlock for me is the daily discipline of exercise, without question. It's just the mind and body are so connected. There's so much science around that. It's such a difference maker when I don't work out for one day, I feel it everywhere. I'm not a great husband. I'm not a great father, below average in both of those aspects. If I'm being grumpy, my wife is like, did you work out today? I'm like, no, it was an off day. Leave me alone. I'm like, oh, maybe I should chill out a little bit. It's so important to challenge yourself. Nothing builds confidence like working out, whether you're a Peloton person, if you're into weight training, swimming, walking, whatever it is, that physical activity It's so core to who we are as humans. It's a game changer. So I would challenge folks to… and it doesn't have to be at a certain time of day, but when you do it first thing in the morning, you're setting you the rest of the day up for success. Because if you can commit to doing hard stuff right when you wake up, whether it's 4:35 or 7 or 9, maybe you have an early call, do a workout after your call, take a break in the day. As sellers, we We tend to have a lot of flexibility in our schedules, right? So we can fit that in. That's what I would challenge people to do. Do it for a week. If you can do it for 7 days straight, just keep doing it until it becomes a habit. You'll notice such a difference in your day-to-day work. Again, my pre-call ritual of the air bike during that big deal sprint towards the finish line was so critical for me. That's what I would challenge folks to do and also reduce the dopamine and the crap that you're taking in. Back to the information diet. If you dial in your information diet, you're going to protect your brain and your mindset. If you dial in your workout routine, you're going to dial in that aspect of your life. Those are my anchors and really are foundational to what I do. So that's what I would put forward there.

1:39:18 Scott Ingram: Amazing stuff. Amazing stuff. I'm working on elevating my own FTP test on the Peloton before the summit. So I'm on a month into kind of a 3-month program I've built for myself. And so far so good. The bar is pretty damn high. I've been at this a long time. We'll see if I can pull it off, but I'm feeling pretty good so far. Mike, can't wait to see you at the summit here in October, and thanks for taking all the time and sharing your story.

1:39:44 Mike Sullivan: Yeah, this has been amazing, Scott. I can't thank you enough. Thanks for allowing me to come on here and share my story in gory detail. This has been so much fun, and yeah, I'm pumped for the summit and looking forward to it, man. Thank so much.

1:39:56 Scott Ingram: See you later.

1:39:58 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.