97: SurePoint's Top Enterprise AE Nick Cegelski - The Sprint to CompetencySTOP Wasting Time in Sales and START Optimizing

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 Nick Cegelski. Nick is an enterprise AE at SurePoint and also the host of the new 30 Minutes to President's Club podcast. Welcome to the show, Nick.

0:35 Nick Cegelski: Scott, I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

0:38 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Well, let's start like we always do with some immediate value and talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success.

0:47 Nick Cegelski: So number one is I take a pretty extreme approach to identifying areas in my life that I can optimize and save time. I think a lot of people are leaving a massive amount of time on the table by not identifying opportunities in their life where they can make micro-improvements in everything that they do. So if I'm frequently explaining a concept via email, I'm going to create a template. If I can find a route to the gym that's going to save me 2 or 3 minutes, I'm going to find it and take that route instead. And I think those small improvements, most people think those don't really make a big difference. But if you actually do the math, Scott, and look at the compounding impact that saving a minute repeatedly each day makes, it's massive. So day 1, you save a minute. Day 2, you save the minute from the day before. You're finding something you can repeatedly save time on. Now you're saving 2 minutes each day. A year later, you found a way to save 365 minutes every single day. Do the math. That's 6 hours of time that you're saving. And so the compounding impact of finding ways to optimize your time is massive. There's number one for you.

1:58 Scott Ingram: Well, so, and you've been at this a while. I know you're a productivity nerd like me. And don't worry, we're gonna dig into this deep. Do you feel like you've done that? Have you saved 6 hours in your day?

2:09 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, I think I found… now, now don't get me wrong, I'm adding more things in to the way that I'm spending my time. But I think I've found ways to structure my time. So I'll give you an example, like, going to the gym, I've saved hours and hours of structuring my workouts so that they make more sense, they're more effective. So it's not like I'm working 3 hours a day and then I'm like, yep, I'm done. I did the same as everybody else. But I think the cumulative impact is pretty powerful.

2:36 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Well, we will, we'll continue to dig in there, but let's go on to number 2. So, so number 1, just to quickly recap, is extreme focus on optimization. Number 2 is what?

2:44 Nick Cegelski: Number 2 is daily journaling. And this kind of plays off of the first one. So this is something that I've been doing since 6th grade. Every single night before I go to bed, I'm recapping the day that just happened and I'm looking at what worked, what didn't, what would I do differently if I could have a do-over? And then I'm also doing a page where I'm doing a look ahead to the next day. So I'm looking at what's on the agenda. Is there anywhere that I need to make any structure changes for how I'm planning to spend my time? And pretty frequently I'm ending up where I look at the day that just happened and I'm saying, oh man, I wish I had done this differently. And I'm finding a way to rearrange tasks or move meetings or Oh, I probably need to wake up 30 minutes earlier or, you know, move my gym session to the evening. And it's helping me better structure the next day. I think the other big impact of daily journaling is it really helps me with my emotional stability. Professional sales will eat you alive if you let it. And so this helps me stay a little bit more level and not get too high and also not get too low.

3:39 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. I'm so jealous of the fact that you have been so consistent in this for so much of your life. It's something that I've wanted to do and I've done on and off, but man, it must be so cool to have that body of work. I'm curious, do you have a process where you're going back and reviewing chunks of your journal and sort of looking for those insights just beyond kind of the day-to-day?

4:00 Nick Cegelski: Not really. The only time I look back is when I want to be horribly embarrassed and read what the heck I was thinking when I was in 7th grade. But no, I'm not going back and doing like a mass review or anything. Usually it's like I'm cleaning the apartment and I find an old journal and I sit down for an hour and I read it and, and it's kind of cool to look see, wow, look how far I've come. But there's no systemic approach to evaluating the past.

4:22 Scott Ingram: Gotcha. Now, what is the specific structure and the capture mechanism?

4:26 Nick Cegelski: Is…

4:26 Scott Ingram: are these paper notes? And what's the kind of typical format?

4:30 Nick Cegelski: Well, I'm pretty cheap. So it's the cheapest journal that I can find at the Dollar Tree. And I sit down in bed. So this is right before I go to sleep. It's like the last thing I do before I open the Kindle and read. But this is pen, paper. First, probably half page, it's literally just brain dump. Is there anything on my mind that I want to write about? And once I've kind of run out of traction there, and that's anywhere from a couple sentences when I can't think of anything or I'm just tired and want to go to sleep to, all right, like, you know, 6 pages of I got in a fight with my girlfriend and I want to brain dump that thing. But eventually I get what's top of mind on paper and then I say, okay, let's do the blow-by-blow from what happened today. What time did I wake up? How much sleep did I get? What meetings did I have? What I do at the gym, anything else go on, and I just get it on paper. It's kind of nice to like look back and say, man, I did have a full day and take a little bit of pride in that. And then I think about, and I'll write maybe 1 or 2 sentences of, would I have done anything differently if I could have? Or did I not handle the situation the way that now when I'm in bed and I'm relaxed in a different emotional state, would I have handled it differently? And then usually page 2 is the look ahead, but it's pen, it's paper, it's nothing fancy. Eventually, I keep telling myself I'm going to scan and digitize those things, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen.

5:44 Scott Ingram: Where do they live after you finish a notebook?

5:47 Nick Cegelski: Under the bed, right with the dust bunnies, baby.

5:49 Scott Ingram: That's awesome.

5:50 Nick Cegelski: All right.

5:51 Scott Ingram: So daily journaling is number 2. What's number 3?

5:53 Nick Cegelski: Last one. This is probably the biggest one, Scott. It's discipline. And I define discipline as doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it. And that was the first thing. I'm a wrestler. I always have been and I probably always will be. But it was the first thing that my high school wrestling coach said to the team on the first day of practice that I ever went to. And it stuck with me ever since. And frankly, I think there are 2 keys to winning in life. One is knowing what to do. And then 2 is actually going out and executing on what you know how to do. And I'm sure you and I are going to talk a lot about different strategies and tactics and best practices, but none of that actually is helpful unless you execute them. And to me, that's the harder part. So discipline is huge.

6:39 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. What is the thing that continues to be that thing that you just don't want to do?

6:44 Nick Cegelski: It's different every day, man. But a lot of days it's prospecting. That's the easy answer. None of us want to show up and hammer out the cold calls, especially when you have a full pipeline with meetings and demos and travel. And you're almost like, do I want more on my plate? But you know, you've got to do it, especially when you have a long enough deal cycle where Eventually these deals are going to close or be lost. And so I got to get more in. So the discipline, it might not be a lot, 10 cold calls in a day, but doing that consistently and getting into the rhythm, getting to the gym. I've probably mentioned it 5 times already, but fitness is a huge part of my life. And still I don't want to go to the gym most days. It's only when I get there and I get 10 minutes into the workout and I start sweating that I remember that I love this. And so sometimes it's the discipline to start there. Sometimes discipline in your personal life, having emotional control, like not snapping at your kids or your spouse or your girlfriend. So I have to remind myself that all the time. But I keep that mantra in the back of my head. It's doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it. Another one kind of similar to this, it's if it were easy, everybody would do it. And so I try to push myself to push towards things that are hard and understand that if something is hard, it's probably very worth doing and I should move towards it. But our natural inclination as human beings is to move away from things that are very difficult.

8:01 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice, nice. All right, man, let's put this in perspective. Talk about your role and how you got to be number 1.

8:07 Nick Cegelski: Sure. So I'm an enterprise AE at a company called SurePoint, and I sell law firm-specific ERP software. I've been in this space for the past couple of years. So this is my first year at SurePoint. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to end up on the leaderboard. I think I'm going to do pretty well. But last year I finished as number 1 at my company, and I think that was your question.

8:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and again, let's talk about kind of last year where you can talk about and just kind of quantify your results. What does being number 1 look like? What does that take?

8:38 Nick Cegelski: Sure. So let me go back to 2018 because that was the last year that I actually finished out. So I was the number 1 AE on my team at a company called Aderant. And I, I sold 2.7 times total contract value what the number 2 guy on my team sold. And I was on track to finish pretty similar to that, although by not as wide of a margin in 2019. But I ended up getting recruited by this company SurePoint, which is similar space, and moving over here. So 2019 would have been another number 1, but I didn't actually finish the leaderboard, so we can't count that one.

9:10 Scott Ingram: Fair enough. Fair enough. Good accounting, though. And this all came because, you know, we had a conversation on your new podcast that you co-host with Armand and Armand's like, Scott, you got to talk to Nick. This guy has been consistently a top performer really everywhere he's been. So Armand, thank you for that. And I'm really excited to kind of dig into your origin story. How did you get into sales in the first place?

9:31 Nick Cegelski: Sure. So I talked about wrestling and in college I was the captain of my wrestling team. And towards the end of my sophomore year of college, my co-captain, who is actually Armand, the guy that introduced us, Scott, came up to me and Armand was a year ahead of me in college and he had just won a pretty big business plan competition from USC. And he wanted to actually put the business plan in. He like, he wanted to go execute on it and turn it into a real venture. And he and I were wrestling training partners. We were best friends. We lived together. And he said, hey, I want you to co-found this thing with me. And I said, okay, let's do this thing. And I had no idea what I was getting into, Scott. And I could probably talk your ear off for the next 5 hours about what that journey actually looked like. But we ended up raising a round of funding, we won some pretty big customers. And the next 3 years, we, we hustled and we stumbled and we made a ton of mistakes and gave that thing our best shot. And we ended up winding down in 2016. And when I was thinking about, all right, what do I do next? I thought about what I liked the most about the startup. And it was really the business development side of things. It was having conversations with prospective customers, it was meeting with partners, it was going to the big trade shows that we got to go to. And so I said, okay, let me try and find a business development or sales job. And I knew that software was pretty hot. And so I just started applying. And I got into like an SDR-esque role at a tech company and kind of went from there. I've never left.

11:01 Scott Ingram: So kind of accidentally intentional.

11:03 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I was in college, I was a public relations major, which is almost more like journalism, but it's actually served me really, really well in the sales space because it's helped me write effectively. It's helped me be more persuasive. It's helped me be not uncomfortable presenting and getting in front of people that I don't really know. But I had zero intention to go into sales when I was in college until that startup. And I really credit that thing for accelerating my professional development like crazy.

11:29 Scott Ingram: Nice. Now, of course, I don't want the 5-hour version. We go long enough on, on this podcast. What's the 5-minute version though? Like, what were some of the biggest takeaways from the startup experience for you?

11:40 Nick Cegelski: So let me give you a little bit of context for what we were actually doing. So I know you travel a lot, Scott, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners do. And so have you ever seen those vending machines in the airport that like the Best Buy vending machines that sell headphones and chargers and stuff? Yep. Okay. So we were something like that, but we were selling nutrition supplements. So think protein powder, pre-workout vitamins, etc. And so we had these vending machines that were almost like a GNC in a vending machine. And we put them in gyms all across Southern California. So we ended up getting a deal with LA Fitness. And we had a couple of these vending machines in LA Fitnesses. And the machines were making money, they were doing really, really well. But Armand and I, we raised this round. And then we said, oh man, we want to hang on to everything else ourselves, we didn't want to do another round of fundraising. And so really, to succeed in the vending business, I think you need to scale. And we decided that we weren't going to get, get any money, we were going to bootstrap. And you can't really scale when you're bootstrapping things and you're 22, 23 years old. But yeah, man, meeting with the partners, we got to go to the Mr. Olympia trade show. And we were talking with all sorts of different business partners and suppliers and vendors and customers. And it was so exciting. It was way more fun than the supply chain stuff that Armand made me work on for a while, which I was terrible at.

12:57 Scott Ingram: That's so funny. I wonder, I mean, would you have taken that path again? I mean, did you get enough education from that? Because I mean, I always ask, you know, if you were starting over today, how would you have approached your career?

13:08 Nick Cegelski: Honestly, I don't think I would change anything that we did because I came out of that learning so much. And it's put me in a place right now in my professional career where I feel like I'm in a really good place. And Armand and I just launched this podcast together that he and I are doing. And so I don't think the entrepreneurial side of things is done for us. I think eventually we're going to find something to get into again. And the learnings that we came out of that, I mean, I learned more doing that for 3 years than I did in my entire formal education.

13:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, sales is so much about… or being successful in sales, especially B2B sales, has a lot to do with your business acumen. And I can't think of a better way to get that. I always say that I have an MBA from the school of hard knocks. It, it cost about as much as a Harvard MBA, but the lessons stick because they hurt.

14:01 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, no, it's, it's the truth. I learned so much doing that, and I'm really grateful for that experience.

14:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah, what, what about kind of getting into your sales career? Like, as, as you were kind of finding your feet, what did that look like as you transitioned from startup land to, okay, now I'm a sales professional?

14:17 Nick Cegelski: Okay, so I want you to imagine going from like basically selling vending machines to all of a sudden being in a tech space. Also throw in, you go from basically running the org and having the authority to make any decision that you want to now you've got to assimilate into an organization. All of that combined to make me an absolutely terrible sales professional for the first 5, 6 months of my sales career. Like, I was awful, Scott. I had no idea how to sell software. Frankly, I got into an organization that I was not really a great fit for, and it was not really a great fit for me. And we talked about the business acumen thing, which is great, but I kind of went in thinking that I already knew it all and that I didn't need to put the work in to get better. And so all that combined to make me a really mediocre performer, probably the first 6, 7 months of my sales career.

15:07 Scott Ingram: Crazy. What did that look like on the other side? I mean, what did you do to kind of turn that around? Because We're talking on this show. So you did something right.

15:15 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, I think one of the things was I really decided to buy into the personal development side of things. Like I'd always been about the… we talked about the optimization of time in the beginning. We talked about the reflection, the journaling. That stuff's all important. And so I was doing all of that. And frankly, 6 months is not a super long amount of time. And I think most people in their sales career will tell you that it's the first 6 months to a year that's the toughest. And so I recognized, hey, this is not how I want the rest of my professional career to go and I need to get better. So I did a couple of things, like I started reading a ton. I'll give you a story. So I rode a bike to work for the first SDR job that I had, and it was about 10, 12 miles away. It was one of those electric assist bikes, so it was kind of cheating. It wasn't like I was showing up completely drenched, but it was way better than battling traffic in Southern California. And so I got one of these bike speakers that was super, super loud. And on the way to and from work, I would listen to this podcast. Like, I'm not even kidding you right now. I would listen to this podcast while I'm biking to work with my big dorky helmet, and I looked ridiculous, but I started getting a lot better, a lot faster. And I was listening to these people, like I distinctly remember listening to the David Weiss episode, and like being like, man, that's, that's where I want to be. And I started almost being able to talk as if like I was using the same language that some of these really high performers were using. So I'm listening to this show. And now I'm probably 8 months into my SDR career at this tech company that's not a good fit for me. And the business was not thriving. And so I wasn't making the money that I thought I was going to make either. And so I did what every single impatient SDR decides to do, and that was go to the first company that would give me an AE job. So I've gotten better, and part of the reason I was able to get that AE job was I was able to talk and talk the talk that some of the top performers on the show were doing. And I had legitimately gotten better, I just needed to be at a different company. So I put my notice in, I tell the VP of Sales, fine, he's a little upset, whatever, Thanks for, for this opportunity. We move on. And then I get a call from the CEO of the organization that I just resigned from. And this was one of the most like rattling experiences of my professional career where the guy gets me on the phone and he basically says, Nick, this company made a mistake hiring you, like talking about the company I'm about to go to. You're going to fail. And there might be a job for you when you get fired in 3 months. Good luck. And I'm like, oh my gosh, like my brain's exploding here. And I was really, really upset and angry and like, I'm starting this new job now in 2 weeks. And I made the decision that I was going to prove this guy wrong. And that's never really been something that has ever really motivated me throughout my career. But I was so rattled. I was like, I got to succeed here. It was like a burn the ships moment. And so, okay, the show is Sales Success Stories. I'll give you a story. Literally the next day I'm like, okay, I've got 2 weeks here and I thought I was going to kind of kick it, but I want to show up to this thing blazing hot and really destroy the number and like prove that I, that I'm not going to fail. So I go and I go on my Kindle and I download the book Fanatical Prospecting. And have you ever been to Fogo de Chão, Scott?

18:25 Scott Ingram: I have.

18:26 Nick Cegelski: Okay. So Fogo de Chão, for those who don't know, it's like one of these all-you-can-eat steakhouses. And it's a pretty fancy restaurant. And I download this book, Fanatical Prospecting. I drive to Fogo de Chão for lunch. It's like 2 o'clock, you know, the not busy hour. And I sit down and I read this book for 4 hours while I'm eating like the all-you-can-eat steak because I was like, all right, I'm not working. I've got 2 weeks to get better. But the idea was I started becoming really obsessive about I got to get better, I got to win. And that served me really, really well. And so I had this, this vision in my mind about making a big LinkedIn post a year later about finishing number 1, President's Club, all of that stuff and how, you know, I was going to prove I had proved this guy wrong. But I decided not to do that. Frankly, he was probably right. Like, I was pretty mediocre as an SDR and all indications pointed at me not being this top-tier AE, but it kind of motivated me. And so I have a lot of respect for him for telling me that. And it's helped. I'm talking to you now.

19:24 Scott Ingram: That's so crazy. Okay, so, so 2 things. One, I'm worried for your health. I can't imagine the day after 4 hours at Fogo de Chão, like even a normal… I've only done that once because I think like the side effect is an impacted colon.

19:41 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, I had to force myself to take it super slow because normally when I go there, it's like, all right, it's a 90-minute, 2-hour dinner with my girlfriend. It's a nice dinner out, but this was not it. I told myself I'm not leaving until I finish the book. And So I was only getting like the really nice cuts of meat and nibbling on things. And so I'm sure people thought there was something wrong with me, but I also live in Southern California and everyone's a little bit off here. So it was actually a really, really fun meal. And I came out of that thing like really juiced up because I read this book and I'm like, oh my gosh, this would have changed how I approached the past 8 months in the SDR role. Frankly, I still… this is actually something that's probably helped me get a lot better and maybe even should have been part of the first 3. Every time I learn something new, whether it's podcast, book, whatever, like a new way to have a conversation or, you know, a mutual action plan you might put into play with a customer, like anytime I learn a new tactic or strategy, I don't just think about it in the context of the organization I'm selling for right now. I think, how would I have put this to use at the last 2 or 3 sales jobs that I've had? And I don't know, it like just having that like 360-degree context as opposed to just how I'd put this into play now has really helped me critically think through future unknowns, if any of that makes sense.

21:01 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Yeah, that's an interesting way to sort of apply the learning, right? It's not just that perspective because it's one of those things. I think anything that is impacting your learning, you always are viewing it from a different perspective, right? If you were to read Fanatical Prospecting again, that perspective is so different because you're in a different place. You have different experiences. Your role is different. So I think that's sort of a neat way to accelerate that learning and think about, okay, how would this apply? How can you expand that perspective in a few different ways?

21:34 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, you're completely right. It's important to do.

21:36 Scott Ingram: All right. So the second thing is I need you to complete the visual for me. I'm imagining you on this electro-assist bike with your funny helmet, with you blasting the Sales Success Stories podcast. Help me complete that, that picture in my head. Like, what is the route How many other people have been exposed to the podcast because if you're blasting it on your bike?

21:59 Nick Cegelski: Okay, so at the time I was living in Encino, California, which is right where the 405 meets the 101, and the job was in Agoura Hills, which is 12 miles… the office was about 12 miles west of where I lived. So I was biking down Ventura Boulevard the whole way at 6 in the morning. Yeah, bumping the Sales Success Stories podcast. And frankly, like, there weren't a lot of people out on the street that time of day, but my coworkers definitely knew about it. And I'm sure they thought there was something wrong with this dude. And there probably is, Scott. But I'd be biking up this massive hill right on the way home. And it was kind of cool because the traffic is so bad in SoCal and I'd be passing cars And so I'm not going super fast up the hill. I'm probably going 15, 20 miles an hour because I've got the electric assist. So I'm sure that people that were texting and driving not only heard me like yelling at them to get off their phones, but, but heard clips of you and other guests. So I'm sure somewhere in, you know, Agoura Hills, there's someone who's picked up a sales tip from you and they don't even know it.

23:08 Scott Ingram: That's hilarious. That's hilarious. All right. So I'm going to put this out there. If you want to be like crazy like Nick, I will sponsor your boombox. Like, if you'll go '80s style and like crank the podcast, put that thing on your shoulder, or if you need like big loud bike speakers. And I know the bike thing's gonna, gonna come back, but this is just, it's so funny.

23:29 Nick Cegelski: Well, it's, it's actually, it's one of my favorite things to do. Like, when I go on super long rides, so when I'm preparing to talk to guests on my podcast, one of the things that I always try to do is I try to listen to a couple of other shows that they've been on. And it's really tough to find time to do that. And that's one thing that I won't multitask. Like I talked about optimization in the beginning, but multitasking never is part of that because frankly, it completely diminishes your effectiveness. My goal is to be effective, not necessarily efficient, if that makes sense. But when I'm going on a super long ride, like, you know, if I'm doing a 50 or 60 miler over the weekend on a normal bicycle, not an electric assist one, I'll throw on the speaker and I'll listen to 2 or 3 episodes of something that a guest's gonna be on, or, you know, I'll even listen to my own to almost proofread or proof-listen to it.

24:16 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice. Yep, I know all about that, which is so much fun listening to yourself ad nauseam.

24:22 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, unless you hate the sound of your own voice like most people do.

24:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah, you get over it. At least I have. Like, yeah, whatever, he just sounds like that. It's fine.

24:29 Nick Cegelski: Yeah.

24:30 Scott Ingram: So what are you most proud of? I mean, you've had some good success here the last couple of roles. What's stood out?

24:36 Nick Cegelski: So I'm super intentional about trying not to focus on the outcomes. Another thing that I got from my high school wrestling coach, he always said focus on the process, not the product. And I've tried to translate this into my sales career. I really have tried to focus on the inputs as opposed to what the outputs are. That said, like there are certain deals that I've gotten throughout my career, like I closed my first ever international deal with a really big customer in the Cayman Islands, which was really exciting because I got to go there and meet them and I was super proud of that one. I think about deals where I just completely nailed the sales motion and I did… I exhibited the right behaviors and I did the right things and the solution really matched. And it was just like it was a really fluid process and I feel like I did things right. So those are the things that I'm most proud of. It's more the inputs and the behaviors and the consistent discipline. That's not easy to do. And so I really tried to focus my mind on inputs, not outputs, and being proud of those things.

25:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah, fantastic. Awesome. Well, we'll come back to some of that stuff. What about the flip side? What do you find to be the biggest challenge in all of this? Or maybe you want to take us to that time when, when you were struggling and what that was?

25:55 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, I mean, I think if you think about most people who are maybe treating their job more like a hobby than a, like, real professional career, and maybe not having the success that they really want to have. I think a lot of those people are acting, but not with a critical eye on, like, what's working and what's not. Like, they're showing up and they're doing the job. And if you can push a little harder to, like, get to really competent, like, the way that you really learn in sales, I think, is you have interactions with customers and you work deals and you, like, are out in the arena battling, for lack of a better term, you're going to get better. But until you've figured out how to engage customers and have conversations and like you've found some framework or strategy to try, it's kind of just like you're shooting from the hip all the time and you don't really have any feedback. So the biggest challenge I've ever had was not really being conscious of what I was doing. That's really what it comes down to. Most people are not really conscious of the things that they're saying or the motions that they're going through. And until you become conscious of those things, you can't improve on them. You can't take feedback and improve on them because you're literally going through life blind.

27:08 Scott Ingram: So how did you do that? How did you flip that switch and decide, you know, I'm going to be conscious of this and I'm really going to work on this?

27:15 Nick Cegelski: I want to go back to the journaling thing because the first 22 years of my life, I wasn't really focused on like the professional development side of it in journaling because I was in college. And so my journaling was focused on like, it was almost like a training log for wrestling or focused on school. And so probably when I left that first SDR job, it was like, now most of my journal, like I'm writing about deals, and I'm writing about work. And I think it's just been a shift of my focus. And so that's probably how I like came through some of that struggle. And I still try to come through it is like, I'll journal about deals. And I think sometimes we try to separate our emotion from it, or like our personal life from the deals that we're working. But I don't know about you, this is like how I support myself. And so It all goes into the bucket of life. So I've got to work my mind through it. I hope that's answering your question, Scott.

28:12 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And it's also interesting that sort of the themes that emerge from your journaling in terms of where that focus is in your life. I mean, so as you've been in these professional sales roles and you think back through journaling the last handful of years, has sales been sort of the primary focus? Like, how's that focus and those themes changed and evolved?

28:35 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, I mean, I think sales is like a big focus of what I'm writing about, probably under the broader context of professional development, where I am financially. I also own a number of rentals in Houston with, shocker, Armand, the guy who introduced us. So I think it falls under the broader bucket of like all of this work that I'm doing. It's kind of similar to you, right? Like I own some of these rentals in Houston. I'm holding a pretty big quota as an enterprise AE. I run a podcast. And so there's a lot of blocking and tackling and things that I need to take care of for all of those things to succeed and go smoothly. And so I think, I don't know, it's almost like the journaling is now just like triaging my life almost, what needs my attention, especially emotionally in the journaling, because that helps me get my head around, okay, what's the right decision to make here? It's one of the things that I'll do, Scott, is when I'm going through that journal session is figure out like what's the right strategy and direction that I need to take a certain part of my life so that I can then figure out how to execute on it. Because if I know the general strategy when I'm in the midst of things, I can, I can better address, all right, this is the direction I need to take it.

29:47 Scott Ingram: Nice. Well, that is the perfect transition to just digging into routine and process and all of this stuff, because as you said, you're involved in a lot more than just your, your sales role. There's a lot going on here and you're about being effective. So why don't we start with just the walkthrough of the day? And you've been listening to the show, blasting the show on your bike. So I don't… I know I don't need to explain this anymore. Give us the blow-by-blow.

30:15 Nick Cegelski: The blow-by-blow, my favorite part. So I think I'm probably pretty different than a lot of your guests in that. Okay. The morning routine starts at night and it starts with going to bed super early. I'm typically in bed asleep no later than 9:30. And where I think I differ from a lot of folks is I don't typically wake up to an alarm. I will set my alarm for like the crisis point, which I would say like the latest that I'm allowed to wake up and not have the day completely blow up on me. And that's usually like 7:30. That way I can get in front of the computer by 8 and start at somewhat of a reasonable hour. But because I go to bed pretty early, I'm usually up a lot earlier than that. 5:30, 6, 6:30 maybe. But the days that I do end up hitting that alarm and sleeping 10.5 hours, I feel phenomenal and I don't really feel guilty about it because that shows me I worked so hard the day before that I probably needed that sleep. So let's just say normal-ish day, I'm probably up 6:00. I try to spend the first 30 minutes of the day once I've woken up not really doing anything related to work. I try to do like low brainpower physical activity. So I'm unloading the dishwasher, cleaning up the living room, straightening up the office. And that seems kind of silly, but like the act of moving around, picking stuff up, cleaning up does 2 things. One, I'm starting the day on a super high note. Great. The living room's clean. I'm in a good mood. My girlfriend's in a good mood. But 2, moving around starts to wake my body up and it gets the blood flowing. So First 30 minutes of the day, it's doing the chores like that and drinking some coffee. Pretty similar to you, I think. When I get in front of the computer and start the workday, it's a triage of the emails. What needs to be addressed? Is there any, any fires that I've got to put out? Typically not, but I want to check for those things. Then I'm handling emails and texts and I'm using what I call the 4 Ds on them, which is delete, defer, delegate, and do. Try to get to inbox zero with those things. I'm a big fan of using Microsoft Outlook Tasks, and so I'll flag emails to become tasks for things I need to accomplish. And then the day hits, and every day… everybody says this… every single day is going to be different, but it really is. I've got a flurry of meetings, internal and external, demos, travel, planning sessions, working on proposal or consulting documents for prospective customers. And so one of the things I'll try to do structure-wise from there is I want the morning to be open if possible, because if I can, I want the first thing that I do to be cold calls because it's the eat the frog principle. I want to get that out of the way right away because that's usually the hardest thing, like the thing I'm looking forward to least in the day. And if I can get that done, I'm in a good mood and the rest of the day is kind of coasting downhill. Nice.

33:06 Scott Ingram: Okay, so first let's talk about your 4 Ds. I've got my 4 Ps, you've got your 4 Ds.

33:12 Nick Cegelski: Yeah.

33:13 Scott Ingram: What determines what you do? Well, just walk me through all of those.

33:18 Nick Cegelski: Sure. Delete means it goes in the trash. It could be an email that is irrelevant to me. If it's a spam thing, I actually picked this up from you. I just unsubscribe from it. If I see it and I don't want to get that anymore, I'm going in and unsubscribing from it. So that's the delete or unsubscribe, get rid of it, doesn't need my action, whatever, move on. Defer. This is something that I should take care of, but it's not something that I need to do right away. And this is probably the deadliest email that most people receive. They receive an email of something that they should do, and instead of putting it in the right area in their priority list, they do it right away. And that's killer because you end up getting it at the end of the day and you, you'll have completed all of, all of these things you're supposed to do, but maybe you didn't get to your top 2 or 3 priorities. And so it's important when you receive an email of something you've got to do to think about where it falls in the priority list. And so frequently for me, I can end up deferring the things that I, that I get in my inbox because they are less important than the prospecting or the, the contract review that I have with a customer that I need to prepare for. So that's the defer side of things. Delegate. This is something that needs to be done, but I don't necessarily need to be the person who has to do it. I think a lot of the real estate podcast stuff that I run falls into this bucket. So I'll get something that I need to do, but I'm not the right guy for it. Or maybe I am the right guy, but somebody else can do it for me. So I'll bump that off to somebody else and then do… it's something I got to tackle right there, right then. That's probably the urgent stuff, but I'm not getting too many of those in my inbox, especially because of the longer deal cycle that I'm working.

35:05 Scott Ingram: Nice. I'm intrigued by the defer thing because it sounds like that ties back to your idea about being effective, not efficient, right?

35:12 Nick Cegelski: Well, it's something that I've picked up and really had to prioritize on recently is my job at work is to make an impact. And it's so easy to find work to do and forget that really most of my time should either be spent finding new customers to engage, new prospective customers to engage, aka prospecting, and working with current prospects and helping them move through the buying cycle. If I focus 99% of my time on those things, the fact that the CRM isn't perfectly up to date won't be a huge issue. And so I have to remind myself that all of the time, that my job is to make an impact. My job is to be a effective. My job is to get deals closed. And I use that to sense check myself when I'm like, oh man, I'm following up with my VP of Technology for the 3rd time this week on the status of this thing, this customer's, you know, the roadmap item a customer is interested in. And I don't want to be annoying. And then I remind myself, no, my job is to make an impact here. This is something that's critical to closing the deal. I'm going to do this thing because that's how I make an impact here. So that's a really good way for me to sense check myself. Is this going to help me make an impact?

36:30 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. And then what does, what does that ideal prospecting block look like? How long is it? How are you structuring it? What is, what are the details there?

36:39 Nick Cegelski: Okay, so there are a couple different pieces to the prospecting. You've got the planning part of the prospecting, and then you've got the execution side of the prospecting. Those 2 things need to happen separately. The planning side is when you're actually building the list of folks that you're going to call. So making the list, researching the folks, preparing contact information, because there's nothing more frustrating than trying to get into a groove of calling people and you realize you've got a lot of wrong email addresses or the phone number isn't right. And so I prepare all of that in advance with some details. So that actually happens in the afternoon because it's kind of a lower energy thing and I don't really need to be on for that because I'm in front of the computer, not a customer. So the prep happens ahead of time, and then I literally open up 25 tabs in Salesforce and I block an hour on my calendar. I do the time blocking thing. It's all I do. And one of the things that I'll try to do, Scott, is I will only call into one persona in one type of… I sell exclusively to law firms right now, and so I try to actually only call CIOs at insurance defense law firms or managing partners at intellectual property law firms. And so I try to bucket those things so that I can get my brain into a really, really particular space, because the conversations I'm having with the managing partners of intellectual property firms are different than the conversations I'm having with the CIOs of the insurance defense firms. And what I want my brain to do is get in the rhythm of being in a space. And so when I'm cold calling, there's no other distractions. I'm not looking at email. I'm not picking up a call from my boss. Like, it's all I'm doing for an hour. I treat it like a customer meeting.

38:25 Scott Ingram: Beautiful, beautiful. All right, so what about just other habits and routines that are core to your success? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna dump into that bucket also, as you've done this kind of time optimization work over, over time to just make those, those tiny, tiny incremental improvements, I'm curious if there are kind of big things that you have found, if there are big examples or things that have kind of fit into some of those habits and routines that have made the biggest impact.

38:56 Nick Cegelski: So typically what I'll try to do, and this is also part of the reflection process, is look at 3… you can call them metrics, you could call them KPIs, I'm just going to call them things. And if I've done these 3 things in a day, I consider the day a win. And if I haven't, not as much of a win. And it's going to sound kind of silly, but it's did I eat 5 servings of vegetables? Did I do some sort of physical activity? And the bar I set super, super low and I usually fly over it. But on the really busy days, it's literally… I could have been a 10-minute walk at some point. And then the third is did I, did I make my cold calls? Did I do the prospecting activities that I set as the goal in the beginning of the day? And if those are the only things that happen in the day, I consider it a success. But 2 of those things are completely… they seem completely unrelated to sales, the vegetables and the workout. But my health, and I think not enough sales professionals take their health as seriously as they should, because I want to be able to operate in an extreme level, at an elite level of effectiveness. For a really long time. And when I'm not taking care of myself physically, my effectiveness plummets. And so if I can have those inputs right, I'm able to, I'm able to get so much more done in a day. So I guess if you want to look at the habits, routines that are critical, it's, it's eating right, it's exercising, and it's prospecting. You do those 3 things you're probably going to do all right sales-wise. Now you've got to figure out the skills and you've got to figure out, you know, the basics. But you do those 3 things, you execute on what you know how to do, you're golden, right? I kind of mentioned it in the beginning, Scott, where I think most of us, especially if you're listening to this show, like you're taking your professional development seriously enough to make it this deep in an episode, you probably have a general sense of how to succeed as a salesperson. I think the bigger issue most folks have is not actually being able to execute on it. And when I feel… when you're feeling good because you've taken care of your health, it's a little bit easier to do so.

41:09 Scott Ingram: Man, so, so good. And I'm sitting here chuckling, and for whatever reason, there's some things you said there that, that triggered me and made me think back to my conversation with Brandon Fluharty. And, you know, there's a lot of things that he's doing from an athletic perspective, and he's tracking his health and his sleep and different things like that. And I don't know if this is a today thing, maybe it's just ironic, but I'm, I'm sitting here drinking out of a water bottle that I normally use on my bike or on my Peloton.

41:38 Nick Cegelski: Yeah.

41:39 Scott Ingram: And I thought, you know what? I need to be drinking out of this all the time and not the glass of water on my desk because I'm a sales athlete. Yeah. And I think there's a mindset piece of that, right? And if you listen to, or you've watched my 4P presentation where I talk about my own productivity process, you'll know that we share that philosophy in that I prioritize my health over everything because if I'm not healthy, then I'm not useful to anybody, right? And I think, you know, treating yourself in that way, and I mean, it's an area that I need to come back to in some ways because especially right now, I think it's not just the physical health and the workouts and the vegetables, although they probably help with that too. It's also the mental health piece. And it's, I mean, it's clear that you, I mean, maybe we can talk about that specifically because there's things that you're doing that there's mindset things you're doing, right? The mantras and the things that you've brought forward from wrestling and those types of ideas. It's the daily journaling you're doing and just having a mechanism to process and to think through this. What else are you doing to manage the mindset and your mental health?

42:48 Nick Cegelski: It's so important that the physical and the mental side are tied together, Scott. And I think a lot of us fail to recognize that, like when you get a great workout, You know, I know you love your Peloton bike in the morning. When you get off that thing, don't you feel a little more balanced and like really ready to rip apart the day as opposed to the days you sleep in and maybe skip your workout and eat a candy bar? Because like, don't believe me, I've been there.

43:11 Scott Ingram: Well, I'll tell you, I feel a lot wetter and I need to immediately take a shower. But no, absolutely right. And I again was, was chuckling at your idea earlier about, you know, you just, you've just got to start. Like the hardest part Particularly of, of the workout side of things is, you know, getting going until you, you realize you get through kind of the warm-up phase, you're like, damn it, I love this, this makes me feel so good. I don't know why we can't like translate that to the beginning sometimes and realize like, dude, you're gonna feel great when you do this. You think that you want to spend another 45 minutes in bed, but I promise you don't.

43:47 Nick Cegelski: Well, so part of it's reminding your brain that over and over again. And so Man, I keep going back to the journaling, but I remind myself those things all the time. Like I might literally write in the journal before I go to bed, hey, it's a crazy day tomorrow. I'm up at 5 a.m. I know I'm not going to feel great, but I know I'm going to feel better once I get the lift in. And so telling myself that and making the decision the night before… okay, here's, here's your quip. It's make the decision before it gets hard, and then it's actually easier to make the decision in the heat of battle. So if I make the decision the night before that I know it's going to be tough to get up, but I'm going to do it anyway and I'm going to get the workout in, when that moment comes, I've already made the decision and it should be easy instead of when my will is weaker and I'm kind of groggy making the decision. So you have to be incredibly intentional with like when you make the decision to battle something hard. And I do that a lot. Like, I remind myself those things a lot. So another thing I'll tell myself when I'm journaling, the only antidote to worry is action. And that's probably true 95% of the time. There are sometimes things that are outside of our control, but I remind myself that as much as I can. If I'm stressed about a deal or I'm worried about, you know, how something's going to go in my personal life, typically I can find a way to take action to make that thing less of a stressor for me. Maybe it's as simple as picking up the phone and calling a customer and saying, hey, I'm kind of getting the sense that we're off about something here. Can you help me figure out if I'm completely off base with this? Like actually calling something that you're feeling in your gut. So I remind myself that one a lot. Another one that, that I'll remind myself is that my attitude is more important than my circumstances. And this kind of goes to the thing you were saying about your health, Scott, where if you're not taking care of yourself, you're not really useful to anybody. And so I remind myself that when I am taking care of myself and I'm in a good place physically and mentally, I can do anything. Like, I can legitimately… I feel like I can do anything. I feel like I'm Superman. And so my goal is to be in that state as much as possible and take actions to get myself in that state. And so we talked about the eating right, the exercise, the journaling, the self-reflection, the listening to the podcast while you're riding the e-bike. Like, before we got on this, I went on the bike, and it's a beautiful day here in SoCal. And so I rode for, for 30 minutes, and I was blasting music that put me in a good mood because I wanted to be on for this. And I think it helped me. I think it helped me. And so identifying the things that can get you in the right state are really, really important.

46:32 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice. Say just a little bit more about the state, and maybe break apart, like what are the different states and the different times that you're trying to be in them and how do you get into them?

46:44 Nick Cegelski: So this is something I learned from wrestling, actually, because wrestling is a really unique sport where your match is only 7 minutes long. And so you'll be at a wrestling tournament and you'll wrestle 4 or 5 matches, each 7 minutes long in a 12-hour day. Like you'll show up and they'll start wrestling at 9 a.m. in the morning and your last match might be at 9 p.m. at night. And so you have to manage your emotional energy in, in an event like that, because if you stay up the whole time, you're going to get to the end of the day and you're just completely shot. And that's usually when like the finals of the tournament are. And so you're not going to wrestle to the best of your abilities. And I think, I think working in being an elite salesperson is really similar. And so you can't be on if you don't spend a little bit of time off. And that doesn't mean you're having a bad day, but it means you have to spend some time doing lower energy things. And so this kind of goes to the optimization side of things, Scott, where… and you do this and I don't know if you intentionally do this or not, but you know, okay, afternoons you're probably a little bit lower energy. So that's the time you're going to intentionally schedule customer conversations because you're not going to be super effective working on a consulting document for a customer or preparing a proposal or territory planning because your brain is just like, ah, I'm kind of tired. I don't want to do this thing. So I intentionally try to match my energy levels to when I'm doing a corresponding task. So the mornings are when I'm on the most. That's when I'm going to do the most challenging things. So it's a management of energy levels that's really important. So it's like when I travel, I don't drink any caffeine when I'm flying from the West Coast to the East Coast because the time change, and I won't be able to sleep like, I don't know, until like 1 AM, and then I end up getting mad at myself. And so I intentionally schedule travel time to do like the CRM maintenance or planning calendar activities or chipping away at some of the, the easy don't really need a lot of brainpower tasks that I have on my list. So matching your energy level to the value of the task, I think, is a really critical skill that a lot of us, myself included, could get better at.

49:05 Scott Ingram: I think that's all really good insights. And you're exactly right, right? I really am kind of being mindful of and trying to manage my own different energy levels. And I'll also schedule things in times where I know that it would ordinarily be a downtime, but I know the activity will get me up and make up for it. And this conversation is a perfect example. You know, we started this conversation at 5:00 PM on a Friday. You know, ordinarily that is not productive time for me in any way, shape, or form. But again, it was, it was a good way to use the time. And then we'll transition into the weekend after this. So what about, I'm super curious about this one because who knows what kinds of visuals will, will come with it, but it just, it's the information diet question, right? What are you listening to, reading and watching? And when does that happen?

49:54 Nick Cegelski: So huge podcast guy, like, of course, listen to this show. I listen to my own show, really like John Barrows. I really like reading Jeb Blount. He's one of my favorite authors. If you want to talk about non-sales stuff, I read a ton of like murder mystery thriller stuff before bed. And I don't know what that says about the sales profession when it's a murder mystery that's like relaxing me and taking my mind off work. But I guess outside of like other, other information diet pieces that are outside of sales, I listen to a real estate investing podcast called BiggerPockets. And then I also am a huge fan of Tim Ferriss's podcast, where he basically finds different interesting people, and he kind of deconstructs their lives similar to the way that you do this on the show, but he takes people outside of sales. And so he brings other top performers, and he's trying to get insights and best practices and the way that they're structuring their time and life. And so I get a lot out of that, because it's one thing to think about how top sales professionals operate. It's another to think about, here's how a top athlete or musician or writer is operating at a really, really high level. And so I pull a lot out of that. Plus, it's really, really interesting. And it's great because I'll meet people who are in a specific domain. Like, I'm trying to think of a good example. Like, I'm not a huge gamer. I don't like TV. I don't like playing video games. They put me in a bad mood. But I'll be at a party and I will have listened to an interview with like a really, really elite esports athlete. And I'll be talking to somebody that's really into esports. And now I can connect with them because I understand at least a little about the domain that their brain lives in.

51:30 Scott Ingram: That's fascinating. And I want to touch on your own podcast just a bit. So I had an opportunity to visit with you and Armand on that show, and you guys are doing a really good job. In some ways, I feel like you're sort of doing Sales Success Stories 2.0. I mean, you've both been fans of the show. I can see the influences that this show has maybe had, but I also see the improvements that you've done. I mean, talk about that. Experience at this stage?

51:56 Nick Cegelski: So the idea behind the show was that, like, I'm a podcast junkie. I'm a sales podcast and professional development junkie. Like, most of the content out there, it's like one step removed from actually being usable. And so there's a ton of academia, there's a ton of like strategy, there's a ton of like vague theories that you can learn about and hear about in conversations on podcasts. And then there's a lot of like like small talk where people are talking about the sports game over the weekend or they're chuckling at a bunch of funny jokes that the guest just said. And there's a time and place for that. But we tried to create this show and we tried to do like one of the things that you do right, Scott, is you actually go pretty deep and pretty gritty about like what's the blow-by-blow for your morning routine. And to me, that's fascinating. But the one I would say big difference between our podcast and your podcast is you'll go super deep and it will be a very long interview. And I'm a millennial and I know a ton of millennials, they have the super, super short attention spans. So what we tried to do was cut out anything that wasn't like, you can go and put this into practice today. So the show's 30 minutes to President's Club, we'll record 45 minutes with a guest, and then we, unlike you, we will cut a lot of the content so that it's 22 minutes of the guest talking, short intro, an outro that recaps it, and move on. So the idea is supposed to be pretty modern. Like, it's not people who last sold in 1977 and have been a guru ever since. It's supposed to be super tactical, super actionable things you can steal and put into play today. And we cut out all the fluff. Like, I've tried to produce the show through a lens. Does the audience care? So we'll go back to like being intentional. We used to intro the show and my co-host Armand would say, Nick, how's it going today? How are you? And I'd say, oh, I'm doing great. Let's get into the show. So we cut that piece out. It was like 5 seconds, but we've started to cut that out because the audience doesn't really care how I'm doing. The audience cares to listen to things that are going to make them better in their sales profession. So they're not listening for me. They're not listening for Armand. They're listening to get better. So that's kind of been the genesis and really the driver behind the show.

54:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Again, I'm fascinated by the process. I'm really looking forward to digging in. Give us, give us your top I don't know, 2 or 3 interviews. You've done a handful at this point. I don't think mine's even come out yet, but by the time this goes live, you'll have a pretty good backlog to work with. What are the standouts if folks want to kind of jump into that and get a start? What's impacted you the most?

54:29 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, I mean, you had a great show. I'll give you a little credit, Scott. I mean, you talked through, you almost did a condensed version of the way that you're being productive, your PEAS process. And so that was really useful. Like it actually inspired me to start unsubscribing from things instead of just deleting them every single time. Because just the very act of like brain processing, okay, I don't need this email, it's junk, and hitting delete. I want to, I want to eliminate as much decision fatigue as possible. So that actually was really, really useful. And there's a… again, I actually think that's a minute that I found that I've saved each day. And it's a compounding minute because that's a minute of not deleting and making a decision to delete that I'm saving every day. So you were really, really great. Trying to think who else I loved. Joe Caprio was on recently. He was a former VP of sales at a company called Chorus, and now he's a co-founder of a company called Reprise, and he talked about effective meeting management in connection with discovery. And so he talked about purpose, plan, outcome, getting a customer to agree to an agenda. And one of the things that he said that really stuck with me was, if you've never had a customer correct you or disagree with you about the agenda, then you're probably not actually setting an agenda in the beginning of a call. Because we'll go into a meeting with a customer and we say, oh, this is what the purpose of today's meeting is, because we talked about it with them beforehand. And then we just launch right into it and without ever giving them a chance to say, oh, actually, I talked to our CFO yesterday and they really wanted to make sure we addressed this. So asking the customer to agree to an agenda and help them set the agenda, even when you are stone cold sure what it is, is really, really important. And then another one, we talked to this guy, I got to make sure I get his name right, is Bilal. He talked about this idea of transparency related to selling. And he had this really interesting idea about kicking off a demo and saying, hey, you know, we're excited to talk to you, whatever, kicking the meeting off, but then pointing out flaws in the product and things you haven't built yet and items that are on the roadmap. And literally, like, It's kind of the idea of… it's something Kevin Dorsey, who was another guest, talks about, 8-miling. Have you ever seen the movie 8 Mile with Eminem, Scott?

56:40 Scott Ingram: Yep.

56:41 Nick Cegelski: Okay. So there's the scene where he's in the rap battle, right? It's at the end of the movie and he's about to rap battle this guy. What Eminem does is he goes up and he literally says all of these terrible things about himself and he takes away all of the power from the guy he's about to rap battle because he just dissed himself for 5 minutes straight. Like, I got nothing to say anymore. And so that's how Eminem wins the rap battle. And so this guy Bilal proposed maybe you start the demo with that and you actually, you completely stand out. You point out the areas that you're not strong and maybe you strategically do that, but you actually make it a really, really transparent conversation. And so I'm still experimenting with how I'm actually going to put that into practice. He gave some more concrete details in the show. But I'm learning a ton every single week. So that was a really, really interesting one that I, that I took away.

57:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah, fantastic. Let's talk about… this is a topic that's suddenly gotten more and more interesting to me lately. Let's just talk about kind of your tech stack. What are the pieces of that? And let's try and be holistic there, right? We can talk about the sales tech stack, but let's talk about the life tech stack as well.

57:49 Nick Cegelski: Sure. Well, that's, that's a good one. Google Drive has been one of my best friends recently. Not necessarily for my sales job, but for organizing a lot of different life activities. So I keep a Google Drive and I collaborate on that with the guys I own the rental properties with. I use it to plan the podcast and a lot of our content goes in there. And frankly, Google has a lot of free tools that I use from, from that perspective. One that I think almost everybody who uses Outlook probably has access to and everyone that I talk to doesn't use this. Is a tool called Quick Parts in Outlook. And what Quick Parts is, is a text expander. And so most people, when they are templating things, right, like you explain something to a customer via email dozens of times and you've created a template, most people have like a Word document where they're storing things and they say, oh, I've got to explain how our pricing structure works in an email. Let me go find that Word document, copy and paste and put that thing in. What Microsoft Quick Parts does… it's a plugin in Outlook and it comes native in Outlook… is if I type the word price and hit enter, it will expand the word price into whatever paragraph I want it to have. And so I, I use it to create templates for dozens upon dozens of prospecting emails. And the way that I… like, I've templated the way that I respond to these not interested email. And so I've created dozens of dozens of these. And so it makes it really easy. The template name for the response to not interested is rejection. And so I type the word rejection into Outlook, I hit enter, and it plugs in my default response. And so this saves me a ton of time.

59:34 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. What else? What are the kind of component pieces, core tech tools that you're using?

59:39 Nick Cegelski: Are you asking like computer-wise? Are you asking phone-wise? Are you asking just like life?

59:44 Scott Ingram: All of it.

59:44 Nick Cegelski: Okay, I'll rattle a bunch off here. So we talked about Google Drive, Microsoft Quick Parts. I'm using OneNote to keep track of all of like the internal knowledge that I pick up. The reason that I like that is I can search it. It's kind of similar to Evernote if folks have used that, but I use OneNote to track all of my stuff there. I use Slack not for my organization, but I use it to collaborate with the guys I run the podcast and the rentals with. Let's see, working out when I'm biking, I use Strava. I love tracking how many miles I rode and how fast I went. I use voice-to-text to write out things on my phone, mostly for text messages, but also emails using voice-to-text and then save it as a draft and go on my computer and clean it up, especially if I'm sending something pretty long. Podcast listeners got to go on 1.5 speed. I don't know how anybody listens to a podcast on 1 speed. It drives me absolutely insane.

1:00:37 Scott Ingram: I can't even listen to myself at normal speed. It's so annoying.

1:00:39 Nick Cegelski: No, it's terrible. But like from a work perspective, we don't have a super sophisticated tech stack. Like we're not using these, the Outreach and the SalesLoft. And so I've had to find ways to make up for some of that stuff. And that's part of the reason Quick Parts comes in. Trying to think if there's anything else. I don't really have anything else. You know, I use Hootsuite sometimes to, to pre-plan LinkedIn posts. So I'll draft a LinkedIn post in Hootsuite. And part of the reason I really like that is it will show you how it will actually display when you post the LinkedIn post. So I'll use that also. But that's kind of my brain dump for you. Not super sophisticated.

1:01:16 Scott Ingram: Well, let me ask this, right? So you, you pride yourself on being a very productive, effective person. If you had to choose a direction, and the directions are either more technology or less technology, which path do you choose?

1:01:31 Nick Cegelski: Great, great question. Technology's a crutch for most people. You talked about this on our show, Scott, the buzzing and ringing and notifications that we get from the 47 different apps we have. Like, I'm looking at my computer right now and I'm getting a reminder from Salesforce in this tab that I left open telling me about something that's completely irrelevant and it's like flashing at me and that's a distraction. And so I actually think less technology is probably better. Like, I kind of kick myself because I use the Strava thing when I'm biking. But man, I keep seeing those Apple Watches and I think about how cool they would be, but I don't want to tether myself to that. I got a great book for you. Cal Newport, Deep Work. Read that one, but read all his other stuff. It's phenomenal. I think in the quest for optimization and efficiency, we can sometimes lose the deep thought and strategy and thinking about the direction that we want to take things approach. The journaling helps me with that. And I would say 90% of the time I've got my head down and I'm just running as hard as I can. But that 10% is so key to be able to shut everything else off and not have my phone buzz and ring and notify me of things that are completely irrelevant. So I'm going to answer your question with less technology. I'm not like, I don't know, I don't… I think having a calendar and a to-do list and some tools to enable efficiency are important. And don't get me wrong, like Like I'm all about sales enablement technology, but why don't you fix the root cause, which is most of us are massively distracted and that's causing us to lose hours of time a day.

1:03:10 Scott Ingram: Yeah, man, that's what I wanted to get to, right? To me, this question has really been fascinating and it's a debate we're actually thinking about bringing to the summit or maybe it's after, but I feel like again, so many assumptions that I had that have been disproven coming into this show. And one of those was this idea that, you know, part of it was I wanted to get inside the heads of people that were producing at very high levels right now, right? And not the folks that are writing the books who, you know, haven't carried their own quota in many years. And I thought, hey, you know, the very best are probably really using technology effectively, right? And they've got these really brilliant tech stacks. I mean, it's really what prompted this question. And what I have found is it's totally the opposite. I mean, it is, it is very… it seems like the more successful a person is, the less technology they're using. Because I think in too many cases, the technology is sort of owning this. And I feel like this is a really dumb stance for me to be taking and a stupid opinion for me to be forming, because all of the sponsors and people who would love to give me money to have access to this audience are, are in that technology space. And don't get me wrong, I think there's some tools that are, are very core. I, I couldn't function without LinkedIn, and, and LinkedIn gets, gets mentioned in virtually every one of these conversations. And I, I think, you know, how would you work without CRM to have something to be tracking your opportunities and, and things like that? And Outreach is another one that I think is becoming kind of one of those core staples just to help you stay organized and efficient in your, in your prospecting motion. But man, beyond that, I mean, you're journaling in paper.

1:05:02 Nick Cegelski: Yeah.

1:05:02 Scott Ingram: And it works, right? So it's, it's really something that I think we need to be asking ourselves. Does more technology really make sense, or, or should we actually be trying to go in the other direction?

1:05:18 Nick Cegelski: I think it's going to be a really critical question that the leaders of the, the next generation of sales reps that come in have to find an answer to. Because you just mentioned LinkedIn, and I didn't even think to mention LinkedIn. Of course, it's critical to how I'm doing my, my work. But Scott, at the time of this recording, I'm 26. And so the technology side of a lot of this is just like, it's been completely embedded in me my entire life. And the sales reps that are going to be starting now, it's even more the case. And so those people, like, I think the old problem was getting people to adopt technology. Like, I talked to older sales reps who still refuse to use a CRM, and they keep everything in a notebook. And I'll hear them, you know, we're on a pipeline call being asked about a deal, and they're rifling through a notebook. And I'm like, I can just Ctrl+F that in, you know, Salesforce or Word or, you know, wherever I'm keeping track of it on a computer. And so sometimes I'm like, how are you not tech competent? The problem now is I think folks are going to be tech dependent to the point that they can't focus and do the real critical work. Like, it's great to automate stuff. Outreach is great for automating, but if you can't figure out how to write an email in the first place, you're just throwing a lot more bad out. And so the problem I think sales leaders are going to have to solve in the future is actually going to be more of a discipline and distraction problem than a you refuse to use the technology we're putting in front of you.

1:06:51 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's a really fascinating call out because in my own lifetime, you know, now I get to demonstrate my age just a, just a little bit, but, you know, technology has destroyed my memory. You know, when I was a kid, I knew the phone numbers of all of my friends because we didn't have cell phones and, and have them stored that way. And, and now I don't know anybody's phone number. Like, I don't know my kids' phone numbers.

1:07:18 Nick Cegelski: Yeah, it's crazy. It's totally crazy.

1:07:21 Scott Ingram: It's totally wild. And, and similarly, I think my memory is, is useless because of Evernote. Like, Evernote is sort of my brain. And I'll… to your point, like, well, that's what search is for. And similarly, I mean, Google… and I couldn't survive without Gmail. And, and the fact that I can just search through any email that I've pretty much ever sent and be able to kind of get those, those kinds of details. To your point, you know, is do we erode our own capabilities because we're over-reliant on, on some of this technology, and do we end up making some of those things worse?

1:07:56 Nick Cegelski: But I don't, I don't think the answer is for you to stop storing contacts in your iPhone and to memorize your kids' phone numbers. I don't know if that's an effective use of your brain power.

1:08:07 Scott Ingram: True.

1:08:08 Nick Cegelski: Right. I think that's where technology is enabling you.

1:08:11 Scott Ingram: Dude, we need to stop this conversation. I feel like I'm getting so curmudgeonly. Like, oh, technology.

1:08:16 Nick Cegelski: No, but it's true. Well, you know what? So here's that. But that's the thing. So you're right. I work in tech too, and I actually think the most successful tech sales professionals are going to be the ones who can artfully balance the enablement side of technology with the dependence side of technology and the folks who can articulate that to customers, because it's going to be a critical conversation that we have with customers a decade from now. They're going to be terrified. I'm getting it now. We have folks who are terrified of adding more to the tech stack because they don't need more. They just need to use the tools they already have. And so if you can artfully walk that line between enablement and dependence, You're going to be a really effective person. Forget about sales professional. We're talking about your life here.

1:09:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Very well said. All right. We totally have to move on from that because that clearly is a rat hole. Let's talk about just kind of sales philosophies. Do you subscribe to a particular approach?

1:09:17 Nick Cegelski: You know, I had to give a lot of thought to this one when you sent it to me with the list of some questions I should think about ahead of time. I try not to put a label on philosophy, approach. Style, because I think it's, it's actually kind of limiting. What I've really tried to do is cobble together learnings from all sorts of different folks. Like, I'll give a shout out to the Jeb Blounts of the world because I've learned a lot from him. I've learned a lot from, from John Barrows and some of his trainings and stuff that he's put out. You know, this show is the reason that I even read the book The Challenger Sale, which… good book, great premise. I think it kind of falls in the bucket of academia to some, some degree. But I don't want to put a label on myself or my style or the philosophy I subscribe to, because if I come across something that goes against that, well, then subconsciously I might actually end up rejecting that. So I'll call the style Nick Cegelski. How's that?

1:10:13 Scott Ingram: I like it. I like it. That's brilliant. I was going to say, I don't get to ask my style question now, but I think you answered it well. What about motivation, right? How do you think about motivation?

1:10:21 Nick Cegelski: What really drives you and, and all the work that you Big one for me is the feedback loop. It's this idea of when you've got a super full calendar of meetings and demos and you're closing business and you're making a lot of money and you're going on the fun President's Club trips, you almost know why you're putting in the work on the front end. It's easy to do the work when you're seeing those incredibly fun results. And so you get motivated by… I get motivated by those things. Like, I know that I'm seeing the results. I'm feeling the results. And so it's easy to do the hard work when I'm like living in the result. In the beginning, it kind of had to be like an artificial push where I was like, all right, I got to artificially push myself to do the work and then I know I'll get the result. I think the other half, it's the wrestling side of things. It's this code that I almost live by. And there was this poem that I got at a wrestling camp once, and I'll give you… it's super short. Called The Man in the Glass, and the last line of it was, you can fool the whole world through a pathway of years and get pats on the back as you pass, but your final reward will be heartbreak and tears if you've cheated the man in the glass. And the first time I ever read that thing, it… I hate that poem sometimes because it never lets me cheat myself. It never lets me cheat doing the hard work because anytime I'm about to, I think about that silly poem that I read in, I don't know, must have been 10th grade, and it won't let me cheat myself. And so I hate to say that, like, the fear of that is part of it, but I think it's this combination of, like, the fear and the code, and like, it's so ingrained in me that you don't cheat yourself, that you do the work, coupled with I'm feeling and living the results, that I almost feel like this momentum is just propelling me right now.

1:12:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, let's talk about the work because I'm actually a little bit surprised. I don't know that I've talked to another wrestler, which is surprising to me because what I know… I mean, I've, I've never wrestled, but what I know of the sport is it is one of the most like physically and mentally grueling things you can put yourself through. And maybe it's, it's why you're a cyclist too, because I feel like cycling is that that as well. Like, you just… if you want to get good as a cyclist, you have to get extraordinarily uncomfortable. And I'm not talking about the padded shorts, which I don't wear.

1:12:58 Nick Cegelski: I just wear the gym shorts. And I know I look like kind of a dweeb, but nothing's gonna change there.

1:13:04 Scott Ingram: I want to hear you talk about like the work side of this, because I do feel like there's… at this point, I mean, I… gosh, I, I hope If folks have been listening to this show for any period of time, you realize like, man, the work is just a given. There's no way around it. And I suspect the training that you've done, like essentially just the grit training through your wrestling career, has really helped you and your work ethic.

1:13:32 Nick Cegelski: It's true. I mean, wrestling is… so I didn't mention it before, but I still coach wrestling and I still wrestle with the I coached at the college level as a volunteer, and so I still wrestle with those guys every practice. And it's great to go from getting punched in the face on the sales floor to getting punched in the face on the wrestling mat. But the sport is really special. There is an immense amount of discipline that lives 24/7 in that sport. The weight management is part of it, right? You have a certain weight class that you have to hit. And so also the fact that you step out on the mat and yeah, it's a team sport. I've got teammates in different weight classes, but when I step on the mat, it is just me. And I think wrestling is a sport that's lifestyle versus lifestyle sometimes, where it's not just about the training that you've done. It's about, are you eating right? Are you getting your rest? Are you focusing on recovery? Are you doing the film study? Are you putting in the work on the mat? The conditioning aspect of wrestling is… that was my biggest advantage when I wrestled. I was not a great athlete. Truthfully, I was not very strong. I was moderately skilled, but there's 3 periods in a wrestling match. And when you get to the last 2 minutes of the match, you and your opponent are absolutely exhausted. Like, I want you to think about it. I wrestled at the 149-pound weight class in college. And I want you to imagine like going and grabbing a 149-pound dumbbell when you weigh that much and just like tossing it around as hard as you can for 7 minutes straight. You'd be exhausted. Now I want you to imagine that that dumbbell is also trying to kick your butt. It is a brutal sport. You come away with your face torn up. You come away exhausted, your shoulder wrenched. Someone just tried to beat you up for 7 minutes. It's grueling. And then you go under the bleachers, you have a sip of water. In 45 minutes, they call you for the next match against someone new and someone fresh. And so I can't credit that sport enough. It has completely changed my life. I would not be talking to you right now without without what that sport has taught me.

1:15:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah, amazing, amazing, right? And you know we've had this conversation in a few different directions here a couple of times, so I won't belabor the point too much. But just the idea of you know looking at some of those those backgrounds, whether they be athletic-centric or performance-centric or or any place where you're getting just just this… I think it's the discipline training, right? It's the fact that, you know, to be successful in any of these spaces, you have to train and you have to practice. And it's, you know, I actually wish that we could do a better job as a profession in translating some of those things. You had put something in one of your notes that you sent me in the prep that you did early on that we actually didn't talk about, and it was, it was around some of the… you had thought you would have been better served by really committing to getting better as a professional and, and just learning how to be competent in sales earlier on. And I feel like there's just not a great training program available to us. You know, I haven't seen one that's like, look, if you would just do this, if you would commit yourself to this process that'll take you maybe 4 months, maybe it'll take you 6 months. In the sports world, you can go from being a couch potato to running a marathon in 6 months. You can go from not being very active to doing a sprint triathlon or probably even an Olympic distance triathlon in 3 or 4 months. No big deal. Where is that and what would that process need to look like in sales? That's my question. I'm just going to put that out there.

1:17:17 Nick Cegelski: Well, it's the ability to battle through adversity. And that's where I think a lot of folks are lacking. And it's where I've lacked in my life. And if you think about the sales profession, and I mentioned this before in like what motivates me, and this probably motivates you too, Scott, once you start seeing success and you start like your brain recognizes and accepts that, okay, in sales, I'm actually probably going to lose more than I win. But that doesn't mean that I've lost. Like, if I, if I win 1 out of every 4 deals, I'm actually probably doing okay in a lot of spaces. But most of us are conditioned to have our heart broken when we lose and to get hung up on a cold call for someone who's 22, or they get yelled at on the phone, or they make a mistake, or they lose a deal they thought they were going to have is, is heart-wrenching and And it's defeating. And I think it's why a lot of people take themselves out of the game and say, ah, you know, I tried sales once and it wasn't for me. And I think most people are, they're certainly competent enough and they're smart enough. I talk to a lot of people who I think would be great sales professionals, but they tried it once and after 4 months they threw in the towel. And so I don't necessarily know if the preparation for sales needs to be skill-related. It certainly helps. And I think I'm starting to see now that there are some professional programs like at the college level. One of the kids I coached wrestling even with at USC told me he's taking a class on sales next semester, which is really cool and exciting. But I almost think the ability to battle through adversity and survive during tough times is more important than the skill side of it.

1:19:00 Scott Ingram: Yeah, man, we're, we're all training hard right now because we all have the adversity of sales and, and we all have the adversity of, you know, let's, let's also overcome a pandemic. While we're at it, game on. And, you know, I even, even my own mentality sort of thinking through that has, has been, it is coming back to those things like, okay, you know what? This is tough, but you know, you just, you, you go in, you, you just, you keep going. There's no tapping out.

1:19:27 Nick Cegelski: Well, something you said, Scott, on the, it was on the Daily Sales Tip podcast and it was, what do we label the situation that we're in right now? Is it bad times? Is it tough times? Is it challenging times? And I think that was the one that you liked. Like the challenging times word, because a challenge is a good thing. We grow through challenge. I know that I'm actually going to emerge from this, this situation that we're in as a planet actually a lot more competent than I was going in, because it's really forced me to take a hard look at the messaging I was sending out, the way I was having conversations, the work that I was putting in on the prospecting side, because everything shut down for a couple of weeks and I had to make a decision like, do I keep pushing here? And I decided to, and I had to kind of tinker with, with my messaging a lot. But now I've come out and I'm like, oh man, this has made me a way more competent sales professional. But I stuck around in the game and I didn't just, just let myself wallow in self-pity.

1:20:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's, that's the question that is really starting to emerge is What did you do with the time? You know, did you hunker down and hide from it, or did you take it on, right, and do something with the adversity and the challenge?

1:20:47 Nick Cegelski: So, and don't get me wrong here, like, I've seen this stuff on LinkedIn and people saying, you know, if you didn't use this time to start a side hustle or whatever, like, then you didn't use this time appropriately. And I don't know if I buy into that because everybody's in different situations and And we talked a little bit about the mental health side of things before. Like, I don't have children. It's like it's just me and my girlfriend. We're in a pretty stable place financially. So there's been less adversity that I've had to deal with than other people. Like, there's people who are fighting just to stay afloat. So, hey, if all you did was stay afloat during this time, that's okay. And so again, this goes back to the question you asked me earlier about like, what am I most proud of? And that's part of the reason that I try to to not focus on the outcomes and instead focus on the inputs? Did I exhibit the right behaviors each day? And am I moving in the right direction instead of like, oh, you know, I launched a podcast during a pandemic or, you know, I started a bit like, I don't know, I think everybody's got their own situation and that's not to make an excuse for other people. But I also want to be sensitive to the fact that everyone's battling different things.

1:21:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it's all in how you look at it, right? It's, it's all in kind of the framing of that. There's a coming Daily Sales Tip. I'm sure it'll be out by the, by the time we share this, but Tyler Menke sent me something that I just, it was so good, right? It was, it was really, you know, the, you choose how to look at things and when you look at them differently, they change. So, you know, it's, it's just being mindful of that. So much of this, I think, comes down to being thoughtful. I think this ties back to the technology question. Right? If you're just being a robot and you're leaning on all the tech and or you're leaning on a process that has been defined for you, that's not really where you get the high levels of performance and growth and success. It's having done the work of thinking through how can I improve my routine today? How can I improve this process today? How can I use this challenge or this situation? To grow and to better myself. And just, you know, you never stop iterating that process. It doesn't ever end. Well, someday it ends, but that's pretty final. Yeah.

1:23:01 Nick Cegelski: No, I mean, it goes back to… it's like the focus on optimization that I talked about in the beginning. And, you know, if I think about the stuff that I told you in the beginning, that stuff's all important. And I mentioned discipline, but the hard work is… I mean, it is the foundation of it all. Like, you can't find ways to optimize unless you go through a day not optimally. Because like you've got to find things to improve upon. And so you got to do the work. There's that like the smart work versus hard work camp. And frankly, I think you kind of need both. And if you're going to learn to work smart, well, you got to work hard first to even, even be able to identify those things.

1:23:35 Scott Ingram: Exactly. Exactly.

1:23:37 Nick Cegelski: All right.

1:23:37 Scott Ingram: So I think, I think we're already kind of on the right trajectory for me to ask if there's something you believe that the average sales professional would think is crazy.

1:23:46 Nick Cegelski: Yeah. So I think a lot of people… this isn't even sales professionals… most people think that you cannot have a lot of career success, a great family and social life, be incredibly healthy and fit, and get enough sleep. Most people think that is… those things are mutually exclusive. I don't think that's the case. I think with planning, with discipline and with like an eye for how to fit everything in, you can do them all. So that's my, that's my pick.

1:24:22 Scott Ingram: I like it. I like it. What about the flip side? Is there something that the average sales professional believes that you think is crazy?

1:24:29 Nick Cegelski: Yeah. So I talk to peers, I go on LinkedIn and I see people boasting about these 80, 90, 100-hour work weeks. And I see them mistaking activity for achievement. And I think that's garbage. I think our job is to make an impact, not sit and slog away in front of our email. So find a way to make an impact, find a way to be effective, and then shut your computer and go, go exercise and spend time with your family. Take a nap instead of operating at 65% capacity for 100 hours a week.

1:25:06 Scott Ingram: I like it.

1:25:06 Nick Cegelski: It doesn't make sense to me.

1:25:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what have been the most important decisions you've made or lessons you've had to learn to get where you are today?

1:25:18 Nick Cegelski: I think we've touched probably the two of them. The first was it was signing up for the wrestling team in 7th grade, Scott. Like that. I mean, it changed my life. So there's number one. Number two, and frankly, this wouldn't have happened without wrestling because it was my training partner who came up to me, but it was, it was kicking off that startup. And even though we didn't finish where we wanted to on that, that thing probably accelerated my professional development a decade.

1:25:42 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great stuff. Great stuff. What advice would you give to somebody? And maybe you're in a position to do this given the coaching that you're doing. What do you tell somebody that's just starting out in their sales career today?

1:25:55 Nick Cegelski: It's you've got to sprint to get to competent as quickly as possible because most Most people are going to come out of college or they're going to go right into the workforce and they're frankly not competent. They don't know how to operate in a business environment. And I mentioned this before, but I think the way that you get like you get really good as a sales professional is you're working deals, you're having meetings, you're going through negotiations because you're quite literally living it. And you can think about, oh, I just read this great book about negotiation. Well, here I've got a customer telling me that the price is too high. How am I going to handle… how am I going to have this conversation? Like, you're taking the things you learn and you can apply it. But if you don't have a place to apply it because you're not competent, like, part of our job as sales professionals, most of us are tasked with initiating conversations with prospective customers. And if you're just sitting there screaming into like this echo chamber, not actually having real conversations with real prospective customers, you never have an opportunity to apply the things that you've learned and actually have the feedback to get better. And so So if I'm somebody that's new, I go on Google and I type in top 10 sales books related to prospecting, top 10 sales books related to discovery, top 10 sales books related to giving a demo, top 10 sales books related to negotiation. And I look at those lists and I pick 1 or 2 from each list. Now you've got, I don't know, 8 books that you have to read. And I picked this one up from this guy, Kevin Dorsey. It's the quote, stop treating your career like a hobby, and the idea that most people People put more work into their high school sport than sometimes they will into their career. And so read 8 books, 2 on each of those topics, and hopefully now you're at least baseline competent on those 4 areas and can start to fumble your way. And through fumbling and stumbling and making mistakes, you're going to learn and get better instead of, which is what I did in my first tech sales job, say, okay, here's your phone, Nick, here's the CRM, go sell something. And just like I didn't get anywhere. I spun my wheels. So the short line is sprint to get to competent as quickly as possible.

1:28:03 Scott Ingram: Nice. What about for somebody that is further in? And today, why don't we frame this in terms of maybe they were doing okay, but they got stuck just given the situation, given the challenge. What, what's your advice for them?

1:28:17 Nick Cegelski: So the advice is going to be you've got to start to be really conscious of the motions and behaviors that you're exhibiting. And this ties back to the journaling that we've talked about probably way too much today. But like, start actually taking a look at what are you doing every day. This, this show, being on this show was a really great exercise for me because it forced me to actually critically evaluate the things that I've been doing. And if you take a hard look at how you're living your life on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis, you'll start to say, oh, actually, Scott and Nick are right. Maybe I should move all my customer meetings to the afternoon because I'm way more high energy in the morning. And you make that little tweak and you do that on Monday. And then the next day you say, hey, I'm sending the same email every single day, but I'm typing it up from scratch. Let me turn this thing into a template that maybe I only need to adjust a couple of words on. So if you're like in the middle of the pack right now, start being really conscious and start looking for opportunities to be a little bit better each day. I don't know, improve by a quarter percent each day and let that thing compound. You'll get to the top way faster than you'll think.

1:29:31 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. Now I'm super curious to know how you answer the question. Since you've been listening to the show as long as you have, what would you want to know about top sellers in other organizations?

1:29:43 Nick Cegelski: I mean, it's the reason that I listen to the show, probably. And it's… I just like knowing how people are structuring their day and structuring their life. If I look at where I am in my sales career, I think I've got a lot of the pieces of things down, like the actual building blocks of how to structure a discovery call, or some of… a lot of the best practices to leading a demo. And those things continue to evolve and change. But I think for the most part, I've learned how to live the best practices for the building blocks. And so now I'm really curious about the folks who are maybe a decade ahead of me in their career and where I want to be. Like, how are they structuring their life and how are they choosing to spend their time? Because that's where I think I struggle the most. I know what to do in any given situation, But do I really need to be in said situation?

1:30:40 Scott Ingram: And I know you know this is coming because you actually prepped for it, which I thought was genius. So how do you answer that question for yourself?

1:30:48 Nick Cegelski: Well, it's funny, on the document there wasn't a like, how do you answer it yourself? And so I added it in for myself because I knew I'd have to answer it. So the real question is like, how do I know if I even need to be in that certain situation? And so again, I'm going to go back to the self- reflection side of things. And I think, I think that's where it is. I think it's on Sunday mornings when I go to Peet's Coffee and I get the large iced cold brew and I just sit down and think. I don't even bring a pen or paper or my phone. I just sit there and drink the coffee and let the caffeine hit my brain and think. That's probably the key. It's like the long-term evaluation of where I am right now. Like, where do I really want to end up being? And are the things I'm doing on a daily basis taking me in that direction? So I think it's just like the maybe, maybe spending more time instead of being in the problem or being in the flurry or being in the arena and, and spending some time like looking at it from a bird's eye view. Where am I? What am I doing on a daily basis? Where do I really want to be? And are those things going to match up eventually?

1:31:54 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's, that's so interesting. And it ties back to what you were just saying in terms of of, you know, prepping for this conversation is, is kind of a helpful process in and of itself. It's, it's interesting. There was a, a very big name, you know, sales expert, sales guru type… most of us have probably read some of their books… who, who said to me one time, they're like, yeah, you know, your premise is interesting, but, you know, most top sellers can't tell you why they're achieving that. And I'm Yeah, you know what's interesting about that is I think the reality, and again, I mean, you've been listening to this show long enough to have seen it and heard it and at this point now experienced it, is actually I think one of the reasons why they perform so well is because they have a high degree of self-awareness and they're often taking the times to think critically about what is it that I'm doing that I'm doing well, that I can be doing better, that I can improve upon, that is going to make the difference for me? Because you, you don't get to… I bet you could apply a wrestling analogy here too, right? You, you don't… you can't get to a really high level and, and really improve significantly if you haven't studied the game and studied what you're doing and really looked critically at, oh, okay, you know what, I'm holding my elbow funny, or, or, you know, there's something about this process. And I think they're totally wrong, which is why I'm not naming them. Because the reality is, it's through this introspective process. And maybe, you know, the podcast is a little bit of a forcing function, right? Maybe this has come somewhat naturally to them. But given the time to reflect and given the time to sort of process and think about, okay, this is what I'm doing. And it's actually something that that I'm getting ready to bring to the show sometime in the next handful of months. Now I've got so much other stuff on my plate, but, but it's actually creating a little bit of a process for folks to do in a really pretty easy manner, understand like what are the things that are innate to me, right? What, what are some of the strengths that I have? And using that to sort of match them up with other folks who've been on the podcast that share some of those ideas so that they can get directly at Nick is somebody that's, that's a lot like me, and I can learn from Nick and the way that he has applied the process. Because somebody who is really high-performing but isn't as disciplined in their approach and isn't as thoughtful about it, maybe they have a very different style, this conversation is not going to be helpful for them. They're not listening to me right now. It doesn't matter. I imagine they've given up, or they're just really committed and they get through all of this. Them, right? But it is that idea of this self-reflection and going through this process matters even if you're not number one, right? Even if, if you're maybe struggling, right, to, to really just dig into that and go, okay, what is it like? What is the gap? What do I need to work on? Is it my mindset? Is it a, a competency? Is it a, is it a skill? Like, what, what is this thing that is in my way? Or if you're doing really well, doesn't it make sense to kind of look at that and try and understand why you're doing well? Because maybe you can double down on that thing.

1:35:13 Nick Cegelski: Well, it's the idea the 4 stages of, of competence. You've got unconscious incompetence… you are doing it wrong but you don't even know you're doing it wrong. Then you've got conscious incompetence, where you know you're doing it wrong but you keep making the mistake. Then you've got… I think it's, it's conscience…

1:35:33 Scott Ingram: it's conscious competence.

1:35:35 Nick Cegelski: Well, it's conscious competence, and then eventually I think you move to unconscious. But correct, I almost feel like some people need to flip them, where it's like It's like we need to spend more time thinking about the areas we are competent, recognizing why we're competent in that area, and then thinking, are there other parts of my life that I could apply this framework?

1:35:56 Scott Ingram: That's really good. All right, man, let's wrap this up. Let's just go to the last question. Let's, let's let you throw down an issue, your challenge. What are you going to have the listener do over the course of the next week or 2 to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:36:09 Nick Cegelski: Super easy one. I think some people give some like really tough challenges. Mine is going to be tomorrow, after you've listened to this, find an area that you can save 1 minute in your day. Ideally, it's an area that it's something you do every single day and you can find a way to save that minute repeatedly. The next day, find another repeatable minute to save. In that week that you do this challenge, now you've found a way to save 7 minutes every single day. If I do the math, math on that. Let's see, 7 minutes times… let's just call it 365. I know we don't all work 365 days of the year, and if you do, I feel for you. But okay, we've got 2,555 minutes. Divide that by 60. Oh, 42 hours for doing this exercise for a week. You just saved yourself a week's worth of work in a year.

1:37:00 Scott Ingram: There you go. I like it. Great challenge. I'd recommend not stopping Brushing your teeth. That doesn't count.

1:37:06 Nick Cegelski: That's true. That's true. You know what you can do? Get an electric toothbrush and brush your teeth with the electric toothbrush. And I don't know, clean up the sink while you do that. That's just insane. I'm sorry. Listeners are going to… I think folks who listen to this, I hope there's not a psychologist listening to this because they are going to totally dissect me after this.

1:37:24 Scott Ingram: It'll be an interesting dissection. That was my job. I hope I've filleted you well enough and folks took away some, some great insights. I think that challenge is fascinating. My horrible toothbrushing analogy aside. And man, I'd love to hear what that was, right? What was that thing that saved you that time? Always love hearing from you guys. Feel free to ping me on LinkedIn, or you can also email me scott@top1.fm. Nick, thanks for taking the time and going through the dissection. I appreciate you, Scott.

1:37:53 Nick Cegelski: This was a blast. Thanks for having me on. 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.