What's In the Well Comes Up In the Bucket

0:03 Thank you for joining us on the Winning and Selling Podcast. I'm Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute and with me is Bill Helkamp of Reach Development Systems. And together we launched Franchise Sales Pro with a commitment to work with franchise owners and franchisees to drive sales and boost revenue. When life turns up the heat we don't rise to the occasion, we fall back on our preparation. In moments of pressure we draw from whatever we've been putting inside ourselves all along.

0:30 Like a well our inner world stores the beliefs, emotions and habits that shape our reactions. And when stress hits the bucket only brings up what's already in the well. So get a grip on the rope as Scott and I delve into what's in the well comes up in the bucket and other substantial subjects on episode 695 of the Winning and Selling Podcast. Sounds like a great topic Bill looking forward to it.

0:59 But before we do that we've got the book club where we're aligning strategy and sales by Frank's Sespenis. We're going to be covering part 2 linking strategy and sales on chapter 9. Before we get into the book club I want to share an announcement Scott. Yep. Do you have the right people on the bus and in the right seats? That's always the first step before investing in training. Because sometimes it's not about more training, it's about finding the right people first.

1:24 If you're looking to build your team for 2026 to bring in folks who can hit your activity goals and drive the results you want. It might be time to talk with a recruiter. Just head over to mnsales.com slash offers and check the box to connect with a professional recruiter. There's no obligation just a conversation. And if you'd like us to introduce you to someone who can find the right candidates for your team, fill out the short form and we'll be in touch.

1:50 Invest in your people. Invest in your future. Visit mnsales.com slash offers today. Thanks Bill. The subject from the book today is chapter 9 control systems. And the chapter opens up with some interesting information. Is that 85% of US companies use incentive plans which on average account for about 40% of the total sales compensation. This is also known as the total target compensation and is sometimes referred to as the OTE on target earnings.

2:26 So in the book they share this study that in 2012 they surveyed 700 firms. A whopping 20% reported that their comp plans had minimal or no impact on selling behaviors. That is surprised you Scott. Oh, very much. Oh, that's not as surprised to me at all. I mean, we're in the sales business and we work for commissions. So it's just. Some people work for commissions. Some people are getting so much base. Oh, well that's true.

2:53 They don't care about their commissions. Well, they run into that. The state of complacency and they're perfectly fine with the salary and there's no reason to do anything different because they like what they have and they don't want to risk it. They don't want to risk it. Or something wrong. They're making so much on their comp plan doing nothing that it's not changing their behavior. So it has a minimal impact on selling behaviors because I still make the money no matter what I do because the sales are coming in.

3:19 So I can believe that that it's not having that effect. It might be too good to be true. It is. And you know, it sounds like we're talking behind the back of people that are, you know, we are talking behind the back because the people that are interested in selling are not listening to the podcast. Well, that's right. The people that are not listening to the podcast. So we're being truthful. We may be speaking bad of them, but they're not listening.

3:43 So it's not an impact. I don't know that we're speaking bad of them. If I'm comfortable and I'm making more money than I ever thought, then it's hard to be motivated to go push beyond that boundary. And if the sales plan doesn't force me to do that, then it just doesn't happen. I'm not a bad person. I'm just doing okay. Plan it safe. Well, I mean, I just, I can always find some reason not to make those phone calls. Here's the punch line though to the study.

4:17 8.9% said their pay policy consistently drives precise selling behaviors. And this is out of the book. So that's less than 10%. Wow. That the compensation in the form of a commission or an incentive directs behavior. Here's the line that I hope that our listeners take away from this particular chapter is reward the behavior you want to instill. Reward the behavior you want to instill. So think about what do you want your team to do?

4:47 Reward them for doing it. So in this chapter, I want to cover two things. One, there's an illustration figure nine dash one that links the compensation, evaluation and motivation and starts off with the motivation. So it talks about the personal characteristics of the sales people. So these are the people that you're screening, you're interviewing, you're hiring. What are their characteristics? Also, what is the territory and what are the account characteristics?

5:13 I think this kind of falls into the category of service, selling a service versus selling a product. I think this also falls into are you building a relationship or are you selling on a transaction? I think it can also mean, I think it can also mean my territory is so big and we've run into this with clients. We fired half the sales team. My territory is so big that I can't really do much to affect it. I'm just kind of running around putting out fires, dealing with customer problems.

5:44 I can't grow it. I don't have time to grow. I don't have time to do creative things. I'm just dealing with the customers I already have. So I'm forced to be a farmer because that's all the time I have. Right. Yeah. True. And that's the job description. Do you have a sales rep or do you have an account manager? What's the compensation and what's the motivation? Another thing you talked about is the perceived link between effort, results and rewards, which is the rest of the chart that he shows.

6:15 And then he also talks about perceived value and additional rewards like recognition. I think sometimes being written up in the corporate communications or being the icon. You're getting into one million club or whatever it is. Yeah. Being on the website is the president's club. The career or building, we've got our top sales person and here come work for us. So you get additional rewards of doing that. He also talked about effort and this is the account development or maintenance.

6:42 Are we selling on new or are we maintaining the existing accounts? Are we selling on volume or are we selling on profitability? That's a big challenge we find, isn't it? It is. Most of them sell up. Most of our people we work with and have talked to, they sell on pure volume and you say that you don't even think the sales people should understand what the profitability is. That's not the job. I don't think it's relevant.

7:07 I really don't. I think that they are given a list of products and services. And here's what's really important about this step of effort is these are the objectives. So I believe that there are sales behaviors, there are objectives and there are results. Objectives are sort of the magic is in the mix. What is our product mix that we're selling? I work for a company that sold laboratory supplies in the chromatology industry and they survive primarily on selling plates and vials.

7:43 And these are consumable products within a lab. And if you could get a client to just buy those and then build that on that relationship with some of the other products that you sell. I mean, I would almost lose money on the entry level products just to gain a customer to be able to have a relationship with them and sell the greater profitable products. So if we were to set up a scorecard of we need to do 30% in this category, 30% in this category and 40% in this category.

8:10 What are the objectives of selling on each of those categories so that it's not all equal? There is a certain methodology and strategy through the objectives within the sales force and what they focus on. And then the results are last. The results are the dollar. The dollars are equal. But what you sell makes up a product mix that ends up creating a strategy and a little bit better diversity of getting entry level products that are highly consumable.

8:39 Using that as a marketing and then gaining those long term customers. I think that's one way to do it. I think it's also incumbent on salespeople to know, not necessarily what the profitability, but they should know the profitability of the deal. All right. My son works for a company. He's in the finance department. Every deal runs through finance to make sure it's profitable. And it doesn't do you any good to do a lot of selling and make no money on it at all.

9:08 And I think a salesperson has to have some responsibility to do that. You know, you talk about salespeople shouldn't be involved in negotiations because all they're going to do is do is price cuts. Well, if I'm motivated by profitability, I'm not going to be as likely to do those price cuts. So caveat to that, negotiations is trading. What are you trading for a price cut? What are you getting in return for doing that?

9:33 And that's what the salespeople are not doing. I'm fine with negotiating, but trade don't offer a concession to cut the price and not get anything in return. And here's one thing that they could get in return. Hey, how about your beta test? One of our new products, you're ready to testimonial. We do a white paper. How about we do that? Okay, great. Let's work together on that. We need customers to be able to be beta testers for us when we have a new product.

9:56 That's negotiating. And that's win-win for everybody. That's a little bit different. And then he gets on with the validation. And then lastly is the compensation plan, which the rest of the chapter kind of gets into those a little bit deeper. We want short-term goals and long-term goals. And then we also want to know, you know, how are we being measured? What's the scorecard look like? What's, you know, we can only manage what we measure.

10:20 And if we're not managing it, we really can't measure it. So that's in the book. And one thing that I found really interesting is he covers three disbeliefs. And I like to go through those and kind of discuss them. So the first one is, comp plans must be simple. Here's how simple it is. A company wins when a salesperson wins a bonus. Bingo. That's great. I mean, you should have a comp plan where every day you get up and you come in and you say, Hey, I want my salespeople to get a bonus every single day, which means they achieve the expectations.

10:53 They exercise the strategy. They achieve the goal. And guess what? We made that quota or that goal for that day. And guess what? The salesperson gets a reward for it. Everybody should be happy with that bill. Have you ever seen where that just doesn't work out that way at all? I've seen where people get mad because their salespeople are making too much money because they figured out what the plan was and they started to work the plan.

11:15 And what I would say is if you don't like what's happening, what's happening for your salespeople to get that money, you need to change the plan to force them to do more work or different work or whatever that is. But if you like your plan and your plan is bringing in new customers and your salespeople are rocking the plan, you ought to be happy even if they're making more than the sales manager is making. Exactly. Exactly.

11:44 As they should. I mean, just like a football player makes more than the coach. It's just the way it works. Here's one thing from the book that I don't really agree with 100% and I'm curious on your feedback on it. As far as predictability, it's the market that ultimately determines predictability and volatility not the comp plan. And I'm not really sure that I believe that 100% because I think that salespeople can go out there with the unique selling proposition to find the ideal customer profile and to be able to find a motivation for somebody to buy from them today.

12:22 Salespeople just have to work a little harder to find a qualified prospect that's willing to become a customer client. I don't think so. I think the market is going to have an effect on every person's sales. The market changes. A new player comes into the marketplace with different value. Somebody comes in, we've got overseas, the Asia pack, much cheaper labor costs that are going to affect it. You might have a law that comes in.

12:55 The government creates a law that almost puts you out of business. These are things that can affect the marketplace outside of the control of the sales person. Now that doesn't give them free rein to say, well, I'm not going to sell anything because of that. We got a client who can't produce enough stuff. It's tough for the sales person to sell from an empty bucket, an empty cart. So I think those things are going to affect that sales person.

13:22 If it gets too bad, you've got to go find another job. Well, I mean, tariffs kind of fall into that category. And I think if a salesperson is finding a need and tariffs are an acceptable part of the formula, I mean, you've got to be able to create enough value and create an emergency where the client still wants to buy regardless of the tariff. Well, and everybody's subject to the tariff. Right. We got to look at the excuses that we give, whether they can be true like tariffs, but also can be true for everybody.

13:55 Nobody's getting the steel cheaper from China as they used to. Right. And so that tariff might be affecting you, but it's going to affect everybody else that's selling something made out of that particular material. But there are some things, you know, if a new competitor comes to the market, you talked about loss leaders. I'm willing to sell this as a loss. Right. Well, you've got some people that are out there willing to sell everything at a loss.

14:20 My father-in-law opened the Chinese market for caterpillar tractors. His biggest frustration was caterpillar tractor had to make a profit every quarter. And Komatsu was looking at a 25-year horizon to take the whole market. So now what do you do? They're building a good machine and they're willing to sell it for a lot less and not make any money on it because they got a 25-year horizon. And your boss is going, Hey, we didn't make a profit this quarter.

14:46 Right. So there's a market shift now the advantage he had was, and you're talking about advantages. Yeah. They chined a market wanted caterpillar. Yeah. They wanted the American, one of the American made products. So he could sell it for more because that was a desired product over there. Yeah. Yeah. Very true. The next one is we pay for results, not process. So these are disbelieves. And this reinforces the objectives as to what is the product mix.

15:16 So not all money has the same value. There are other products, other revenue that have more value in the big picture and in the strategy. So we must really know what works and how to improve it if it doesn't work. So we are getting within the process. And we need to be able to identify a formula of what percentage are we going to target that's new revenue within a month. If we're a sales rep and our job is to go out and get new customers, what is that percentage every single month of the revenue that needs to come from new business that we didn't have x months ago?

15:48 You know, whatever that is. And I would like to think that it's 40% or 60% depending on how I'm concerned. I certainly believe that we should pay more for new business than for old business. They should be compensated for new business in the form of a commission versus maintaining business. Right. I believe in that. Now he talked a lot about also the other type of objectives. How many phone calls do you make? How many appointments do you have?

16:14 Activity goals. I don't think those should be based. I wouldn't want to see all the details that has to go into trying to base your compensation on that. But I do think those can be triggers. If you don't make enough phone calls, you're not going to be eligible for other compensation. If you don't do enough of these activities, if you're not feeling not your activity report every month, if you're not using the CRM, then we're not going to give you your commission or your commission by because you're not following the rules.

16:45 But I don't want to make commission based on all these little things. Right. Right. And I've seen incentive programs that can get very segmented is you get 25% if you show up for work this day. You get 25% if you end up adding up the ticket and you get more than the original order. You get 25% if all of a sudden you start looking at different stuff and it's like, wow, I got to do all of this to get 100% of the commission.

17:10 Yeah, that's kind of the way it works. Right. And that's when you said what gets measured gets motivated. Right. And you know, reward the behavior you want to instill too. Right. So, but I don't think it all has to be completely mixed in with how much you make on every deal, but it can be the trigger to say whether you're going to get that commission or not. Right. Yeah. There's rules that have to be followed. All right.

17:36 Number three is money is the only motivator. Now, we had Dr. Croner on the show a couple of weeks ago and we know that that's not true. I think recognition and we talked about other rewards earlier that are in the book that Frank Sesbeth talks about. That's recognition. And then a sense of accomplishment and achievement carry more weight of meaning and purpose and value on a sales person that money does. Now, money is all part of the formula.

18:02 It's all part of the overall compensation and hopefully that's a great motivation for sales people. But money is not the only motivator. There are so many other things that influence a person's behavior besides money. Well, I think too, you know, I get a lot more jacked about a new customer than I do about working again with an older customer. I get really excited by developing that new relationship and starting that new customer.

18:26 I think that's a lot of fun. So, that can be a type of recognition just in of itself. Right. And you can look back and you go, Hey, look, I did this and I did this and this new customer came out of the work that I did. It wasn't just like it fell out of a tree or it wasn't a lead. I did the right things and I created this thing. And I think that's can be a lot of fun. We talked early on as we opened up, but you get the President's Club and things like that.

18:49 That might be motivators. I can remember when I was working for a large company wanting to be in the President's club, but that got me excited. You're going to go to the National Convention. You know, if you get in the President's Club, it's going to be paid for. Right. So it's a financial thing and a recognition thing. So I think there's a lot of those things going on. I always find it interesting. Are you really having conversations with your salespeople so you know what motivates them?

19:19 Or as a sales manager, do you have absolutely no idea and everybody is painted with the same brush? Well, and that's what chapter 10 is about next week or the week after that. But let me just kind of build on that. Just one more line I want to put in on the book is that linking the performance evaluation processes is important because sometimes companies confuse pay with performance management. So they think if I'm paying you a commission, I don't have to have a sales manager that's leading you and influencing you and directing you and mentoring you because you have a commission.

19:56 They work together. We need to be able to have leadership direct our sales team because they're the ones that are managing the company and the revenue and where salespeople are spending their time. So it needs to be pay and performance management when it comes to a good comp plan. Agreed. So next chapter, chapter 10, we're going to talk about the role of a sales manager and measuring their effectiveness and giving performance feedback and building field capabilities, which is really important on developing the salespeople. So this is reinforcing my point about market condition influences versus building a field capacity to be able to sell against the market, sell against the objections,

20:40 sell against those trends that are holding you back from achieving your goals. And we can't just say, well, what will be will be we need to be able to be proactive on developing our sales skills so that we can adapt as the market changes and we can maintain competitiveness. So I want to leave just one thing, reward the behavior you want to instill when it comes to compensation in salespeople. Before we get into the topic, I have an announcement.

21:04 All right. Sales rep can be a daunting proposition. Some sales leaders put up with underperforming salespeople because they are afraid of the hiring risk. So what are the reasons the process goes badly? According to a number of studies, there are three main reasons new sales reps fail. First is misaligned expectations. Some people hope that selling will be easy and when they have to prospect, they face rejection and cave.

21:28 Second is the failure to fill the funnel. This often happens when salespeople believe that they will close at too high of a percentage so they will need less prospects. And the third and final one is you have an inconsistent follow up plan, meaning they give up too easily when the prospect hesitates. Wouldn't it be great to know if a candidate you are hiring has the passion and perseverance to really accomplish a sales process?

21:55 You can if you're using an assessment that measures the candidate's core competencies that have been shown to predict sales performance. The winning of selling podcast has partnered with the group whose sales person's assessment will measure those competencies that are essential to success. To learn more, go to mnsales.com slash offers. All right. Back to you Bill. All right. Thanks for that Scott. So our topic today is what's in the well comes up in the bucket.

22:22 So do frustration, fear, resentment, if these things are kind of building in you and challenges hit, that's what's going to spill out. All right. If you're filling yourself with gratitude and discipline and perspective, good ideas, that's what's going to come up when the challenge is hit. So becoming better under pressure isn't about learning tricks for crisis management. It's about managing what fills your well in the first place.

22:48 And that means only adding better input, but also stopping the things that pollute the source. I heard once you can't unpickle a pickle. Pickle is pickled. And the only way you can unpickle it is slowly adding more and more water. So you take out the pickling process. So, so what do you stop putting in your well? What are what do you stop inculcating yourself with in order to to start to clean it up. All right. Negative media and energy drains. I'll tell you, Scott, this is a bad one for me. I like to listen to talk radio. I like to listen to, you know, watch YouTube videos about things that are going on.

23:33 And, you know, the good thing, the thing that's good about computers is they feed you only what you want to hear. And so, so there's just a constant stream of outrage and fear and blame and emotional imbalance. And there's only one thing you can do. Stop listening to all that crap. Fill your mind with something better. Yeah. Yeah. So true. Take a day off from social media and see how you feel. Yep. Get away from toxic people. You know, there's conversations. We're in the workplace. Now, Scott and I, we were the only toxic influences on each other.

24:14 But there's people at work. We've trained them. Right. And they're nasty. There's some people at work. They gossip and they have negative things to say about everybody. They're cynical. They complain about everything that happens. Limit your exposure to these people. Be willing to just walk away from a conversation that's not going anywhere. Hey, I got some work I got to do. Thanks for your good chat with you. Yeah. Hope that works out well for you. Good luck. Yeah. Get back to doing something good.

24:51 I was, I heard a story the other day about confronting people about things. So Winston Churchill was at a big affair. Winston Churchill and the Queen and they were at this big thing. And one of the, one of the servers came up to the Queen and said, we have a problem. One of our distinguished guests is Stold Stold Assault Shaker. And these were like gold salt shakers that went back to King George. So these weren't like, wasn't like, you know, some junkie little salt shaker.

25:21 And they didn't know what they're going to do. They didn't know how to confront this person. So Winston Churchill said, I'll take care of it. And he took the pepper, the matching pepper shaker and he stuck it in his pocket. And when he saw that person that they thought had stolen the other one by themselves, he went up and pulled the pepper pot out and he said, I think they are, they're on to us. We better put these back. Clever. And so instead of being, you know, challenging that person, he made himself one with them. And now we both have to, to get better at this. So I thought that was good.

25:56 Great story. Anyway, okay, number three, self criticism and perfectionism. This is not my problem. I'm a critic of myself, but it's not so bad that I expect perfectionism. But I have certainly run into people and this may be, you know, your type A personality. They won't do anything if they can't do it perfectly. And so what they end up is doing a lot of nothing. Right. If you run into people like that. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the procrastination of perfectionism. Go hand in hand.

26:26 And what you mean by that was procrastination. People want it. People want it to be perfect so they don't even start. Oh, okay. And they want it to be perfect and never finish. So they're always working on it. What is going to be said that most, most good decisions, if you got about 60 to 80% of the information go with it. Right. That last little bit's just never going to change enough to make the difference. So be careful that perfectionism.

26:52 And then you don't need to beat yourself up. You can look at something and then move on. If you made a mistake, look at that move on. I think all of us have woken up in the middle of the night. Our brains rolling and we think of something stupid. We did 15 years ago. Wow. And I can feel my ears turn red again, but it doesn't do any good. It's over and it's done with don't do it again if it embarrasses you, but don't have to beat yourself up.

27:18 You got to forgive yourself first before you can expect other people to forgive you. Yeah. I think another reason that we do badly in a stressful situation is we don't get enough rest. We're just not, we're running an empty all the time. I used to stay up late all the time, stay up till midnight. I kind of liked that alone time that I had. And yet I was so tired in the morning. It took me forever to get going. My wife was in bed for two hours before I went into bed.

27:46 And so, so, you know, we didn't have time to talk. It was kind of a separate life. So I had to change my lifestyle and I get a good night sleep every night. Now I get to bed, you know, 9, 30, 10 o'clock, do a little bit of reading and I'm and I'm shutting her down. And so I can get up at six, get my day started and have no problem. But if I try to sleep and stay up till midnight and then get up at six, it's not going to work out well.

28:10 So get enough sleep, have some time to think about what's going on. I think this is one thing I haven't done that either a Sunday night reflection a Monday morning reflection. Think about your week. Let's get things started off on a good foot. Do you do that self reflection? I try to get to bed before 10 every single night. And I love taking about an hour before I get out of bed, just kind of simmering and reflecting on the day and and what I got to really get ready for. And when I'm in that sort of that state, my stress level is down.

28:43 My creativity is high and I'm able to work out some things that I think are fine that I might find challenging during the day. If I try to simmer, I just go back to sleep. So I have to get up. I can't I can't lay in bed beds for sleeping. Let's get going. All right. So that's what to try and take out of your head. Now, what do we what do we put in the well? What are some things that we should put in? Well, these are not going to be out of the realm of possibility, I think, for most of us.

29:10 Positive mentors and role models. Start listening to people who are where you want to be and who are the type of person that you want to be. Get around people that elevate your thinking and cause you to try to be to be better. And this doesn't have to be just somebody you know. Listening to a podcast of somebody who's positive. That can be really good for you. Listening to reading a good book. I can't stress enough how much, you know, our book program is helpful for us, but it wouldn't be helpful if we weren't reading it.

29:47 Right. Just listening to us is not enough of that. Grab these books that we're talking about. I'm excited about our next one. I'm not going to talk about it yet, but I got an our next book's all lined up. We're going to have the author kicking it off again. We've been enjoying the ability to do that. I think the authors enjoy it as well. Get around people who have gone through challenges and come out the other end and can give you hope. I think that's that's really important and understand how important resilience is.

30:18 Good advice in episode 698. We're going to be talking about do I need a mentor. So stay tuned for that episode. All right. Good. All right. Second thing. We talked about this a little bit. Let's focus in on reading inspirational and educational reading. If you have a faith life, your faith reading can be very important. There's some very kind, nice, thoughtful people that talk about your faith and how that faith can guide you and cause you to make better decisions.

30:48 That can be something that's very important for you. Both Scott and our Christians and we both have a faith reading plan. Biographies of leaders, biographies of people who have overcome things. I love to read how to win friends and influence people a little old fashioned, but his stories are nice. They make me think about the way that I act around people. I like reading Agman Nino's books. Those are books of hope where people are challenged and they turn their life around.

31:17 I just think getting yourself a reading program about how to be a better person is going to help you aspire toward being a better person. In the strength finders test, I come up as learners, my number one strength. So when I feel down, if I just start reading a book, first page, I'm already up. I'm just already jazzed. I'm already ready to go. So play to your strengths when you are thinking about what inspires you. And you may notice that every time we have a guest on Scott asked a question about their favorite book or author because he finds that to be so useful.

31:50 All right. What do you do in health wise? Right. What are your health habits? Are you working out or you just sit in the hot tub and hope that things get better? Oh wait, that's guy. I do. I do that. I have no problems in the hot tub. They're all gone. Well, I'll tell you, I think using some physical exercise, getting out and burning a little sweat off. I love to play pickleball gets me sweating. I like the activity. It's easy for us to just sit in a chair and have kind of entertainment flow around us.

32:25 So I think having some healthy physical habits, also some healthy emotional habits. You know, a nice walk in the afternoon on a fall day can be just a very pleasant experience with your thoughts and thinking about that and being tired at the end of the day from physical activity can be a good thing. Fourth one, gratitude and reflection. One of the most important things I ever talked about faith life a little bit. Part of my prayers every night is to say what I'm thankful for.

32:56 And by having a thankful attitude, you end up having less of a selfish attitude. I don't think I'm owed anything. But if you have an attitude that says you, I'm owed this because of who I am or what I am or where I am or whatever, you're going to be in trouble because you're not going to get everything that you want. And so are you going to be grateful for what you have? You know, kind of like a positive mental attitude, Scott. It's not that you find a parking place that's really close to the door.

33:28 It's that you're happy with whatever parking place you find. It's like gratitude and criticism cannot occupy the same space. That's a great, great point. Finally, we've talked about this in a couple of other ways, but faith and core values, right? What are the deepest values that you have and are you going to live them? One of the exercises I do when I'm coaching somebody is a values test and have them go over what their values are and how they're using those values and what are the barriers to achieving those values?

34:01 That value position in their life. So if it's integrity, what are the barriers that they face toward being in a person of integrity? Because those values aren't easy to get to. But if you're not aspiring to greatness, what are you aspiring to? My company name is Reach Development Systems. I always like to quote, reach for the stars. You may not get them, but you won't wind up face down in the mud. So are you reaching for greatness or are you reaching for common?

34:31 What do you say? What are you putting into your head? What are you reading about? Are you talking about gratitude and are you staying healthy? I think those are the important steps to fill that bucket with great input instead of bad input. Stop pouring in negativity, start filling your bucket with truth, gratitude and strength. Great advice. All right. So our resources again check out mnsales.com slash offers. We got a few options there.

35:03 And our golden nugget today is we become what we think about. Earl Nightingale I think was the first person that wrote that and that's from his 1956 classic book The Strange is Secret. But Brian Tracy has also been credited to something very similar to that as well. I don't know. I would have become a girl or a beer in college. How many cars do you think about? Cars and sports. So everything that we've talked about today references to it, winning at selling.com.

35:33 You can go there and plug into the podcast or you can go on your favorite streaming source and get the podcast there. Winning at selling.com. This is episode 695. Next week we're going to have a guest Paul Benkey is going to be talking about your biggest objection maybe in your own head. I'm looking forward to that one and Paul always delivers a great message. The following week we'll be covering aligning strategy and sales with Frank Sespittis chapter 10.

36:01 So please subscribe and share this podcast with your colleagues on your social media networks. We'd be grateful for a five star review and posted a favorable comment. If not favorable, please tell us directly. Go on and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.