14th of March, what are these? Diogenes. I've got something for you. Don't let yourself off the hook. All right? Diogenes. Zeno would also say that nothing undermines a solid understanding more than self-deception. Who is the easiest person to lie to? Yourself. Yourself. Absolutely. I don't mean the Greek guy. Yourself. Yeah, he owns the Greek restaurant in town. Great.

great hummers by the way guys, check it out. So don't let yourself off the hook. I've been doing some coaching with somebody recently and they set unrealistic targets. And I said like, are setting yourself up for failure here. They said, no, no, no, I'm going to do it. And then the next week they hadn't hit it. And there was all these kinds of excuses. And I think it's very easy to come up with excuses. The human brain is wired to find a reason as to why you've not completed it. But actually, if you say you're going to do something, set something for the year, don't let yourself off the hook. Don't give up so easily. Commit to the bit, whatever that bit is. And I feel like a real powerful way to do this is really understanding your why. Before you do anything, why am I doing this? And then that way, I know that every single day when times are tough, because whatever you commit to it is going to be difficult. There are going to be challenges and there are going to be days that you probably don't feel like picking up the phone.

How do you actually say no? The reason I do this, I remind myself that this gets me from A to B. Nice. Give me an example then. Well, it could be anything from call blocks and making sure you commit to them. It could be anything from that. Let's talk about KPIs. Okay. And I might get emotional on this, but I think KPIs are bulls**t. Sorry, mate. I think KPIs are bulls**t. Da da da. Okay. And the reason I say that is I think it's very 90s sales manager.

to say you need to make 60 dials a day and do two hours talk time. I've worked in those call centers and you know what I used to do? I used to ring Derek at the Italian restaurant because I liked him and we'd talk for an hour. Des. Des. Or I'd call the talking clock or I'd call the same number a few times to get the numbers up. Whatever you put in place, if the mission is dials or talk time, people will find a way around that to kind of play the game. What you should reward...

are great conversations because great conversations lead to meetings and revenue and things like that. So that's why I feel strongly about KPIs. On the flip side of that, I do think that actually if you're only making two dials a day and the results aren't there, well then there's a conversation to be had and input and output are very kind of key drivers. If the result isn't there, then a lot of the time probably dialing up the input. If you book three meetings, you're only making three calls a day, great.

do that, whatever's working for you, do that. If you're not getting the results you need to get, you probably need to do it. So if you were holding yourself accountable, why I need to do 30, 50, 60 dials today. Every time I do a dial, I'm going to do a cross. I need 20 conversations every time. And I'm going to do that. And I'm not going to get to 17 and give up because I've said that this is what I'm going to do. Talk about the early days before.

before I was... just round your point off there? Yeah, please. alright? Yeah, please. I hope you don't mind. Just jump in here. Jump in this grave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I think sometimes as salespeople, you have these moments where you think, this is tough or this is like harder than I thought or what am doing with my life or whatever it may be. The question to ask yourself is, are you who you say you are? And it's OK if you're not. But are you who you say you are? Are you who you said you were to your employer, to yourself, to your family, whoever it is that you're doing it for?

are you who you said you are. And if you're not, it's fine to throw in the towel and say, you know what, I'm going to go and be an estate agent or whatever else like other jobs are available. But it's fine to knock it on the head and not do it. But hopefully just having that thought should remind you of why you're doing it in the first place and get you back in the right gear. you wouldn't ask me something about the early days, wouldn't you? Well, we had a rule in the early days. So the business started with you. A few months later, I come into the business and we talk constantly when I was in that dark place. And I don't mean in my mind, there was a little dark corner that I used to dial in couple of kids' face. But you had rules in place of things that you needed to do. Talk me through that. So one of the rules would be like, so let's say a client said, I need one meeting a day. Right. So I would say rather than just like that has this never ending finish line. I'd say, well, if they want one meeting a day, I will stop at two. So when I've got two meetings, that's enough.

That would be what I would do in the early days to make that work a bit better. But what I would also do for myself is when I was growing the business is I would set myself that same target. So for Wham, it would be, I've got to book myself two meetings a day. Right. So two meetings a day becomes 40 meetings a month. If I sit 40 meetings a month and I can't get one person to say, yes, I'm in the wrong job, but it allows you to set yourself these goals that there is a finish line.

But it's a finished line that over exceeds what your targets are. And when you get there, the work stops, but it just keeps you going. There's a thing that I read about if you're a job, which a lot of sales jobs are where it's like clock watching. You've got, I'm just here from nine to five doing the job. Like that can feel a bit brutal. And actually you then can't get in flow state. That's what it was saying. Like, because you're thinking of time, you can't get in flow state. When you think about flow state, it's the absence of time. I was having just, I was just in the zone.

So you can play different games that aren't focused on just the clock. Great things can happen if you focus on, you know, you got the first person to get a meeting today gets this reward or you're on the leaderboard or you get this feedback. We did the thing at Christmas, didn't we? Where we had the one vent calendar and the one vent calendar was everybody booked a meeting. We got to five o'clock. They get put into a draw. A wheel gets spin bang. They get a prize and what kind of prizes did they get? They were sick. There was a Kim Jong Un calendar.

Kim Jong Un calendar, a label maker. There was a luxury cheese set, but it had no cheese in it. Yeah. And Amazon, uh, I didn't ever do that. Yeah. And Amazon Kindle, a voucher. There some good prizes. Exactly. getting people to play a game that wasn't against the clock got them in flow state. And we had one of the best December's, which is normally a stressful month that we've maybe ever had. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, I think one of the most important things is defining what, what the bit is. Define gravity.

nice. I think it's defining what the bit is. like, what is the bit that moves it forward? Because in the early days, there was many different things that we wanted to do from creating a website, designing a banner, doing podcasts, doing straight to video, LinkedIn content, doing a newsletter. There was all these ideas, but actually we knew that the bit that drove the revenue were just booking meetings consistently. So most of the time there are other things that distract us, but it's about doing the obvious thing and keeping with that and then holding yourself accountable to that, not letting yourself off the hook. Beautiful stuff. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember you will die. Jack's much smaller than you realize.