(upbeat music) - Who we got for the first one? - The first one is Thomas. And he basically has a question about deep life and how that applies to sales. - Nice, all right. - Hey Cal, my name is Thomas. First, I wanted to say thank you for all that you do.

Your work has really helped me live a better life. Anyways, I work for a software development company and I'm starting my own recruiting agency as well. For both companies, my main focus is currently sales and business development. I'm usually focused on outbound sales work like calling, emailing, and curating and sharing relevant articles with prospects.

My question is how can I incorporate deep work into my role and how does it apply to sales? Also, how do you see outbound or inbound sales for that matter, evolving as buyers continue to be inundated with emails and calls? Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

- Well, Thomas, I mean, I think when it comes to any work activity, probably the relevant term, and I think you're mixing two similar terms together, but I'm gonna separate them. Probably the relevant term here is deliberate practice, maybe even more so than deep work. So deep work, and you can go back and watch my core idea video about this, is an activity, it's an activity where you give something focus without distraction.

And it's a mental state in which you produce at a high level for your cognitive capacities. I mean, clearly on a sales call, you know this, you wanna be doing just that and you don't wanna be checking your email at the same time. But I think what's really relevant here is the related topic of deliberate practice.

It's something I write about in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." How do you take this concept and apply it to the really varied and weird and kind of squishy to measure type activities that make up typical office style work? And my argument is we should be trying to do these efforts.

We should be trying to deliberately improve in the office. We should be applying deliberate practice, which means we have to design activities specifically to stretch our ability beyond where we're comfortable, using feedback to help keep us aimed in the right place. And in that stretch, we get better and better.

That's probably the key thing for sales. It's continually saying, what are the key skills here? What makes a better sales call versus a worse one? And designing activities to stretch your abilities, getting feedback to make sure that you're aimed in the right direction. And this might be something you do with mentors.

This might be something you do with studies or courses, but there's a lot of improvement to be done here and what really works and what doesn't in the type of sales that you do. And you should have the mindset of, I wanna get better at this in a month than I am right now.

And I'm not gonna be better in a month just by doing a lot more calls. I'm gonna get better by doing a lot more deliberately structured activities that stretch me in the places where I am not yet good, or I could be better. So you gotta get in the information about what matters here to design activities to stretch you.

That's how you get better and better. Once you have that mindset, the issue of the mediums changing, people aren't listening to emails as much, people are more inundated with distractions, or how do we sell better? You're gonna react to that naturally because you're already gonna be in this mindset of trying to figure out what works and stretching yourself towards what's better.

Getting back metrics, seeing what works, what doesn't, moving towards the things that do. So you'll already be in that mindset. So you'll already be shifting away from the trouble areas and towards the new modalities that work better. So that's what I would suggest. This is a deliberate practice play.

You wanna train at sales calls like an athlete training to pick up a new type of shot, like an athlete trying to get an accuracy higher. You wanna train like a chess player trying to master a new type of opening, deliberately structured work. And we do this not just for success, for the sake of success.

We do this because it makes you better than you were, which gives you more career capital. And with that career capital, you get more flexibility and autonomy over your working life, which is ultimately the whole game here is get that capital, gain control of your working life, move it towards what resonates and away from what doesn't.

All that's built on skill. The skill comes from practice. So that is the term, Thomas, I want you to have in mind is deliberate practice, not necessarily deep work. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)