How to Sell More in Less Time, with Jill Konrath [Episode 331]

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Joining me on this episode is my friend Jill Konrath. Jill is a speaker, sales expert, and author of multiple bestselling books, including Selling to Big Companies, Snap Selling, Agile Selling, and her latest book, More Sales, Less Time.

Among the many topics that Jill and I discuss are how she came to focus on selling more in less time, what she learned from her research about concentration, focus and how to eliminate distraction that waste selling time, how to make the most of the limited hours available each, and how you can take the More Sales, Less Time Challenge.

Key Takeaways

• After Jill wrote SNAP Selling, about selling to frazzled customers, readers asked her how to simplify their own lives. She had no idea how to help them, so she researched it.
• Research shows multitasking is an illusion. Learn what happens when you try to jump between two tasks and refocus your attention.
• How often the average sales person checks their cell phone each day. And how each interruption reduces productivity.
• To write More Sales, Less Time, Jill used herself as a test subject for the before and after metrics for each new strategy she tried.
• Jill shares how using your willpower impacts your ability to make decisions.
• Jill’s Time Master Manifesto sets rules to manage time, starting with getting seven-and-a-half hours of sleep nightly.
• How you should start each business day before turning on your computer and checking your email.
• Two books to assist salespeople in learning how to prioritize are Essentialism, and The One Thing.
• Challenge the status quo at all times, looking for a better way to achieve the end result.
• Jill shares the value of scheduling your activities into blocks of time. You are most productive while focusing on one activity.

More About Jill Konrath

What’s your most powerful sales attribute?

The quality of my questions. They’re penetrating; they’re insightful; they make people think; and I get a lot of good information that I can then translate into what I share later.

Who is your sales role model?

Neil Rackham, when I started, but today it’s new territory, and I scan a lot of people, and pick and choose what I need.

What’s one book that every salesperson should read?

There are so many. It depends on what you’re selling, and what you need at a particular time.

What music is on your playlist right now?Podcasts only, but when I write, the Focus@Will app.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul 0:56

It’s time to accelerate! Hi, I’m your host, Andy Paul. Join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales, marketing, sales automation, sales process, leadership, management, training, coaching, any resource that I believe to help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business and most importantly, you. 

Joining me today is my friend, Jill Konrath. Everybody knows her, speaker, sales expert and author of multiple best selling books, Selling to Big Companies, Snap Selling, Agile Selling, and her latest book we’re going to talk about today, More Sales Less Time. Jill Konrath, welcome to Accelerate.

 

Jill Konrath 1:41

Andy, thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be here today.

 

Andy Paul 1:44

Oh, such a pleasure to have you here. So in the off chance of someone listening who’s never heard of you, take just a quick second. Introduce yourself, maybe tell us how you got your start in sales.

 

Jill Konrath 1:53

I started in sales at Xerox Corporation and was cold calling in the streets of St. Paul, and literally cold calling in St. Paul in the winter.

 

Andy Paul 2:01

Yeah, because 7 months of the year or ten months of the year, it’s cold.

 

Jill Konrath 2:05

I know, absolutely. And after that I moved into technology sales, and then I started selling different kinds of services. And then I started my own consultancy. And then finally after that, actually, my business collapsed and I had to rebuild it. And everything I learned was the impetus for writing my very first book, Selling to Big Companies. And then since then my business has been about sharing my knowledge and helping other people.

 

Andy Paul 2:28

Okay, it’s what you do to a large audience of people. So you’ve written a new book, which I want to talk to you about today, which I highly recommend, as all your books. I really enjoyed reading it and cursing you at the same time. Because I was downloading all these, you talked on one hand about getting all these apps off your phone, and then you suddenly had all these great suggestions for new apps to use. I’m just downloading all these new apps to my phone. I’m unbalanced. I have the same number of apps on my phone before I started. But anyway, nonetheless, I’m anxious to use some of them. So what was the impetus to write this book? I mean, it’s about personal productivity. And why now? Why this?

 

Jill Konrath 3:11

Well let me just say that after Snap Selling came out, which is all about selling to crazy busy people, I kept hearing from people, oh my god, Jill, this has really been helpful. It’s working, but I’m crazy busy, too. What do you have for me? And invariably, I’d look at them and go, I don’t have a clue. I’m swamped as well. And this was nagging at me for a number of years. 

And finally, what happened is I said, literally, I am so sick and tired of being crazy busy all the time. There has got to be a better way that I can run my business, do more sales, and do it without working from the moment I get up till I shut down in the evening and working nonstop. So that was the impetus. I wanted a life. I wanted to be able to do more in less time.

 

Andy Paul 4:04

Yeah. Well, it’s sort of interesting. Part of when I was reading the book, I was thinking, okay, well, why care so much at this stage of your career? You’ve been so successful, you could ride off into the sunset and be successful. So what is it you’re seeing that said, okay, god, this is so urgent for me?

 

Jill Konrath 4:29

Well, first of all, by nature, I am a problem solver. And I see sales challenges, and I delve into them, and I explore them, and I figure out how to share what I learned with other people. That is what I do. I do it in my spare time. I can’t not do it. But what I saw literally is is that everybody I’m talking to is saying, oh my god, I’m just exhausted. I feel like I’m always at work. There’s no escaping this thing anymore. It’s just driving me crazy. 

So that was, on one hand, what I was hearing. It’s a sales challenge. And again, I like sales challenges. I hate them when they’re mine. But I like other people’s sales challenges. So I knew that it was a huge issue, and I just want to say, why else? Last year I went to  CEBs conference, The Challenger Salespeople. And they were sharing their information on the challenger customer and what it took to sell to groups of people and how to mobilize different groups to get orders through. 

And I said to the two authors after the conference while we were talking, hey, you guys, that was your latest research. What is your current research showing you? And they said, without a doubt our new research is saying that sales rep overwhelm is the number one issue facing organizations today. 

 

Andy Paul 5:53

And I wonder, how much of that do you think is generated by one of the other issues you’re really talking about in the book a lot, which is we’re in a different world now where there’s nonstop distractions available to us. And given that we’re living digitally, both in our personal lives and our professional lives, we have this seamlessness between the two that these distractions really feel like part of work almost to some degree. And as you said, it extends the day. Like you said, you’re never off.

 

Jill Konrath 6:27

Research is showing that smartphone carrying professionals are working about 13.5 hours a day. Or if they’re not working, they are connected to work doing something, whether it’s reading emails or following up on something 13 and a half hours a day. That is mentally exhausting, and no human being in the world has the capacity to keep at that level of performance for any period of time. That’s the reality. We are human creatures, and literally our brain is not able to spend that much time concentrating and doing our best work.

 

Andy Paul 7:00

And multitasking is really a myth. It’s funny. I was at a conference last week, and this guy was giving a really good presentation about the multi-generational workforce. Now we have this unique situation, we’ve got these five generations in the workforce. And we’ve got what he hesitated to call the millennials. But the millennials, and one of the hallmarks was they multitask. They think they’re multitasking, right?

 

Jill Konrath 7:26

Right. There is no such thing. Research shows, if you go into brain science at all that the human brain is not capable of doing two things concurrently. What it does is it shifts and it goes, okay, I’m gonna focus here, then I’m going to quick focus over there. Then I’m gonna go focus here again. And you go back and forth. And every time that you switch from one thing you’re working on to another thing, you actually slow everything down. Every task you’re working on takes 20 to 40% longer.

 

Andy Paul 7:53

And there’s this time gap, too, when you have to shift. I read once so it’s like once you interrupt to check your phone, for instance, and then you go back to work, it takes 30 seconds to a minute for your brain to recalibrate back to what you were doing.

 

Jill Konrath 8:07

I think some other research I read said that it takes 10 to 20 times the length of the interruption to actually recover and to be back where you were at. So say you were working on a proposal or you had a big presentation that you were working on with an upcoming client, and you just went to check email. Of course, when you went to check email, what happened is you saw something that was interesting. 

You went down that rabbit hole and clicked on a link to something else. And then you were on LinkedIn, because you thought of something while you were on there. And so you go to LinkedIn, and you check out something, and that leads to something else. And pretty soon you get back to your presentation that you were working on. 

You’ve gone maybe five or six different routes just because you wanted to check one email. And now you have to get your head back in gear, and it maybe took you five minutes. So 10 times that, think of the lost human productivity that we have just because we slide down into that world of distraction, and we live in it. And it’s horrible.

 

Andy Paul 9:04

Yeah, you talk about saving an hour or two a day. You could just do the math and say, okay, I think you have the statistic in there, your average person checks their cell phone 34 times a day or something like that. And so even if you assume it just took a minute to recover from every time you checked your cell phone, you’re talking about half an hour right there. That’s a quarter of the two hours you’re trying to save or add to your day, if you will, which is just amazing. 

So one thing I really liked about the book is that you used your– I identify with so much of what you said in terms of the pre or the current Jill, or before writing the book, Jill. I get swept into those rabbit holes all the time. So when you start looking at how to improve things, you really used yourself as the guinea pig to test all these things, which I thought was a lot of fun. So you became like your own personal productivity test dummy, if you will.

 

Jill Konrath 9:58

Oh, yeah. I failed a lot of tests along the way. And I was really quite discouraged for a while because it’s not easy to change what you’re doing. And I had to step back and recognize that I had slowly, over time, developed these habits and these ways of working that were no longer serving me. But I didn’t understand how to change things. 

And so, of course, like everybody who’s really distracted and really busy, the first thing I did is I just tried all these little sales hacks. People say, well, if you do this, it’ll save you a second a day or something. And there’s 100 gazillion articles on sales hacks, 21 sales hacks to save you 21 minutes a day or whatever. 

And I tried all those. And the reality of it is that sales hacks save you many seconds, but they don’t get to the root cause of the issue. And the root cause is how we’re working is actually not right. We have to literally change a lot of things. And I found that I personally did not have the willpower to be disciplined. In fact, you’ll laugh when I say this, but I really came to hate certain people

 

Andy Paul 11:12

Based on what they were writing about and how you could ?

 

Jill Konrath 11:15

No, no, no. I just hated those people who were able to be so blasted disciplined that they said, yeah, from tomorrow I’m going to be organized, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to get up at 5:30 every morning. And I’m going to exercise for 45 minutes, and I’m going to sit down and do this and that. They were so disciplined. I just hate them, because I was not able to control it. And I know I’m not supposed to do that. But I just lacked the willpower. 

And then my research shows that you’re only given a bucket of willpower a day. you know, Here’s this bucket of willpower, Jill. And if you use it up ahead of time, you’re going to run out. And what I found is that I was using it up ahead of time because I kept allowing myself to be tempted away from what I was doing. And what I didn’t realize is that every single decision we make like checking email or going to our emails, every email is a decision. And every decision we make wears out our brain. And if we’re trying to resist it, here I am trying to resist. Don’t go there. Don’t go there, Jill. My brain is going, oh god, this is hard work. 

And by 9:00, 10:00 in the morning, my willpower would be shot and then I’d say, I’m such a failure. There’s no way I can control this. And then I finally realized that I had to put a fire wall around me with the distractions, the distractions themselves, the world that I lived in. And every seller lives in that world, too. The online digital world is like you’re swimming in a sea of temptation. Look here, click here. And savvy marketers are doing everything in their power to attract us away from our work. And we fall victim to it, because they’re so good at what they do. And we are losing our working time. It’s tragic.

 

Andy Paul 13:07

Right, I agree. And I wouldn’t put the onus just on marketers. I think it’s our technology lives that we live, Facebook, for instance. It’s amazing. I’m not as avid a Facebook users as 99% of people out there. But think about you’re a junior sales rep and you’re checking between calls. Think about how distracting that is when you then have to say, okay, I have to be focused on this customer when I’m calling them. And this distraction, I think, is a huge issue. Why aren’t more people asking good questions? Well, because they’re not listening to the answers they’re getting to the previous question because they’re distracted. So they don’t know the next question to ask.

 

Jill Konrath 13:57

I’ll tell you, Andy, you know what really helped me to deal with this? When I finally understood that when I went online, there’s a part of my brain called the amygdala, which is the fight or flight response that we all have. It’s an ancient primitive part of our brain. But when you go online, the amygdala actually steps forward. And it says, here, I got this brain. Because now I’m in a new world with all these things. 

And that amygdala’s job is to go out and scan the horizon and goes, anything new out here? I’m watching for danger, so literally goes out there and looks for something new. Of course, there we are in our online world, and we get a bing here and, oh, here’s a link there. And oh, here’s a new update on Facebook. Oh, let me check this. 

And that’s our amygdala doing its job and our body is literally rewarded for noticing. So every time we notice something, we get a shot of dopamine. Dopamine is a feel good hormone. Dopamine makes us want more. So literally it becomes an addiction, and you get twitchy if you can’t, I gotta check it out. You know what I’m saying? 

 

Andy Paul 15:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It made perfect sense. When I was reading the book, I was laughing because I was so right on point in so many respects. So I want to spend some time talking about your time manifesto in which you created this avatar of yourself as the time master. And you had a manifesto you published a number of items on. I thought it’d be fun to go through some of these. Because I think some are really essential that really get overlooked in terms of managing time, being more productive with the time you have, starting with the importance of sleep.

 

Jill Konrath 15:39

Yeah, isn’t that interesting? You mentioned that I became the experiment. I became the sleep experiment, too. And I had always believed that I could do my job on six and a half hours of sleep. That was macho man or Superwoman here saying I can get by on six and a half hours of sleep. But once I actually started testing my sleep, I found that there was a significant difference in my productivity the next day if I had a decent night’s sleep. 

And for me, the personal time I needed was to get at least seven and a half hours. And then I could wake up in the morning and boom, the brain was there, and I could move into gear, and I could be really sharp. Anything less and it took me at least two hours to get my head in the game and be worth an ounce of gold.

 

Andy Paul 16:29

But you hadn’t been getting the seven and a half before?

 

Jill Konrath 16:32

No, but you don’t know how many hours I wasted. What am I trying to say? I’m trying to say until I realized I had no idea how powerful sleep was, and I know people are talking about it. But until it became a personal experiment where I could literally track and see my differences, it was fascinating to me. But nobody realizes that because we just can’t know. Just asleep. It’s just what we do.

 

Andy Paul 16:57

Especially if it’s somewhat age related, right? Think about all these masses of new salespeople that come into the sales force every year. I remember my time at a similar age, from 6:00 to sometimes well after midnight, we were in San Francisco having a good time.

 

Jill Konrath 17:20

I wasn’t in San Francisco doing that. We still went to work a little bit, you know.

 

Andy Paul 17:24

In big cities, young people have the distractions of a big city. I look at my son’s generation, same thing. And I had one guy that worked for me that was manager of a team. And he was out till 3:00 every morning.

 

Jill Konrath 17:40

Oh my god.

 

Andy Paul 17:41

And that lasted about a week. And then he just like, okay, I can’t do this anymore. Right. So you’ve got to pay attention to this.

 

Jill Konrath 17:49

Well, you become a zombie. You really are not performing at your peak level. And if you really want to do your work and get out and have a life, then you have to have all your mental capacities there and that involves a lot of different things, including making sure that you have enough sleep. Everything else takes longer. Your willpower is less by the way, you eat more with lack of sleep. And you’re less disciplined, you make fewer calls, and you do worse on them. 

 

Andy Paul 18:13

Alright, so second thing, number two on the list I want to talk about. Not necessarily number two on yours. You begin the day with what matters most. So talk about that.

 

Jill Konrath 18:24

Well, if I take a look at– can I do a comparison of before and after? 

 

Andy Paul

Sure. 

 

Jill Konrath

Okay, before I would do email triage first thing when I get up. And I still do that just to check, and that’s literally to go through my emails just on my cell phone and see if there’s anything urgent and delete things that are irrelevant. But before, the first thing I did when I’d get to my office is I would open up and look at my email. And oftentimes, an hour and a half later, maybe longer, I would go, oh god, I’ve been doing all this stuff. I’ve been busy, busy, busy, busy. And now what do I need to get done today? 

And I’d actually used up a lot of my cognitive capacity, my ability to think and be as good as sharp as I could. The reality is  if you sit down quietly and say to yourself at the beginning of the day before you turn on the blasted computer, even though you feel compelled to and you’re twitching and you’re waiting for your dopamine to, hit and get going, you just sit quietly down and say, honest to God, Jill, what are the most important things that you need to get done for today? What are the most important things? 

It could be I need to get hold of a specific prospect. It could be that I need to follow up on a customer service issue with a big client. Whatever it is, there are certain things that are key priority. And when you come into the office to start those things, or at least to start the most important one early on, assure that’s going to get done. As opposed to you’re going to run out of time at the end of the day, because you got so caught up in email that led to other people saying, Jill, can you get this? Jill, can you do that? Jill, can you do this? You open an email, and now you’ve entered everybody else’s priority list, not your own.

 

Andy Paul 20:17

Not your own. And so you talk about you’ve divided your life into three buckets, basically. And so if it’s not one of the buckets, which are priorities, it just doesn’t happen. 3

 

Jill Konrath 20:27

It just doesn’t happen, right. Some things have to be done in the evenings, they just don’t belong during the work day. You just have to really think, what is the most important thing for me to get done? Is it something related to a customer interfacing type of activity? Is it something related to the research that you have to do or the preparation you need to do in order to have good customer interactions? I mean, those things are crucial. And for me, I’m a doer, as well. Because as an entrepreneur, I have to actually deliver the things that I get paid for.

 

Andy Paul 21:03

Well, you reference two good books on that when you’re talking about that, Essentialism, which is a great book people should read, and The One Thing. 

 

Jill Konrath

The One Thing is great. 

 

Andy Paul

We both like some books on that. I don’t think that you have– and that seems obvious on the surface of it. But it’s an issue we see with salespeople all the time. You say, I think about what I’m doing and why. And it seems like so much of the way sales processes are evolving, they are so activity based and quantity based that people are just little automatons. And you have to always stop and think about what you’re doing.

 

Jill Konrath 21:43

Yeah, it’s interesting. I had a really good conversation with the VP of Sales for an organization. And they had a lot of the sales development reps who spend a lot of their day on the phone. And I said to him, these guys – and it’s mostly guys in that – it’s kind of like call, call, call. And it’s a very–

 

Andy Paul

Testosterone driven.

 

Jill Konrath

Testosterone driven environment. And so I said, do you know what differentiates your top sellers from your average ones? He said, our top sellers before they get on the phone for the day, they sit down, spend some time thinking about what needs to get done and why they’re gonna do it, literally. And that’s important. 

Everybody needs to do it rather than just getting to work.There’s a lot of things we can do. We can walk away from our 8 or 10 or 14 hours at work, and we could have been busy the entire day. But busy about what? Did it matter?

 

Andy Paul 22:51

I think that’s one of the issues, the traps, people get stuck into with, again, hey, we’ve got these SDR teams. They have to make so many calls and so on. They don’t stop and think about, well, maybe there’s a better way to do this. And that’s what you’re missing. And I have this conversation with SDRs and SDR managers. You should, as a manager, expect your people to think, push back and say hey, there’s a better way to do this. We’ve been in this process we know, even practice passive disobedience. Sometimes if they’ve got a better way to do it, and they just passively disobey or vary from the script, that’s okay.

 

Jill Konrath 23:37

Yeah, I honestly believe that one of the most important things we can do is to get people to experiment all the time. What we have right now in a lot of organizations, there is the processes. There is the way that we do it. But who’s to say it’s the best way? And you say passive disobedience, I would really encourage people and create weekly challenges about what can we do better? What can we do better? 

Let’s take this particular thing and see if there’s a way we can improve it. I’ll just take something like the PowerPoint decks that a lot of people have, which by the way, I think in most cases, and I always see my clients’ PowerPoints when I’m working with them. But in most cases, they pretty much suck, Andy. They’re the reverse of what they should be. They’re let me tell you about my company, and all the locations we have, and how long we’ve been in business, and who we were invented by.  It’s all that bogus stuff that nobody gives a rip about. 

But that’s their presentation. And they do it religiously, because this is our corporate deck. The reality is they should be saying, should we give a presentation? Yes or no? If we do, do we need a deck? Well, that’s interesting. Do we need a deck or can we just talk to people? That’s an experiment. Maybe we could look at if we take the deck and we cut it in half, would that deliver better results and create better interactions? And to me, it’s the challenging of the status quo at all times, consistently looking for the possibility that there’s a better way to get to the end result. 

 

Andy Paul 25:09

Exactly. So one other of the hints you had is working in blocks of time. And this is one I actually picked up a year ago and started using the Pomodoro timer. And it’s been very useful for what I do. So why don’t you tell people about that?

 

Jill Konrath 25:25

Well, research into productivity shows that you can get into a flow. And rather than just working straight through, take a look and say, what am I doing that is similar to each other? And how can I group like activities together so that I can be more proficient at them and get them done faster? 

And so literally, there’s a couple parts here. Literally looking at your day and say, well, what do I have to do? So say you’re prospecting today. Rather than just saying, okay, here’s my list of people I want to call. Here’s Eric’s phone number. Okay, let me check Eric out on LinkedIn. Let me go to his company’s website. Okay, I’m going to call Eric. Okay, he didn’t answer. I’m going to enter that into my CRM. 

There’s Eric, and then we get to Jennifer. She’s the next person on our list. And we go back to that whole sequence. I’m gonna look Jennifer up on LinkedIn, I’m going to do this, I’m gonna check out their website. I’m going to think about what I’m going to say. And one by one, we do this. And the reality is, if we can say, okay, here’s the 10 prospects that I want to contact today. Let me do all my research at one time. And let me go on and look them all up and take some notes on each one of them. 

Now, let me plan what I’m going to say or do to each person. Because I know something different, I’m not just going to do the standard call or email, I’m going to do something that pulls them in. And now let me do my interactions. Let me call or let me send out my emails. That kind of stuff, you’re faster at your research and you’re better at it. You’re faster at your preparation, and you’re better at it. You’re faster at doing the activity and better at it. 

So blocking time for each type of activity allows you to get better at each one and condense the amount of time it takes. But I would say beyond that, we should be blocking the time on the calendar so it’s actually there. This is my prospecting time. Or this is my research time. This is my planning, prepping the calls time or prepping the emails time. And this is my outreach time. And actually put it on your calendar. Because if it’s there, then we are more likely to stick to what we’re doing and do it well.

 

Andy Paul 27:41

Yeah, that was a great hint that came from when I interviewed Kevin Cruz. I don’t know if you read his book on time management, which is a fabulous book. And his whole thing was his interviews with those long titles about his time and secrets of billionaires and millionaires, athletes and so on. And the consensus among everyone he interviewed is that one of the key time management secrets of those people is they don’t have a to do list. They have a calendar. And everything that needs to get done, it goes into the calendar.

 

Jill Konrath 28:11

It goes to the calendar, and you put it there. Because if you don’t have it on the calendar, it’s easy for the day to disappear on you.

 

Andy Paul 28:17

Absolutely. And that’s been a powerful one for me in transforming what I do. So, Jill, this is the segment of the show where I’ve got some standard questions I ask all my guests, and the first one is a hypothetical scenario. And in the scenario, you, Jill, have just been hired as the VP of Sales by a company whose sales have stalled out. And the CEO and the Board, they’re anxious to hit the reset button and get things back on track. So what two things could you do your first week on the job that could have the biggest impact?

 

Jill Konrath 28:51

Well, that’s a toughy. First week of the job, I certainly want to get my hands around what was going on. So I probably want to interview people to find out what is the state of the situation. But to have an impact, I think to me, one of the biggest things that you can do to have an impact is to capture the spirit of the people and to engage them. How can we make this better? 

And so I would want to do that right away. I’d want to say, look, you guys, you know sales have stalled out. I know that sales have stalled out. We’re here in this together. We’re going to go on a massive experiment. And we are going to be doing tons of things in the upcoming weeks. And I want every one of you to be a part of it. We are going to find better ways to do things, and we’re going to test and experiment, test and experiment. And I want to get started on this right away. I would engage people. To me, that would be like the most important thing I could do.

 

Andy Paul 29:43

Get them enrolled with what you’re going to do.

 

Jill Konrath29:45

And it’s not like they’re bad people. It’s like, sales have stalled out. We’ve got to find out why. But more importantly, we’ve got to work together to find better ways and share what we’re learning so we can all be lifted up at the same time.

 

Andy Paul 30:00

Love it. Great answer. Okay, so now I’ve got just a handful, actually four rapid fire questions. You’re gonna give me one word answers or you can elaborate if you wish. These are pretty simple, but maybe might cause you to think a little bit. So the first one is when you, Jill Konrath, are out selling your services, what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

 

Jill Konrath 30:24

Wow. So when I’m selling my services, and people contact me and they want to look at me to do work for them or somebody else, the quality of my questions are probably my best attribute. They’re penetrating. They’re insightful. They make people think. And then I get a lot of good information that I can then translate into what I share later. 

 

Andy Paul 30:53

Excellent. Next one, who’s your sales role model?

 

Jill Konrath 30:56

I honestly don’t have one. I grew up with Neil Rackham as a salesman back in the early days. But in terms of today, I think it’s new territory. And I’m constantly creating. I don’t look to anybody. I scan a lot of people. And I follow a lot of people, because I pick and choose and find really good ideas from a lot of different people.

 

Andy Paul 31:19

Great, great. All right, other than any of your own books, what’s one book you’d recommend every salesperson read? 

 

Jill Konrath

I have no idea.

 

Andy Paul

It doesn’t even need to be a sales book.

 

Jill Konrath 31:29

I know. I still have no idea.

 

Andy Paul 31:31

Okay. We’ve had that. 

 

Jill Konrath

You’ve had that before?

 

Andy Paul

I’ve had that before. That’s no problem.

 

Jill Konrath 31:36

I feel really dumb saying that, but there’s so many books out there. I think it depends on what you’re selling, what what you need at any particular time.

 

Andy Paul 31:47

Okay, so last question. This is sometimes the toughy. What music is on your playlist right now? 

 

Jill Konrath

Nothing.

 

Andy Paul

Interesting. So do you listen to podcasts or?

 

Jill Konrath 32:00

I listen to podcasts, I listen to radio, I listen to different things. But music, I don’t listen to specific music. I will turn on Focus At Will and let them give me music in order to help me focus when I’m working. But when I’m walking, I’m listening to podcasts and things like that.

 

Andy Paul 32:17

So when you write, do you have music on?

 

Jill Konrath 32:20

No, I actually listen to Focus At WIll, which is an app, and it’s a focusing app. And it actually plays music in the background while you’re working that is designed to make you more productive.

 

Andy Paul 32:34

Alright, that’s going on my list. That’s a good one, Focus At Will.

 

Jill Konrath 32:38

Yeah. Write that one down.

 

Andy Paul 32:45

I’m working on my next book. I have my music I select to put me in the mood to write but–

 

Jill Konrath 32:53

Well, the neat thing about Focus At Will is that they have different kinds of music to even choose from. So there’s classical music, and there’s acoustical music, and there’s contemporary music, and there’s showtunes and stuff like that. So you can choose the genre that you like. But they’ve literally tested to find out which ones have a best chance of making you get more done and getting your thinking going better.

 

Andy Paul 33:16

Interesting. Yeah, I’ve got my playlist that I have that invokes like a Pavlovian response when the music starts.

 

Jill Konrath 33:23

Do you really? Well, that’s cool.

 

Andy Paul 33:25

Yeah, like a trained dog in that regard. Okay, so well, that’s great. So Jill, thank you for being on the show today. Tell folks how they can find out more about you.

 

Jill Konrath 33:35

Well, there’s two things. The first thing is that they can take my More Sales Less Time challenge, which is kind of fun. It’s a seven part series. And all they have to do to take that, which does challenge the thinking and hopefully get some thinking about new ways to be more productive. All they have to do is to text 44144, that’s 44144, and text message sales. And boom, they’ll get a response and then they just send the email and then they’ll get on the program. And it’ll roll out over the next couple weeks. So that’s one way. Or they can go to my website, JillKonrath.com.

 

Andy Paul 34:06

Perfect, perfect. Okay, Jill, thank you for being on the show. And friends, remember, thank you for taking time to join us today. And make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success. An easy way to do that is take a minute, subscribe to this podcast, Accelerate.

That way you won’t miss any of my conversations with top business experts like my guest today, Jill Konrath, who shared her expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me. And until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone. 

Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, and want to make sure you don’t miss any upcoming episodes, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or stitcher.com. For more information about today’s guest, visit my website at AndyPaul.com.