Sell Like A Leader – Episode 40

David Kreiger sits down with Justin Michael, Creator of the Justin Michael Method and author of over 10 books to explore why doing the opposite of what feels natural is the real key to winning in outbound. 

His central premise is simple and uncomfortable: whatever thousands of sellers are doing right now is probably the wrong move. 

In this episode, he breaks down: 

  • Why permission-based openers make buyers want to hang up
  • How dating psychology explains why availability and neediness kill your pipeline
  • The three walls every seller hits, and why most people never get past the first one
  • How to build a semi-automated tech stack without losing the human edge that closes deals

If you’re a sales leader still coaching your team on what feels safe, this conversation will change how you think about outbound entirely.

About Justin Michael

A former sales leader at Salesforce and LinkedIn, Justin built a methodology that has generated over one billion dollars in pipeline across more than two hundred companies he’s advised.

His frameworks — from the Justin Michael Method to COMBO Prospecting — have been adopted by tens of thousands of reps and used at companies like HubSpot, Cisco, Okta, and DocuSign.

Podcast Key Takeaways

  • Justin’s entire method is built on a simple premise: whatever the majority of sellers are doing, the top performers should do the opposite.
  • Neediness reads as low status, and buyers can smell it. Justin’s advice is to build in intentional pauses and indirection, the same dynamics that work in dating, so the prospect feels like they’re doing the pursuing.
  • Technology quotient is now a real differentiator, but it doesn’t replace selling skill.
  • Despite all the automation hype, the phone still wins the most deals. Email and LinkedIn are getting harder and more heavily throttled by the platforms themselves.

Connects

Connect with Justin Michael: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljustin/

Connect with David Kreiger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkreiger

Subscribe to the podcast and follow our Podcast LinkedIn page so you don’t miss any episodes!

Transcript

David: Welcome back to another episode of the "Sell Like a Leader" podcast, the podcast for revenue leaders who are on a mission to cultivate a high-performing sales team within their organization. I'm your host, David, founder of SalesRoads, America's most trusted sales outsourcing and appointment-setting firm.

And today, excited to bring you one of the most unconventional thinkers in outbound sales, Justin Michael. He's a former sales leader at Salesforce and LinkedIn and has built a methodology that has generated over one billion dollars in pipeline across more than 200 companies that he's advised. His frameworks, from the Justin Michael Method to combo prospecting, have been adopted by tens of thousands of reps and used at companies like HubSpot, Cisco, and DocuSign.

Across his extensive library of published books, master classes, and [00:01:00] tactical codexes, Justin has systematically mapped nearly every dimension of what it takes to win in outbound. Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin: Well, It's great to be here, and I appreciate the auspicious introduction. I was thinking back to seven years ago almost in January before all this started and  before I wrote the book "Tech-Powered Sales" with Tony Hughes, and we were talking about 2035 and the singularity. We were talking about buying and selling bots, and I always say, "Oh, I predicted ChatGPT," and then I feel like Al Gore.

Like, I invented the internet. So I did not do that, but it's wild how many predictions I think you and I were talking years ago, maybe even five years ago, just to see it all playing out, this age of automation. And what's happening is there's a lot of slop, and there's a lot of empty suits running around, so w- we're kinda needed as humans right now.

Sales acumen and some of the techniques are becoming more and more manual and, hand-rolled artisanal [00:02:00] outbound. I don't know if you're seeing that trend. But yeah, I'm excited to get into it today.

David: Yeah. So we're definitely gonna get into some of, some of your perspective on, on technology and, and how that's playing out in the tech stack where things could be automated maybe w- as well as where we're over-automating. But let's start at some of your basic premises for folks who aren't familiar with some of your work.
And, the Justin Michael method is built on a neuroscience-backed premise that whatever feels natural in a sales conversation, you should do the exact opposite. So could you unpack that for us a little bit?

Justin: So Earl Nightingale was known for "The Strangest Secret," that wonderful audio in the '50s, and he was also known for this quote that if you analyze an industry and look at what thousands of people are doing and do the opposite, that's gonna be the most successful. So that's almost like a George Costanza, do the opposite.
I think I ended a book like that. The brain is interesting. So Oren Klaff is a friend, and I've interviewed him, and I did a book literally called "The [00:03:00] Frame" about frame psychology. There are two elements to your brain, no matter how old you believe you are. There's the n- neocortex, the new brain, and the old brain, the amygdala and the croc brain, essentially.

And so the main issue with the three form factors we use, if we just take email and cold calling a cold call, you interrupt a person and you trigger the old brain, and they're in fight or flight or freeze, and you're trying to say the reason for my call. You're trying to hit them with logic, and they're in this place of fear.

The main issue with email is that the human brain, it processes visual- visually. It can't really see text. That's why like when you're a four or five-year-old kid, you're tracing letters with string to try to learn to read. But adults are no better. Sending emails, sending pictograms in emails is bad for the brain.

If I tell you Starbucks, you think... You just see coffee. Brown liquid or black liquid. So I started doing visual prospecting using Venn diagrams and compressed GIFs and custom GIFs and just giving visuals to the brain, which processes 60,000 times faster. So I [00:04:00] basically found that there are cold call openers that are far more effective than what we're doing now, and emails that are far more effective, and social selling patterns.

I call a lot of this heuristics. David Hoffeld and "The Science of Selling" use this word. It's a computer programming word which means shortcuts. And the reason I use that is because a template can just get copied or a script can get copied. 

So what I'm looking for is axioms or laws or heuristics that govern the channels.

And that's what started-- I started doing. I have a different way to do cold calls completely. It's goofy foot. I have a different way to do emails, even the frequency of email sequences. I have a very unique way of doing social selling that feels like chat flows, chat and grow rich, and I use a lot of visuals in my prospecting.

And a lot of it does come from simple understanding of the brain and how divorced from that most popular techniques are. And then there's stuff just like power, dating dynamics, and things in every other human system that makes sense that [00:05:00] for some reason sellers and outbound folks just don't use. For example, like if you went on a date and you're like, "Hey, can I have 30 seconds of your time to explain to you why you should stay with me here on this meal and date me again?"

They'd be like, "That's a little creepy." Like, But yet 99% of everyone who picks up a phone in the world, 5 million tech sellers, use a weak low status opener and popularize it and believe it's good 'cause their tone is good. They're like, "It's all about tone." It's like, well, if you call someone and say, "Hey, you wanna see my meth lab?"
It doesn't matter how good your tone is. So I love that one. So Steve Chandler, classic. 

David: If you could for cold calling, 'cause you sort of brought that up, if you could give us maybe an example of how you would approach that differently, either through the neuroscience principles that you just laid out and/or the, the dating principles  'cause I know that's a lot with some of your new work.

What are some examples of things that you think actually embody that and work better
of these [00:06:00] other openers?

Justin: if you do this opener and you have success with it, the first rule of my system is if you get a meeting, you're right. So if you call someone and sing a Justin Bieber song or tell a joke and you get a meeting, you're right. But for me, the permission-based opener, the PBO, is from the '90s, and a lot of like, the big dog sort of seven-figure closer people don't use it and don't know why it's so popular now.

So like, "Did I catch you at a bad time? Can I get 30 seconds of your time, 20 seconds of your time? This is a cold call. I hate making them, you hate getting them. This is a cold call. Wanna roll the dice?" So we're doing a lot of negative associations immediately in the first five seconds. Just the whole concept of calling a person and then saying the reason for my call and just pitch slapping and controlling the call in the front versus asking open questions and getting them to talk, like social aikido, that doesn't really work.

So like you'll never see neuroscience where by you talking, you win. So l- imagine this, 99% of every cold caller on Earth in every vertical calls a person and talks [00:07:00] for the first 20 seconds. This is the worst thing you can do. So I'm not using the permission-based opener, and I'm asking open questions. Get the-- get them to talk first and controlling the call with active listening.

So already that is radical. That's an alien. I call it route, ruin, multiply. I c- I talked to this kid at PandaDocs. He went and got President's Club five years in a row. Yeah, I usually just use someone's full name, the most beautiful sound in the human language, and then try to see if they're the person in charge of a thing, right?

'Cause we're in this environment, like Gartner says there's 11 stakeholders in every account. So I would just say, " John Wilson?" "Yeah." "Hey, John. Justin Michael from Acme. Just curious, who heads up your API management there?" And he's like, "Oh, that's Chris Rogers." "All right. Can I talk to Chris?" So I'm getting a lot of referrals off the top of a call.

You know, I mean, It's-- There's this book called Cold Calling Sucks where I would say the book sucks.  People love this book. It sells very well, and just about everything in it just makes you mediocre on a phone and violates just [00:08:00] about every law in neuroscience, and it's, it's prevailing winds. So I've been writing books kinda to combat that.

David: That's great. And so, um To that end, and maybe we could frame it in, in, in this perspective so that people keep on understanding your, your perspective on ways to, to approach these. A lot of your clients sell high-ticket items, right? And so you have a formula, a seven-figure formula, which breaks down specific revenue ceilings that sellers hit.

And so you, I think, call these the JMM three walls, right? And so tell us a little bit about what are these walls, and then using your methodologies, how do sellers break through them?

Justin: What's interesting is about 40% of salespeople, at least in the US, side hustle. So they're doing something to advise or they have some kind of S corp or LLC. This is more... you could apply this to direct selling, but this is more for people trying to do consulting because I built [00:09:00] my consultancy quite rapidly to the 1% level, and so I actually have a ton of clients now that are senior account executives or VPs of sales, and on the side, they're advising other companies.

And there's all these moonlighting clauses, but 40% of Americans just do this 'cause we need diversified income streams. So the interesting first wall, and this does apply to mainline selling, is nobody wants what you sell. Nobody wants coaching. Nobody wants appointment setting, right? And that's why when we do the studies, it takes four to five nos.

On one call, the prospect says no to you three, four, five times before you get to the yes. So it's a fine line. Like, when do you honey badger and when do you push because you know the first is a brush off, the second's a recoil, the third is like pricing issues, right? So I went on LinkedIn. I had 30,000 connections, 15,000 sales leaders, and n- nobody wanted sales training.

That was weird. So I created these chat flow techniques called the fourth frame to kinda turn LinkedIn- LinkedIn into a chatting platform, which [00:10:00] got me through the first wall, got me through the no and they became interested and they started talking to me. The second wall is nobody has any money. I guess this does work for selling, and that's because they hate to be sold, they love to buy.

They like to decide. And we live in this budget-less world too where like where's the money coming from? It's not like the '90s where it's just check the procurement enablement budget. And we know this from SDR, right? You have to pull it from the marketing PR, P&L. It comes from these weird places.

And on an individual basis when you're selling consultancy you're doing consulting, who knows? They have to transfer money out of a brokerage account, sell some stock. It's it... You don't know. The third wall is interesting. That's more about when someone's working with you and they fire you because you succeeded.

This actually completely applies to your business. "We love the appointments that you're setting. It's amazing. We found someone just like you at Stanford. He's 24. He is your mini me. I'm telling you, he's great, and we're gonna like fire you and just insource this." And you're maybe it's 'cause I have 30 years of experience and gray hair.

Trust me, there's gray hair, and that's why it's working." No. He's amazing. He's a spitting image of you." It's [00:11:00] like you, so you become, you become a victim of your own success on the services side sometimes. So this kind of applies more to services and consulting, but I can now see sharing it how it also the first two are totally there  for selling SaaS or AI or something.

David: And so with those walls, and going back to the book that you're working on right now, which is, and I think you sort of,  alluded to it earlier in our conversation, is trying to figure out how to make people chase you, right? And a lot of times, like the example you gave when we're doing these permission-based openers we're lowering our, our, our stature.

How do you coach your clients to flip that, that dynamic?  Because I think most sellers feel that way. They feel like they've gotta chase the person, they gotta keep going after them. what do you mean by that? And how do you successfully flip people from a sales perspective, or is it really marketing that's coming into play here?
'Cause I think a lot of people think of that more from a marketing lens. And get those prospects to chase you [00:12:00] versus us chasing them.

Justin: Yeah. So I think most techniques that you see on LinkedIn are what I would call transactional fast closes under twenty-five grand, right? Like PLG, these are low ticket, low ACV, TCV products, and they can be sold quickly, almost in an order-taking manner with like even this whole trend of high ticket closing is like that.

What needs to happen is like indirection and subtlety and something not being so direct. So a concrete example is when I do a voicemail, I say, "I'll follow up with a note." I never ask for the callback because the callback is needy. It's here's my number, and if you have time..." When I send a CTA in an email, I'm like, "Hey, if it makes sense to talk, how does your calendar look?"

Not, "Here's my calendar. I'm available Tuesday and Thursday." It's like, they're like "Well, hey, Justin, when you're available," it's I just... I've got the whole month wide open. My calendar is wide open." You're like, right? You're too available. So th-this stuff comes right out of human psychology and persuasion.

I feel like Sandler had a flavor of [00:13:00] this. He always said, "Don't spill your candy in the lobby," which has been interpreted like not giving it all away on the first meeting, holding one slide back, keeping them wanting more. There's also a f- an idea of I'm hyper persistent, but then I have a concept of reaching and then withdrawing and having a rhythm and a pause where a lot of people are just full on honey badger or they're too elusive.

They try once, and then they wait, and they think the other person isn't interested. I go into a lot of this within the latest few books, and it manifests in a lot of ways. But first off, the person on an identity level has to feel equal to who they're contacting, right? You can't be calling the decision makers and bowing down and being overly polite and fawning on them.

And that's what's so weird about personalized email. It's "Dave, congrats on the new job. You're a CMO now." And they're thinking like, " This is hell. I'm a CMO. I've got all this pressure. Everything's broken here. These people are not happy." And then everyone congratulates them. That doesn't make them wanna buy from you.

They want you to solve a business challenge or make their life [00:14:00] easier, right? On a technology or a business process level. So I can keep going on and on, but the parallels between human dynamics and relationships are spot on. You'd probably be better off studying psychology and things like dating and interpersonal relationships and then transposing it to selling versus just following blindly the sales de jure the popular scripts.

David: Yeah. I think I think it's a great analogy, and I think at the end of the day, people are only gonna date you if it gives them value if it's something that they wanna do, if it makes them feel good. And so thinking through all those different dynamics in dating and how they can be applied to sales is an interesting prism.

And would I do this on a date?

Justin: Like Steve Chandler says, "Needy is creepy." And so there's this new one that the Wrestler Bros have that cold call sucks. It's this. You call and you say, "Hey, Dave, my name's been coming up a lot, huh? You've been hearing my name?" It's like the cocky like... you're gonna call a CFO or a CEO and say that?

And they're like, "No, I've never heard of you." But what if you're at a famous company like [00:15:00] Salesforce? You're like, "You've heard of us, right?" It's d you're Salesforce. So, like, You-- there's no way that's gonna go well. They're gonna think you're conceited, my whole thing in all the techniques is service-based.

You wanna make the prospect the star, right? And if they're talking, you're winning. If you're using their full name, if you're very curious, they're gonna flip the polarity.  Yeah, so I've had a lot of fun with that, and, 75% of the workforce is under 40-- under 44. I'm 46, so I'm the elder statesman now.

So I've been doing a lot of research into Millennial and Gen Z patterns, and the entire sales universe has adopted these '90s techniques, which is a bit shocking and weird. Try something different.

David: And so the millennial techniques, I think it, it echoes back to some of your thoughts around turning LinkedIn to a texting channel if you could play that out for us a little bit.

Justin: so first of all, sliding into DMs is a dangerous thing to do. So I think older sellers, we have a concept of like, what are the challenges? [00:16:00] What's keeping you up at night? Tell me what's going on. I think people really don't wanna sit in a private thread and explain what's wrong and open themselves up to being sold.

So I tend to use a lot of reverse psychology. I tend to see what's the vision you have at your company, what's going right, what are you excited about? I try to get people to go toward explaining what is good 'cause then they tend to share what is bad. So I have this fourth frame method, and it's essentially something personal, something professional, and then I insert myself.

And then I have this other cool seven-step process where we really orient around the north star of the person and then what's driving that, the why, and then what else they've tried. So I've isolated that buyer's buy. So when I was selling SDR services, the best thing they could say is, "Hey, we already use someone right now to set appointments in Costa Rica or the Philippines or Des Moines or whatever it is, or Redding," because then I knew they understood the process and they could buy.

So I'm doing, like, all these crazy DM flows. Reach has been cut on LinkedIn by [00:17:00] 95%. People are always like, "Wow, you've had 60,000 followers. You barely post. You should put up a book a day." Because I'm sending thousands of DMs and, I'm in constant communication with people. I would rather have four or five meaningful back-and-forths. The DM is the new cold call. The light is green. They're there.

David: Interesting. Let's slide into the last part of this conversation to where I think you alluded to at the beginning, and that's, that's technology, and maybe you can also explain how you're able to keep up with that many DMs. Are you leveraging some technology to, to do it? But let me frame us in, in, in a few things that you've written about.

And so I think first is the idea of TQ, which is a

Justin: Yeah, that's a tech quotient, 

David: right? And so a lot of folks talk about IQ and typically EQ. You talk a lot about TQ, among other things. And so can you explain what that is? And especially over the last few years, why is that important and how do sales leaders think about that in the context of their teams [00:18:00] and help improve the TQ?

Justin: Yeah. So I think the technology quotient idea came out of psychology today. Like many things, I wasn't the first person to think of this, but I popularized it for B2B, which the concept is you have IQ and EQ, and those can actually be improved, but you can improve TQ. So now we have almost a reverse argument.

I go into a business and they're like, "We want all the reps to be learning advanced Claude code and Cowork." It's like, "Okay, but none of them are cold calling, and they're not speaking C-level." So all things equal, if you have strong selling capabilities and you're using sequencing and you're using automation and you're using AI, if the two sales teams that are competing are equal, that will give you a distinct technology advantage.

So you do see that. One smart kid on the team gets all the automation stuff, the tech-powered stuff, and becomes the head of RevOps. And then I was working with a company in England, and they, their reps weren't even sending the emails. That was all automated, all AI. It was pretty amazing to see it happening.

But that's just everyone [00:19:00] should really be embracing and trying to pick the tech that they like. What I just described on the DM flows, you've got Expandi, you've got HeyReach, you got Lemlist, you got Dripify. There's a lot of automations now that you can use, Duck Soup on LinkedIn to do that, at least for the first touch, and then drop in.
I think semi-automation is really the exciting piece now, where there's some tool that's, blasting hundreds of emails, but then when it-- the music stops, you jump in as a human to apply your expertise. I do a lot of stuff highly manual just to test flows, but also because I can break all the thresholds.

If you get an automation tool on LinkedIn, you can send 50 messages a day, 40 maybe. I can send 200. It doesn't do anything to me 'cause it's used to that.  Mass email is very tough now. It's 1,000 to get one meeting. You have to warm up, five domains and three emails a piece, and it takes six weeks, and the domains get shut down.

It is a full-time job getting a scaled email. Mass calling is kinda crazy 'cause only 20% of people pick up. A lot of these parallel [00:20:00] assisted dialer solutions, no need to name names, that it's gone too crazy with robo-calling. Like,  10 lines at a time out of wherever, Jamaica or wherever they do it.

And now people are in enterprise accounts getting cell phones, slowing down, trying to get a point of view out of the AI and then calling. So I had th-this book, "Cold Call Algo," that really goes into effective strategic enterprise uses of AI for responsible C-level type calling. So yeah, they keep saying we fully automated SDR."

I'm like, " I don't think so." In one famous company right now who had a big celebrity on I guess one of my clients got their email in their own spam folder, so that was ironic.

David: So if people are trying to figure it out, there's so many tools. Like you said, you c- you threw out a whole bunch of them. A lot has gotten harder, especially with email. Obviously LinkedIn, there's only so many you can do if you're using technology. Where are you seeing the most effective use of technology?

And if you're a sales leader sort of confused, maybe ha- have used sequencing tools, you've used [00:21:00] emails in the past, it's not really breaking through. In this day and age, w- where would you have people focus to try to figure out what their tech stack should look at? If... Are you still arguing that 75% of top of funnel should be automated, or is it, should it be less than that nowadays?

Should it be more? Like, how should people approach this?

Justin: I think back in 2017, we had the golden opportunity to automate  75% of the top funnel. We have, While f- by the laws of physics, it's possible to automate the top of the funnel, it's unlikely now. We're actually seeing 50% or 30%. It's reducing. It's a great paradox. First thing to happen is if you want an AI to synthesize your voice, it can do it perfectly, and it can call people.

But the FTC and the TCIP made it illegal. This guy I know, Thomas Cornelius from Science, he had the first fully functional AI that could just do phone calls. Maybe a few people did it at once, and now it's been banned. So it's not even legal to do it. You know, Faxing people is illegal. You can't just, in America, send faxes.

It's hilarious 'cause people [00:22:00] overdid it. Then we get on LinkedIn, and if you really wanna hit the magnificent levels of LinkedIn automation, LinkedIn just shuts you down. You can do a little bit of it, but you can't go crazy in there. You hit throttles. So LinkedIn has controlled, the API is closed, and you can't do much automation.

You can't really go too crazy now with these parallel assist dialers or do 10 at a time or spam all these lists because then you get deprecation of those numbers, even can have implications on your business. So now we have semi-automated, safe, responsible curation where the data side is really hard.

I used to say just get ZoomInfo and LeadIQ and a couple data providers." It's not enough. So I'm really interested in things like TitanX, the Joey Gilkey company, and they just bought Frontspin. Have you seen this one? They have these giant datasets and AI, and they basically tell you who you can call.

And it, it looks like even ConnectAndSell is turning into a data company and helping to surface beforehand the the channel specific. And that's how some of these vendors have been going out on the data side. It's like it'll tell you they're likely to respond on LinkedIn or respond on email or it's sell Word direct dial.

[00:23:00] So some connect and sell data I'll reference that blew my mind is they looked at 10 million numbers over the last few years, and they found that 50% of the f- meetings that were booked were fully navigated dials. So it was actually still from switchboards and IVRs and dial by name directories. And during the pandemic, it was the golden age because I would call you, it would go to your phone, it would forward to your cell.

Everyone was remote, so they forwarded their machine. Cell phones are only 7% of the data set that you can buy. So this goal of finding cell phones isn't the way to go. 80% of the companies I've worked with, I've worked with probably 250 companies in the past five years, they're doing the majority of the winning is happening still on the phone.

So I'm heavy on voicemails, I'm heavy on cold calling still. Little bit of email. LinkedIn, hit and miss for certain industries, right? Like If you work in l-logistics, utilities, supply chain, like a lot of those folks are just not as present on LinkedIn. There's a CEO of a company called Reveniar, you might know him, Greg Casale, and [00:24:00] his thing was like he doesn't even start sequencing until he has a connect. Once someone picks up the phone, then he hits with all the other channels. So yeah, Cold Call Algo is the book I would say about the RevOps problem, about enterprise cold calling and how to integrate AI and the tools and the stacks. It's sort of a sequel to Tech-Powered Sales.

And then my new one is really more fundamental. It's just applying dating psychology to the three channels. The channels we have are we have phone, we have LinkedIn, and we have calling. That's kinda still what we have, ironically.

David: Yeah.

Justin: What else is there really? I mean, DMs, even WhatsApp now, if I send 200, boom, it shuts me down for 24 hours.

Now that's even regulated. And they cut the... There was a loophole with 800 open profile InMails, they cut that algorithm completely now, and you can only add 400 people a month. Restriction, closing the aperture. So yeah, I'm curious how you're handling this, but I would say being strategic, building really good lists, pre-verifying the data, measure twice, cut once.

It's about quality prospecting now. I don't think the volume play is still here.

David: I think that's right. And so the two [00:25:00] places that we really lean into and is on the data side and using technology to just u- have the best lists possible, both waterfalling, combining data, using AI now to verify every single company to make sure that they're the right ICP fit, figure out if we can surface good insights.
Before, SDRs needed to do that manually or you didn't do it at all. Now there's no reason in the world not to have an agent for every single client that we have t- and even within those have s- sub-agents to find the right insights and make sure we're calling the right companies, as well as with the right targets, right?

So having a really high-powered tech stack on the back end for data to verify, target, and surface insights is huge. And then I think a lot of the work that you're doing in talking about how we interact and this has always been true, but more true than ever since so many things have gotten shut down, is you've gotta maximize every touch you [00:26:00] have, every conversation you have, and make sure that it is as good as possible.

And so that's where we have really leaned into with both technology and from a training standpoint.

Justin: Yeah, that's why I love my opener because it's the route opener is going for a referral. So it's just like the most venomous snake in the Australian Outback because the animal comes like this giant, wildebeest, and the snake is like this tiny snake, but it's so poisonous it could just knock it out because contact rates are really low.
So if I get a contact rate, I'm just like, "John Hughes." "Yes." "Hey, John. Are you in charge of X and Y?" "No, it's not me." "Who is it?" And they-- I do these mapping and routing calls, and it's a different intention. It's not, "Let me sell you a product," or, "Let me get your time." It's just "Hey, there's like twenty-two VPs of marketing over there.

Which one should I talk to about fraud analytics?" And they tell me. I think a real big reason that these generations are hitting the PBOs is because it's just a simple template. It's you memorize a line or something. It's, I think that the route technique that I teach is easy, but it's not as simple as a line.

You just [00:27:00] keep picking up the phone and going, "Did I catch you at a bad time? Did I catch you at a bad time?" Just like you could just, lean on it like a pickup line. "Did you just fall from heaven?" Like something like, "I wanna roll the dice." So while there's comfort in that, I would also encourage people to think if everyone's doing that, you need to pattern interrupt.

You need to do the opposite. You need to do something else. And so that Gong measured PBOs and non-PBOs, and it found certain statistics, but the problem with the Gong research is they never test my data, never once in the system. And from a heuristics viewpoint they're ten- they're tending to test identical heuristics.

They're like, "Let's test all these subservient PBOs." These are, like, all supplicated sycophantic PBOs and like, "Here's the ones that work better." I'm like it's all one. It's all weak, like weak against weak." They're not testing the strong force of like, equal business stature and these more high-status openers, which also fits in with Sandler, like DISC profile and high D people.

Like, all CEOs just get to the point. A lot of how I learned this is I would write like a three p- page email to my CEO, and he'd be like, [00:28:00] "Rad." Or I would write this huge write-up on a division of a sales team I was running, and he's "Hey, by the way like, if you send me more than three bullet points, I'm just never gonna respond."

And then I just see all this wacky CEO that looks like text messages, and it's all grammatically funky, and I just encourage people just to write like that. Like, there's, There's a lot of formality. "Hey, I head up the relationship with your account, and we had a conversation with, Jess- Jesse Turley, and we talked about bullet point one, two, three."

And at the very end of the email is the point. They just like, bury the lead here. I'm like, "Bill, Jesse on your team said we should test the API call. Do you agree?" Just boom, right down to the point. Love that. No one is direct. That's the other weird thing.

David: Yeah. Justin, this has been awesome. Always great to have your perspective. And before I let you go we like to do a little segment called Rapid Fire Questions, where I'm gonna throw a few questions at ya.

Just give us your short first take on 'em. And so first, what's the one thing that people don't give enough [00:29:00] value or attention to in leadership?

Justin: Wow. I think like humility and the growth mindset, leaders that wanna create other leaders. It's definitely in that Carol Dweck book. Like the leader really is the culture. Like I'll quote Tony Hughes on that, but if you don't have a good leader of your division or your company or where you work, like that's just gonna be like "Lord of the Flies," so who-- Like the leadership is almost as important as product market fit and the upside of your commission. So toxic leaders continue to affect everything. I have clients like, " Oh, I went there. I had the big... Like a micromanaging CEO, and I just thought I'll just do it anyway. The money was so good." He was out like two.
 
David: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great point. Which one skill you'd advise everyone in sales to master, leaders or non-leaders?

Justin: Definitely cold calling, even though it seems like a totally dying breed, but I'd call C-level cold calling. Like finding people that you're afraid of. It should feel like wing suited base jumping or trying to learn a back flip off a high dive. It should be [00:30:00] hard. This isn't simple calling like, "Oh, just call everybody in account and map it."

Find the biggest account you have, the one you could blow up, and find the most powerful person in it and call that person. And if you get butterflies and sweaty palms and you're afraid, good. Feel the fear and do it anyway. So that's, it's a very cold call. And oftentimes those people are more gracious and they remember being younger and when they were doing similar stuff, 'cause a lot of the C-suite came out of sales.

So they're often hu- humble and cooler. But I just f- find people just taking the easier route. Like they're doing some calls if it's an inbound, there's already a discussion. That's what I think we need.

David: Nice. Favorite business leadership or sales book?

Justin: Oh, wow. There's so many good ones. The one that's coming to mind now is called 4 Disciplines of Execution. I think it's a FranklinCovey book. It was a big hit at Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud ba- way back in the day in Indianapolis, but it has this thing called the WIG, the wildly important goal. I like books that have proactivity and 80/20 and power laws because I find that's very rare. [00:31:00] So that 4DX, 4 Disciplines of Execution. It's a very good one.

David: Awesome. Favorite quote, mantra, or saying that inspires you.

Justin: Yeah, so I share this on a lot of calls and I saw someone else do it, but I have this concept called pronoia. It's a made-up word. It's the opposite of paranoia. So paranoia is like you're worried bad things will happen. Pronoia is the universe is plotting to do you good. And I think that's like the kind of optimism I've literally been selling since I was 21, 25 years. It's a brutality. There's so much rejection. And I think why I succeeded is even when I'm in a trough or a slump, I'm still having a good day. I'm still positive. I never internalize that. I'm always like, "Oh I'm one email away from a yes. I'm just a day away from..."

Then clusters of closes come in and I'm sitting around sending DMs on my phone hitting pronoia, being like, "Okay, nothing's happening," and then $80,000 comes in. You know what it's like. So you have to be paranoid about the deals and pressure test them, like only the paranoid will survive.

That's-- this is the paradox. It's two competing [00:32:00] motions, right? You have to pressure test your pipeline, but you have to be so optimistic and have pronoia about your future and getting to your number and being able to build up your business.

David: Love it. And lastly, what's the most important goal or project you're working on right now, Justin?

Justin: It's my, I'm a river to my people. I'm quoting  Lawrence of Arabia here. My dad loved that movie. But the thing I love most in my life is when my clients, go to Presidents Club, or they do their first ever $100,000 a month or whatever it is, 50,000 a month, they hit a target. Not only are they using the techniques, we've customized them, but then they become unconsciously competent, and they get the goal.

And so that's what I enjoy most in my life and my career is your results. And even if it's random, someone just I've never seen leaves a review on Amazon and I have... I, it's anonymous, I can't even find it, and they're like, "Oh, I just, had the best quarter of my life because of this book." And that's the legacy.

So that's why I do it, and that's why I don't really scale. I'm not trying to build an empire or franchise [00:33:00] or, I'm a very... like a little carpenter, it's in the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, right? The real Holy Grail wasn't the gilded one. Your results are what power me essentially.

David: That's awesome, Justin. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast here, sharing your experience, your knowledge. And if people wanna connect with you online, learn more about your work, do they find you?

Justin: Simple. I'm on LinkedIn, Justin Michael, you can't miss me. And on Amazon I have, 10 plus books. So just look up Justin Michael, any country on earth, and  yeah, I wrote too many books.

David: Wow. Thank you all for tuning in. This was a great episode. Justin, great conversation. Appreciate you being here. Everyone, you can hit me up on LinkedIn share some, some guests you'd like to see any, any questions you might have. Until next time, thanks so much.