One of the things that both sales reps and managers kind of get wrong about sales and selling

is that they think it's just the reps, just the repetitions of doing deal after deal,

and that's how someone becomes great at sales. Well, that can happen, but the problem is it takes

15 or 20 years. Now, if you have read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, it is a fantastic book.

It's both entertaining and informative. It's got that right mix. What Malcolm does is he uses a lot

of research in there, and the 10,000 hour rule that was researched by somebody else,

but he made it famous. And what it states and what most people get wrong about it is people think,

oh, it's 10,000 hours of doing something will make you good at it, great at it. Well, that's not

exactly what the researcher says. The researcher says it's deliberate practice, not just doing.

See, there's a difference between deliberate practice and just doing. Now, let's say you want to

learn the guitar, you want to learn a play of video game, you want to become a master chef,

doing it without the delivery. Now, let's define deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is

doing it, reviewing it, analyzing it, finding a distinction, doing it again. Pretty much what you

would get if you took lessons from somebody in tennis, any sport, any activity, anything that's

a performance. And until somebody gets this distinction of deliberate practice versus just doing,

because when we go to work, is it deliberate practice? Not really. You know, we get some feedback,

and the problem in sales is, since we're dealing with people, we could do a great job and lose.

Doesn't mean that we did something dramatically wrong. Maybe we were working on the wrong account,

with the wrong people, the timing was bad, whatever it was. And then we start to think,

oh, well, that was wrong. Or we win, and we really didn't do anything. We got a bluebird,

and we attribute it to ourselves. Now, today's interview is very different than probably most of

the ones I've done in the last year or two. This is somebody who's probably on a similar journey

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