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The Selling Well Podcast | Justin Michael | Sales Superpowers

Improve your sales skills by accessing your Sales Superpowers, combining ancient wisdom with modern strategies. Get ready to learn about “Justin Michael Method” as we have Justin Michael himself for today’s episode. Justin shares his game-changing outbound strategy that has turned sales professionals into true superheroes. Drawing gold nuggets from his book, “"Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth”, Justin breaks down the barriers to explosive pipeline growth and unleashing your sales superpowers. It's time to embrace your inner superhero and revolutionize the way you sell. Tune in now!

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The Justin Michael Method: Leveraging Your Sales Superpowers For Your B2B Sales Game

We got a great episode for you because we're talking with Justin Michael. He's been on the show before because along with Tony Hughes, he authored an amazing book called Tech-Powered Sales: Achieve Superhuman Sales Skill. This book is a bible for the sales tech stack that you need to contemplate to have the right conversation with the right person at the right time. It’s a great read, a great book. Both have been guests on the show.

We're talking about Justin's book called Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth. I have talked to a lot of thought leaders in the SDR and BDR space, filling the top of the funnel. I also consider myself a thought leader in that space. We trained hundreds if not thousands, of SDRs.

I always learn something from Justin in this book. It requires reading if you are in that SDR space. Justin is a world record-breaking outbound sales maven who's arguably built the deepest client acquisition model of all time. It's called the Justin Michael Method. We're gonna get into that Justin Michael Method. We're going to talk a lot about mindset, coaching, and approaches to email, voicemail, and telephone. The telephone works. We're going to talk a little bit about sequencing, leadership, and how you get yourself into a position of growth orientation.

It’s an interesting conversation with Justin. He's got lots of communities and sources of value to help you elevate performance. We align with our value system, which is trying to increase the performance and professionalism of B2B sales while improving the lives of salespeople. I enjoyed my chat with Justin. You will too. If you do, please like and subscribe. Here's Justin Michael.

Justin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.

It's a pleasure to be back. I'm sitting in my Zen garden. I have a lot of matrix references in my book. I like to beam in from Tokyo in the multiverse.

I've never read a book with the amount of references you've got. You've got matrix references, Dale Carnegie references, and a reference to Chuck Woolery. For those of you who are not 40, Chuck Woolery was a game show host in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. He was dynamite. I have never seen many quick references unless you've read dozens and hundreds of sales books. You never pick up everything. I love those references.

My mentality is being a synthesizer, and it's dangerous to write sales books if you read a lot and you've done a lot of sales because it's easy to fall into a derivation of Sandler, Challenger, or Spin. Like the Elon Musk story, he goes to the government and says, “I want to build rockets.” They said, “Okay.” After several years, he goes, “Where can I get some Molab denim? Where's a mine where I can get some iron?” He starts to deconstruct the rocket, soup the nuts, and build the thing.

It's really dangerous to write sales books.

What I isolated is when you look in the pantheon of sales books, and there are many great ones, the majority, like 98%, assumes there's a customer or a client. We have this, “Let's progress a deal. Let's qualify progress. Close the deal.” When we get to the top of the funnel up here, it gets quiet, and you see things like Jeb Blount’s Fanatical Prospecting, which is a great foundation. You see Grant Cardone’s 10X. You see Jordan Belfort. You see a lot of these confidence volumes and traditional approaches.

Sandler has some great adaptations and methodologies for opening calls and prospecting. I've done some Sandler training in the past. What I wanted to do was embrace the technology revolution at the top funnel because I found that as a technology rep in SaaS companies, my day was sat down in sales navigator. I go into ZoomInfo and look for the phone number and email. I try to dial and catch someone. I try to sequence email and personalize it. I set up the calendars and record my call. It was all this tech stack stuff because I needed to get the customer. The opening is the new closing.

I used to work for LinkedIn, the Empire State Building, and as a sales navigator. There was a day when people were thinking, “Should I pay for that?” Now, it's the Bloomberg terminal. When I write, I put 2,000 people into five documents. I spent about 300 hours over several months. I took a lot of feedback. I had hundreds of coaching sessions during that time because I do executive coaching. Every time someone asked me a question, I put it in there. I got a couple of editors in England to lower the Flesch-Kincade because everyone said, “Tech-powered sales were hard to read.” I made the reading level similar to college or high school.

I found, in my base of 50,000 people, the top three people who understand GPT prompting. This whole ChatGPT engineering of prompting it and stack prompting it and all these different shop prompts. They have blurbs and segments in there. I challenged them. I said, “I don't want this to be technical for now. I want you to write about ChatGPT and LLMs as if we're at GPT-10. What are the universal principles for prompting a machine so it can think like a human, spit out B2B verbiage, and start thinking?” That's the GPT lab that flows through the book, which was Greg Meyer. That was great.

We're going to get established as a bit of a foundation here. Justin mentioned tech-powered sales that he wrote with Tony Hughes. Tony Hughes has been on the show before. He was great, like Justin was. We interviewed both of them to talk about Tech-Powered Sales, a book I loved because there are 6,000 different technologies to help us have the right conversation with the right person at the right time. It's overwhelming even if you dedicated your life to this.

What I found with Tech-Powered Sales was that it was great for categorizing the things I need to think about, and it gave top lists of technologies that we could go and leverage so we don't get overwhelmed by the tech stack. When we talk about Sales Superpowers, let me call it out before we get in here deeply late. The joy of doing our show is we don't have 1,500 episodes. We have 100. I read the books of the people who are on our show. I go after them to join the show. They don't come to us. I go, reach out, and ask them because I'm a fan of their books. I am a fan of this book, Sales Superpower.

If you are an SDR, BDR, or an account executive where you have to fill your own top-of-the-funnel, which is everybody in the business, you need to read this book. One of the things that's unique about this book is about filling the top of the funnel outside of the depth and experience that Justin had. If you know what you're talking about, you know where his depth and experience came from. I do like the fact, Justin, that you respect some of those core foundational business models and books like Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling and Miller-Heiman’s Strategic Selling. You talk about Sandler.

The truth of it is, and we read 100 sales books a year, 60% of many sales books come back from one of those foundational models. They came from a lot of Dale Carnegie several years before that. That came from ancient Greek wisdom in certain periods of time. In terms of interacting with a human being, it hasn't changed dramatically over time, but you need to capture this with a voice for a new generation. In terms of figuring out what to do, once you understand those things and you can have a great conversation, there's nothing better than this book for an SDR or BDR.

I'm honored by that because I started to realize there are seven areas that humanity uses to develop business. There are 400 million small businesses worldwide that are the engine of the backbone of the global economy. There are a million SDRs in SaaS and tech and eleven million sales reps in software technology.

No one has questioned the call opener for the first 3 to 7 seconds. I have this idea of heuristics. If you take linguistics, which is the syntax, the words, and the way we talk and communicate. Heuristics are shortcuts over the top. I've seen that in David Hoffeld’s book, The Science of Selling. It's a term taken from computer engineering. My brother is an engineer at Google.

What I'm talking about is rather than memorizing a script, a template, or a pattern, you look at the meta of what it means. You tell the joke that's a humor heuristic. You compare another company that's a social-proof heuristic. You could have pain or fear, emotional resonance. You could have brevity. By stitching together the bounding box around communication, it changes the way you communicate. You can take a 22-year-old, and now they can communicate to a 54-year-old exec making seven figures. Now, we have conversational parody. It's a fast way to upskill and get on the same wavelength.

The way that phone openers have been for several years is the same. It's permission-based. I call you and ask for permission. What I argue in the book and what I did in my methodology is it lowers your status if you ask permission, like, “Could I get 27 seconds of your time?” It works with tone. If you're selling a seven-figure product, you can't tell it in 30 seconds.

Another popular one now is, “You don't know me. I'm reminding you I'm soliciting.” The most famous one is, “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Aaron Ross, who's a friend and mentor, created this. It's popular. It's been fatigued and saturated. They've heard it a lot. It has a Chris Voss mechanic because it's a negative question in that, “Did I catch you at a bad time?” They say, “No.” You're asking for a no rather than a yes, which is a pattern interrupt in a way that comes from Sandler.

I'm quick to attribute everything, but I love Todd Caponi, who did The Transparency Sales and was my first boot camp trainer at Salesforce in Indianapolis when it was ExactTarget. He goes back on his show, The Sales History Podcast, to the origins of Calvin Coolidge having a sales kickoff in 1910. We're constantly exchanging 3% of the markets in the buying window chat homes. Where does that come from? He is like, “People were talking about the small piece of the market in 1890.”

What I've done on the phone with my techniques has been divergent over the last several years. I believe what I've done in email and in one-to-one DMs is post-1993. I have created a Napoleonic asymmetric warfare or pattern interrupt where I'm doing something different from a neuroscience perspective that stands out to the prospect.

Editor's note here for those reading The Science of Selling by David Hoffeld, he's been on the show. If you want to take a look at past episodes, he's been on the show. One of the things you referenced well is we can't take the LinkedIn platitude of an opener and say, “I'm going to apply this across my entire team through automation. It's going to work.” In LinkedIn platitude, you get what you pay for. Secondly, it changes if it works.

If it works well, people scale it and automate it, and it stops working. You have to be nimble enough no different than any super high-end athlete who comes up with a different way of approaching the sport and somebody can defend against it. If they treat it differently, you have to be able to acknowledge, assess, adapt, and change along principles.

That's another thing that I like about your books, Justin. You've been through the wars a little bit, but you do get back to this mindset and principles in terms of we've got to make sure we can add value. We've got to understand business acumen and industry acumen. Get away from pitching. The pitching came from venture capital going into SaaS and scaling up sales teams so fast. They didn't invest in training or the person training. The team had been doing it for several months. Not everybody's sales force can spend that money on it. People got lousy training, and they became bad. Whatever their bad boss was coaching them on, that's what they did. That's why we've got so much churn in professional sales.

In your book, we'll get into some of the detail here, and I want to talk about all these things, email calls, text, and objection handling, but at a higher level again, it seemed like your book this time had a slightly different tone than some of the other ones I've read with you. You are starting with the mindset and you spent quite a bit of time on coaching. You are a coach, but tell me why it had more of a focus on that and where you've got to in that space.

It's metaphysical, but as I've gone on a journey from being stuck at $45,000 per year to buying 31 without a college degree, earning over $100,000, and finally getting to Salesforce and LinkedIn after many rejections and the pursuit of happiness story. I’m making the most calls and taking the toughest gigs like working in call centers in Costa Rica. It's a great country, but where I was managing wasn't the safest location there. I wasn't out on the beaches. It always sounds a lot more glamorous, but I would always take the hardest jobs.

I worked my way up to Salesforce and LinkedIn by dint of experience and merit. I'm self-made and self-taught. What was happening inside my mentality, my mind, and my self-talk rapidly and dramatically changed. We know that your head is trash. What's in your head, whether that's Tony Robbins, Sandler, or any system, “We think I can't do this big deal.” I'm sitting in front of you, trying to close a seven-figure deal with a CFO. It’s not going to happen. They're going to sense it. At a deep level, your identity needs to shift.

One of the big ways that reps can shift is by starting to serve and feeling the service and the joy of transforming a customer's business. I had a lot of signposts. There was this guy at Salesforce, Tom Randall, who was a former NFL player. I sat with him in a blizzard in Chicago during a challenger sales simulation on a break. I said, “What are your favorite books?” He said, “You're overcomplicating it with all the books.” He looked at me and said, “Justin, sit down, look them in the eyes, and say, ‘I'm going to transform your business.”

The reason I emphasize coaching is that you have to coach yourself until you're coached. If you're in this racket for long enough, you'll be coaching teams. You're going to have to motivate others. I've trained and managed hundreds of reps. I've coached a thousand reps and advised 200 teams.” We can go even crazier to Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, and 5% of your waking reality is your conscious mind, and 95% is subconscious. Some are 80/20. Eighty percent of your success in life is the inner game, and 20% is the outer game.

I'm huge when I coach people on figuring out what's inside the head of my client, what they are thinking, and what the repetition is. We have 70,000 thoughts per day. We're not our thoughts, minds, and bodies. We're the consciousness behind it. From being, we shift identity that changes thinking and that changes doing. We have this ego, and what it does is it create sabotage and holds us in homeostasis at an exact income level. We're making $95,000, and we get promoted to a $150,000 job. Everything goes wrong perfectly. We can be comfortable again. We can never get enough of what we don't need. Our comfort zone brings us back, and we subconsciously self-sabotage us.

People come to me trying to 2 to 5X their income, trying to blow it out, hit President's Club, and make their number. You see this cyclical manifestation. That's why I got into the mindset, positive mental attitude, John Wooten, all the law of attraction, and neo-transcendental stuff. It's medicine for the heart and mind for these kids that are lost, and they're getting rejected all day, and they might quit.

It’s their view of what success is sometimes. That's something a bit of a challenge for the younger generation. I notice many themes in the reading that resonate because all of us battle with this. All of us have some degree of imposter syndrome. No matter what we're doing, we're going to feel it at some point. Justin was referencing. He has this great Venn diagram where he thinks about doing, being, and thinking within the book.

That's an important thing to get this abundance mindset where the universe isn't trying to get you. The universe is providing opportunities for you. Take a pause. It's a bit of meditation or mental preparation. Enjoy what you're doing. That idea of every interaction with a client, a prospect, or a guest on the show. You're of service.

First of all, be curious. Always trying to learn and develop. It sounds like you've read every book out there. Nick Morgan from Harvard talked about us being able to sense somebody else's intent in milliseconds upon meeting them. Having the intent of service, like, “I do want to help you achieve a better business outcome. I do want to help you be successful in your business. I have value that I can add to this conversation. I'm not going to pitch my product. I'm gonna talk about some insight, value, best practices or trends.”

In a genetic sense, you want to know what other clients like you who are running call centers are doing now. I'm not going to tell you specific things, but I'm going to give you some ideas here so you can stay ahead of the curve. That mindset is such a critical one starting off what we do. It's tough to sell. There’s a lot of rejection. We need some mental fortitude. We'll talk about your honey badger, but it's an important one, Justin. I'm glad you started with that in the book, and it's important.

Take paranoia, and there's this funny word called pronoia, which is to flip it. The universe is plotting to do me good. Take the rapper 50 Cent. He takes nine shots to the face, and he lives. He sees himself, and he goes, “This is a miracle he lives life from that place of a miracle.” Look what he accomplished. He invested in vitamin water from Glaceau and made a fortune. He is a strong businessman. He wrote a book with Robert Green. It's fantastic. It's a street hustler's interpretation of The 48 laws of Power. I love it.

All your weaknesses are your strengths. It's a double-edged sword. I have no college degree, and I've moved up into the top 1% of this industry repeatedly in regards to shedding the profit motive like a skin. We're all taught money focus. I hired him. He's money-focused. That's the goal of the salesperson. The top rep at Salesforce said, “Read The Go-Giver by Bob Burg.” I know Bob. We've all read some of the great books. It's a parable. It's like Og Mandino and The Greatest Salesman in the World or Frank Bettger and How I Raised Myself. You read it, and it's all about paying it forward. The minute I finally got on calls and I didn't want to close the person, the floodgates opened because that little dot, that nanoparticle of blood to the great white shark, was always there. You can't coach people like that. I can't close my coaching clients. I take on the burden of their case. I have to help this person shatter their income ceiling, locate their unique genius, and find shortcuts. I’m like, “I want to get results. I want them to reach a better future in a far better state.”

If you create your future from your past, you're forever a victim of your experience. If you create your future from your future, it's a powerful and infinite possibility. That's a quote by Werner Earhart, and I love it. You read pronoia and future from the future over and over in the three books. I'm hammering it into your psyche purposely because I want you to shift from fear and worry and all the external like, “What are the tactics? What are the hacks? Is it Sandler Miller, Heiman, challenger, or SPIN? I'm like, “It's in your head. The fact you're looking outwardly to solve your sales problem is step one.”
let's get into the rest now. You want to underscore that.

Let's jump into a couple of things. This show is not something that's a replacement for buying and reading the book. Buy and read the book. You'll come back to me and thank me for suggesting you do this. Many of our clients who always read these blogs go and do it. It aligns perfectly with many of the things we teach.

Let's do a bit of a quick round table, Justin, so people get some value out of it in addition to everything else we've covered here. Let's talk about a couple of things. Let's start with the telephone. I can't tell you how often we get brought in to coach organizations where someone's pulled a platitude from LinkedIn that says, “The telephone is dead.” With love, I'll show them why that's not the case. We might do a couple of days worth of telephone prospecting in front of a group of people to show them that it's not dead. Let's talk about some of your approaches on the phone. We're going to talk about email and sequences.

I was greatly honored that Art Sobczak from Smart Calling read this. He gave it a positive review, and He didn't even have to. Thank you, Art, for reading. I'm never saying that what you're doing on the phone won't work. If you have tonality and a strong frame to quote, you can crush it on the phone with almost any script. The issue is a lot of the models are quite predictable.

In 2024, you should be prioritizing the telephone as the tent pole to your strategy. I was part of that research and combo prospecting with Tony Hughes, where if you get an email, call. If someone views your profile, call. If someone comments on something on LinkedIn, call and invest, and you're a manager out there in data, not ZoomInfo, but hitting that against a VA operation to clean the list or working with LeadIQ, there are many different ones because what you want to do is get phone numbers that ring.

In 2024, you should be prioritizing the telephone as the tent poles your strategy.

Connect and sell. Looked at about 10 million phone numbers, and they found that 50% of the meetings were from fully navigated dials. What does that mean? It means that direct sales are not the holy grail. A lot of these folks are still about leaving a voicemail through the switchboard, getting through a gatekeeper, and dialing in through a phone tree. You need to get masterful calling gatekeepers because you need to go to power.

In an organization, it's pyramidal. You go top down, bottom up, and middle out at the same time. Why? It’s because if you call the C levels, they'll freeze you and say, “Leave it with me.” They'll delegate it down to who you sound like. If you try to get groundswell and call low, some small fiefdom will catch you and block you from going up to the CRO.

What I do is I call up and down the org chart. I gain intel at various levels and take that intel with me up and down until someone stops the cakewalk like the music stops and says, “I'll get an email and say, ‘This is Jane's team. Call off your dog. Stop calling the whole company. Stop sending Venn diagrams to everyone.” That's the why behind calling and the techniques we could get into.

Let's call out while you're on it because you talked about the pyramid, top-down, bottom-up, and flanking. I love this idea of reaching out to salespeople to take calls. If you're trying to get some intel and insight, they'll respond, take an inbound call, and share. There's a karma about that. They're doing down-demand generation. They're willing to lend a hand.

The other great tip, which I didn't know, is when you're on LinkedIn and you see somebody you're reaching out to, on the right-hand side that people also looked for because it may not be somebody you would've logically gone to or flanked in that organization or another organization. Tell us a little bit about that tip. That's an interesting one.

I'm glad that you caught that. That's such a small nuance. It's made companies that I've worked for millions of dollars. Two office giants merged, and I needed to get the chief digital officer. I went to LinkedIn and put people who were also viewed. There was a VP of financial planning and analysis. At that time, I wasn't as smart as now. I thought, “For some reason, it was a hack that whoever knows the person, even if it's a different company, the water cooler is people also viewed now.”

I know that's true because people are turning that off. I called him, and I got through to his cell phone. He picked up and gave the value prop. He's like, “Here's the cell phone. Give him a call.” I called the chief digital officer of a Fortune 100. On his cell, that wasn't available in any database. It was a private cell. I talked to Vern. He didn't respond. I went to my own CEO. She sent a message on LinkedIn and the combination. We ended up on-site in Boca Raton, flying in. This became a multi-hundred thousand dollar deal and was successful.

Another great phone story is that I tried to get to the chief marketing officer of Marriott. It’s not easy. I was reading an article in Wired Magazine, and there was a quote in it. I call this Hyper P in the book Hyper-Personalization. I read about these new apps where you can open your hotel door with the app. We had a geo-fencing technology that was accurate. You could serve different offers at the pool, front desk, and golf course.

I called her phone. I dialed DiscoverOrg, which is now ZoomInfo. It is Friday afternoon, 4:00 PM. I leave a voicemail like, “I saw your quote in Wired to have this technology.” I'm doing a combination of calling voicemail and email. I left a voicemail and sent an email. I put your quote in Wired as the subject line. Within fifteen minutes, she responds, and the loops in London. The next week, I called London. I explain the whole scenario, what the tech is, and how I got to the CMO. I get transferred to Plano, Texas. Within a few weeks, we're on a plane going to Plano, Texas. I'm sitting here using the Justin Michael Method, making this stuff happen. I hadn't codified the method back then. It was routing, multithreading, and doing what it takes to smartly use the phone.

This is the beauty of it. People who achieve a certain level of proficiency in anything have an open mind to a lot of different things. The top hockey players and trial lawyers in the world are always looking to learn and understand what other people are doing. There are no real absolutes, “Never do this. Don't do this.”

People who achieved a certain level of proficiency in anything have this open mind to a lot of different things.

What I love about that is when you think of your sequences in some sense, you say, “In certain areas and levels, we can use some automation with some basic personalization, but at certain levels, it's got to be hyper-personalization.” As soon as you leverage somebody's quote, they're going to respond. I always call this out, Justin. I'm not cold call. I get a lot of email spam because although I don't do anything in the funnel, I'm listed as a CEO. The hard work gets done by other people, but I'm listed as CEO. I get pounded.

It's easy to get my attention. All you have to do is say, “Mark, when you were talking about value proposition in the second minute of that video, I loved when you said this.” If you say that, “I'm morally obligated to take your call.” It's easy. All I get is, “I get five times a week. We're a sales training company five times a week. I'm going to get an email blasted by another sales training company.” That's what happened.

They don't even look at a website. They have no idea what we do. They've taken a list and are blind. That's the noise that it's easy to stand out from these people if you do some of the things in Sales Superpowers because it's a dynamite book. Let's jump over to email. You talk a lot about, “Let's get away from text. Let's get to images like the Justin Method and Venn diagram.” Tell us a little bit about that.

The whole idea of the Justin Michael method is there's the David Sandler Method, but at the end of the book, I say, “It's the Mark Cox Method.” The goal is to make it your own, disassemble it, and make it a steel alloy without you already using it. I almost called my method the Venn Diagram Selling. I was kicking around 2016 and 2017 in a company called Tune.

There was a chief revenue officer. This guy is Ralph Hurt. He had this 350-page sales kickoff document. I was onboarding. I was like, “This is impressive. This is MBA-level stuff.” Inside it, he has these market breakdowns, full Deloitte style of all these different Venn diagrams. I was taken with them. I thought, “I'm going to send these in emails.” I took one of them. I sent it to the Chief Digital Officer of McDonald's out of my Gmail, and I booked a meeting on the first cent. I was like, “That's crazy.” He immediately looped someone in and had a call.

I sent it to the VP of Home Depot. My cell phone rang, and the guy said, “Pitch me.” He called the phone number in my signature. In several years of prospecting, no one had ever called me back, even off my phone messages. That was the Doc Brown flux capacitor falling and hitting my head on the toilet and inventing time travel. I thought, “Maybe there is something to do with it.”

Over the last several years, I've helped people build thousands of Venn diagrams. I don't know if I can divulge this, but there's this company with about $1 billion in revenue. They have this extremely sophisticated Venn diagram that looks like close encounters of the third kind. I wish I could show it to you. It has these wheels. It looks like a crop circle. They've set 60 opportunities in the enterprise, driving tens of millions in funnel by sending this diagram.

Here's the reason why. Images process 60,000 times faster than words. Ninety percent of what the brain retains is visual. Words don't exist. I thought, “Here's the tombstone. You're going to one of these big cemeteries and there I am.” On the tombstone, it says, “Email is visual. The phone is power transfer.” Email is not about templates because it's about heuristics and images in their mind that are the connotations of the words. If you think of Starbucks, you think of coffee. If you think of the ultimate drawing machine, you think of BMW.

What you're trying to do with words is put an image in their mind. We all know that people hate to be sold and they love to buy. They are triggered emotionally, but they rationalize with logic to close. Those are different sectors of the brain. There are all these, like complicated brain diagrams and books. Oren Klaff has great stuff on the crock brain.

Here's the idea. You have an old brain like the lizard brain, and you've got the neocortex. The problem is, between phone and email, we use the brain wrong. Here's what I mean. When you interrupt a human on the phone, it’s old brain, fight or flight. You need to calm down. That person says their full name. Let them talk, make them safe, and validate them. That's not the reason for my call, not combative, not rebuttals, because they're going to be uninterested. I'm not interested because the old brain is reacting, and the front brain is catching up.

When you email people, you need to trigger the old brain because if you send them all this stuff to the front of their brain that's logical and happy, it never triggers the emotion for them to have a visceral response. Humans are loss-averse and risk-averse. They're not pleasure-seeking. You have to be a merchant of fear.

You have all this reverse engineering. It's like, “Is this even ethical? You play with people's minds, Justin.” I say, “If you sell a product and service that is a 3X our why and you transform their business, and it's good for them, you have to move them out of their comfort zone so they can change. That's the most ethical thing you can do. If you have to use a tactic to get them out of their own way, no one else is going to do it. Help them help themselves.

The way theories of persuasion have been out there for thousands of years. We're all victims of this. We have our mobiles, and 80% of everything we do comes through our mobile. Who doesn't miss the dopamine of scrolling through our mobile? There are smart people who have figured out how we do this they get us connected.

I have a couple of thoughts to throw out, folks. I've referenced this before. I love The Old Lizard Brain, New Brain, Emotion Fact, System One, System Two Thinking, by Daniel Kahneman. We've talked about that book on this show every third episode. It’s the hardest read I've ever read. That's the most difficult book to read I've ever come across. It's hard to capture the 135 cognitive biases because every time you look at one, you think you've got it. How many books do you read a week? You must be reading 3 or 4 books a week. This is insane stuff.

It's funny because when I first got on the phone with Mark Berry, she was like, “Are you an encyclopedia?” I was talking fast, like Mark Andreessen. I've been experimenting with not taking caffeine because David Goggins doesn't take caffeine. I've been doing experiments between the beta-focused state of the brain, states like Theta and Alpha, and the impact of geometrically sacred music like Solfeggio frequencies on the brain to relax and focus on the beats. I've been doing a lot of this stuff.

There was a time when I was on the road for several years when I digested this stuff like candy. I did like what Alex Hormozi said. I would get a pile of books. If it didn't grip me in the first couple of chapters, I abandoned or read a blink of summary.” Stuff like Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Thull or The New Power Base Selling, I've read some of these books five times.

I've gone and contacted every single author who would talk to me. These days, I spend more time editing my own writing than even writing. If you look at it with the Justin Michael Method Series, you've got 150,000 words there. I have put out 500,000 words of published writings in the past several years, and I've gotten faster. I also did a book with my co-founder, Julia Nimchinski, called Reinventing Virtual Events, which is a go-to-market book. I don't know if you're aware of it.

I'm not, thank you.

That's a cool one if you want to check out my thoughts on marketing.

I know how busy you are and we're going to wrap this up. I got to call out a couple of things. First of all, I'm happy to reconnect with you again. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us. I do love the book Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth. It's fantastic content and an interesting read for those of us who enjoy understanding, developing, and trying to take it to the next level. If you've got a growth orientation, this is for you. If you're starting in sales development or business development, this is for you. All of Justin's links will be in the blog. Justin, we have to stay in touch. Thank you so much for joining. It's been such a pleasure having you.

Thanks for having me. I put out some free guides called the Codex Guides. They were put on Reddit by 25,000 people who got them. If you reach out, I'll share them with you. They're immediate heuristics, formulas, and frameworks that you can apply to emails, calls, social selling, visual prospecting, and video.

I'm coaching some amazing teams and individuals and incubating new writings. I was on a call with Aaron Ross. That was great to catch up. I've had a lot of support from the entire writing community. I’m grateful to see how well this book's been doing. The book is selling at the pace of gap selling. I've put out five books, but this one is the one for Sales Superpowers.

Tech Powered Sales is like Iron Man and Jarvis Suit. They interviewed Stan Lee about the Spider-Man character, and it was the most successful even after Superman because it was a real human being that becomes supernatural or extra sensory and gets these superpowers. If you feel average or you're not that good at sales, I get it because I was average. I was making $45,000 at 31 with several years of experience. I managed a 1,000-person team. This is a book for you. You can turn your life around with what's in that book. I would be honored if you leave a review.

What's the best way to get ahold of you?

I'm accessible over LinkedIn. Follow Justin Michael. I try to answer everyone if I can and be helpful.

Thank you again, Justin. This is now going to be the last time we are going to talk. Team, thank you so much for joining the show. We run this show because we're intellectually curious about people like Justin and the great work they're doing. We want to increase the performance and professionalism of B2B sales because we believe, that by doing that, we improve the lives of professional salespeople like you.

We also know we're not perfect at running this show. Please send your comments on how we can make this more valuable to you. Keep sending them to me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We respond to each and every piece of constructive criticism we get. We love constructive criticism. That's how we improve this. You've given us some great ideas. Keep it coming. Other authors you'd like to see on board and other methodologies you'd like to talk about other formats. In the meantime, we're recording this in 2024 in January. I wish everybody an amazing 2024, where you're happy, healthy, and prosperous. You're giving back to the universe that love it shows you. Thanks, everybody.

Important Links

About Justin Michael

Justin Michael is a world-record-breaking, outbound sales maven who has arguably built the deepest client acquisition methodology of all time: the Justin Michael Method (JMM™).

It's driven over $1 billion in pipeline for 200+ startups he's advised and over 25,000 reps, 1,000 of which he's personally coached.

With 20+ years in sales, ex-Salesforce, and LinkedIn, Justin is the global authority on AI-based outbound prospecting alongside legends like Aaron Ross, Josh Braun, and Mark Roberge.

His counterintuitive, mobile-responsive, neuroscience-backed visual prospecting methodology made him a million-dollar earner and helped countless startups scale past $10 million ARR.

His clients frequently 2-5X their pipeline and income, consistently getting promoted within six months. Justin is the bestselling author of "Sales Superpowers" and "Tech-Powered Sales," which proved that over 75% of top funnel can be automated by raising your technology quotient (TQ). He lives in Los Angeles, California, advising top SaaS technology CROs and teams on bleeding-edge revenue models.