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Sales Coach & Trainer | Peak Performance Selling Podcast
It’s a new month/quarter, and you are back to zero again (sigh). Staying motivated in any role is difficult, but it’s even more so in B2B sales.
In this episode of Closing Time, Jordan Benjamin shares tips to avoid sales burnout, bringing his perspective as a salesperson, sales leader, meditation coach, and yoga instructor.
He’ll discuss the four types of energy salespeople bring to their roles, how they can find a deeper purpose in their work, and the mind-body connection that he uses to coach salespeople and leaders.
Sales burnout is a real issue that affects many sales professionals. Constantly chasing targets, meeting deadlines, and handling rejections can take a toll on their mental health. When burnout strikes, it leads to decreased motivation, lower productivity, and even mental fatigue. To truly succeed, sales reps need more than just techniques and tools; they need to prioritize their well-being.
Jordan emphasizes that most salespeople already have the tools and knowledge they need to succeed. It’s not just about making calls or tracking reports; there’s something deeper at play. While these tools are essential, many sales reps miss the internal elements that can boost their performance. Instead of constantly seeking new sales tactics or training, they should focus on maintaining their energy and well-being.
Many salespeople equate performance with constant grinding, believing that hard work alone will lead to success. However, the key to sustained high performance lies in how they manage their energy levels.
Sales is indeed a numbers game and requires hard work. But how sales reps show up—both their physical presence and energy—makes a significant difference. Prospects can sense when a salesperson is low on energy. Therefore, finding ways to recharge and rest is crucial.
Jordan suggests creating a personal “menu” of activities to help salespeople recharge. This could be taking a five-minute break to walk the dog, standing in the sunlight, or listening to a favorite song. For deeper fatigue, longer breaks might be necessary. The goal is to avoid the trap of running from task to task without taking time to rest.
Finding a bigger purpose in sales transforms the job from a grind to a mission. When sales reps connect their work to a meaningful goal, it not only boosts their motivation but also enhances their overall performance.
Jordan emphasizes that every action in sales is tied to a story we tell ourselves. Many struggling sales reps view their job as merely a means to an end, identifying simply as a “sales guy” or “sales gal.” However, shifting this mindset to see oneself as a “sales professional” can be transformative. Professionals show up differently—they recognize they are helping people by solving problems and fulfilling needs.
Connecting to a bigger purpose starts with reframing the internal narrative. Jordan shares that in his early career, he learned to view sales not just as a job but as a way to make a positive impact. Even if the product isn’t perfect, believing in the journey toward improvement and the ultimate goal of helping people can provide a powerful sense of purpose.
Sales success also opens up opportunities for personal and professional growth. It can lead to financial freedom, allowing reps to support causes they care about or volunteer their time. The skills gained in sales can be applied to various impactful roles, such as sitting on boards or contributing to non-profit organizations.
Sales professionals show up every day with different types of energy that significantly impact their performance. Understanding and managing these energy types can be the difference between a good sales rep and a great one.
1. Mental Energy: This is all about focus. How well can a salesperson concentrate on their tasks and maintain sharpness throughout the day?
2. Emotional Energy: This encompasses general feelings and emotional well-being. How a salesperson feels emotionally can affect their interactions and resilience.
3. Physical Energy: This is the foundation of overall health. Are they eating well, exercising, and taking care of their bodies? Physical health directly influences stamina and the ability to handle stress. Exercise, in particular, has numerous benefits, from releasing endorphins to building endurance.
4. Spiritual Energy: Though it may sound abstract, spiritual energy involves finding a purpose that transcends personal gain. It’s about helping and contributing to others. When salespeople focus solely on quotas and personal achievements, their energy is short-lived. But when they connect their work to a larger mission, it can provide a lasting motivational boost.
Jordan stresses the importance of self-awareness in managing these energy types. Not every day will be perfect, but recognizing when focus is waning or emotional energy is low allows sales reps to take proactive steps. This might involve taking a break, setting specific time blocks for tasks, or managing distractions effectively.
One of the toughest challenges in sales is the relentless cycle of resetting goals every month and quarter. At the beginning of each period, sales reps go back to zero, which can be demotivating and stressful.
To counter this, Jordan suggests zooming out and focusing on bigger goals. Instead of getting caught up in quarterly numbers, consider annual targets. This broader perspective helps reduce the pressure of short-term resets and allows sales reps to see their progress over a more extended period.
Many salespeople aim for 100% or 125% of their quota simply because it’s expected of them. However, without a meaningful purpose behind these targets, motivation can wane.
Jordan emphasizes the importance of understanding what the sales targets truly mean for the individual. What are you doing this for? Is it to create a better life for yourself and your family? To support organizations you care about? By finding this deeper purpose, sales reps can tap into intrinsic motivation.
Jordan suggests focusing on what reaching your targets can help you accomplish. Maybe it’s getting a promotion, buying your first house, or taking a vacation with your family. These tangible, personal goals provide a stronger drive than abstract numbers set by the company.
Empowering a sales team goes beyond motivating individual sales reps. It requires leaders who are self-aware and committed to elevating others.
Jordan highlights that self-awareness is a crucial skill for leaders—they need to understand who they are, including the experiences and pivotal moments that shape their leadership style. MIT refers to these as crucible moments—significant events that impact how a person leads. By recognizing their biases and perspectives, leaders can manage themselves better and, consequently, lead others more effectively.
The process starts with introspection. Sales leaders must ask themselves: Where am I today? How am I showing up? What stories or biases influence my leadership? Understanding these elements helps in building a toolbox to improve self-management and leadership skills.
Interestingly, many principles of sales also apply to leadership. In sales, reps lead customers through a change or development process, akin to how managers guide their teams. Jordan suggests that the best managers move beyond focusing solely on numbers. Instead, they prioritize elevating others.
Jordan shares an impactful conversation with a highly successful CFO who measured his success by the number of people he had mentored who became CFOs themselves. This story aligns with Clayton Christensen’s concept of using a meaningful yardstick to measure life’s value. Leaders who gauge their success by the positive impact they have on others often find more fulfillment than those who focus solely on personal gains.
For sales leaders, this means shifting the perspective from personal achievements to team success. Losing a top performer to a promotion should be seen as a victory, not a setback. This mindset fosters a sustainable and positive environment where leaders thrive by elevating their teams.
Sales is full of rejection and frustration. So how do you bounce back? Let’s talk about recovering from sales burnout in this episode of Closing Time. Thanks for tuning into Closing Time the show for Go to Market Leaders. I’m Val Riley, head of content and digital marketing at Insightly CRM. Today I am joined by Jordan Benjamin. He is the founder of My Core OS. Welcome to the show, Jordan.. Thanks for having me. So, Jordan, I love your background and I think it makes you uniquely qualified to speak on this topic. You work in sales, but you are also a meditation coach and you teach yoga. So how did you come to have that very unique skill set? Yeah, it’s a really good question. For me, I think it probably starts with coming from Boulder, Colorado. For folks that are familiar with Colorado, they they know that we’re a little weird. And so I was open to a lot of different ideas early in my sales career. I was always kind of a weird seller. And so for me, it started when I first went to a yoga class and realized that at the end of the class,. I was laying there after these, you know, 65 year old women were so much more athletic than me and able to do all these poses that I could never do. At the end of the class,. I was laying there in Savasana and like, just felt this crazy energy coursing through my body, something that I had no idea of, school had never told me about. And I still have no idea really what it is. But it opened up my eyes to be really curious to go out and learn and understand what else is there that we haven’t been taught in school to help us really build a life? You know, I had a lot of tough experiences that also kind of led me to search out different ways to help grow for myself, develop myself personally, and it opened up all these different pathways of meditation, peak performance. What did athletes do? So you believe that most salespeople have what they need to do the job and know what they need to do the job, so it’s not really about like dials or reports, it’s something deeper. I think those things are really helpful. They’re critical to sales, but there are these things that most folks miss internally that they’re looking for a new sales tactic, a new sales training, and yet they’re not finding the results, they’re not finding the performance, and they’re kind of scraping and clawing to get by when there are a lot of tools that we have internally that can really help us perform a lot better and sustainably. So expand a little bit more on what you mean by that. Yeah. So, you know, one of the really common things I see with folks that come to me that maybe aren’t even burnt out, but they feel like they’ve tried everything. They feel like they’ve gone out there, they’ve pushed, they’ve done all these other things. And yet some of the simplest things they don’t realize can help them get back to performance. You know, most folks really think in order to perform about grind, grind, grind. And yeah, sales is a grind. You’ve got to work hard. It’s a numbers game at the end of the day. But how you show up, your energy when you show up for those dials, if you show up in you’re low energy, your customers, your prospects, hear that. And so finding ways to actually recharge and rest is really how you get back to top performance over time. And so we work with folks to say, how do you actually build out a menu of different items that you have to know, yeah, I need 5 minutes right now to go rest and reset. I’m going to go walk my dog. I’m going to go stand in some sunlight. I’m going to listen to my favorite song. And other times when that battery’s draining even further, maybe we need a little bit longer time to go rest and recharge to actually get ourselves to perform. But so frequently, sellers run back to back to back. They’re chasing that next thing. There’s always more that can be done on the joyful sales roller coaster that we live on. And really, it’s about how do you find some time to rest and recharge yourself to get back to top performance? So I know one thing you said when we were speaking was, a seller really has to believe in what they’re selling And like the bigger purpose of what they’re selling, you know, which translates to helping people. How how do you help sellers discover that? Yeah. So everything we do goes through some sort of story in our head. And a lot of folks look at sales, especially when they’re struggling as just a means to an end. I’m just a sales guy. For me early in my career,. I sat down with our CRO and he was like, Well, you can either be a sales guy or sales professional, sales gal or sales professional and really starting to think about, you know, what are professionals do, how do they show up and how do they find this purpose to say, we’re actually helping people here, we’re helping solve a problem solving need? I talked to a lot of folks. A lot of us in sales we’re not curing cancer. But you can if you succeed in sales, you can have freedom with your time and autonomy to say, I’m going to go dedicate this to an organization. You can make great money that enables you to go support another organization. You can take those skills and sit on a board. So there are so many different ways that you can connect that story to a bigger picture. And for me, early in my startup days, when, you know, product wasn’t great, it was about how do you find belief in that we’re moving to a place that’s getting better, that we’re on the path to actually solve a problem that will help people. And so that’s really where we work through understanding what are the stories that we have in our heads and how do we create those and architect those in a way that actually connect to our bigger purpose and that can go across so many different areas depending upon really what matters to you and what’s important for for each individual person. One thing I saw that you mentioned was about different types of energy that people can bring to a sales job. Can you expand on that a little? Yeah, totally. So there’s really four different types of energy that we talk about. Mental, you know, how much are we able to focus. Emotional, you know, how do we feel in general? Physical. Our body is the foundation of our overall health. You know, are we actually putting good nutrients in it? Are we exercising? The benefits of exercise have so many cascading effects on the rest of how we show up, whether it’s releasing endorphins, whether it’s building more endurance, expanding your VO2 max, There are different things that we can do to help that physical energy. And then to your last question, the spiritual, which is a squishy word for a lot of folks, but to me it’s ultimately how do you solve for a bigger purpose that goes beyond you? Because so many sellers get stuck thinking about their quota, their teams quota, managers sit in this same exact boat too, where they get stuck focused on themselves. And for many, many, many of us, if we’re really solely focused on ourselves, our energy is short term. And if we can focus on how do we help, how do we give, how do we contribute to others, that purpose or that spiritual energy can really lift up. So it’s about building one self-awareness to figure out where we’re at in these different areas, because not every day is going to be perfect, but then building different tools to utilize to say, okay, how do we know that, Oh yeah, I’m really struggling to focus right now. I’ve got to take a few minutes or I’ve got to really work on a specific time block on my calendar to know exactly what I’m doing or I need to manage my cell phone notifications to shut things down so I can manage my environment more effectively and show up better with that energy more frequently. I love how you spoke about the, you know, your physical body. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many former like collegiate athletes or even professional athletes are in sales because I do believe, like the the challenge that you put on your body to compete athletically, there’s a lot of relationships there with the challenges that a salesperson deals with. Big time. I’d say physically and mentally. For me, baseball was my sport and it was,. Hey, if you fail 70% of the time like that in the professional level, at least you’re in the Hall of Fame. And on the physical side of it is building these routines and habits that help nurture us. You know, I was actually just thinking about this the other day. I saw a picture of my mom with her personal trainer on a flier at the gym. And, you know, she’s in her seventies. And my dad would always tell me, like, wow, you’re lucky your mom gave you these good habits and these good routines around health and fitness because he didn’t have them. And those are things that I learned in sports that I saw modeled from other people that really helped me build better habits physically. But I think these athletes have so many practices and routines and understand that they’ve had good coaches in their life. They’ve taken outside perspective. And that’s where I work with a lot of folks that are former athletes, current athletes, state champions, things of that sort. And a lot of folks forget what they did back then to be at the top of their performance, and now they’re just focused on work and think that’s all that they’re values driven around and it’s pretty it’s pretty shocking when you help them realize like, Oh yeah, what what I did in the past to be a state champion. I kind of forgot as I got into the working world. So one thing that’s super hard in sales is at the beginning of every quarter you go back to zero and that can be great. You know, if you didn’t have such a great quarter. But I mean, how do you motivate people around that particular aspect of the role? Yeah, the the always back to zero and the what have you done for me lately, life in sales, is what drives so much stress and tension and anxiety and that ultimately kind of creates this negative spiral around performance. And so for us, you know, a lot of what we’re looking at is how do we have these bigger goals? How do we maybe reframe or zoom out on a bigger picture for from our perspective, think about an annual number versus a quarterly number. And again, how do you come back to really understanding like, what are you doing this for? So many people chase 100% to quota 125% just because the company told them that that was a number. And if you don’t have any purpose behind it, it’s not necessarily that motivating. And so really what we look to work on is like, well, what are you doing this for? You know, what does this help you create for yourself, for your family, for the organizations or whoever it is that you care about, and really trying to find that deeper purpose that allows us to say, Oh, yeah, well, here’s what I’m doing this for, here’s where I’m here, and here’s really what this means to me so I can get the next promotion, so I can buy my first house, so I can take a vacation with my family. Those are the types of things that really start to drive some more of that intrinsic motivation that go beyond just the extrinsic, Hey, here’s 100% quota or here’s where you are back to zero. I love some of those tactics for individual salespeople. But let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about how your message might differ when you’re coaching a sales leader. Yeah, so sales leaders, one of the key skills that Harvard Business Review talks about that leaders have is self-awareness. And so really starting to dig in and understand who am I, you know, what are the experiences or what MIT talks about is crucible moments in your life. What are the things that have happened in your life that impact how you show up and how you lead as a person? You know? So we can start to really work on understanding our biases, our perspectives, you know, what is this awareness that I can build around myself to not only manage myself more effectively, but then actually manage and lead others. And so really it’s about starting to build that toolbox again to say, where am I today? How am I showing up? What are the perspectives, what are the stories or biases that I have in my head that impact how I lead and how I show up with others? And a lot of times similar principles come up because sales in its own right is leadership. You’re leading folks to make a change or coaching them through developmental process in some form or fashion. It’s very similar to how managers work. And so we also start to look at, you know, how do managers and how do the best managers move beyond, It’s just about my number, to It’s about me elevating others. One of the best conversations. I had with somebody that really hammered this home was, you know, I asked somebody super successful CFO, like, What do you measure success as in your life? And he sits there for a second and starts counting numbers on his fingers. It’s like gets up to about ten and he’s like, you know, there’s ten people that have worked for me that are now CFOs somewhere else. And this ties back to a theme from Clayton. Christiansen, who talks about what is your yardstick and how do you measure the value of your life. And the folks that sit there and say, Oh, the value of my life is just the money that I’ve got in the bank,. The things that I have, usually aren’t the ones that are the most happy. So as managers, we work to say,. How do you work to build your skills and your tool belt to elevate others? So yeah, you may lose your top performer on your team because they got promoted, but how do you see that as a massive success and massive win opposed to I just lost my top performer. I’m so screwed. When it becomes all about me , it’s such a tough thing to sustain through. So that’s really where we work with managers a lot to say, How do you build these leadership skills for yourself so you can support others more effectively? Gosh, I love that message. That’s all the time we have. So we’re going to leave on that note. But Jordan, where can folks find you? And I believe you have a podcast as well. Yep. So my podcast, peak performance selling find it anywhere you listen to podcast today or or for folks that are curious I work with folks one on one, do a lot of different work. You can email me Jordan@mycoreos.com and also my website, mycoreos.com or some folks look at it and think it’s my corridos, but My Core OS is the best way to find me. Shoot me an email, find me on LinkedIn,. I’m happy to connect. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us and thanks to all of you for tuning in. Remember, you want to like this episode, hit the button for notifications and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss an episode. We will see you next week.
