Untap Your Sales Potential

The night after Ian Mai closed the biggest deal in his company's history, he couldn't sleep.

The deal was about 20 times the average deal size at the time. By every outside measure, it was a massive win.

But instead of celebrating, he felt more beat up and more broken than before. One question kept running through his head: how am I going to keep doing this?

He had built his entire career on pressure, stress, and anxiety. And he couldn't keep pretending he had it all together.

I think a lot of sellers experience some version of this.

When it's the end of the quarter and you're behind your number, you lock in. Pressure is the only thing that gets you moving.

But on a normal day, it's the opposite. You know exactly what to do. Call the prospect. Write the executive email. Build the proposal deck. And you sit there and can't make yourself start.

I deal with this too. Most mornings, I'll find something else to do before I start my workday. For example, right now there's a lead generation project for our business that’s one of the most strategic things we should do for our business, yet I've been putting it off for a month.

Most sellers spend two to three hours a day on RGAs (Revenue Generating Activities). If they could get that to four to six hours, it's game over. President's Club this year and every year thereafter. 

But KNOWING what to do and DOING it are two completely different things. 

That's why I wanted to host Ian Mai on our monthly Fireside Chat.

On paper, he had it all. Valedictorian. President's Club winner. Professional bodybuilder. 

Behind the scenes, he was battling overwhelm, addiction, and shame. After hitting rock bottom, he cleared $60,000 in debt, lost 60 pounds, and saved his marriage.

With a background in electrical engineering and 12 years in technical sales, Ian now helps executives, founders, and sellers understand why they struggle to do the things they know they should be doing. His approach combines neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and faith.

What I loved is that he didn't just explain the problem. He gave us practices we could use right there on the call.

What's actually happening in your brain

Ian explained that getting started takes two things: pressing the accelerator and letting go of the brakes.

The brakes come from the amygdala, your fight, flight, freeze response. It fires in under 300 milliseconds, faster than you can even notice it. That's the numb apathy you feel staring at your laptop screen. 

Why constant dopamine makes deep work harder

Quick hits of dopamine from your phone, sugar, and scrolling lower your brain's sensitivity to it. Then the parts of your brain you need to focus and follow through don't get what they need.

Because your brain is constantly in search of immediate gratification, focusing and doing work that requires thinking feels much harder than it should. 

Instead of understanding the reasons behind why we struggle to get started, I asked Ian to share and demonstrate simple techniques we can all start using immediately. 

Learn more at: https://untapyoursalespotential.com/podcast/

Last week I had my mind blown by one of our clients Ahiman Alexander, who doubled his income during his time in our program from $220K to $420K/year. 
The thing that impressed me most about Ahiman is that he found a way to apply strategic selling skills to his mid-market role at Asana, and scale this approach across 4,000 accounts!
His average deal size is just 15K, yet he will sell over 2M this year. That’s 10-12 deals per month! He set the record for the biggest deal in his division, and closed over 500K last quarter and is very close to hitting his aspiration goal of $750K this quarter.  
Before joining the program, Ahiman was in a dark place, losing his father and mother in-law in a period of 6 months. That’s when he decided to go ALL IN on the program, and applied nearly everything I teach to his sales and personal life. 
Here are the 10 things he applied which made the biggest impact: 
Mindset 
1. He found his why and connected it deeply with a daily mission statement. 
2. He shifted from an inward to outward focus. Instead of trying to sell, he focused on serving
3. Stoicism + Process thinking – he detached from the results and attached to the inputs
Habits
4. He joined a 12 week year accountability group and sold more in 12 weeks than most do in a year at his company
5. Addition by subtraction – he cut out the habits that no longer served him in his personal life
6. He set boundaries around his work hours so he could be present with his family at home
Selling Skills
7. He applied the 80/20 rule and had 80% of revenue come from 20% of his deals
8. He had rigorous prospecting discipline and made sure to complete 50 touches per day
9. Qualifying ruthlessly – every deal had to complete a PREDICT scorecard(opens in new tab)
10. He coached and educated his clients on how to buy software and controlled the process. 
Every month I run a Member spotlight, where our members get the opportunity to receive coaching from our top performing clients. This month’s member spotlight with Ahiman was so powerful that I asked if he’d be willing to share the recording with my public audience. He graciously obliged. 
If you want to change your sales and your life very quickly, check out this video and hear exactly how Ahiman transformed himself and his results in such a short period of time. 
I know you will be deeply inspired after hearing his story. I will also serve as a wake-up call to execute every day, serve your clients, and give everything you got so that you can become a person you are truly proud of and get the results you always dreamed of! 

Learn more at: https://www.untapyoursalespotential.com/podcast

Christi Civalier was crushing it in sales and making half a million a year, but something was missing. Deep inside she knew there was another level of selling she had yet to reach. 
She felt stuck in her career, and had hit a ceiling.. 
Five years ago, while I was still working at Salesforce, she started messaging me whenever I posted on LinkedIn, asking to work together. At the time I had no capacity for 1:1 coaching, and told her to stay patient until I launched my coaching business. When the first cohort of Untap Your Sales Potential opened, she was the second person to sign up. She still calls herself an OG.
We coached together for three years, which turned out to be the best years of her career. She mastered executive selling, and consistently closed large, transformational software deals. She had so much success in the program, that I asked her to coach on my team as a side hustle.
Then her clients started seeing similar results. One of her clients just closed a $34 million deal. He got there because Christi talked him into walking away from a smaller deal he had been chasing for months, which freed up his time and attention to go find a much bigger deal! She found coaching so fulfilling that she decided to quit Corporate Sales entirely this year to coach full time. 
Christi’s story is inspiring and powerful. She's 59 years young, and a single mom to two teenage daughters. She’s the breadwinner in her house, and walked away from a lucrative sales career to follow her passion and make an even bigger impact in the world. She just finished writing a book, which will be released in a few months. 
In this week's podcast, Christi shares how she reinvented herself and how she now coaches sellers to do the same.
We discuss:
Why successful and stagnant is such a dangerous place to be 
What she learned at Untap your Sales Potential, and how it helped her reach the next level of selling
What the million dollar earners actually do differently with their time
Why she left a successful sales career at 59 and started over
The book she's writing, Identity Under Pressure, and who it's for
If you look successful on the outside and feel stagnant on the inside, I strongly encourage you to watch this entire episode.
If you have ever told yourself it's too late to become the person you know you could be, this might be the exact story you need to hear today.
Learn more at: https://www.untapyoursalespotential.com/podcast

I get asked all the time how to break into Enterprise tech sales.

Since I don't offer career coaching, I decided to interview my good friend Daniel Borodyansky, who broke into Microsoft with no sales experience.

Not only did he share his step-by-step playbook for landing his dream job, he also broke down how he hit 97% his first year at Microsoft, then used that as motivation to crush his quota the following year. 

This year, Daniel will make well over $500,000 and have his biggest year yet. He is also a father of 3, avid boxer, and launched his own company building AI sales systems for other sellers.

The craziest part? He's only 30 years old.

Here's what we covered on the latest episode of the Untap Your Sales Potential podcast:
The exact goal-setting and journaling practice Daniel has used since he was 19
Why the side door beats the front door when you're trying to land your dream job
How to tell your story so your current experience counts as sales experience
Why he spent $12,000 on coaching two weeks into his first sales role
Missing quota his first year, and what he changed to have his biggest year afterwards
The frameworks that reshaped how he sells: the 12 Week Year, territory planning, and thinking like a businessman instead of a seller
The buyer-not-seller mindset he runs every call with
How he uses AI as a thinking partner at every step of the sales cycle

If you want to land your dream sales job, this episode is for you.

And if you want to know how to crack $500,000 with just a few years of sales experience, this one's for you.

Learn more at: http://untapyoursalespotential.com/podcast

Nine years ago, a guy I just met at a mastermind was in the middle of a strange challenge. He was handwriting five thank you cards a day every day for a full year. This challenge eventually led to a book “The Mr. Thank You Project,” Ted Talk, and professional speaking business. 

Not long afterwards, I started my own 365-day challenge, where I posted a motivational video every day for a year on Instagram. Those videos became the foundation of my sales coaching business, which ultimately became Untap Your Sales Potential, the world’s fastest growing sales coaching company. 

So it's fair to say this company exists in part because of John Israel.
This week I finally got to sit down with John on our monthly Fireside Chat and hear his entire story. Including why he owns 205 chickens on his homestead outside Dallas, Texas. 

Here's the part about John most people don't know.

John was the #6 seller out of 10,000 reps at Cutco, where he sold gifting services for client appreciation. And in his own words, he had become the most ungrateful gratitude salesman on planet Earth.

One evening he got home ready to complain to his wife about his day, and he stopped. She was nursing their newborn with one arm and handwriting a thank you card with the other. He couldn't appreciate this beautiful moment because he was too stressed and overwhelmed. 
He has a name for that which he calls “perpetual discontentment.” That never-ending feeling that you aren’t where you’re supposed to be in life. 
If you carry a quota, you probably know the feeling. Only allowing yourself to be happy when you’re performing, and typically that happiness is short-lived when you have to start all over again next year. 

That was the catalyst. John committed to five handwritten thank you cards a day for 365 days, and that one year turned into a book, a TED talk, and a career built on a single idea: gratitude is one of the biggest, underutilized advantages in sales.

We covered a lot in this one:
What he actually does with his 205 chickens 
The four black-and-white rules that made him finish 365 days straight, when most of us quit a challenge by day nine
The $1,000-a-day bet that guaranteed he never missed a single day
The "Story, Significance, Struggle" formula for building real connections fast (it lines up almost exactly with what we teach for executive conversations)
How to make everybody in your life feel safe, seen, significant, and supported
How he uses strategic gifting to turn expensive, hard-to-reach executives into lifelong customers 
The quickest way to get yourself to prospect every single day

If you've been grinding hard and still can't enjoy the results, this episode is for you. 

Learn more at: http://untapyoursalespotential.com/podcast