The Elon Musk 5 Minute Productivity System, and Why You Lose Sales Deals

0:00Have you heard about the Elon Musk five minute productivity system? No, I'm curious on it. So Bill Gates does this too. I looked this up. So I use perplexity deep research because I read about this somewhere. It's like Elon Musk only works in five minute increments, right? So what he does is, you know the Pomodoro technique? You know what that is? Okay, so that's like a little tomato thing where you have like 25 minutes and you just focus on that work and then you get a five minute break and then 25, you're just doing blocks of focused work, right? Elon is even more hardcore. He's only working in five minute blocks.

0:30So there's this thing called Parkinson's law where the more you give time to something, the more it expands. So if I say I'm going to give you one hour and something, you might mess around for a little bit and then you might get it done, right? But if I say five minutes, he's only working in five minute increments on the highest leveraged things. And I was like, does he plan out his schedule every day? Turns out he had an assistant that would map out his schedule in five minutes. And then he would actually make adjustments last minute to it. Because I don't think you and I like assistants planning our calendar.

0:57At least I don't. So that's what he did, right? And then I was looking at, I was doing more research on this five-minute productivity thing, and Bill Gates did the same thing in the past. So his assistant planned everything. Bill Gates was very detail-oriented, so he would check the night before just to see everything was good. And you know Elon's hardcore about his time because I think someone tried to get on a call with him, and then one of his chiefs of staff or assistants reached out and said, hey, each minute is worth about$22 million to Elon Musk or something like that, right? Is this call worth$22 million?

1:27Why is this call worth$22 million, right? So it's that hardcore. But I'm just saying, I started testing this this week because I just wanted to focus more. Talking about focus, right? I'm like, why don't you just try 15-minute blocks for half a day and see where it goes? I downloaded this app called Sessions and it syncs on your iOS, your iPad, and it syncs on your Mac. And it actually records to your calendar too. So eventually I want to see, I want to test out five-minute blocks, but I'm just like, even 15-minute blocks. Because the problem with me is I'm getting problems from everywhere right now.

1:58and so I need more focus. And so I thought this is interesting. Yeah, I usually try to do everything in 15 minute increments. Do you? Okay, so how do you do it? My assistants just set up everything in 15 minute increments. But your calendar's open. Yeah. But they have tasks. So I have a list of tasks that I need to complete in a specific day and I try to spend 15 minutes to do each task. Yeah, but you're, see you're, guys, this is not normal by the way. This is Neil. Neil has like an app in his head. So he just focuses on that. Like I think you can do it like that. For me, I get distracted really easily.

2:29So I need something that's like, there's an alarm and all that. Got it. My whole thing is I just need TV. If I have TV on in the background, I perform better than if I don't have television. See, guys, we're all different. I can't have TV. Otherwise, I get super distracted. Yeah. And I don't know what it is, but if I'm in like an office setting, I do not work as hard or as fast. I get too distracted because I look around and I people watch and I'm like, it's just novel for me. And I was like, I don't know what to do. But if I'm by myself in a room and television's on, I'm the most productive and I get tons of work done with no distractions.

3:03And I know people think television could be distracting. For me, it's not distracting. For some reason, I just perform better with the TV. It's whatever works. I got a good one because we both have been talking about gone calls the last couple of weeks. Well, let's talk about why you lose sales deals. So we can give you guys some feedback based on the gone calls that we listen to. Do you want to share some trends that you've seen as to why people lose sales deals? The biggest reason people lose sales deals is not doing the first call correctly. So whenever you have a call with someone in sales, you're first asking them about them, their company, their problems, what solutions, whether it's B2B or B2C, and you're trying to figure out how you can actually help them.

3:46If you don't take the time to try to do as much research as possible before the call, and you don't ask them the right questions during the call, you're not going to understand enough about them, their business, the problems, potential solutions, budgets, things like that. And the rest of the sales cycle is going to be messed up. And I say for all the sales calls that I've listened to, the biggest issue starts with the very first call and people not taking the time to do it correctly and really listen. So I've been listening to a handful of these calls and I've listened to hundreds, thousands of calls.

4:23I'm sure you have two over time. And it is every single touch point is a confidence killer or a confidence builder. And all they want to know is if you can do the job or not. And so when they ask you questions like, hey, like, so what industry do you focus on? If I tore my ACL, I really care if you actually have done ACL surgeries before. I don't care if you've done like X, Y, and Z and talk about all the other industries that you've served. You start to, that tells me you're unfocused and you don't know how to focus on what my problem is. every single thing that you do is a confidence building thing.

4:56And so when it comes to like getting on a call, if you get on a call quickly, Oh, these guys are fast. Oh, wow. They know what we're talking about. Oh, they actually listened. They've done research on us. Um, well, they can do a, they can do a proposal, um, in a timely manner or whatever. It seems like they're more buttoned up. It's all a confidence building exercise. Um, but there's, there's also like minus points too. So I've just found that, um, that's probably the main thing. And I would just add one more thing that less is more. When you start saying a bunch of stuff that also kills confidence too.

5:22Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that. Um, we've also found in sales because the AI is much easier for us to listen to calls. I know Gong will summarize things and help you go through recorded calls faster. Um, we like going one-on-one and actually listening to the whole call minute by minute instead of just looking for a summary. Cause you'll notice things that let's say Gong won't pick up. But you can also use AI now to translate someone's voice and sales call, like let's say from Italian to English, which allows us internally to listen to way more sales calls. I don't know what we do. I just get the audio file and I listen.

6:04The voices, of course, don't match up to the people's real voice, but we don't really care. And that's helped us really fix and grow ourselves globally. And that's been a game changer. That's fascinating because, um, you know, like Americans are generally more aggressive, right? But when you're talking to like, if you're talking to like an Italian, for example, or like a French person, they have different nuances in their culture. Whereas like, if you talk to a Chinese person in China, like they're probably even more aggressive. So, um, it's interesting because your feedback will probably be more aggressive, but then it's like, how do you adapt the, the cultural nuances?

6:35And I don't have an answer for that right now. And we look at everything because when you do recorded calls, we can actually see when the call was scheduled, when they showed up. So we know which of our people are late to the call, which pisses us off. Like you cannot make someone wait for you. If you're not early, you're late. That's our philosophy with sales, right? So we start looking at all these things and you just fix them one by one. It's not one thing that fixes sales and just skyrockets your numbers. Like everyone, every guru likes to pitch, do this one thing and you'll skyrocket your revenue.

7:07And I was like, no, it's not one thing. It's do a lot of things. And over time they add up. Yeah. And the reason I bring this up is, dude, I don't know about you, but on Instagram, I keep getting messages from people like, let's see, where was this one person? I responded to them. They're just like, Neil, let's chat, man. Last year, we did over 60 million in high ticket sales with, I'm not going to name the program. Let's do an extra 100 million with you. Okay. So they're talking about how they did 60 and they're telling me how they want to get to a hundred with me. They shouldn't be making it about them at all.

7:46It should be about me. And I get if they do a hundred, I'm making money too, but it sounds like it's more about them than me. And you responded? Why'd you respond? And they sent me a loom video talking about how they were so successful last year. So my response was, we don't do high ticket sales. We don't sell training or info. we're an enterprise company. Hey Neil. So then they get a response. Hey Neil, have you ever thought about launching a high ticket program with your audience size, the revenue potential and profit would be massive. And I respond with not for us. And then they say, I appreciate you, but like, you know, I get so many of them and this person I did respond to because they have such a massive following in the sales space.

8:28But even then they just don't like people believe that they can just teach you this one tactic and you're going to close a ton of revenue. and I met someone in this conference room, no joke, who does high ticket sales for one of their business and they're like, yeah, dude, doing over a million dollars a year. I'm like, yes, you're promising people the world. They're not getting the world. You're going to have tons of chargebacks and you're going to burn your brand. And you're going to keep doing it until you get burnt out yourself. Dude, I don't know if you saw this tweet. Did I share this tweet with you?

8:56So Andrew Tate, he tweeted something. He was like, if you are a modern man and you don't have multiple wives with multiple children, you are not a conqueror, right? And then Mike, the friend of Logan Paul, Mike Malak responded. He's like, calm down, Alexander the Great. You sell courses. I thought that was pretty funny. And then did he even get a response? I don't think he responded. But it's interesting because the original tweet from Andrew Tate got like 5 million views on it. Yeah, he's not conquering anything. He's just selling courses. Yeah. And so, hey, whatever works, it's just not for us.

9:32We've helped people that have big brands with courses and stuff. We don't have a problem with education. We're doing education right now. But I think our stance on it is we would rather give away the vast majority of our education and then serve people when they actually need the help. And if you're trying to go into a business like that, I'd rather be the Kajabi than the course seller. Yeah, you sell the picks and shovels. The picks, the shovels, and the axes, right? It's like Levi's back in the day with the gold rush. But another great example of this is ClickFunnels. They've done good as a business from a cash flowing standpoint.

10:04I'm guessing they have high churn. I don't have any data, but I'm going to guess based on their pitch, they have high churn. I believe the one that has done exceptionally well in that space is Go High Level. Is it CRM? Is it CRM or Project Management Tool? It's similar to ClickFunnels. I say Go High Level or Go High Level or something like that. But the key is, how can you end up selling to someone who's going to be more sticky. They sell to agencies. They've done exceptionally well from that. Agencies are a good space. It's a great space. And I think they raise money from General Catalyst or something like that.

10:41Okay, so that's what we learned from sales deals. Take that for what it is. Real quick, before I move on to the next one, remember a couple months ago, we talked about how Klarna, which is, I think they're worth$40 billion. They were talking about how they cut a lot of costs with their AI agents and all these things, customer service. so that the CEO has a reverse course. So he tweeted this and here's what he said. Wait, he went on a reverse course? Yeah, meaning that we just had an epiphany. In a world of AI, nothing will be as valuable as humans. This is from the CEO of Klarna. So, okay, you can laugh at us for realizing it's so late, but we're going to kick off work to allow Klarna to become the best at offering a human to speak to.

11:16So he said, we will continue to invest and improve our AI support, but the truth is cost savings, the cost savings it generates and improving in quality allows us to double down on making sure the human service part of Klarna becomes even better. So I think he's backing up and saying the human part is still important, not all AI. So it's interesting because we're going to see a lot of these experiments over time. We had a lot of people pitch us that they can automate our sales team with AI, or at least the initial call, and we refused to do it. We think in certain industries, at least consulting, if you don't have that human touch, it just isn't.

11:54If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Yeah. Actually, I can't think of any time where it's worked out. Can you think of any time where something sounded really too good to be true? Oh, yeah, you'll lose 100 pounds in one day or something like that. Dude, even like you don't eat McDonald's, but the next time you go to the airport, check out McDonald's. They have these kiosks where you can order from. And when you're saying too good to be true, I can push in there what I want it takes me longer than just telling the person assuming there's no line what I want and they just plug it in and I'm off into the races it does take a long time to fill out like I go to boba shops in Arcadia and I'm just like dude this thing takes forever and so I just gave up on it and I just ordered from the guy yes and as a customer I'd rather just go talk to the person at the counter and they just put in what I want and it's done eventually though we'll probably just talk to a robot pretty fast I'm okay with that When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real.

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15:06There's a lot of articles I've been going around over the last few months. I saw a Kevin and Dick study, but go because I'm sure you have a bunch of charts. So the obvious one is if you rank on page one, there's a strong correlation of being included in the AI overviews. Not necessarily number one on page one or number two or number three, it's just page one. If you're on page one, there's a good chance that they mention you. The next big thing that we're seeing with the AI overviews is if you can optimize for it and you can get placement into the AI overviews, we're seeing nice increases in traffic.

15:38Now you can't always optimize for it or get wins there, but a lot of people like, oh man, I'm losing out on tons of traffic. Well, if you're on page two of Google, you're not really getting much search traffic anyways. The traffic's on page one. If you're on page one, you can optimize getting mentioned and the AI overviews are anywhere else, any other areas that Google wants to end up showcasing because depending on the search query, they may push some other stuff. We're seeing overall sites that are doing SEO and are pushing hard on SEO are generating more traffic post AI overviews rollout still today than we did when it first rolled out.

16:16How much more traffic are you seeing? When it first rolled out is a little bit more than a percent. The last time I looked at the data from my team, it was a little bit more than 3%. So it's slowly going up. It's not much, but everyone keeps complaining that Google's taking away traffic yet there's more people using Google and you can still get a lot of traffic if you're doing things right. I think Google's still fine for the next couple years. I think long, long term, I think it'll go down but I think it's still good. So while the party's still going, you can keep dancing. I would actually say I don't know if Google's going to go down in the long term.

16:49I think people are going to... I don't think Google... No, I'm sorry. I mean website traffic specifically. That's what I mean. And I think people are going to shift on how they use Google. For example, like Google Lens. Do you have the Lens app? No. Are you using Google Lens to like scan an image and then it goes and finds it for you? That was something you needed access for a couple months ago, right? So I never tried it. You can go download, I don't know which app it is, but they have Lens on there and you can just scan an image and then it shows you. Okay. Could just be the Google app. Google Lens.

17:20I believe the last numbers I checked was either 10 or 20 billion monthly searches using Google. Wow. So I think you're going to start seeing people use search in many different ways. I agree with Eric, whether it's website traffic or people buying directly from social or directly through an email, because you can do that through tools like Zamo instead of just having people go to your website. Website traffic may be affected, but there's other ways to make up the sales and the revenue. Dude, speaking of Google, let's talk about YouTube for a moment. because I saw your new video come out yesterday and I'm looking at ViewStats right now.

17:53I have the ViewStats mobile app and you have a one of 10 here. Do you know what a one of 10 is? It's better than 10 of my other videos. No, so it's close. It's your last 10 videos. It's your, when you have a one of 10, it's the top performer out of the last 10. So that's a great one, right? And you have pretty nice thumbnails here. I'm looking at the A-B test that you're running. How do you think, based on this first video, I know it's very early right now, but how do you feel about how this is going and where this will go? So just so everyone knows, Neil made a video called How to Get Rich in a New Era of AI and we talked about how he's going wider TAM with some videos and these are very well edited.

18:28So what do you think so far? I think the videos are performing well. I think this one we knew was going to be a hit before we ended up releasing it because everyone's talking about AI agents right now. I don't think the next three that'll come out will be as big of a hit but I think they'll still get traction. this whole model of going broad and creating content. I think it's good when you're running ads. We'll see if we can make our ads pan out. We've sent out tons and tons of proposals from the cold traffic ads that we're doing, and we're able to get the cost per lead down, but we're seeing the sales cycle way, way longer, more than double, potentially triple or quadruple or normal sales cycles because these people aren't as familiar with my brand.

19:18And we're hoping that this solves this because if it does, then I can scale up ads really quickly and generate a high return. So too early right now. Too early to tell. I think the biggest lesson that I got from this, good editing really can make a difference. Yeah, your editing is really good on this. The editing is really amazing. Yeah. And we want to try to produce that quality of editing in all of our videos. It does cost more, but there's ways to figure out how to get it done at a much more affordable rate. It's worth it to pay a little more because you already spent the time on it. So just to get more mileage from it.

19:51By the way, there's a lot of lens. Is this just called Google Lens? Yeah, I think it's in the Google app. In the Google search app, if you have it, there should be a lens feature. Okay. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. That one. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And then you just select it. It's a little camera thing. Yeah. Yeah. I know what that is. Okay, cool. All right. Let's continue on here. So you have one on the simplest marking strategy being land and expand? Yeah, everyone in marketing is focusing on more traffic or increasing their conversion rates, but people forget the most basic thing, which is sell more. And a great example of this is you have your ABM software.

20:30People are interested in that. You try to also sell them on your agency services and vice versa. Let's land and expand. If you have a lead or you have a customer, make more money from them than just selling them one thing. And we both use, uh, Legion supplements, right? I've ate their protein bars for ages. Uh, I use their creatine. I use their fish oil. You know, I don't take tons of protein powder or anything like that on a daily basis, but I've used so many of their products. It's land and expand. Yeah. I do the same thing with this brand called Pure Encapsulation. So their Omega-3s, all their supplements.

21:10I have a bunch. It's either that one or Thorne. It's those two, right? Yeah. And then the protein bars are either Legion or David bars. But then the David bars, it was one flavor. I've expanded it to four flavors, right? But I think, by the way, this will go back into why you lose sales deals too. So sometimes when I listen to some gong calls, I'm like, the reason we're losing these too, it goes back to confidence, but we confuse the pricing so much and we try to sell everything at once. And we come off desperate. it comes off really confusing and it scares people because they're sticker shock too, right?

21:39Sometimes if it's a really big one and if it's an enterprise company and they're like, hey, we want to do a pilot with you guys, sometimes you take that bet because those small ones can become really big. Yes. If it's the right brand, the right division, the right department, and you know you can expand it, especially going through divisions or departments like procurement. Yeah. If you can get in the door, even if it's really small and not worth it right now, three years from now, it can be worth it. And I love those type of deals because if you're going through all those hoops to just get the initial contract, those contracts usually last for a long time.

22:12Because not many other people are going to go through the hoops, right? And sometimes procurement takes like nine to 12 months. So that's what we're dealing with, with Carrot. Yeah, and when you're dealing with some of these long procurement ones, keep in mind, they know internally to switch you out may take nine to 12 months. So they just want to pick a vendor that works and they want to stick with it for a while. Once you're in, you're in. You know, this happened a long time ago when we had Amazon. So we, remember Alexa, not the actual speakers, but the SEO tool. So Amazon had bought Alexa. Wait, does it still exist?

22:44Alexa.com? No, it's dead. It's dead. You're telling me they got rid of the website? They shut it down. Yeah, I think they shut it. I'm sure Alexa.com is still around. What does it say? Dude, there's Alexa.com. Learn about Alexa features, skills, and products. I don't know why they just don't take you to the device. They should just take it to the device. That's so dumb. So they had a thing called Alexa, which they acquired, which is an SEO tool back in the day. And so we were helping them with that. And then they had signed another agency to help them with running ads for Amazon ads. And that agency took forever to get through procurement.