Paul M. Caffrey (00:00.686)
You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart, that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole. And you associate with Lou Diamond.
Paul M. Caffrey (00:18.094)
Would you like to learn from those that are taking their lives, their businesses, and their passions to the next level? Best -selling author of Speak Easy and master connector Lou Diamond is here to connect you to some of the most inspiring and amazing people on this planet. Get ready to thrive loud with Lou Diamond.
Paul M. Caffrey (01:10.414)
See the phone twist in your side
Paul M. Caffrey (01:19.982)
Welcome everyone to another amazing episode of Thrive Loud with Lou Diamond, connecting you to the most inspiring and amazing people that are thriving each and every day. I'm your host, Lou Diamond, and today on Thrive Loud, we have a master of the sales craft, an elite sales professional that focuses on preparation to help salespeople prospect better, sell more.
and get promoted faster. He is the lead author of The Work Before the Work, which shares the hidden habits that elite sales professionals use to outperform the competition. Thrive Loud listeners excited to bring you Paul M. Caffrey. Paul, welcome to Thrive Loud. Lou, thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I just jumped off a flight and the first thing I did was race to the studio to come and speak with you.
See, and listeners need to know I'm the one who's the real winner here because we get to have this magical accent here along with the world traveling cool guy and a very cool background here. We're gonna give a shout out to his co -author of this book, Mr. Phil M. Jones, who's been on the show as well. We got a lot of Ms going on over here. And The Work Before the Work is a phenomenal read. We will put all the links in the show notes. We'll talk about in the plug section. But I wanna do a little rewind. I kinda wanna understand The Work Before Your Work.
Paul, do me a favor, let's do a little rewind and go back to how the stuff you're focusing on now became your gig. Yeah, it all, I guess in 2011, going back quite a long time, I left the science industry and moved into sales. So since then I did that move and started taking my craft a bit more serious in 2011. I reached a point where I was traveling every week and I was meeting a lot of clients and I was closing a lot of business. But then I reached a point where I was like,
How can I actually achieve more? So I was at the stage where I'd be jumping in the car at say 5 a .m., a rental car to go to one city, then go to another, 12 o 'clock at night, doing the quotes, all the follow -up to all the meetings that I've been having. And it's great, business is closed and there's a lot happening, but I kind of reached the ceiling. I couldn't do any more. So I was looking into performance and how can I improve my performance? How can I improve my results? How can I get to the next level?
Paul M. Caffrey (03:29.678)
I was very fortunate. I stumbled across a gentleman called Todd Herman, who is an elite performance coach. And I happened to be able to join one of his first forays online in the 90 day year. Now we're talking 10, 12 years ago when he was doing that. And at that point, it really opened my eyes up to, if I want to perform at a higher level, it actually steps back to being prepared for each of my meetings, being prepared for what I'm doing so that I get the most out of all of those opportunities.
And also being prepared to say no to certain work, which probably doesn't have as much a chance as closing, but I was just going after everything. So that really helped me to take a step back, do a little bit less, but be a lot more prepared and then close and be a lot more successful with what I actually chose to go and work on. By the way, I love what you just said there about that by saying no potentially limits the chance of you.
closing the business. It doesn't totally rule it out. In fact, a lot of people will tell you, no, it's one of the best strategies you could ever do because people are like, well, why don't you want to work for me? And it's almost like, wait, if he doesn't want to work for me, maybe I should be considering this individual. Why am I not? It's like a total mind mess, if you would. Yeah, absolutely. OK. I am on the same page with you as it relates to preparedness, the things you need to do beforehand, maybe even the mindset you need to be in. Let's talk about some of the most common problems you see because it's
It seems pretty logical that people should be more prepared. They should be like boned up before they walk in, but for some reason, maybe they're not. Is there one particular thing that you're seeing leading sales professionals miss out on more than anything else? Something that they're not stepping up or preparing for ahead of their work? Yeah, the biggest, the biggest thing I see people not prepare for is what they think they'll be able to do.
with no problem at all. And that's a lot of what you do. When it comes down to it, your experience actually becomes a problem because you know, I've done this demo a hundred times. I've negotiated many, many times before, and you will have the skills to get through those conversations and through those demos and through those meetings without preparing too much. However, if you actually stepped back, there will be nuances and there will be moments in those meetings that come along. Whereas if you have prepared,
Paul M. Caffrey (05:51.918)
you will be able to do a whole lot better. And a great example, I've seen many, many really successful salespeople do this. And I remember when I worked in Salesforce many, many years ago now, there was one of the top professionals in there who was always top of the dashboard, always delivered great numbers, insisted on practicing their demo for this deal they were working on. And it was a big deal, but it wasn't a huge one. It wasn't make or break your year stuff. I had their solution engineer and the wider support and team demented because they're like, we've done this.
two, three, four times, but he knew that if he got that perfect, much, much higher chance of winning the business, which he went on to go and do and close, because we get one chance to impress with our clients. Much as we like to think we get more than that, we really don't. And that's the key difference. It's preparing for the moments that are important that you don't think you need to prepare for, that you can get through, but if you were prepared, you would actually make the chance of that being more successful a bit higher. But here's the rub. Most people,
don't want to do the work. And preparation, it's more work. So it's work on top of work. And that's what's great about it. And that's also what's not so great about it because that is the work that most people won't do, but what elite performers do again and again and again. Let's have a little play on this because I think I'm in agreement with you. The term itself works.
is something that we don't want to do because we don't want to consider it to be work, right? Like we want to have fun, we want to play versus we want to work. In fact, I've had a lot of particular guests on this program who are all about getting in the right, you know, the play mindset when they're entering something to be creative or be a great leader. But we all know that there's work that has to be done. Yet here we are, the work before the work that needs to get done. And you're right, there is a mindset, oh, I have to put in that effort. Can we talk a little bit about the word work and an understanding,
What's in some of the work that you need to do ahead of time so that people can kind of get rid of that misconception? Because I think, I know it's a play on words, and obviously we both have a connection here to Phil M. Jones, who's all about words, and words will change your world. So the work, let's talk about work. You specifically tell me how we can think about work before the work differently.
Paul M. Caffrey (08:12.398)
Well, the key thing is when we're looking at meeting customers, meeting clients or serving however we serve, when it comes down to it, if they achieve what they want to go on and achieve and we help them get there, we will be rewarded to do that. So if you just blindly show up to something and do the normal work going through it, you know, you might hit the mark, it might work out, it might not.
When you do the work before the work, you're in the position of making that a whole lot better. So really another way to think of it is it's almost a thinking framework. Where we're at is if you've got a meeting coming up, think of the next big sales meeting or the next big customer interaction that you're going to have where you're like, I really want to get the right result here. There's three lenses. There's always three different lenses to look at it through. So the first is thinking about, well, what does the other person want to achieve? What's their current situation?
and what's their decision -making process. Then you're thinking about that from what other stakeholders are there. So if you're meeting a company, maybe it's got investors, if you're meeting an individual or a manager, maybe they've got people who are gonna be using your solution. Maybe your customers, customers are the ones who are gonna benefit from it. So there's always these other stakeholders that are in the distance that tend to get forgotten about, but are really, really important if we can make sure that things work for them as well. But then there's yourself.
What are you looking to get out of it? And in the world of sales, you know, typically we're like, well, we want to get the deal or, you know, we want to move on. Really, we want to get to a point of helping the other person make a confident yes, no decision. And the work before the work could have been called a thinking framework, could have been called, you know, thinking before the work, but I don't think it quite worked as well. So totally, I totally agree with that. It does. It's very catchy and it always gets the idea.
Obviously you've done a lot of sales in your career in the technology space and I have a good story which I'll share here and I may have shared this on the program before but I got the opportunity to, from the head of sales and the CEO of a company, to go with one of their sales teams to a sales pitch to actually watch them deliver the pitch because they wanted to understand why they weren't closing the business. And one of the things that was very prevalent that nobody on that team actually saw was...
Paul M. Caffrey (10:31.118)
they were very focused on talking about themselves or talking about their demo or their product or their solution versus the person that they were trying to help, the company they were trying to make a change and the ones they were selling to. I mean, they were even chest bumping and high -fiving when the meeting was over when I don't even think they asked a single question about exactly what they did. It was like, yes, they gave a great performance, but they didn't necessarily deliver. When it comes to helping salespeople balance that, to your point, because it is really hard,
when you have an offering, a technology, a solution, an offering that's very specific to you, to make that flip, share with the listeners as a sales season pro like yourself, what are some of the great ways that you can not only do that preparedness work beforehand, but have that delivery come out that makes it seem like you're not talking so much about yourself, but you're actually focused on solving the problem.
It really is a great question, and it's something that's overlooked so often. The first thing is before you're going to have this meeting or before when you're getting ready, bring a point of view, bring a perspective. If you're inexperienced at sales, let's say you haven't met that many customers or you're really, really young in your career, you can use that to your advantage. So you can do a little bit of research about how the business is doing, the solution that you're providing. You can kind of see, well,
Why would they want this solution if the industry is going that way? And then you can bring your perspective and you can share that at the beginning of the meeting in the sense of, well, I see that there's changes in the industry and it looks like this is happening. And I guess you're looking at the solution because of that. But I'm, I, this is what I see from an outsider looking in and I don't have as much experience as you are early in my career. What's your perspective on that? So straight away we get the other person to open up and give us a little bit more about that. Then the.
Sorry, go on.
Paul M. Caffrey (12:21.454)
No, you keep going. It's all you. So then the second thing then to consider is when you're looking at the problem, so your client is going to have a problem. They have a solution that they're working towards and you're going, well, this is great. They've got a problem. I've got a solution that solves that problem. One thing that we really don't want to overlook is your solution might solve the problem. But if...
the cause of their problem is in line with what your solution offers, you're never gonna get that deal. So for example, let's say you're selling CRM software and if you bring in CRM software, you can increase sales typically by 30 % and there's a lot of metric driven data to box that up. So you can see some head of sales, I need to increase sales on my team. So you can go in and chat to them about that, then you can present your solution and it can seem like, great, you want a 30 % uplift, this solution will do that.
But if that head of sales believes that it's not a CRM or it's not an organization issue, they believe that, oh, actually the leads that are coming to them are of much, much lower quality. They will want to bring in some sort of marketing solution to improve the leads that are going their way or maybe change how they advertise. So what's really, really key is bringing that perspective and then looking to verify, well, this is the solution. But what do you think the cause of the solution is? What's the root cause of that in your words?
And if they give you something which is in line with what you provide, that's great. We can extrapolate that. If they give something which is maybe, you know, left the field, we can delve into that. We can challenge it. And if it is a case that actually, yeah, you know, you've got a small sales team, but you've got a big lead problem. You can point them in the right direction. Save yourself time, save them time and prevent you from just wasting, wasting effort. I don't think I'm ever going to ask a question more relevant to this.
to what I'm about to ask because of what the topic of the book is. I ask content creators from podcast hosts to authors to great speakers on this program all the time that you give a gift to the world and the content that you've created. In this particular case, the work before the work is the gift that you've given. Yet there's always some happy accident that comes back to the author that you get.
Paul M. Caffrey (14:39.374)
in a gift, almost like a happy accident to you, a gift that you received from putting this work out there. Because the work before the work is something that you won't be able to see the reaction right away because to visualize the preparedness and the result of what that is, it's not that easy to see right in there. People need to read the book, by the way. We'll show you links on how to go do that. What's been the gift that you've seen?
from this particular thing. Has it been feedback? Has it been messaging? Has it been great reactions to what you're doing? I'd love to hear the happy accident that you've received for this, the work before the work. Yeah, the happy accident that I received was this book was written over a three year period, quite a long time. Myself and Phil M. Jones, we were working on a couple of other projects together and just having side conversations and then Phil got involved. This was only ever intended for
salespeople, sales professionals who are in that position have been a bit frustrated and they wanted to bring their performance to the next level. What I never anticipated was leaders of small businesses or solopreneurs actually taking away the steps from this and getting value and using it. And the gift that I got from this was taking my sales training, taking my sales methodologies that I never thought would be ever used for anything else.
I mean, able to share them with friends or a family and other areas where I can see people actually then bring in preparation into other aspects of their lives. I never thought that was a possibility. And now I see people getting great results when they're actually applying it to all sorts of different things from getting kids into certain schools to, you know, how they're actually, you know, you know, chatting and working through things with their families. Love it. Let's I was going to say, let's do the admin part of the show. But beforehand, I did want to ask.
one real question. Is there one particular preparation habit that you make part of every single thing that you do? Is it one particular task or something right before you do the work before the work? Yeah, there's one thing that you can do and we can all do this and we can take this away right now because you might end up in a situation where you don't have time to prepare. You might meet somebody at a conference, you might bump into somebody on the street and whatever that is, when you enter into that conversation,
Paul M. Caffrey (17:00.878)
Just asking yourself, what's the other person looking to achieve? What's their current situation? And asking the same thing of yourself, what am I looking to achieve? What's my current situation? And that in itself will get these chance interactions going in such a way that you will be looking to serve value to them. And then in return, they're looking to serve value back to you. And yeah, you're probably not going to be selling something to that person. But if you've had a valuable conversation and they then know what you're doing,
there's a much higher likelihood of them actually bringing you, recommending you or introducing you to someone as opposed to just talking about the weather, just talking about the game. And then you've met an influential person and you've just wasted the interaction. So being a little bit more pointed really helps you and really helps the other person and opens up an endless world of possibilities. Paul, let's do the admin part of the show.
share with the listeners all the places people can find you, websites, URLs, where they can get the book, where they can learn more about you. We'll put in the show notes, but it gets more engagement when they hear it from you. Absolutely. Well, the work before the work is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, pretty much all good bookshops. You'll find it all over the place to go and check it out. And there is a special bonus of a free course with the book, which I've made available just recently. So check that out. Me, you'll find me on LinkedIn. It's at Paul Caffrey. So.
Shoot me a DM, let me know you found me true to show. I'd love to have a chat with you. And then if you want to follow up with my weekly newsletter, it's paulcaffrey .com and you will find everything there. Spectacular. That was easy. I like when it's all simple. And for the listeners, that's Caffrey, C -A -F -F -R -E -Y. Paul is coming to us from Dublin, as you can tell from this amazing accent, which I'm totally jealous of. Although he might think I'm the one with the accent because I learned that's how it works.
Can you share with the listeners what you shared with me are two of your favorite movies? Because this is by far the most unique answer we've ever had on this program. Well, there you go. I do like to be unique, so I'll go with that. So my favorite movie, I put down Hotel Transylvania 2. So has to be number two, not the first one, although the first one is very, very good as well. If you're not familiar with it, it's the story of a vampire.
Paul M. Caffrey (19:22.222)
played by Adam Sandler, and he is going through life raising his little daughter and then becoming a grandfather, which he becomes in the second film. And it is a laugh minute, something that you can watch with your kids, which is, and has a lot of adult jokes in there as well. And for me, it's one of those movies that can make you cry because if you've raised kids, it will get you. So go check it out.
There was another movie in this list, too. Do you remember what you shared with me? There was another movie. Yeah, I threw in The Social Network, which was the Facebook film. It tells us the...
Paul M. Caffrey (20:06.478)
And although I don't think he's Brazilian, but I don't think it came across in the movie actually, which is quite interesting. And I just thought that was a really fun little time in history where anybody who lived through that period. And, you know, I was studying computer science at that stage. There was all over the place. Yeah, social network. Yeah, we should go and do it. And they went and actually did it. And it wasn't the first one.
And it went on to be what it is now. $170 billion coming or whatever. So you've probably even more than that. I just found it really interesting that if you, the little microcosm of this was a period when anybody could do anything because the internet had really become ubiquitous and they did. And then the other side of it is how ruthless the world of business can be. That you can.
you know, be all intents and purposes, be best friends and then have everything torn away from me. So I just, I just remember that. Yeah, that was, it's a nice little, I suppose, tale for people to learn from. Yeah, it was, I like the angle that they went out of the story that of these, these, these two overlapping lawsuits that were taking place was such a, which is a great way to tell the story and then to keep going back and forth and in history and time and whatnot to something that,
was such a, I mean, it literally changed the world. Changed the way that we connect and everything and it was pretty fascinating. All because of one drunken night of being upset from something that happened with a girl. So just one of those really interesting components to everything you got. Okay, we're gonna do the speed round here on Fun Street and Paul I know is very capable and prepared for this. I'm gonna ask you something. This is our little stroll down the speakeasy.
Pub crawl if you would, something you could relate to. We're gonna ask certain questions and stopovers and they're all related to you because they all make you thrive. Ready? Yes, let's go. Okay. Of late, a song that you love to listen to, maybe a jam or something that pumps you up.
Paul M. Caffrey (22:16.27)
song that I love to listen to at the moment. I've actually went back to listening to U2, which I, it feels very cliche, to be an Irish and saying U2. But there is an acoustic version of With or Without You that they did in the BBC. And that has been popping up on my YouTube again and again, because I'm probably watching it too much. So I've been listening to that quite a lot. They, for those listeners, we're recording this in early March of 24 and...
You know that U2 is kind of like in residence at the Sphere in Las Vegas. I have not been, but I've seen people on their social media accounts and I've seen people say, this venue looks incredible, but kind of a psychedelic experience and what an amazing time to go there. To go check out, to hear U2 perform there would just be epic. I know a bunch of people who've gone more than once already, which is kind of crazy. So yeah, I'm a big fan. With or without you is a good one. Favorite food that is not a dessert.
My favorite food is not a dessert. I am going to go for a shu hasku barbecue. So it's called costa laun. What you do is you get a big lot of ribs, a big flank. You put it into a, it's sort of like a charcoal barbecue that's in the ground. You cook it for about six or seven hours. Then you take it out. I'll send you on a picture afterwards. And the meat just peels off like.
It is absolutely delicious and yeah, that would be the food I'd go for if I could. So I'm interrupting the pub crawl here. So I know you just got off a plane from Brazil to come back to Dublin. What you just described, there's a lot of South American foods that fall into this. What's your connection to Brazil in this particular case? Friends, family visiting? Yeah. Yeah, well my connection is my wife is Brazilian. So I've been going for the last 12, 13 years.
are two young kids, are dual nationality. So every year like to spend two or three months so that they can number one, top up on language and number two, pretty more importantly, spend time with family and friends over there. So. Oh, amazing. Amazing. And by the way, what a combination of the Irish, Brazilian overlap there. That's like accents, Portuguese and...
Paul M. Caffrey (24:31.406)
and Gaelic if you combine it all together. I think it would be wonderful. Maybe more Scottish. A lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. Two good cultures that love to party, hang out and watch sports. So yeah, it works really well. We definitely have to be there at St. Patrick's Day in Mardi Gras. In the years that they overlap, we really need to be there. So I think that could be a lot of fun. OK, so you covered a favorite food that's not a dessert. What is your favorite dessert?
My favorite dessert, I'd go for a creme brulee. Okay. Straight to you. An activity you wish you did more of? An activity I wish I did more of, I am going to say running. And the reason I'm going to say it is I took running off when the pandemic hit and I went from being able to do about a mile to around about 20 miles. And when I was at that 20 mile amount, I felt...
Amazing. Since it's declined, you know, the world opened back up and I've run a whole lot less. So I would like to do more of that because I just feel so good when I do. An activity you wish you did less of.
Walking up the stairs. So straightforward. My house has got a couple of different levels. I just end up going up and down stairs all day. You're getting your steps in. You know, I think that's a good thing. I certainly am. I go up 15 flights of stairs a day on average, my iPhone told me, and it actually then sent me a message there yesterday saying, oh, is there something wrong? You're only going up three flights of stairs a day. I was thinking, how does he know to send this to me on the day that I'm going back to where all the steps are?
So yeah, I'm back getting my steps in. Awesome. An activity that's relatively new to you that you've recently tried, that you like so much you want to tell everybody else to try.
Paul M. Caffrey (26:23.214)
activity that I recently tried, frisbee. I don't know if you've ever played, well, frisbee is, you know, we throw them around the place, but you can actually play a game. It's like competitive frisbee. Yeah. Like you have teams and you're trying to basically get the frisbee from one end to the other. I tried on top. That's a lot of fun. So yeah, it's something I want to do a little bit more of. Ultimate frisbee is awesome. Big fan. And I'm also a fan of frisbee golf, which is another fun one where you could like throw the frisbee to certain locations. If you're in a big place, like, you know, this is a
A par two, a par three, par four. You can do those kinds of things. I like that. Yeah. We, we, we had football golf introduced over here a number of years ago. So you just put the football down and you're kicking it. Um, it's very tiring. It's like even if you think you're a footballer, you'll be tired after this. And if you're not, you won't finish. Oh my goodness. If I could snap my fingers and Paul Caffrey could be anywhere on the world. Where is he?
I am in Brazil. Nice. Which part of Brazil? I'm in an island called Florianopolis, which is a 33 kilometer island, about 15, 20 different beaches. I'm probably in a little beach called Armasão, which is really chilled out and just has great vibes. Paul Caffrey, the work before the work. Truly a pleasure to have you on Thrive Loud, man. Hey, keep teaching people about the work before the work because I think it's going to...
help a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And thanks for coming on Thrive Ride today. Thanks so much for having me on, Luke. You got it. To all our listeners out there, thank you for joining us. Until next time, keep moving onward and upward. And remember, be brief, be bright, be gone.
Paul M. Caffrey (28:34.35)
If you've been listening to Thrive Loud with your host, Lou Diamond, check us out on the web at thriveloud .com and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook at Thrive Loud. And check us out on the Good Pods app at Thrive Loud, where you can follow, listen, and connect directly to Lou and all of the Thrive Loud episodes. Thanks for listening.
