From Info Overload to Clarity: How Outside Sales Reps Win In 2026 | SOS Ep. 379

We break down why holding a signed deal for the next quarter backfires and how to build habits that weather quota changes. Then we share our pivot to a simpler community platform, a long-term coaching model, and a clarity-first framework that helps buyers decide.

• striking while the iron is hot on late‑Q4 deals
• the cost of waiting illustrated by pandemic losses
• systems, processes, and habits over quota anxiety
• information overload and buyer paralysis in 2025–2026
• simplification and clarity as the new sales edge
• shifting from vendor to long‑term consultant
• building repeatable systems that protect pipeline
• moving coaching to skool.com for community and ease
• group coaching, VIP options, live calls, and replays
• interview prep insights and ongoing training gaps
• referral bonuses and early pricing for members

Go to skool.com/survivingoutsidesales to join the free community or upgrade for coaching. 

“Monday the 29th is going to be a webinar about how to set your goals for 2026"

Chapters

• 0:00 Q4 Wrap And Holiday Setup
• 1:15 Never Hold Deals For Next Quarter
• 3:10 Pandemic Lesson On Waiting
• 5:20 Quotas, Habits, And Systems
• 8:10 Pivoting Platforms And Processes
• 10:45 Info Overload And Buyer Paralysis
• 13:20 Simplification And Clarity As Strategy
• 16:00 Long‑Term Consulting Over Quick Fixes
• 19:00 Building Repeatable Systems
• 21:10 Cutting Losses And Seeking Help
• 23:00 Moving To Skool Community
• 26:00 New Coaching Formats And Access
• 29:00 Hiring, Interviews, And Training Gaps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The Surviving Outside Tales podcast, hosted by Michael Kelly, presented by Tales Builder Academy. The goal is to survive and thrive at all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating, or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now for the show.

SPEAKER_01: 0:35

It is getting close to the end of Q4. I did not post as I did not shoot as many episodes or record as many episodes as I would have liked to in Q4. Q4 was a wild, wild quarter. And it is ramping down for me. Kind of the hay is already in the barn. It doesn't mean that the work isn't done, but the hay is in the barn. And hopefully the hay is in the barn for you as well. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. It is just before Christmas. There still are a few more selling days. If you've got deals you know you can pull through, fantastic. And I would recommend pulling them through beforehand. Um, real quick, I saw a post on LinkedIn, and there was somebody who has some influence in the medical sales world. And he was talking about how uh, you know, should you hold your sale if you've already hit quota from quarter to quarter? And he said, you know, he he he laid out the pros and the cons. Here's what I'm gonna tell you right now there are no pros. Okay. There are no pros. There's only cons. You don't know what's gonna happen once the next quarter starts. You don't know what's gonna happen once the next year starts. And his justification was well, if you've already hit the quota, you can hold it till the next quarter, and then you're actually gonna make more money because of blah, blah, blah. Here's the problem, okay? When you start having that type of mindset right now, as you're starting to grow your sales business and you're trying to build the right habits, it's about processes, systems, and habits. If you're trying to build the right habits in the sales world, holding sales over, trying to manipulate your pay plan is not gonna work. It's not. Now, if you want to say, well, uh, I could push for the sale, but I'm gonna hold off till next order, next uh quarter, okay. That's that's a decision you have to make as a sales professional. The other decision is if you have a sale in hand, I have seen so many examples in my career of sales that have fallen through, not because I held them to the end of the quarter, but literally because something came up and they had to be held over a weekend. They had to be held for 24 hours, 48 hours later. Um, famously, if you've listened to the podcast, I have talked about when the pandemic hit, I had six radiation units that I was negotiating with dermatology clinics. And I thought I had all the time in the world. And a couple of them dragged their feet and I said, Well, I'm not gonna press it too hard. You know, dermatologists are very conservative buyers. I'm not gonna press too hard, and then bam, state of state of North Carolina gets shut down completely. We had stay at home in effect here in Charlotte. And all of a sudden, I got email after email, I got phone call after phone call. Hey, Mike, let's just put this on pause till we know what's gonna happen. And of course, I tried my best, but to no avail. And some of those sales I probably could have made in February before the pandemic hit in March. It was just one of those things where I didn't push it. I didn't push it. Um, and it wasn't necessarily because I thought, well, I'm just gonna wait till the next quarter. It was simply the fact that I said, well, I just don't want to scare them away or I don't want to ruffle their feathers. When you have an opportunity to sell to a buyer, you have to seize that opportunity. If it is going to give them extreme value and you know that it's gonna work for them, you have to push through. You have to. If the buyer knew 100% what was best for them, there'd be no need for you. It would be an online retail product that they would just click whenever they were ready to buy. But that's not the case. If you're an outside sales, that is not the case. So do not do that. Do not hold any over. If you have a chance to make some sales and you have a chance to close some deals that are already in your possession, you've got PO orders, people said, hey, here's my credit card, let's place the order, let's move forward, let's sign the paperwork, do it. You have absolutely no idea. Once that calendar turns over to January, it's a whole new ball game. So don't do it. I just wanted to mention that. I saw that. I was gonna say something in the post, but uh fighting on LinkedIn is not something that I highly recommend. You just kind of you go other avenues, other ways. But do not do that. Do not hold, hold it over because you think it's gonna be more beneficial. You have no idea what's gonna happen. Okay. And I hear the other people say, well, you know, it's gonna increase your quota for next year. Okay. Like uh, you know, that's part of sales. Your quota's going up. You have to increase business. But usually, if you're doing everything properly, you're if you're building systems, you're building processes, you have the right habits, your sales are gonna increase. So there's nothing to worry about. That fear of, oh my God, I gotta hit a quota, that is for somebody who I believe personally is unprepared. Somebody who's unprepared, they don't have a plan, they don't have a system, they don't have processes in place that they can just rinse, repeat, they don't have consistency, that those are the people that I believe are fearful of quote unquote quotas. Now, it doesn't mean that sometimes companies don't raise your quotas ridiculously high. They do. However, you just have to strike while the iron is hot. Speaking of which, next week I'm gonna be having a webinar for goal setting in 2026. It is going to be a free webinar on the new platform that I have moved everything over. So if you're one of my coaching clients, if you are one of my past coaching clients, everything is moving over. And I'm gonna take it, take about 10 minutes to kind of explain. And this is kind of the microcosm of what's happening in the business world right now. First off, the one thing you have to understand is if you're in sales, you always have to be available to pivot. Okay. You have to be available to pivot. You have to be able to adjust. You can't worry and be beholden to the past. If you do, you're going to get left behind. So at the beginning of the year, I had my coaching platform on my website and you know, Michael Kelly.com. Michael Kelly.com is not there anymore. Okay. Still own the domain, but I decided to shut down the website because it wasn't extremely efficient. It was very difficult to send out, it was very difficult for clients to sign up. It was very difficult for clients to log on. It was difficult about three or four other ways. It was a lot of friction. It was not streamlined, there was no automation, there were so many things that were manual that was that was taking so much time back and forth with clients, with prospects. Um, it just wasn't, it wasn't worth the investment. And when my time came due in November, I decided not to re-up with the website. So I shut it down and I moved, I was going to move everything over to my brand new platform, which I had started in 2025 and I was starting to shift things over. The problem there was, while it's very efficient, it's go, it's on a go higher level platform, as you know from the marketing and sales world, as my CRM. It also was extremely manual and extremely difficult. It is not a super intuitive platform and was taking me a ridiculously long time to do various things. And so when I had to re-up for my platform, my mentor, the guy that I has been guiding me on my online coaching journey, he mentioned that everything has completely changed in 2025. And he had this really long video where he kind of described what has happened in 2025 that has changed everything. And it's not what you think. You might be thinking, ooh, it's AI. It's not AI. What has happened is we have come to the 100% plus saturation point of information at our fingertips. Information overload. It's completely there. There is no sector of our life, of our world, where we can't get away from information. What's also happened is buyers are the exact same. So when you're trying to sell to a buyer or a prospect, they have so much information at the tip of their fingertips, there's too much information. And so what used to be they don't have enough information to make a decision has now turned into they have way too much information to make a decision. There is paralysis by overanalysis. People are inundated with information. If they're not buying in 2025, it's not because they they don't know enough about what you offer. It's you offer or there's too much information and they don't know how to make a decision. And the one word that I talked with with my clients this year, but it really I started looking back in my business, all my businesses, clarity. Simplification and clarity. Those are the two key words of 2026. Simplification and clarity. Do your buyer know what you do simply? Do they know how you're going to they're going to get results simply? And do they know how they're going to have to implement this into their business simply? If they don't know those three things, they're not going to buy. And if you can't clarify the time it's going to take, the result they're going to get, and the return on investment, okay? If you can't clarify those three things, you're not going to get the business. And so just so you know, I'm pointing pointing at myself. Because at the beginning of the year, I was signing up a lot of clients. A lot of people were reaching out to me. They wanted sales coaching help. A lot of clients. So I thought, oh, this is great. You know, got all these clients helping people, um, had a lot of success stories. And then towards the end of the year, all of a sudden, there were fewer clients, and people wanted different things. And they're in a in a nutshell, 2025 completely flipped on its head by the end of the year. And what I realized was I was not creating simplicity and I was not creating uh clarity. Those are the two things that I was failing to do. And so I took a step back, probably about October, and I said, okay, how can I achieve those? Do a little bit of macro planning. Because sales is the exact same whether it's outside or whether it's inside. Outside is you're just interrupting a business owner. You're just interrupting people face to face. That's the difference. Um, you're driving to their work of work of business, you're showing up in person. So a lot more things come to play, like body language, tone, um, how you interact with people live as opposed to over the phone or on Zoom or, you know, over text or email. And that that really is a skill amongst itself. But at the end of the day, sales is sales. What you're trying to do is you're trying to um get your get somebody else to agree to use your product or service. And and in and in return, they're going to get a said result, a return on investment. So you have to simplify exactly what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for. And then you have to clarify um how long it's going to take, what type of result they're going to get, and what's the return on investment. Simple as that. So as I was kind of going through that same process in my businesses, it kind of dawned on me that I didn't know what it was. It was kind of nagging at my side. I didn't know exactly how to do this. And it took me, I don't know, this was probably eight weeks. I was talking to a lot of my colleagues, I was talking to a lot of people in the industry, and I said, What do you think? And they said, Well, you know, nobody really had any answers until my um mentor kind of came back on the scene and he had an offer for his four former clients. So um I was I was questioning whether or not I was even gonna re-up with him. You know, it's an annual contract, whether I was gonna re-up with him. And he basically made an offer that was different than what he did before. And what he mentioned, and this is kind of the point what I'm getting to, is um he mentioned buyers' habits have changed. And what people are looking for is more pop-ins. They're looking for more, um, they're looking for more structure, but over time. Gone are the days of somebody wants to come in and do uh six to 12 weeks of uh sales coaching or any type of coaching, or they don't want to, they're not looking for just a short-term relationship. What they're looking for is they're looking for a library, a catalog, a resource, um, somebody that they can pop back on nine, 10, 11 months, because this is the problem that happens. And I had one of my coaching students blew through the program, did exceptionally well. Six months after he was done, he said, Hey, can we hop on a call? I have a new problem I'm dealing with. And I hopped on a call, and the problem he was dealing with was pretty large. And it was going to take probably about, I don't know, three, it's gonna take three to six months to solve it. And he said, Okay, well, what type of investment are we looking at? And I started thinking, I said, you know, this guy's already paid me once. He's a, he's, he's seen results, but now he's dealing with something completely different. He's gone past just needing to learn sales, needing to drive revenue, needing to structure sales calls and earn the business. He now has gotten to the point where he he needs to scale, but also he's now so busy he doesn't know how to handle it. And I started thinking, and I said, well, I could do the exact same thing. I said the problem that I was just having was the amount of time it was going to take, the attention, but the fact that there was nothing on the back end that could also help other people. So when you think about business, you can trade your time for money or you can build repeatable systems. And I had not been building any repeatable systems. And building repeatable systems is the key to sales, period. So fast forward to right before Thanksgiving when my mentor held a webinar for all of his past clients uh from his core, his core program. There was probably like, I don't know, 1300 from his core program. And um, I think you know, 350 to 500 people jumped on board to his offer. But it basically was things have changed, the structure has changed. This is kind of what is working right now. And what is working right now is more long-term consultation as opposed to quick results, quick fix, quick results. As opposed to trying to put a band-aid on a bullet hole and then kind of pushing somebody out of the emergency room, it's more of a uh concierge. So it's more six months, 12 months, not 12 weeks, 12 months. It's allowing somebody to consume information over a really long period of time and to amplify what they're doing, but also to uh assist in any kind of adjustments or changes that needed to be made. This is kind of what buyers are looking for as well. They're not looking for, quote unquote, a vendor. They're not. What they're looking for is they're looking for consultants, they're looking for resources. And I've talked about this in the Sales Builder Academy, and I've talked about it definitely before in Surviving Outside Sales, many, many podcast episodes. But really, when it comes down to is long-term consults, long-term relationships. And it's building that frame, that frame with your buyers that, hey, this is not a one and done. This is not, you're gonna say yes to me and you're never gonna see me again. Because that is what's completely done, completely over, what people are not looking for anymore. I know I'm not. I'm not just trying to look for the best widget and then I'm just gonna be off for the races by myself. I want somebody to help implement it. And if I need, if I have questions and if I need help, I want somebody there to assist me. That is what is going to set you apart in 2026. The consultative selling part. It's no longer just, oh, it's never been about features and benefits. Because if it was, you'd never need any outside sales reps. But it's all about setting yourself apart and being a consultant over a long duration of time. So that is what I am doing. And that is the changes that I have been making behind the scenes. And yes, I can't tell you how difficult it was to cut bait on probably about 250 hours worth of work that I had put into my other platform. I mean, I can't tell you how many nights I went to sleep with my eyes uh hurting from staring at a screen for four to five hours after finishing a full day of work, after putting the kids down. Some nights my wife went to bed and I'm still looking at a computer screen. All that's gone. Now, Thomas Edison, when they asked him about the incandescent light bulb, they said, um, do you feel like it was a waste to have failed so often? He said, No. I learned, I educated myself about a thousand plus times how not to make an incandescent light bulb. And that's all, that's the way I think about it. It was an investment on what not to do and what not to struggle. And honestly, what I learned from this was I shouldn't try to go go it alone. The moment I got to probably hour 100, I probably should say, you know what, I need to reach out to somebody. I need somebody to help me with this. And so many times, I know you're out there in the field, and so many times you feel like you have to go it alone. You have to um, you know, you have to do this by yourself. You have to just, you know, effort your way through. And you don't have to. It's about building relationships, people helping you, people assisting you. And so that's what I did. Basically, right before Thanksgiving, I pivoted and I said, okay, I moved the platform onto a new to me platform, but it's not a new platform. You might have actually heard of it. It is school.com, S-K-O-O-L.com. School with a funny, a funny way of spelling it, school.com. And I actually have used school for several years now. That's where a lot of my uh coaching programs are on that I learned from, that I have paid and I have invested in. They're they're housed on school.com. And school.com is a community, excuse me, it's a community-based idea where people go on there and um you have the ability to connect with other people in your market. You have the ability to connect with other people in the same boat that you are. And so this is one of the things that my mentor Aaron said was everybody should go to school. Forget about doing your platform on the CRM, which by the way, it's the CRM that he uh that he licenses out, but he said, don't do that, go to school, make it really simple, really easy. You can do almost everything you you want to do on school. It simplifies and it clarifies. Remember the two things in 2026 that have to happen simplification and clarification. So school.com moved every I'm starting to move everything over. It's not done. Okay. It is not done. I'm still working, so please uh forgive me. But basically, there's gonna be multiple models. And you know what? You might go back in about a month and you might see that things have changed. And with new information, you have to adapt with new information. And so I'm gonna be no different. So I've invited a lot of my past clients. Um people are busy for the holidays, um, but it's school.com slash surviving outside sales. There is a free portion you'll be able to go on. There's a couple of mini courses on there. Um there are some uh cheat sheets for you to kind of get started. There's also two other paid levels. So there's paid levels if you want to do some sales coaching, if you want to learn um more, if you want to develop your skills. One is gonna be the group coaching. So this is something that's completely new to what I have done in the past. And that's gonna be a group format. So basically, it's gonna be um set times uh every week where it is going to be whoever comes on can come on. There's gonna be a lesson, and then there's gonna be a section called AMA, ask Mike anything. And basically that's gonna be the open floor to what are you struggling this week? But you have access to all of the coaching programs, no matter where you are, whether you're getting in, trying to find that new sales job of your dreams, or whether you're looking to dominate, you're trying to scale your business with sales growth, or you're trying to get out, you're trying to level up to the next level. How do you get into management? How do you exit the industry? How do you start your own business? How do you become an entrepreneur? Um, how do you start to become a consultant? I've had a couple clients who've said, hey, I'm starting to get to the point in my career where I don't want to carry bag anymore. I want to do what you do. I said, fantastic. I can tell you exactly what I did. I can tell you what not to do. So I have all of the lessons I've paid tens of thousands of dollars in mistakes. Uh, I've I've spent thousands of hours making the wrong decisions and making missteps. So you won't have to make them yourself. So it doesn't matter what side of or what phase of outside sales you're in, there's now going to be a community for all. Now, just to let you know, if you are a paid member, you get access to everything. So you get access to the getting in, the dominating, and the getting out part as long as you're a paid member. So you can consume all of that content. So right now you might not be looking for a new role, but you might in, let's say, three or four months, as opposed to having to join a new program and have to go through the whole thing. You basically can just stay on school and you can just look at all the content about how to get hired, how to find the job of your dreams, how to get the right resume in front of the right people, how to knock out the interview and how to land that role with the highest salary negotiated. And trust me, I have interviewed probably almost a thousand people in the last year. And I can tell you that if you come prepared, you will stand out like a sore thumb. So there's still a lack of preparation in the sales application world. There's also just in general, there is still a lack of sales training that happens in the outside sales world. It is shocking to me that people are still doing the exact same things over and over and over again. So uh it doesn't matter what side of the coin you're on. It doesn't matter what phase you are in your outside sales career. You can go to school.com and you can do one of two things. Um if you want to, you know, you don't have to, but if you want to, you can sign up for the group coaching or I do the VIP, which is the one-on-one. It's a 12, basically, it's up to 12 months. Um, or it can continue past that. There's either a monthly or an annual uh charge. The annual charges for both of the coaching programs are heavily discounted. If you're willing to invest and say, hey, I'm all in for 12 months, great, I'm going to reward you with a huge discount. Okay. So if you're if you're looking to up your game in 2026, that is kind of the update that I have for anybody who wants to elevate their sales game, surviving outside sales. Um go to school.com, surviving outside sales, and check it out. You can communicate with me on there. Oh, that was another thing, too, is I had some people emailing me. I had some people um sending me messages on Instagram, which I really don't do any Instagram. I really don't post. Um, I need to 2026. I'm I'm putting that into my plan to post more on social media. Um, and then I have people uh on LinkedIn. So I had people communicate with me on email, LinkedIn. Here, it's just one place school.com, surviving outside sales. You can message me and I'll do my best to respond as soon as possible. So um that's pretty much been an update. You know, we've we're right before the holidays. This is gonna be released right before Christmas. It's a time to relax. Um, even if you are not uh if you're not Christian, you don't celebrate uh Christmas, most things shut down for Christmas. So it's a kind of a quick break before the end of the year, and you might be taking the rest of the year off. Fantastic. Get yourself right. Um, I do want to tell you though, is that for all of the paid clients, I have basically gonna be doing two live uh weekly calls per week that have nothing to do with the group coaching. It's just add-ons. So, what I'm also gonna do, and this is what my uh my mentor Aaron is doing, is just putting out one to two live episodes per week where people can hop on on various topics, ask questions to elevate their game. All will be recorded and all will be updated in the various um will be updated in the various communities to watch later. So you don't have to watch them live, but they are going to be there as a resource for paid members. So I hope to see everybody there and I hope that this is um I hope this has been helpful. I hope that uh what you know we're trying to build over at school is going to be a lot more efficient than what than what I know I've done in the last three years, which has been a lot of manual, it's been a lot of confusion, a lot of buttons. Um I will say this, uh I do appreciate everybody who's had a lot of patience and a lot of grace with me in 2025. Um, but you know, I really do appreciate all all of the people that have uh you know been with me. I've really enjoyed getting to know the dozens of clients uh from this year. I've loved to know their um uh stories, the successes. I love getting those text messages about closed deals for 13,000 and increasing sales by 100K this quarter and you know, hitting quota and getting a$9,000 check this month. I love hearing that. That that makes me extremely, extremely happy. So um, and then also the last thing I forgot was the one thing that's cool about school is that if you really have success or you have enjoyed uh surviving outside sales, you can uh send referrals to other people. And if they do sign up, you will get a referral bonus. So we're all in the sales world, we're all in this together. Um, till the day that I die, I am going to still be a big advocate, big proponent of the sales world, especially if you are an outside sales. It takes a special type of sales professional to get in their car every single day, to get out of the car, interrupt people, um, have to try to build relationships on the fly, you know, open sales calls, grab people's attention, and do it over and over and over again. It is a it's a um very thankless industry. You know, you're there's no ticker-tape parades except for maybe a one-off uh sales awards dinner, but it is very thankless, it's very grinding, it's very grueling. Um, it's very difficult on the body, it's very difficult on the soul, it's very difficult on the mind. You have to deal with uh the general public, you have to deal with clients. Um, but just so you know, I'm I'm gonna be the backstop, I'm gonna be the champion for every single person who's listening, and every single person who wants to uh elevate the game in 2026, then join the school community, even if you join for free. Or if you want to sign up um and get started for 2026. I know that right now the introductory pricing is gonna be the best pricing, it's probably gonna be on there for a while. The prices will go up each quarter until we kind of hit um the number that we're used to charging for um sales coaching. So um I know, and also I do have on Monday, the 29th, is going to be a webinar. I think I just mentioned this. It's gonna be a webinar about how to set your goals for 2026. It's happening on uh in six days. And you can wait till after then, you can wait till the new year, but I wouldn't. I would get started as soon as possible. And uh yeah. So hope everybody has a fantastic, fantastic um holidays, a little bit of a break, and hope to see you over at school.comslash surviving outside sales. Cheers.