How to be Time Effective with Morgan Lim

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value pros get value ready. In this episode, we are meeting with Morgan Lim, author of unleashing the power of time, an expert in time effectiveness for sales professionals. Morgan shares his unique perspective on partnering with time rather than fighting against it and introduces us to his OPPTIC, which I pronounce as OPTIC framework for qualifying opportunities and organizing your sales activities. Join us as we explore how to be more time effective in sales from targeting the right buyers to maintaining focus in a world of constant distractions. Hope you enjoy this episode. Well, Morgan, I'm so grateful you're joining the ValuePros Show, and I just loved your book. And I read that and just for the audience, both Morgan and I were featured in a cross book promotion. We ran a promotion together as part of 77 other authors, and we wanted to time that with Amazon's Prime Die Sale.

Bruce Scheer: And, oh my gosh, it paid off in so many different ways. We both had so many more readers of our book. Mine made it back into the top ten list on Amazon for sales and sales management. So, yeah, I was really happy about that, Morgan, because I'd been there before, but over time, it kinda dropped down. But because of that promotion, people ran in there and grabbed a copy, and it just delights me. The more people that read the book, the better. My mission's to inspire others. So that book really delights me when people read it and let me know how they're getting a benefit from it.

Bruce Scheer: And then I had the chance to read yours and loved it. And we got together, found so many points of connection together. And now I wanted to introduce you to our audience and just your whole notion on how to be time effective, especially as a value pro. So, Morgan, over to you, and let's get into a great conversation here.

Morgan Lim: Well, first of all, thank you, Bruce, for having me on your show, and I'm very, very excited and delighted to be here. Also excited to share what it means to be time effective. And it was great meeting you at Amazon Prime promotion. And I've got the chance to read your book as well, and I was very happy to read a couple of pages that really resonate with me in terms of how you explained how to tell an effective story, how to tell a seasonal stories to really get people to pay attention to you. I think that is so amazing. I've learned a lot just by reading your book without even talking to you.

Bruce Scheer: Thanks, Morgan. Yeah. Absolutely. So, yeah, tell us more about kind of your philosophy because that's what intrigued me the most. And I was even describing this to my 27 year old son. Just that concept of time and just I can get kinda woo woo on this stuff, and I've read books literally on time and different philosophies around it. But the thing that made me so excited about your deep work in this area is just how it relates to sales, sales performance, and just your life as a consummate salesperson. What we like to talk about is being a value pro, how to be time effective.

Bruce Scheer: You've really dialed in on that wavelength, and I'd love for you to share that with the audience.

Morgan Lim: Happy to. Believe it or not, when I first started my sales career decades ago, over 25 years ago, I learned a lot just like everybody else. I started off as a sales development rep and making calls and all that, and eventually been promoted to an AE, starting off with small, medium sized business and targeting all those small, medium sized business, Doing a lot of work, and I ended up spending over 40 hours a week and sometimes weekends just to prep myself for the next week. And it was very exhausting to do all that. And over a period of time, I begin to realize that as my sales acumen and business acumen improve, and I also noticed that it's not just being able to sell, being able to qualify and drive deals to close, but beginning to realize that I personally have a pretty dysfunctional relationship with time. I tend to always focus on, oh, I'm running up against time. I don't have enough time to do this and that. There's too much paperwork as software sales, as technology sales become more and more prominent, and as people are industry are adopting technology to help them with their business.

Morgan Lim: There is a lot of additional paperwork and steps that needs to be added into the whole buying process. And that extended the salesperson's time, and all of a sudden you realize that you have to do prospecting, you have to qualify, you have to drive deals to close, and then you have to work. You have to have other meetings that you go to. Maybe you're traveling. Remember, we used to do our site sale. We have to go to customer's location. And back in the day when I was selling, we used to wait in the room where we have the fax machine to fax our PO over to us. Remember that? And then the people would get all that.

Morgan Lim: So all of those little steps. And then when you have your lawyers doing the redlining of the service agreement and then send it back and fax it back, All that takes time. Remember, we are doing all this before, DocuSign and all that exists.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan Lim: All that and a lot of time into the whole, buying process and selling

Bruce Scheer: process. Mhmm. So it

Morgan Lim: even makes me occurred to me that how do we manage our time effectively so that we can actually do all our work within Monday to Friday without having to work weekends and all that. And I bought a lot of books on time management. I tried to learn time management, but it never really worked. And it's almost like buying all kinds of diet books and diet plans that it never work. You never lose weight or you lose a little bit and then gain back the weight and all that. So that's how I felt like with time management. And finally, it occurred to me, why aren't we fighting time? And this is what happened when we moved to Pacifica, this small little coastal town in 15 minutes south of San Francisco. So this coastal town, in fact, when we moved here in 2008, was a surfing town.

Morgan Lim: Right? People come here to learn how to surf and all that because the waves are just perfect for learning how to surf and all that. And I also pick up surfing, and I started buying a longboard and start surfing. And it occurs to me while I was shooting, I go waiting for my waves. And it says, in surfing, you don't fight the wave. You don't fight the current. You work with it. You wait for this right surf to come and you just ride the wave. Right? So you don't fight the waves.

Morgan Lim: You don't fight against current because you won't be able to overcome the ocean. So it makes me realize, what if I partner with time instead of fighting against time? So that little epiphany, if you will, makes me realize out, okay, if I'm gonna partner with time and if I'm gonna work with time, how would that looks like? So that began the genesis of creating my own sales process that aligns with time. And one of those things that put it into a metaphor, put into a practical term is why am I targeting and going out back in the day? I used to have, like, a territory. And within that territory, there might be, like, a hundreds of accounts that I can go after. So what does being time effective means? It means that why don't I choose, do my research within the industry I'm selling to and find top 10, top 25 accounts that I can really spend a lot of quality time into. And then I will write a little executive summary of why I'm targeting this company versus that company when I'm reading all the public information they have in terms of their revenue goals, objectives, and all that stuff. Why are we targeting this company versus that company? And then through that process, I look into who are the people that I'm targeting within that organization, and why should I be targeting them, looking at their LinkedIn profile, looking at their persona, looking at their background. Are there someone that I'm most likely to be willing to listen to my pitch? Right? Are they a caretaker of the organization? So dialing back to my career, I was tasked with selling to and opening up the educational back industry, the vertical.

Morgan Lim: And as an educational rep, and I'm the 1st in the West Coast for BlueJeans of either company that I was that I used to sell to. And through that process, I do a lot of research, which organ or which institution will most likely be receptive. And then within the university, which department or which schools within the university, which is most, what do you call, receptive to having a conversation with me? And most likely, I'll just have a conversation, but most likely to have a reason to invest in our solution. And turns out that your alma mater did, University of Oregon Business School, actually needed a solution like this to help their graduating MBA students to be able to virtually do job interviews with potential employees across the country and potentially across the world as well because there's a lot of finance company in Hong Kong and places like that who wants to hire American MBAs. So all of a sudden, the opportunity for MBA students to meet with employer, the geography, the barrier has been resolved because of that. So because of that, I was able to go after all the business schools because they have the money. They have the usually, business school within a university have the most money, and they have the money to spend. And then within the university, within the business school, the the very particular department that are most likely to open the doors for us to go and have that conversation are people who most wanted to really provide additional services there and their students because that helps them recruit more students.

Morgan Lim: That is what I meant by being time effective. That is what I mean by not wasting your time calling. Imagine if you will spend all your time calling different part of colleges and university, you'll be banging up against the wall. And the reason why it's important to be time effective in the sales is because our performance, how we are measured in terms of success as an account executive is time bound. Morgan,

Bruce Scheer: that is so interesting how you were talking about your concept of time effectiveness. But you talked about your own story about selling in, and then you talked about the wave analogy. And I've been watching the Olympics lately. And, of course, if you're a surfer, you wanna choose the right wave. Right? And then you wanna ride it. It's all about choice and prioritization and and which way of am I gonna ride and what makes sense here. And I love how you talked about my alma mater selling BlueJean and Eugene. I really laugh about that.

Bruce Scheer: But how you took that lesson and go, hey. This worked. I'm gonna do more of this, focusing on more universities, but not just universities themselves, educational systems, but even the department that would care about it. So you really got into system smart targeting just like that server wants to catch the right wave. Hey. We'll let that one go, but let's take this one. This is awesome. So, like, yeah, it makes total sense.

Bruce Scheer: I even have a chapter in my book around that, just target the right buyer, both by organization also on who you're selling to, which you've mastered here, obviously, and how you spend your time effectively. So please tell us more.

Morgan Lim: Yeah. So definitely when you go into a small receptive audience within a large institution, the goal obviously is to get everybody else to buy into your solution because they have use cases that they need to. But we are not there yet. So the most important thing is to spend a lot of time qualifying, for potential opportunity, not just the opportunity. So spending a lot of time asking the right question matters because you only have some amount of time to engage with your audience before they lose interest. If you over ask them too much questions, it becomes an interrogation. If you ask too little questions, you don't have enough information to qualify the opportunity. So striking the right balance within the amount of time that you have to keep the person attention is the most important thing

Bruce Scheer: to do. More. Yeah. Asking the right question at the right time. The questions that the customer would appreciate being asked, insight driven questions, credibility driving questions, versus, like you say, just wrote questions that turn into an interrogation, especially self serving questions versus client serving questions. You're absolutely right. Spending time asking the right questions and listening to those insightful responses.

Morgan Lim: Absolutely. So you wanted to craft a series of discovery questions that really showcase that you are really interested in their point of view, your business. They wanna be heard. Right? If they spend the time willing to schedule a call and meet with you, they wanna be heard. They have an opinion. They wanna share their opinion. They wanna share their thoughts. It's very important that come across that you are facilitate.

Morgan Lim: The question is facilitating that. And the bonus is that when you build that trust, that credibility, then you'll have earned enough rights to actually ask more questions that would help really cement whether this is, you know, a real opportunity within the time frame that aligns with your personal objectives or not.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. And one other thing I'd like to say is you're respecting that buyer by asking the right questions. And, again, questions they'd appreciate being asked, but just getting their point of view as you shape ideally the value proposition between the 2 of you.

Morgan Lim: Yeah. So one of the things that if you notice in my book, I created what we call an acronym called OPTIC, o p p t I c, created this acronym to help frame my discovery question. Number 1 is that I like an acronym that helps me think about actual thing I wanted to accomplish. In this case, I wanna have OPTIC visibility into how they think about their goals and objective and the impact of the pain that is impacting their business or their project. And how do they choose? How do they create a criteria that they choose to decide which solution to use? So I like an acronym that really means something to me personally. So call OPTIC because I'm a very visual person. So I like to be able to visualize or mentally visualize how they think about it. The second is I wanted to have an acronym really focuses on the customer's needs and and goals and objectives.

Morgan Lim: And the o stands for outcome. What is the desirable outcome for the customer? What are they trying to accomplish? Where do they wanna get to? What is their promise that looks like? So I like to really understand that. Then the p stands for pain. What is the specific pain that is blocking them from achieving that? And then the 2nd p is people. Who are the people impacted by this? Not just this person, but what about this person's management and the surrounding team and so forth? And MT stands for timeline. What is the timeline they envisioning to get this thing completed, done, or begins? And I stands for impact. What if they do nothing in the next 60, 90 days? Because remember, we are always qualifying, pipeline for next quarter. What if they do nothing for the next 90 days? Would that really impact their business? Because this really surface, if this is a sense of urgency that we should be spending more time with this opportunity, or should we spend less time with this opportunity, but spend appropriate time with another opportunity that is more immediate.

Morgan Lim: Right? And then finally, the C stands for criteria. What are the criteria they use and who decide this criteria of what to buy, who to buy it from? So uptake gives me a really clear sense. And one of the key things I like to add a little bit is that OPTIC is not only a acronym that you can use to qualify prospects outward facing, but you can use the same OPTIC acronym to really do discovery question with your internal team, with your colleagues across other departments, like your legal team and your security team, in order to also be respectful of their time and how to help them be more effective with their workflow. If I'm time effective, I'm well prepared in sending all the right paperwork to my legal counsel. They appreciate

Bruce Scheer: that. Oh, I love it. Gosh. Morgan, I just had on our show, a former head of procurement for Levi Strauss and Inger Micro. And at Value Pros, we have a concept. It's called being approval ready. So if you want to close your deal, it needs to go through approval cycles, and as you rightly say, on the client side, that happens where you've got procurement or purchasing, you've got legal, you've got compliance, you've got information security, different folks that need to kinda tie off on what you're selling, especially if it's a technology type of solution. But I love how you're being wise in terms of even getting your own pursuit team and stakeholders internally lined up and getting them approval ready so they do what they need to do at the right time so your buyer can buy going through their approval process.

Bruce Scheer: So, yeah, that's brilliant.

Morgan Lim: Thank you. And, really, also for me, it's really about I wrote an article, follow-up essays on Medium, called beyond revenue. And the thesis of that article is really about we're there to help our fellow colleagues be more effective with their workflow as well. And if you are better prepared in giving them all the information that they need and in a very clean organized manner, no different than when you're giving clear information about your deals to your manager, they appreciate that because it makes their job easier. So the goal of being time effective is not for yourself only, is to ensure that other people benefit from you being time effective, means well organized. So if you are in operational excellence, other people will benefit from that.

Bruce Scheer: Oh, I love it. Love it. Well, hey. You just outlined your framework, and it's in the book, and I've had it. It's very clear, and I love how simple it is and how relevant it is in managing time to be more time effective. I think it's brilliant. I'd like to ask you now just a couple of questions. You work with so many sellers each year doing training, courses, etcetera, and your coaching masterminds.

Bruce Scheer: But I wanted to ask you, what's kind of the number one hiccup or flub up that you see for sellers? Where are they not being time effective? If you had to change one thing, what would that one thing be that would just totally change the world of sales? In terms of what you see and how it doesn't serve that seller, what would you say?

Morgan Lim: Organization. Take the time to sit back and organize your book of business because it's all about organizing it so that you can visualize your business, good and bad, as it is. Not as you want it to be, but as it is. Because imagine if you are an AE walking into a company and you're given a territory, a list of accounts to go after, or you are in a company you've been in, as an AE there for several years, but they shift your a new fiscal year, they shift your accounts or your territory, or either you get promoted. You are focusing now on a very specific vertical. You have 3 accounts to work for as a global account executive and no longer managing a territory. Whatever it is, there's a lot of changes that you're targeting remains the same. Your territory remains the same, but your quota has increased.

Morgan Lim: And the dynamics of the quota increase changes the cadence of how you work. So the first thing you will need to do is have a really clear process of how you organize all your information in order for you to visualize, then you can figure out how to operationalize to get that optimal performance.

Bruce Scheer: Excellent. Thanks for that. I I appreciate it. Yeah. One other curiosity, I sent you this question before the show, but I was curious what you'd say on it is, how do you maintain focus? So you get organized. How do you maintain focus? Sometimes I'll think, hey, squirrel, and it and it catches my attention and I get off my focus. Any tips, tricks, thoughts on how to maintain your focus to be more time effective?

Morgan Lim: Believe me, Bruce, I'm the same way, and I'm no different than anybody else. There are some new shiny thing comes along, and it catches my attention, and I tend to refocus and take me away from my real goal. I think the most practical way of doing that is to break things into chunks. Right? So we all know that in world of sales, we all have to do 3 things at the same time every day. We have to spend some time prospecting, spend some time meeting with existing customers or existing prospects and qualifying them. And then working with them on a mutual plan to drive the dues to a close at a very specific time later we create on. So those are the 3 things. And then in between, we have to meet with our fellow colleagues and managers, 1 on 1 with our managers, and then presentation with marketing team and all that kind of stuff.

Morgan Lim: And maybe even go to a conference and do both duties and all that. So there's a lot of things that you're dealing with. Right? You're juggling with. And I think that from an organizational perspectives, part of trying to be organized is really to put very specific timeline on things that you have to do. This could be different for each people. Right? You could put it in your calendar. But the one thing I would recommend that I find that is effective for me is don't block 3 hours of your time for prospecting, and don't block 2 hours for a meeting and so forth. The reason why that is important is that we don't have that long of an attention span.

Morgan Lim: We're living in a world of Internet and all that instant information flowing in. We don't have a lot of attention span. So I would block maybe 50 minutes for prospecting. And within that 50 minutes, block 10 minutes or 15 minutes for doing research on a specific company that you wanna research on and all that. And then take a 5 minute break to check your emails or check your phone. Because let's face it, reality is that, remember, we don't fight the wave.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Morgan Lim: Wave of attention span. We wanna allow 5 minutes to take a bio break and check your email and all that, and then come back to another 10, 15 minutes. And then 10, 15 minutes. And then 10:50. Because if you have a 10, 15 minute attention span, block that out for prospecting, making calls, having all your templates ready so that you can send out emails or contact your prospects, you know, LinkedIn messages and so forth. So do all the activities in 10, 15 minutes increment and then 5 minutes break. And so that allows you to work in the reality of lack of attention span. So when some shining thing comes in, you have the 5 minute break to pay attention to so that you don't force yourself to be in a situation.

Morgan Lim: You don't starve yourself,

Bruce Scheer: so to speak. Mhmm. Mhmm. Oh, I love it. Well, hey. You've got your book there. Right? Let's just talk about that just a little bit more as we kinda come in for a landing because I know there's so much wisdom that you have to offer, but I just wanna make sure everybody's aware. Please go out and snag Morgan's book.

Bruce Scheer: And the book title is Unleashing the Power of Time? Exactly. Yeah. So we've got that book. It's on Amazon. You can go out and snag it. I'd recommend it just to up your game and how you manage your time effectively. Morgan talks about a lot more in that book. We've kinda scratched the surface, but I think that'll serve this audience really well. So, Morgan, your model that you outlined in the book, the optic model, so you can get optics on the situation and and use your time effectively regarding that. How does that relate with other typical sales processes, different models, like Medpick, for example?

Morgan Lim: Great question. Most people already have some kind of sales training if they are working or belong to part of the sales team in, a lot of tech companies. Right? So it is up to the sales team, individual sales rep, whether they wanted to adopt uptake as a way to organize their book of business and execute their sales motion, or they can adopt to the concept of how I work with time, partner with time, and use that to help them organize and plan the sales motion, but actually using to qualify the opportunity. So they don't have to throw away what they have learned. They can complement the time effectiveness. So when they use Matic, for example, to qualify the opportunity and embedded the the champion, the next question you wanna ask is, as you go through the sales motion, are you getting the right information to be time effective? Are you getting information that makes you performative? Performative in the sense of when you're swimming, you could be, treading water, but you're not swimming to a destination. Right? If you are swimming intentionally to a very specific goals or destination, that is where you want it to be. And are you doing it at a cadence that will get you there on time? Right? Unleashing the power of time will help you think about that, to frame that.

Morgan Lim: Right? So you can frame it around unleashing the power of time to really think about what you are doing and then using medic as a way to qualify. And if medic doesn't really help you and maybe you wanna adjust what type of discovery question you wanna ask. Right? But having time as a way to frame everything is your North Star. It's your partner in this journey. Does that make sense?

Bruce Scheer: It really does. Yeah. And I just love your distinction, time as your partner. Well, Morgan, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been fantastic, and, I just look forward to other people reading your book and getting a lot of benefit from that in their lives.

Morgan Lim: Well, thank you for the opportunity for me to share my book and my philosophy and my sales method.

Bruce Scheer: Oh, absolutely. And how can the audience be in touch with you? Any good ways for them to connect with you?

Morgan Lim: Yeah. I have a website called optic sales, opptic, sales, s a l e s.com, And, they can connect with me that way. My phone number is there. My email is there so they could connect with me. They can also go to LinkedIn and to my profile, Morgan Lim, and get in touch with me that way as

Bruce Scheer: well. Excellent. Awesome. Well, take care. Have a great day.

Morgan Lim: You too. Bye bye.

Bruce Scheer: Well, that wraps up our conversation with Morgan Lim on time effectiveness in sales. Remember, you can find Morgan's book Unleashing the Power of Time on Amazon and connect with him through his website, opticsales.com, and that's opticspelled with 2 p's. So opticsales.com, or just connect with him on LinkedIn. And thanks for tuning in to the ValuePros Show, where we inspire others to inspire others. Until next time, stay focused, stay effective, and keep creating value.