Use Frameworks To Make Better Decisions

Welcome to Lesson 04 of The Purposeful Performer!

Frameworks simplify complexity and help you make higher quality decisions. Today, I’m introducing the most powerful one in my career, The 2-Line Framework—a streamlined tool for evaluating and guiding your best work as a strategic seller.

By using it, you’ll bring clarity to chaos, eliminate wasted effort, and focus on high-impact actions aligned with creating value for your clients and elevating to the best version of yourself.

Last week’s Mission was a doozy right? But no doubt after going through the three hour exercise you should have clearer insights of what served you well, what didn’t, and what you need to keep in play from last year as we enter Sales Kickoff (SKO) season that will bring new company targets, objectives, account changes, and comp plan.

Upgrading your thinking has been the focus of the first three missions, and now this week, we’re going to get more tactical and unpack a powerful and practical framework that I call The 2-Line Framework. It’s dead simple and you can apply it to all areas of your work (and even life).

It involves assessing every key action by asking two important questions:

By visualizing your inputs and outputs along these two lines—high standards and low expectations—you create the widest gap possible to allow success and satisfaction to fill your space.

In strategic tech sales, things are coming at you a million miles a minute—emails from customers, inbound leads, Slack messages from your leaders, tasks on your to do list, reminders in Salesforce.

You don’t have the luxury of treating everything as equal.

Without a (simple) framework (you trust), you risk spinning your wheels on low-impact activities while missing out on creating high-value opportunities. The 2-Line Framework cuts through the clutter, helping you focus on key actions that push your performance up a level while lowering the stress on the things outside of your control.

I wrote about this last week, but it’s worth repeating and looking at how I used this framework across my entire four years as an individual contributor at LivePerson.

On paper, I had no special “advantage” to average 278% quota attainment and close a total of $27.3M ARR in 38 months as a strategic seller. Our small strategic account team all had parity:

Further, I had never worked on deals of this caliber before, knew nothing about the contact center space (our key use case), and had no college degree (when most of my prospective executive Mobilizers were accustomed to working with Harvard MBA grads at McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, and Deloitte).

If anything, I was actually at a disadvantage on paper.

But I was highly purposeful and it turned out to be my leading edge.

At the the heart of being a Purposeful Performer was reframing what it meant to be a strategic account seller.

Up to that point in my career, I had been trained that it was about:

However, when I received my original target in year one ($1.34M ARR) and given a mandate to sell $250K “starter packages” across my strategic account list … I knew I had to develop a smarter approach. Hustling wasn’t going to be enough.

So I designed a better way forward.

This focus on redesigning a “less, but better” approach centered on keeping the 2-Line Framework front-and-center in everything I did—outreach, demos, meetings, presentations, proposals. I paired it with a mental model, called The Purposeful Performance Model, to ensure I moved myself from left to right in every high-value action I took in my role.

When you open the Mission in Notion below, I provide a handy matrix you can use. This will be a valuable tool you can use every day. These are the three big steps to take and what you want to achieve:

STEP 1: Identify a few focus areas in your role to zoom in on this quarter

These are all your “duties” as a strategic account seller, like:

Customer-facing:

Internal-facing:

Note, it will help to look back on your reflections from last week’s Mission to identify the areas you should prioritize at this stage that will give you the biggest lift this year.

Not everything can (or needs to) be a priority. The key is closing capability gaps on the highest value areas and moving you from left to right on The Purposeful Performance Model on those few.

It’s helpful to think about these areas like dominoes—identifying one key domino that can make the subsequent dominoes fall easier and faster. A great book that unpacks this concept is The ONE Thing by Gary Keller.

For example, maybe your outreach isn’t getting responses from executives. Perhaps instead of figuring out how to send more emails, you first need to start with developing a stronger point-of-view and sharing the right insights, and this will help your outreach get a higher response rate. You want to always think, “Less, but better.”

We’ll unpack specific strategies in future learning paths. Learning Path I is focused on “getting you in shape” so you can develop a high-performance operating rhythm, and the best way to do that is by upgrading your thinking using frameworks, mental models, design, and systems.

STEP 2: Rate your performance level using The Purposeful Performance Model

The goal is to move from left to right in that focus area. Let’s use an example:

Let’s say a high-value area you really want to improve is running executive meetings. Use the model to anchor you to various outcomes you’d ideally like to happen, and the further right you go, the bigger the outcome gets.

Ask: “What would have to be true in each of these situations to reach that level?” Then write out possible scenarios.

The key is not to get tied up in limiting yourself. You have nothing to lose here. You’re thinking about ideal scenarios, so let your mind go wild.

Here are actual outcomes I’ve experienced as a strategic seller across each of the situations on The Purposeful Performer Model to give you a concrete example in running an executive meeting:

There’s no exact answers. This is a thought exercise focused on getting you to think deeper before you take action so that those actions have the best possible shot at achieving the desired scenario you envision.

STEP 3: List out what raises the standards and lowers the expectations

Most sellers I start coaching have the wrong perspective of their role.

They think they are only a revenue generator. But to be an effective revenue generator, you need to be an effective value creator. We’re actually “creatives” in our role. Creative, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean being creative (although that’s helpful), it means the act of creating. In this case, creating value that was hidden or did not exist. The natural output of this flow is generating (outsized) revenue.

With this reframe of your role in mind, think of standards not only as the inputs that you can control, but the things that actually deliver value, while the expectations are not just the outputs you cannot control, but they are the “pushy” behaviors seeking to drive revenue.

Said more simply:

For example, if you are pursuing one of your top strategic accounts, you may want to lead with a high standard like, “How can we make this meeting the best one of their year?”

Getting answers to these questions give you more realistic optimism.

‍On the flip side, you need to lower the expectations you or your leaders have for that meeting like, “We expect to uncover a core use cases to support our starter package.”

‍This gives you a dose of healthy pessimism and allows you to have contingency plans in place to prepare for navigating unknowns because you ultimately cannot control how the client will react.

Most revenue generators I observe are working in reverse. They have absurdly high expectations (either their own or driven from the top down), and extremely low standards (because they’re operating in chaos, not clarity—about themselves and their accounts). This leaves them feeling frustrated and with customers who don’t see any differentiated value in their approach.

Feel familiar?

When you focus too much on expectations and not enough care on standards, it closes off opportunities. This is not a good place to be operating from. It locks you out from making meaningful progress.

I see examples of this everywhere:

To get this back in harmony and create the widest gap possible for success and satisfaction to enter your orbit, list out all of the supporting principles and actions that raise your standards. Then, list out all of the limiting beliefs and actions to lower your expectations.

Do this for each high-value area and each portion of The Purposeful Performer Model.

Ready to dive in?

Access a helpful matrix that you can use to work through this exercise. Then, for additional points, repeat for additional high-value areas (for a total of three) that you’ll stay committed on improving this quarter.

[Reminder, if you need help with Notion, bookmark this page].

That’s it for now.

See you next week!

All missions for Learning Path 1 will be housed here (← worth bookmarking this link).