Welcome to Lesson 4 of The Clarity Challenge inside 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 an experienced tech 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.

The last lesson was cathartic, right?

But no doubt, after going through the reflection exercise, you should have clearer insights into what served you well, what didn’t, and what you need to keep in play from last year as we enter the next part.

Upgrading your thinking has been the focus of the first three lessons, and now we’re going to get more tactical and unpack a powerful, practical framework 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 possible gap, allowing success and satisfaction to fill the space you operate in.

In high-end 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, and on and on.

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 this clutter, helping you focus on key actions that elevate your performance while reducing stress on things that don’t matter.

I wrote about this in lesson 3, but it’s worth repeating and looking at how I used this framework throughout my four years as an individual contributor at an enterprise-first conversational AI company.

On paper, I had no special “advantage” to average 278% quota attainment and close $27.3M in ARR over 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 heart of being a Purposeful Performer was reframing what it really 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 was 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 on every high-value action I took in my role.

When you open the digital workbook below, I provide a handy matrix you can use. This will be a valuable tool you can use every day.

These are the four big steps to take on whatever it is you want to improve:

STEP 1: Identify all the actions in your current role.

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

Customer-facing:

Internal-facing:

STEP 2: Hone in on the ONE focus area in your role to zoom in on this quarter.

It will help to look back on your reflections from the last exercise to identify the areas you should prioritize at this stage that will give you the biggest lift this year. Start at the top of the funnel and work your way down.

Where do you have “leaks” in your funnel, and what are the skill gaps that need to be closed? Ask questions like:

Not everything can (or needs to) be a priority. The key is closing capability gaps in the highest-value areas and moving you from left to right on The Purposeful Performance Model for that one area until it becomes elite, or even world-class.

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.

Highlight just one.

Customer-facing (example):

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 develop a stronger point of view and share the right insights, which will help your outreach achieve a higher response rate. You want to always think, “Less, but better.”

We’ll unpack specific strategies when it comes to designing a world-class buying experience in future lessons. Learning Path 1 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 3: 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 another example:

Let’s say a high-value area you really want to improve is running more effective 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 a highly effective executive meeting:

There are no exact answers. This is a thought exercise designed to help you think more deeply before you take action, so those actions have the best possible chance of achieving the desired scenario you envision.

STEP 4: List out what raises the standards and lowers your 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 (which increases your income, which further amplifies your autonomy).

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:

Bottom line: Focus on creating value; the revenue will take care of itself.

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

Getting answers to these questions gives 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 case to support our starter package.”

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

Most tech sellers 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 high expectations at the start and not enough on maintaining high standards, it quickly creates an unintentional, albeit invisible, wall of resistance. Essentially, it creates a high-stress, low-performance environment.

This is obviously not a good place to be operating from. It locks you out from making meaningful progress.

I see examples of this everywhere:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU):

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU):

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU):

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

Do this for each high-value area and each portion of The Purposeful Performer Model. You’ll instantly gain clarity while simultaneously reducing your stress.

Ready to dive in?

Access a helpful matrix to work through this exercise. Stay focused on that one focus area until you move it to the elite level this quarter. Once you have clear signals that it is indeed at an elite level (something you are the best at in your industry), then you can focus on the next area.

Quality > Quantity.

The problem I see with the members I work with one-on-one is that they are trying to focus on too many areas at once, and it’s keeping them in a deficient state or, at best, at a baseline with a few pro-level capabilities here and there. That won’t be enough to break through to the next level of autonomy in your career—keeping you tethered to the corporate chaos longer than necessary.

This is a great focusing question taken directly from Gary Keller in The ONE Thing that will help you identify the best focus area for this quarter: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Always remember, Purposeful Performers learn better, remember longer, and transfer skills more reliably when they actively apply knowledge rather than passively consume it. To help you get started on your own journey, I have created a digital workbook to guide you through The Clarity Challenge.

Note: If you haven’t done so already, you will need to register—but it’s fast and free.

See you there ⤵