Use Frameworks To Make Better Decisions

Welcome to lesson four 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.

Minimum points available: 5

Total points available: 15

One framework to rule them all

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:

1. “How do I raise my standards on…?” (inputs you can control)

2. “How do I lower my expectations on…?” (outputs you cannot control)

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.

Why does it matter for a Level II Revenue Generator?

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.

Moving from deficient to world-class (fast)

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:

• The same amount of accounts: 50

• They were all evenly distributed across North America

• Spread across our core verticals: Retail, Fiserve, Travel, Telco, Healthcare, & Tech 

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:

• Charisma and charm

• Executing a sales process

• Relentless pipeline generation

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.

Putting it into action

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:

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