Dan Waldschmidt's Blog, page 19

How To Beat Fear.

Make no mistake, trying new things is scary.

Venturing into the unknown is guaranteed to leave you filled with fear.

After the initial glamor of pursuing something new, what you’re left with is a sense that it is all about to crash down on you.

That is scary on every level.

Your fear impacts how you spend your money, who you ask for help, and a thousand other important decisions you make each day.

In truth, there is no sure way to ever really getting rid of fear.

If you’re going to work and try and care and improve, then you’re opening yourself up to a new and scary future.

Here is what is important to remember as you continue down this path.

The only thing that beats back fear is activity.

Taking action is the greatest antidote you have to the poisoning paralysis caused by fear.

Sweat works. Pursuit works. Revolution works. Challenge works.

Not thinking or worrying or obsessing — those are the ingredients that catalyze fear into the death trap that it often becomes.

When you’re feeling scared, double down on your effort.

When you feel fear swallowing you up, get busy doing things that matter.

Work so hard you don’t have time to be afraid.

Don’t let your thoughts rob you of your destiny. Press on.

The More You Do, The Better You Get.

Hard work is smart work.

Working hard leads to working smarter.

It’s not the other way around. It doesn’t work in reverse.

That’s because hard work creates busyness. And busyness forces you to make better choices.

You get the most done when you’re already doing things.

You are the most productive when you already have too many things on your plate.

That’s because you begin to realize what is most important.

Your priorities become exponentially more clear when you don’t have time to do everything right now.

That only happens when you’re working hard.

The more you do, the more you realize what you should be doing.

And as you do more of what you should be doing, you get even better at that.

Execution leads to better execution which leads to even better outcomes.

Hard work is your race to the top. It is what pulls the best out of you.

At some point you have to stop planning and preparing and talking and sharing — and just go get started.

The more you do, the better you get.

Get to work.

The Power Of Having Everything To Lose.

Never bet against the individual who has everything to lose.

That person who is so possessed with a sense of purpose and destiny that he or she is willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to achieve their desired outcome.

That’s the person you don’t mess with.

They’re not just talking about what they’re going to do. They’re doing it.

They aren’t bothered by your disbelief or by your criticism.

People with everything to lose don’t lose sleep because you don’t believe in them or because you think that what they’re trying to do is impossible.

They just do it. They try.

They make mistakes and end up looking foolish from time to time, but they never lose track of what’s most important.

They keep their eyes focused on the prize at the end of the sweat and toil and agony that they are exerting right now.

While you spend time wondering what other people are going to think about you, they are heads down in a religious pursuit of their destiny.

It’s magnificent to see. Awe-inspiring to behold.

And the greatest miracle of all is that you can be one of those people yourself.

The only thing that separates them from you is it they have everything to lose.

And you don’t seem like you care about your future nearly as much as you should.

You’re Just A Flop Away From Success.

As Mamo Wolde prepared to make the turn into the stadium for the final 400 meters of the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics marathon, he anticipated the roar of 80,000 people cheering him on to a gold medal.

He was a full 3 minutes ahead of the next closest runner and about to become the first runner in the history of the Olympics to win the marathon in back-to-back years.

He was greeted with silence.

The crowd was too focused on a tall, gangly American high jumper gunning for his own gold medal.

Scrawny nerd Dick Fosbury struggled at high school sports. He couldn’t make the football team. Or the basketball team. And he didn’t make the cut for the high jump team his first year — the sport he had spent so much time training for.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. He did everything his coach told him to do. And his coach was one of the best in the world.

A great high jump was the result of great technique.

That started with a few rapidly sprinted steps. Nearing the bar, Dick would push off from the balls of his feet and throw his body sideways over the bar, using his hips to keep from knocking the bar off the pins.

No matter how hard he practiced, Dick continued to be frustrated. The best he could muster was 5’ 4”, a full 2 feet lower than the world record — in a sport measured by fractions of inches.

And that wasn’t something he was willing to tolerate.

He improved his sideways lunge. He worked on scissoring his legs in the middle of the jump to build more height. He tumbled and trained. Practiced and prepared.

But none of it was enough to make him a winner.

He was stuck. And feeling frustrated.  And then one day, a crazy idea hit him.

What if instead of lunging over the bar sideways, which always felt awkward to him, he could push himself up and over the bar backward?

It was scary to think about the possibility of landing on his head. This new strategy would leave him trying to land on his shoulders with the entire weight of his body driving down on his neck.

One wrong jump and he could be paralyzed for life.

Or worse.

As he refined his new high jump technique, he quickly improved. At his next competition, he blew away his old personal best by a full 6 inches.

But if he thought that getting better was something that would win him praise, he was in for a rude awakening.

The local newspaper noticed his odd style, naming it as the “Fosbury Flop”.

And they weren’t the only ones who noticed.

His own college coach called his new head-first, backward lunge “a shortcut to mediocrity”.

It got worse from there.

The Los Angeles Times said he “goes over the bar like [an idiot] being pushed out of a 30-storey window.”

Sports Illustrated said he has “a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel” and looks like “a slightly apprehensive man lying back on a chaise lounge that’s too short for him” when he jumps.

Other papers called him “a fish flopping in a boat”.

The “World’s Laziest High Jumper.” “A guy falling off the back of a truck.”

He looked like a fool trying something new like this.

His big success was ridiculed by everyone. For years.

His style looked ridiculous. And the critics piled on. Never letting him forget how stupid he looked every time he lunged backward over that high jump bar.

And in 1968, in the thin air of Mexico City, that success was in jeopardy.

Dick had barely even qualified for the Olympics, squeaking out a third place finish by brushing over 7’ 3”.

He was in over his head. Literally.

There he stood, staring down 7’ 4¼”, a height he had never cleared. It was a height no one else had ever cleared.

He was staring down an Olympic record.

And so was his competition. It was just Dick and fellow American Ed Caruthers left. The new against the old.

Dick, as he always did, stood at his starting mark, rocking back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists, letting his adrenaline and the energy from the crowd flow through his veins. He wouldn’t start until he believed he could clear it. So he rocked. And waited. And then he started running. First straight, and then slowly turning to his right as he jumped over the bar, head first. Backwards.

And he knocked the bar off.

But so did Caruthers. Strike one. And so they both did it again. And again, they both failed to clear a height nobody else had yet to ever clear. Strike two.

They each only had one chance left.

This was it. Dick had one final opportunity to prove that his head-first, backward style wasn’t as ridiculous as everyone told him. For years he had battled and competed and improved. This was it.

So again, he lined up at the starting mark, rocking back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists, psyching himself up to believe he could do this, despite what his coaches, the press, and everyone around him said.

And again, he took off. Bounding closer and closer, slowly arching in towards the pole.

And then he leaped. Backward. Head first. Hips up. Shoes up.

And the bar stayed up.

He had done it. He had jumped higher than anyone in human history ever had. Dick Fosbury won the gold medal, claimed a new world record, and forever changed the sport of high jump.

Today, every single high jumper in the world uses Dick Fosbury’s “awkward” backward lunge over the bar. His “flop” wasn’t so much of a flop after all.

He refused to listen to some of the brightest minds in the sport. They told him that his new style was foolish and irresponsible. Dangerous. Perhaps even deadly.

Where they saw danger and fear, he saw opportunity for growth.

It’s the same with you.

There are those that tell you that your crazy idea “will never work” and that it’s okay just to be “normal”. There are those who tell you to “keep your feet on the ground” and “be reasonable.”

They scoff and sigh at your ridiculous ideas and call you a flop.

Nobody knows any more or any less than you do. Decide what you want. Then work fanatically until you get it. Keep iterating on your idea until it works.

It might not be today. It might not be tomorrow. It might be years from now.

You might have to jump backward to make forward progress.

Never forget, you have to ignore the critics and experts that tell you what you’re doing will lead to failure and injury. Believe in yourself. Don’t settle for conventional wisdom when what you really want is so much grander.

Use what you believe to achieve greatness.

You might not reinvent a sport, but you’re guaranteed to achieve your own brand of greatness.

5 Calendar Tools To Keep You Focused On Being Awesome.

You can’t get anywhere without a plan.

To make progress, you need to get good at segmenting your day and using smart tools like a calendar to stay focused.

Psychologically, you’re wired to complete easy wins without doing what it takes to invest in long-term success — the daily meditations, reading time, or workouts you promised to start at the beginning of the year.

You do the easy things. And push the long-term goals.

You can do both. Because it’s on the calendar.

Here are 5 calendar apps you should check out. They are guaranteed to help you stay focused on being awesome:

Fantastical [link] — It’s an amazing bit of witchcraft. Use their handy calendar sets feature to view your work and personal calendar all on one screen, even if they’re separate email addresses. Click on a location and Google Maps will put you there. Create groups to manage your teams and use natural language to type in something like “dinner with Matt at 6pm Wednesday at Steve’s” to create an event. Easy as that.
Trevor [link] — Trevor is a personal assistant that connects your task lists with your calendar,

to help you manage your time, the same way you already do in your mind. It’s the coolest mobile calendaring app you’ve never heard of yet. Figure out how you want to spend your day and Trevor will slide all those important calls and follow-up into available openings in your day. A new web app is on the way soon.
Google Calendar [link] — It’s free and easy and available everywhere — even when you don’t have access to the internet. Add multiple personal or work calendars and search through Google’s directory of important events (everything from foreign holidays to NFL games) to find a place for everything that is going on in your life. And the best part is that it works with everything else in your Google account.
Plan [link] — Plan intelligently organizes projects and tasks from all the tools you and your team use: your Google and Outlook calendars, email, JIRA, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Github. Think of it like a work concierge. Plan brings together action items from all of your work tools, so you never have to worry about dropping the ball on any task, project, or meeting. It provides two-way sync to all of your favorite tools.
Any.do [link] — Any.do is the easiest life manager according to the more than 15 million users who use it each day. It works seamlessly with Google Calendar, Exchange, and iCloud. The new Any.do Assistant uses AI to automatically review your tasks, and mark the ones it can do for you. With your approval, you’ll be connected to a combination of smart robots and diligent humans who can help you accomplish that task. What?

One more big idea for you.

When you have a calendar picked out, use it.

Block off your calendar. Block off moments to keep yourself accountable for the important time you’re going to spend doing related tasks — like processing emails and returning phone calls.

If you’re like most people, you’re barely accomplishing half of what you could do.

Don’t let your big goals and frustrating to-do lists overwhelm you.

Put it on your calendar.

Your Shortcut To Success.

Mediocre people do mediocre things.

Normal people, looking for normal results, do normal things.

If you want to be extraordinary, then you have to do extreme things.

You won’t find breakthrough looking in the middle of your challenge. It’s at the edges.

That’s where the critics point when they want to make fun of somebody.

It’s the place where you’re afraid you might fall off, where it’s likely you’re going to get hurt.

But it is the fastest path to a breakthrough. It’s that shortcut you’ve been looking for all along.

The hard thing. The lonely thing. The absurd thing. That thing they tell you “will never work.”

When you’ve tried and failed so many other times before.

You’re going to have to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Your feelings are going to get hurt.

You’re going to have to spend more time and money than you planned.

In the end though, you’re going to find that one thing you’ve been looking for. Success.

No matter what you label it, call it, or imagine it to be. Success is on the other side of breakthrough — just on the outer edge of crazy.

So stop expecting easy efforts to result in tremendous results. Stop expecting ordinary measures to produce extraordinary outcomes.

If your idea for change doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not crazy enough to get the results you want.

Push yourself a little bit more.

Making Progress Is Messy.

You don’t have to get it right the first time. You just have to keep trying.

Perfection isn’t the goal. Getting to where you want to be is the goal.

Often that is an ugly process. It’s messy. Full of the human things that cause frustration and confusion.

You’re going to make mistakes along the way.

You’re going to get your feelings hurt.

And probably hurt other people accidentally along the way.

Which is why it matters that you focus on forward progress — not how far away you still are from your goal.

In truth, the only way you can measure your progress is by taking the time to look back at how far you have come.

The future is always in the distance. More and bigger and better — they’re all in the distance.

No matter how hard you try and for how long you try, there will always be room to improve.

Perfection isn’t possible.

That’s not an excuse to avoid doing the hard things that drive personal improvement.

Your perspective is what matters — the thoughts you allow to circulate inside your head.

You’re in the business of trying. You’re in the business of giving maximum effort.

Nothing could, should, and will hold you back from getting closer to where you want to be.

You might stumble. You might fall. But you’re going to get back up and keep moving towards your goal.

Your journey isn’t a dance recital. Being pretty and perfect isn’t how you get scored.

Press On. Keep trying. Stop comparing yourself to those who seem like they’ve got it all going on.

Be too busy to worry about anything other than just taking the next step.

Messy progress is better than no progress at all.

The Mistake Of Believing That They Are Smarter Than You.

Think about the rules and conventional wisdom you have adopted to help you run your life.

You believe that if you have more money that you will have fewer problems.

You believe that you can’t get a decent job without an advanced degree.

You believe that you shouldn’t feel good about yourself unless your body is sexy.

You believe that the better you are at following these, the more assured you are of success.

But you’re dead wrong.

You’re following other people’s rules because you think that they know something that you don’t know.

You believe that they have some insight – or perhaps a shortcut – that will help you avoid your own insecurities and more quickly propel you towards success than if you ventured out on your own.

The truth is that the people who created the wisdom that you’re living by aren’t any smarter than you are.

They are just like you.

They don’t have any magic formulas or know any special secrets that you don’t already know.

They are flesh and blood. Human. They make mistakes and screw up just like you do.

So before you give up on yourself, maybe you should rethink your hero worship.

Before you decide that your ideas are stupid, remember that a lot of other “stupid ideas” turned out to be wonderfully amazing — the lightbulb, pasteurized milk, and travel to the moon.

The secret is that there isn’t a secret.  Just “stupid” hard work.

You’ve Got So Much More Potential.

Thuuuuuuuud.

It was the middle of the night. Steve was jolted awake in the middle of a raging storm. In the dark and stormy unknown of the Atlantic Ocean.

It had all started as a race. He had planned to race his sleek, 6.5m sloop, the Napoleon Solo, from England to Spain and then back across the Atlantic.

But on his way to Spain, he was forced to drop out when the hull of his craft developed a small crack. Beaten but not broken, Steve decided to sail solo across the Atlantic anyways.

But then he had to get back home. And that’s what he was doing right now.

Thuuuuuuuud.

In a panic, Steve realized that he was in a much worse situation than a mere crack. Something enormous, perhaps a whale, had crashed into the side of his boat, tearing the hull wide open.

It was February 4, 1982. Two days before Steve’s 30th birthday.

Knowing he had to move quickly, Steve started packing his life raft. It was raw instinct.

Sleeping bag: check. Flare gun: check. Emergency kit: check.

Speargun: check.

Diving in an and out of the cabin that was now completely under water, he grabbed all the food he could find: a head of cabbage, a box of eggs, 10 oz of peanuts, 16 oz of baked beans, and 8 pints of water.

As he was underwater gathering more supplies, a wave smashed into the boat, slamming the cabin door shut from the outside. He was trapped underwater. Helpless.

Gulping the last bit of air he could, hatch lid still closed, Steve felt in his gut that this was it. His time had come. His moments of his life flashed before him in an instant.

That instant seemed to last an eternity.

Just when he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, the pounding waves changed direction — ripping the hatch back open and allowing Steve to swim back to his life raft.

Exhausted, he tied the life raft to the boat. He needed rest. He would get more supplies in the morning.

But then his line snapped in the middle of the night. He was alone — at least 450 miles from the nearest living soul.

Taking stock of his situation, he reasoned that he had enough supplies to last about 18 days.

After that, he’d be at the mercy of the sea.

Working quickly, Steve began to examine the solar stills he had salvaged from the boat. Each of those 3 had the potential to turn ocean water into 6 pints of safe, drinkable water each day. Except none of them worked.

He was a dead man floating.

Knowing he’d be dead without fresh water, he took one of them apart to see how it worked. Using the odds-and-ends he had in the raft, he managed to get the 2 remaining stills back to operational — a little. Together, they were able to create 5 cups of clean water each day.

Days turned into a week. And one week into two.

He exhausted his food supplies and had to figure out what to eat.

He noticed that barnacles had grown on the bottom of his life raft. And slowly, small fish started to eat the barnacles. And then slightly bigger fish started to eat the smaller fish. And eventually, the fish were big enough to spear and eat.

Which worked perfectly until his spear gun broke.

So he tied his survival knife to the end of the spear and started stabbing away.

Two weeks turned into three. Three turned into four. Four turned into five.

Five weeks turned into six.

He was 44 days into his survival journey home when he accidentally ripped a hole in the bottom of the raft trying to spear a fish.

No amount of patching worked. After surviving the impossible, he was doomed to a slow but sure death. But that wasn’t a fate he was willing to accept.

Every day, the raft leaked, and he blew it back up. Every night, he repeated the same process.

One day passed doing this. Then two days. Then three days. And while he worked to repair the hole that could end his life, sharks circled, waiting to strike while he worked to repair the bottom, arms submerged in the water.

He was enraged. Tired. Hungry. And thirsty.

He wanted to just give up and die. So he did what any reasonable person would’ve done in that situation. He threw a temper tantrum. Nothing he was doing was working.

It would be easier to just quit than to try to fix his hopeless situation.

But after he calmed down, he came to a moment of clarity and talk himself down: “look, you’re going to be dead if you don’t do something that works. You have only enough strength left to try one more thing. Now figure it out.”

The next morning he had an idea from this Boy Scout days. He used a fork to twist the nylon he had bunched around the gaping hole to seal it off.

It worked.

And he drifted like that, shivering all through the night, burning up during the day, floating along with nothing to see but an endless expanse of blue ocean and the fish that swam around him.

Day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day. One monotonous day after another.

He saw hope passing in the distance in the form of a ship. Digging through his supplies, he grabbed the flair gun and launched one towards the boat. If they would just see the flare, they could come and rescue him.

Except they didn’t.

And then there was another ship. Same story. And a different, third ship. Same story. Seven times ships passed close enough for Steve to see them, but none of them stopped to help. Three times he turned on his emergency beacon, hoping a passing ship or airplane would pick up his signal.

Except they didn’t.

A man can start to go crazy in situations like that, drifting alone, covered in salt sores, and ignored by passing ships. Steve knew this. And so he knew he had to figure out how to keep himself sharp.

So he developed a daily routine. Wake up. Exercise — he found a way in spite of his weakened state and swollen feet. Restock the water. Check his food supplies. Measure his current location. Do algebra.

Think about the deeper meanings of life.

So he came up with a series of questions to keep himself focused:

Which of the elements most critical to my physical survival need the most attention: water, food, or raft? What specifically are the most basic elements of the problem that I am currently facing, and what among my limited resources would address that specific need? How can I be a better person, to be of more help to others, to be a willing participant in my society? What is the worst-case scenario if I do this? What are the beneficial elements of what is happening right now? Am I doing the best I can?

Every day he ran through that routine. Wake up. Exercise. Restock the water. Check his food supplies. Measure location. Do algebra. Think about the deeper meanings of life.

He was determined to keep his mind straight. One day at a time.

Day 44 turned into day 56. Day 56 turned into day 67.

Day 76 was April 20th. Against the blackness of the clear night sky, Steve saw the glow of lights off in the distance. It was an island. It was hope. But it could also be death.

To get to land, Steve would have to travel through the crashing surf and wash ashore, a relatively easy task for a grown man, but an impossible task for someone having spent two and a half months living on a starvation diet.

As he braced himself for the struggle ahead, another boat came into his view. But this wasn’t like the seven other boats before. It was a small three-man fishing boat that had headed his direction when it saw all the birds hovering over the water — a sure sign of good fishing.

They found those birds hovering over Steve Callahan. And rescued him.

He had drifted 1,800 miles in those 76 days.

All the way down to Marie Galante, a 9.5 mile-wide island in the Lesser Antilles.

As he would later write about his survival: “it was one in a billion.”

And maybe he was wrong about that.

The Navy SEALs have a rule: “When your brain tells you that you’ve given it your all, you’ve only given 40%.”

It would’ve been easy for Steve to quit and resign himself to despair when the rope broke from his boat. It would’ve been easy for Steve to quit when the solar stills quit or when he ran out of food or when the raft got a hole or for any other of the thousands of reasons that floated through his brain every second of every day.

But he kept going.

Each new excuse to quit was an obstacle to overcome. Each boat that passed him was one boat closer to rescuing him.

He didn’t have anyone to depend on. Nobody was going to save him. But him. He didn’t have time for excuses. He had to get tough and figure things out — or die.

The same is true for you.

When you think you’ve given it your all, you’ve only given 40%.

When you think you’ve saved as much as you can, you’re still wasting 60%.

When you think you’ve invested everything you have into your relationships, keep investing.

They’re not even half as strong as they could be.

When you think you’ve worked all you can, you’re walking away from 150% growth.

You’re tougher than you think you are. You’ve got more potential. More power.

You don’t have to be afloat for 76 days on the angry ocean, surrounded by sharks, to dig a little bit deeper.

You can start today. Right now. This moment.

14+ Ways Cloze Delivers a Better CRM Experience.

Smart people use smart tools to achieve greatness. It’s hard to be maniacally focused on your goals when you’re juggling 37 different tools, email accounts, social media profiles, and to do lists scattered throughout your phone, inbox, and refrigerator sticky notes.

The other problem is that most of the tools being thrown at you today to help you make money, organize your business, or get things done are woefully incomplete or clunky.

They add more work to your daily routine, which is frustrating and unhelpful.

Over the last few years, I have used all the popular CRM tools in my different businesses — Salesforce, OnePageCRM, Nimble, Contactually, and Hubspot CRM. As a nerd, I get deep into these tools. I try everything. Click all the buttons. And then leave frustrated (and sometimes enraged).

Over the last year, I have been using Cloze as the core of my business. I can tell you that it is the best sales platform I have used in the last decade. I’m not exaggerating. And here are a few surprising reasons why.

DISCLAIMER: I wasn’t paid to write this, and you can’t pay me to write about your tool. I pay full price for Cloze and email their senior leadership (like you can) when I want a new feature.

It is better than Gmail and Outlook for managing daily email — Cloze combines all of your accounts into one unified inbox, regardless of platform. You can archive, create new, or reply just by using keyboard shortcuts.
It logs your cell phone calls, so you know when you talked last — You connect your mobile provider (e.g. Verizon, T-Mobile, etc…) and Cloze automatically connects your calls to your contacts. No data entry required. You just call — and Cloze reminds you of when you did it.
It combines multiple contact profiles into a single record — You get one view of all your contacts from email, social media, and phone. Cloze will use the information you give it (email and phone numbers) to add social profiles and bio data.
It provides sales-centric social media management — Cloze organizes your social feeds by who matters to you, not by who you talked with last. You can reply and schedule posts like you would with a fancy platform like Hootsuite.
It delivers proactive reminders — Cloze automatically reminds you to stay in-touch with important people. You can add special follow-up requirements for certain types of people (e.g. prospects, existing customers, partners, vendors, etc…) or just use Cloze’s built in AI to do the work for you. Cloze also tracks email opens and reminds you if a reply email was not received.
It is one place for everything in business — Cloze brings together all your different calendars, Evernote, call history, Slack notes, projects, to-dos, contact enrichment, RingCentral data, and anything you can add via API. And there are no limits on email accounts or contacts.
It shows the full deal picture — It makes it incredibly easy share the complete view of project and deal activity with the right people automatically – no data entry required. Emails and notes and last call data are all a part of the record, which means your team is tripping over each other to get things done.

It scrapes contact data from your emails — Cloze analyzes email signatures in emails you receive and lets you know when the sender’s contact information has changed, so you always have the latest info. You’ll be asked if you want to  update the contact record, so you always have the choice whether to enhance your database or not.

It is the easiest mail merge on the planet– It allows you to send a personalized email to multiple contacts at once — as many as 50 at a time. Each person will receive their own email delivered through your email account, just as if you sent each of them a separate, regular email. And, with open tracking, you’ll know who read the email or clicked a link. It’s “dummy proof.”
It allows you to create and share email templates — Cloze makes it a single swipe to reconfirm meetings, reach out to contacts or follow-up on a next-step. And you can customize the built-in templates and create your own to consistently deliver a powerful sales message. Imagine combining templates with mail merge. It’s a great time-saver.
It sends you a morning briefing — Before you start your day, Cloze sends you a morning briefing that outlines all the things you’ve got to get done for the day, emails and posts that you haven’t seen and might want to take a look at – as well as a snapshot of what you’ve accomplished in the last week. You can turn it off too if being overly productive becomes a problem for you.
It allows you to schedule email to send later — You can draft an email and schedule Cloze to send it at a later date or time. Write it at night. Send it first thing in the morning.
It helps you coordinate follow-up — As a team, you can use Cloze to track who’s responsible for contacts, projects, deals, next steps, and to-dos. You can easily add people to the group or move them out, assign tasks, and leave notes for everyone involved.
It lets you search in “sales speak” — You can search for contacts the way you think – “VPs in the Big Apple,” “marketers at IBM,” “customers in Boston.” Makes it incredibly easy to track down that “one guy” you know you’ve needed to speak with. 
It is priced at an incredibly fair $13.33 per user per month — In spite of you what you have read thus far, awesomeness doesn’t need to break the bank. Most tools are at least $100 per user per month. That makes Cloze an absolute steal.

If it sounds like the tool for you, give it a whirl. Then get back to focusing on your plan for world domination.

By the way, we call this a CRM, but really it’s just a smarter address book. And that, in my opinion, is really what a great CRM should be all about — people.

Whatever you do, don’t assume that all technology is a waste of your time. Products like Cloze can help you deliver more value, stay in touch with the right people, and make more money.

Right now, I think it’s the best thing going.