So I've been in tech sales now for over a decade and I'm currently a senior account executive over at LinkedIn. But the path to being a top performer was not an easy one. My first year as a SaaS account executive in B2B sales was absolutely miserable. I almost wanted to quit sales completely. And the reason why is I got good at the wrong things. There are eight things that I got really good at that made me a terrible sales rep and I wanted to share them with you in case you're struggling or you're new in sales or you're trying to break into sales so you can avoid these eight mistakes. So number one, I got really good at being a product expert. I knew our product inside and out. I could speak our product all day long. The problem with that is prospects don't care about your product. They don't care about your features, they don't care about your functionality. They care if you can uncover what their problem is, what's driving that problem, and who else is affected by that problem and if your solution can actually help them achieve what they're trying to achieve or solve the problem that they're having currently. I could not connect the dots between the problem and my solution. I was so focused on just my product that it completely made prospects want to ghost me because I didn't care about them. All I cared about was me and getting validation about how cool and awesome my product was. Number two kind of fits right into number one is I wasn't able to speak my prospect's language. I had no idea what was going on in their world. All the training that I did was focused on me, my product, my company, our customers, our funding, our investors, and it nothing to do with understanding our prospect's business. Number three, I treated every lead the same. So I would treat inbound and outbound leads the same in discovery. And so I would get on a call and be like, hey, so why'd you take the call today? And one time this prospect was like, dude, you reached out to me. Don't you have like a point of view on why I might be interested? And I sat there and never made that mistake again because I was like, damn, I feel like an idiot because it's true. I reached out to them. There was something something compelling about my outreach that made him get on the call. Maybe there's something going on in their business. Maybe I should do a little pre-call research. So instead, I now come in with a hypothesis, a point of view for outbound. For inbound, it's fine to be like, hey, so like what brought you here today? Like why are you interested in making a change now, et cetera. Number four and five are one and the same. But I at the time was in my mid-twenties and I was a very anxious, insecure, needy person outside of work. I hadn't like developed confidence yet. And so as a result, I was so focused on being a people pleaser, not asking hard questions, not challenging my prospects, having happy ears, being a people pleaser, avoiding friction at all costs. And what ended up happening was I didn't get to the right person, I didn't ask the hard questions to understand the true business impact of the potential problem, I didn't disqualify. I thought I needed to close and chase every single deal. What ended up happening was I would get ghosted or I would not talk to the right person and I would get strung along. I didn't know how to build champions and I was a people pleaser. I was so focused on getting validation from my prospects that I was not running my sales cycles the right way. Number six is pretty self-explanatory, but I try to do everything on my own because I was afraid that if I asked for help, it signaled that I didn't know what I was doing. So don't make that mistake. Team selling is the way to go. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Number seven, which is probably the most important one, I probably should have put it at number one, is tying all my self-worth to the outcome of my deals and everything that involved in the sales process. So if things were going well, I felt great about myself. If things were going bad, I felt like a piece of shit that I wasn't worthy of being in sales, I should quit, bunch of self-doubt. When-- What ended up happening was I was on this emotional rollercoaster. I could never just be neutral. I was so high in the highs and I was so low in the lows. And as a result, I went crazy up here and I was just like, what is going on? Like I have no control. And so as a result, I started to figure out that I needed to do the work on myself outside of work, make my life outside of work so much fun, full of joy, build confidence that I stopped putting up work on such a pedestal. I stopped putting my performance on such a pedestal and then I started to come across less needy, less anxious and I was focused on actually trying to help versus trying to hit my quota. So as a result of all this, I won a few small deals here and there, but I remember December 2019, I had three deals push on the same day and I was like, you know what, I'm gonna quit. But instead of quitting, I decided to go all in on flipping the script, trying to become a great seller. Three months later, I closed my first six-figure deal, ended up hitting President's Club in 2020 and I haven't been the same since in the best way possible. I'm now a pessimist, I love challenging my prospects because I'm trying to actually understand if I can help them. Um, I'm not a people pleaser anymore. I know how to be productive and not busy. I love multithreading, I love asking for help, I love getting feedback. I love figuring out what is the friction in this deal, what could go wrong, how do I ask really good hard questions that maybe cause a little bit of uncomfortableness but are in the best interest of my prospect? And as a result, as well, my life outside of work has been is been so amazing that I'm not so focused my self-worth being tied to my performance at work and I don't put it on a pedestal anymore. So I show up with this indifferent confident energy and I'm easy and fun to work with because I know regardless if I win or win or lose a deal, my life outside of work is great. Got a great family, great wife, great puppy, whatever the case is, that I'm not so focused on work. Anyway, hopefully this is helpful. Don't do those eight things that I mentioned. Flip the script and let's go.
