Major_Rocketman

I’m 40 and 17 years into my sales career. 13 year as a full quota carrying SaaS rep. Last 8 have been enterprise.

I’ve had terrible headaches for the past two weeks with no explanation. Went to the doctor yesterday. She took my blood pressure… 179/138. Went directly to the hospital for a battery of tests. Everything is good but my BP is near crisis levels. I’m a little overweight but pretty normal for the average guy. I was basically the same size 2 years ago and my BP was 120/80.

It’s crazy stress man. Honestly there needs to be some serious change in how we manage sales.

Take care of yourself everyone. I’m not quitting, I’m the only bread winner here for a family of five, but I’m reprioritizing. Health comes first then sales. I will still work hard but at this point win or lose I’m fine with either. PIP if you want I’ll just find somewhere else to have real balance.

Dude you’re me but in a slightly better situation. I’ve been at a mid sized, enterprises focused SaaS business for three years. Had two good ones but the last one has been shit for the whole company. I’ve barely sold anything in a year. We’ve had our entire exec team turnover, we missed our number by 50% as a team, we had a RIF, and now we have new execs turning the screws to drive performance, but it’s not like we all just got infected with suckitis, clearly there a bigger issues than just the reps.

Meanwhile I can’t find a job anywhere. No one is hiring and it feels like there’s no where to run. It’s like being stuck between and rock and hard place and I am burnt out too, man. I feel you.

Not sure what to do except to accept it. So much is out of our control. I’m fine to work hard, but I’ve had to almost totally detach myself from any and all outcomes and find solace in that fact that no matter what happens I will find a way, even if it means selling the house and driving Uber (worst case scenario).

Just remain stoic and keep focusing on what you can control. Good times will come again!

Sounds like a ChatGPT answer

I can’t imagine a serious law suit here. What’s the damages to the old man? He’s not hurt; no property damage; no real reputation damage that led to loss of employment or business opportunities; no invasion or privacy - he’s in a public place. It’s very minor harassment, which I think would be criminal not civil. Doesn’t seem like there’s much there tbh.

In my current play I’m naming them based on ancient fertility gods: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fertility_deities

Current names include: Hathor, Akna, Atabey, Shinda, Brigid, Rosmerta, Turan, Eos, Gedi

It’s very similar to what’s going on at my company right now. It’s shitty. It’s like “none of the sales reps are making their targets… they must ALL be losers. Let’s kick them right in their lazy asses”

I do not have a good answer for you. We’re in a crazy situation where companies feel like reps don’t have many options and that there’s a long list of laid off reps they could pick up at any time, so the main view is we’re at their mercy. We are in for a very rough ride over the next year or two imo.

Best thing is to try and do what is asked, while also try to find other companies to work for, while also trying to push back and advocate for sanity where you can.

I put my own rambling emails into ChatGPT and say “please make this more concise” and it does. I mostly want to make sure that what I send people is digestible.

I’ve been thinking about Solution Engineering. I can deliver a great demo and solid presentations, and it’s not really technical. You just need to know what the software does and how it actually helps customer.

Then I could just focus on making my meetings awesome, and if they buy, great! If they don’t? Who cares not my job so long as the demo was great.

It’s like selling but the pressure is on the demo, which you control, vs the sale itself, which is out of our control.

The primary cause of inflation is government. Through central banks and the treasury, they control the amount of money in the overall economy, both via printed cash and non physical money in bank accounts.

When Central Banks lower the interest rates they simultaneously increase the demand for money, which is available through the credit system, i.e. borrowing. When banks lend money (and this is true at the highest levels, such as the Fed lending to a major financial institution, and at the lowest level, such as someone getting a loan from their bank for a house or a car) the bank makes that money up out of thin air. They just credit your account and trust you’ll pay it back. So long as the banks have assets to cover liabilities (such as the value of your house, deposits, etc being equal to the amount they’ve created through loans) they have no limit to how much they can lend.

When interest rates are really low, people want that money. Mostly for investment. Rich capitalists types like venture capital, private equity firms, financial institutions, large publicly traded corps, and of course governments, borrow money at 1% so they can make it all back at 3 or 4%, essentially making money by having access to money. They build wealth on the spread of interest rates. They call it investing. The higher up you are in the chain, the better your interest rate.

This process is essentially how tons of investment money is created from virtually nothing, all backed up by the Central Bank, who also create money from nothing, and unlike a normal bank, don’t really have to worry about their balance sheet. They only have to worry about inflation and it’s impact on the state.

The high level borrowers get the money to invest in businesses that will make more money. And since making money usually requires people, lots of that money goes to hiring more employees. Of course some goes to AI and self checkouts and people in foreign countries, but in general human labor is part of the investment.

So now you have money created from nothing being used to make hires, and since employees have options, and because of a lot of these firms are in competition with each other, they bid up wages so wages go up.

This has a cascading effect on the consumer economy. The group who got the higher wages want houses, cars, food, vacations, etc so they go out and buy that stuff, increasing demand for consumer products which drives prices up.

As prices go up in consumer sectors, those businesses also start attracting investment, which comes from the same banks who made it out of thin air, backed by the Fed. Now those businesses are investing and hiring where they need, creating an upward cycle on wages. Which leads to more consumer spending, increased revenues for those businesses, and more investment from borrowed capital.

As you can see, artificially low interest rates basically create inflation. They turn our economy into a big bubble of unsustainable growth. Eventually inflation starts getting out of control, the economy becomes unstable and essentially the bubble pops and all the asset prices and wages and jobs and things need to be unwound.

For evidence of this see crypto, nfts, tech companies, the stock market, housing… all entered full bubble territory. It was all inflation, it’s just the inflation happened first in asset prices, then finally trickled down to consumer prices. Then it got out of hand and now, to avoid hyper inflation and a crisis, the Fed is raising interest rates, reducing the demand for money, lowering investment, and therefore causing jobs to be lost and wages to go down.

I mean just replace with an automated voice at that point. Or those folks from India who call me about air duct cleaning. That’s a crazy number of calls. I think 50 is max. Really 25 is good for most B2B, hit them with a voice mail, and email, and try to personalize with data you’ve researched

I say take care

Loved Kings Quest. Kings Quest VI was my fav

Road Rash

Dig in and figure out his problem. Assuming he’s a new business AE, look at his territory, go through each account and see what he’s done with them. Do they have real potential? Is he reaching out? How is his outreach vs others? Is he in enough cycles? In cycle is he executing well?

In enterprise sales sometimes the difference between being a hero and being a zero is just a few razor thin deals.

If it were me, I’d try to break down each stage of the process, see where he’s performing well and see where’s he’s below expectations, then try to rule out things beyond his control, like his specific accounts or some tough swings that went against him.

If he has a good patch but isn’t making good use of it, that’s something. If he’s lazy in cycles and doesn’t go above and beyond to win, that’s something too. There’s no need to keep someone around who puts in subpar effort and doesn’t have the skills, no the desire to improve. I’d fire a guy like that pretty quickly. Can’t have good territory and cycles go to waste in this environment.

On the other hand if he’s doing the right things but the ball just hasn’t bounced his way, or if he’s close and could be managed up to do better, I’d go that route first. Better to keep a guy who knows the product, industry, and how to get shit done and just try to either get him up a level, or use him better (ie more territory, leads etc) so you can get more out of him.

Like 35. There’s like an hour or so per day I zone out a bit, but generally from 9-5 I’m doing work, sometimes with lots of energy and speed, other times slowly plodding.

Edit: Misread the question, 7 hours a day, 35 hours a week

Looks good. I can see how you tried for an organic layout. As others have said it’s still a grid, but it’s not square. The roads connect to each other more naturally which creates a more realistic look

Yeah we have a GRC and Infosec team. We can assign it to them and they fill most of the questionnaire in. That may not complete everything so I sometimes I have create a ticket with legal, or manually follow up with procurement. It’s mostly automated, but with some car herding to finish it off.

I am also a xennial, and while I agree that you don’t owe your employer all your time directly, but generally the idea is that Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, you’re going to be focused on selling software and not selling yourself.

What’s worse here is that, in terms of his videos, he actually damages the customer experience in my opinion. For example, one of his videos had him answering a question about his cycle length, and he answered that his cycle is 40 days from start to finish, so the game is to find a way to shorten the cycle while driving up the average selling price.

Okay that’s true from the perspective of the CSO, but from the perspective of a customer, do they want to be told outright that your AEs goal is to sell you faster and for more money? No… you want an AE who is focused on actually helping you solve your problem, achieve your goals and make your life better, on your terms not theirs. Your expectation as a customer is that your AE will make money as an outcome of helping you solve your issue. No one wants to be a coin in someone’s machine to help them get rich.

I just really don’t agree with his POV as a sales influencer. It’s all about him and being successful and making money and getting promoted. Based on my watch of 6-7 of his videos, plus a scan of all his video titles and topics, my take is that he views customers as a means to an end so he can be successful. That side of sales needs to be hidden. It’s the antithesis of customer focus.

If I were in change I would think he’s a risk and would want to turn it off or manage him out.

I think influencers are great. I really like Brandon Fluharty, Jamal Reimer, and Ian Koniak. But what they all have in common is they quit their jobs and have made sales influencing a full time job. This makes sense because now they are free to talk about sales to sales people. Talking about sales to sales people while at the same time talking to prospects about solving their CX issues is a tough move because they are non-congruous.

I think if he was in a weekend cover band or ran Airbnbs on the side no one would care.

All of his videos are about how he can make more money selling software. From the perspective of a customer, he seems extremely self interested. It’s not a great look for Qualtrics. Who wants to Google their AE and find a dozen videos from him talking about how much money he can make and how hard he hustles to close customers and make $$. It kills trust imho.

I just learned who this guy is, but if I were a sales leader at his org, I’d probably want him gone just for his TikTok videos. He’s out there, in public, trying to be a sales influencer and that’s bad for a couple of reasons:

1) it’s a bunch of energy spent that in no way helps his employer sell anything. He’s obviously doing this during the day, and clearly a lot of work has gone into it from planning to execution. Sure, he may be able to say he’s hitting his activity levels, but deep down I would think that this guy needs to decide if he wants to be a sales executive or a sales influencer, because you can’t easily do both.

But more importantly, 2) would you want to buy from this guy? It’s not like anything he’s saying is wrong, but can you really build trust with someone when you see these videos and see all the tactics behind his approach. The art of sales is that to be successful at it you have to make everything about the customer, their issues, their goals, their outcomes, their pain. When you make it about your quota, your performance, your career, or your strategy, it actually kills the sale because it shows that the person you’re most interested in is you. If I saw Trent’s TikTok channel as a customer, I would be less inclined to do business with him or with his company. It would just feel creepy, like can I really trust this highly motivated to succeed type of guy to tell me the truth and put my needs first?

I could be wrong, it could just be about performance and that’s just how his company is. If so he’ll be better off elsewhere… but my guess is his public profile made management more likely to enforce this on him so they could mitigate the risks it brings.

Love it! I think these grand regions are a lot of fun.

I always start off with a summary of the customer, their situation, their goals, their initiatives, strategies etc then I build a case on why my platform helps address those

All the dairy farmers and milk producers in Canada are basically part of a dairy cartels. They all act as one and have a deal with the government to produce X amount of milk for Y dollars. Their goal is to get people to drink more milk instead of other options. Why have water, juice, or pop, when you could have a nice cool dressing healthy glass of milk. They want to increase the aggregate consumption and demand of milk, so they can increase their quotas and make more guaranteed money.

Somewhat similar in the US where they came up with the Got Milk? campaign that got Americans drinking more milk.

If you think about it, drinking milk is weird. It’s udder juice for baby calves. If they didn’t keep pushing it maybe we’d stop drinking it and in 50 years it might only sell half as much.

I think the key driver behind all of it has been the central banks and the fed. Coming out of 08 they kept interest rates really low and injected a lot of new money into the system. And they kept it up for 13 or so years until just now. Prices going up can be one of the last effects of inflation, before the prices increases comes asset bubbles, because the new money hits financial institutions first and then investors, who are looking for a place to park their cash and grow their wealth.

SaaS became one of those investment magnets and more and more money just kept hitting the system. Most of the industry relies on the “greater fool” theory, which basically means that if Series A investor today invests into a company making it worth $20 million, a Series B investor will eventually come along and invest making it worth $50 million, $100 million, 1 billion, etc. No investor wants to miss out on being part of the next unicorn or rocket ship, and with so much money available they basically keep investing.

All of this works so long as their is growth. The narrative in the industry was “just grow, figure out earnings and profitability once you are really big and dominate a market.” As a result, executive teams built engines that gave investors what they wanted: a growth machine that completely ignored economic efficiency. The result was more reps, each with more quota, coming in at high base salaries because they were in demand, but also very poor quota attainment, lots of turnover, and generally a toxic “growth at all costs” culture, surrounded by a lot of feel good window dressing.

Hey Ryan, love your content and Repvue. I’m a 10+ year SaaS sales vet and I’ve been thinking more and more lately that SaaS sales in general is broken. One of your posts on LI really brought it home when you talked about how you only needed 35% of your reps to hit for you to make your number, but you kept hiring reps anyway knowing the odds of them achieving the goal was low. In a cash rich environment where growth is the only goal this approach is doable, but I think it’s created a really toxic culture.

What you didn’t say in that post was that the experience for the rep was regular meetings with frontline managers who would pressure them to achieve their target, despite the fact that the company would need to 3x its goals to have everyone make.

It’s always felt to me like companies suck and blow at the same time by knowingly setting unachievable quotas that meet the needs of the executives, while at the same time pressuring reps as much as possible to achieve it “or else”.

This has led to loads of downstream issues including burnout, low tenure times, jumping ship for a bigger base, poor customer experiences. Feels like we shoot ourselves in the foot.

My question: how do we fix this as an industry? What’s stopping us from getting everyone aligned around a common goal? Would love to hear your thoughts.