DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO CLOSE HUGE ENTERPRISE DEALS IN B2B

You know those walk-around and sales ideas that I come up with on LinkedIn that I post? What you don't know is that it's usually about the 3rd take that's a keeper. I keep the first 2 or 3 as well in case there's a piece of gold that I can edit into the 3rd. But what this reminds me of is sales. If we don't have a clean way to warm up and practice and just get the juices flowing, get the neurons connecting. And actually, when I go out and walk, that helps me. But I still have to open my mouth, hear how it comes out, feel it, connect with the audience, get the eye contact right. Usually takes about 3 times. Now, if I was paid or I had to do that on the phone and I didn't practice, one of those first few would be the only chance I'd have. If I did it live on LinkedIn and just opened up my iPhone, you would decide right there how good it was. I don't have— I could do it again, but you're not going to sit through that. That's what brevity helps you do. It gives you a way of conversing with what feels like another person. And they've got accents now. They've got multiple languages are coming out. It's just amazing. And it's customized to your audience, your market, your market's vocabulary, your vocabulary. So it is like talking to a live prospect, and you get no downside, meaning that if you mess up, yeah, you do it again. It's not a real client. Why are you practicing on real clients? That's the most expensive way to practice in the world. Check out brevitypitch.com. Tell them Brian sent you. Bring your manager. And have them give you a little view of how to make you a better salesperson really fast. Let's get into this interview today. I think you're really going to enjoy this. Uh, we talk about, you know, growing in a very unique market, the petroleum market, which I covered at a short period of time in my career. But don't skip over just because you don't cover petroleum. It's just A large industry, a complex industry, a well-established and tightly knit industry. And we're going to get into a lot of these issues. And you're going to get a lot out of this, both on skill set and mindset. And I'll sum it up at the end. Here we go.

Hey, Paul, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Hey, Brian. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, so I'm a Houston native, so from Houston, Texas. I've been here most of my life, although I've traveled all over the world for sales. But because of my being native to Houston, it's no surprise that I'm involved in the oil and gas industry. So did undergrad at Texas A&M University, which maybe means something here in Texas, but maybe doesn't mean much outside of the state. But it was a good program and learned a lot about leadership and developed some decent skills and then got out of undergrad and said, okay, I'm going to go work in the oil and gas industry. Had a lot of family members there, but I wasn't an engineer. So what do I do then? And a lot of people told me growing up that I should either be a lawyer or that I should be in sales.

Wow.

So I said, yeah, let's not go to law school. I'm done with school for a little while. So I started working in sales and I've been working in sales for the oil and gas industry for 15 years now. And the beginning of that was more of a nuts and bolts type of offering. I was selling physical goods that helped with, you know, pressure and flow control, some of the, you know, the core pieces of oil and gas industry. And then for the last 10 years, Roughly, I moved to the software side. So very interesting change there, learned a lot and I'm still learning. So that's, that's a little bit about me. Somewhere in that journey, and I'd say about the last 6 years or so, I transitioned from being mostly an individual contributor to being in management. And now really for the last 5 or 6 years, I've been exclusively in a sales slash revenue leadership role. So that's, that's a quick bio.

Cool.

And what do you like about sales? Why have you stuck with it?

Well, I like a challenge and that's always been a part of my personality. You know, I played a lot of challenging sports as a youngster. You know, I played football, I played middle linebacker. Which I liked. And you kind of have to be a glutton for punishment in that type of position on the field. And turns out that's kind of the thing you need for sales. But we don't talk about that enough, do we? Yeah, I like the challenge. But on a more serious note, I find it very stimulating. At first, I think my perception of sales was the same type of perception that a lot of people have, which is, well, Either you got it or you don't.

Yeah.

You know, some people are just cut out for it and yeah. And I think that there are personality types that maybe can step into it a little bit more easily than others. But, um, it's not, um, something that can't be improved. There, there are things you can do to get better. And I think naturally I had a pretty good personality for it, but, um, I've started to become a little bit more intellectual and practiced. And I find that stimulating and the fact that you're having to deal with clients all the time and everybody's different, especially in B2B. I'm in B2B SaaS. There's a lot of variety. So I find it very stimulating.

Yeah. I was actually in that space for quite a while and enjoyed it. I found Texans to be very upfront, honest, straight shooters.

Yeah. Yeah. We have a culture and reputation for that. That's how I was raised, right? Frankly, I think also the industry, you know, those of us who work in the oil and gas industry, and I'm a lifer, I don't— I mean, who knows what'll happen, but I don't plan to leave it. It's an industry that's important to me for a lot of personal reasons. But it goes hand in hand with the state culture because the oil and gas industry has a lot of people who you sell to that have a very pragmatic disposition. Because they don't have time to be highly speculative about their work. It's very project-based. It's either you're, you know, making educated guesses, but still guesses nonetheless about where hydrocarbons might be. And that requires a lot of money and it requires a lot of expertise and you need to get it right. Or you found those hydrocarbons and you need to produce them safely, efficiently, and in a way that you can market at a profit, which is actually incredibly difficult. So the entire industry attracts people who are very pragmatic and results-driven. And so that's created a culture where if you're selling into this industry, right, you need to mirror the client and you need to have very clear offerings and communicate them well. If they feel like you don't understand the space and you're not from the space, you kind of get pushed out. It's a bit of an insular space for that reason, but it's a good reason.

Yeah. And what sales characteristic do you feel is your strongest?

Oh gosh, that's a tough question. As an individual contributor, I would say the strongest trait that I probably have is my interest in people. I'm genuinely interested in human beings. You could ask my wife. I mean, if you have something to say to me at the ice cream parlor, I'll listen and I'll give you my full attention because I feel like people are exciting and you never know what you're going to get out of them. We're very interesting creatures. And I have had so many miraculous moments happen where I'm interacting with someone and they make an introduction that I never thought could be made, or they give me an insight that I had underestimated that person and didn't think that they would really have. And so being very curious and interested in people, I think, is probably the best, the best trait because if you're not that, you're probably gonna get fatigued.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people are that way because they don't like talking.

Some people like listening.

Yeah.

Or, or don't like talking, so they'd rather the other person talk.

That makes sense.

What's going through your mind when you're curious? What are you trying to learn or understand?

Well, usually it's one or two things. Either it's how can I, you know, from a selfish perspective, it's like, how can I grow or benefit from this interaction? Right? I'm always looking for growth, right? Because I'm competitive and I do like, you know, the stimulation that comes from sales. And so it never, the learning never stops. And so for self-interested reasons, I'm typically wondering like, what can I learn from this? How do I stretch myself a little bit, get better and better and better? On the other way, when I'm trying to give something, it's typically me wanting to understand, you know, what the problem is and empathetically really be able to relate and offer a meaningful solution. And so I'm trying to learn, especially in the early days, if you're like launching a product, one of the things I'm trying to learn with my curiosity is how viable is this? How do we talk about it? Right? What's the pain really? Am I assuming I know what it is? Or am I actually listening and hearing what it is?

Yeah. Did you ever make that mistake joining a startup where the product didn't match the market, where there was this kind of a science project that they thought? And there's a lot of that in the petroleum space, isn't there?

There is. There is. I, not as a whole company, but I've, you know, so I've been a part of efforts where we had an established product, we had a product that sold, And then we also tried to offer other ones and those didn't go so well. So not as a whole company, I don't have that experience of something just totally flopping, but definitely seen additional product lines not quite take off and miss the mark. And, you know, there would be a lot of confusion from product market fit all the way to, you know, what, you know, what are our talk tracks? How do we communicate the value of this? Who are we talking to? And with B2B SaaS, as you know, Especially in the industry that I'm in, it's like there's so many stakeholders. And so sometimes you've got the right product and you've got the right message, but you're not talking to the right people. Sometimes you're talking to the right people, but you don't, you know, you're not communicating well and it's maybe not right, you know, product at the right time. You know, there's layers of maturity, especially with the oil and gas industry, because a lot of regulatory considerations. often drive commercial viability.

Yeah. And who is the buyer on the customer side? Is it the engineers? Is it operations? Is it leadership?

Yeah, yeah, it depends on your product, you know. It's sometimes, it's as simple as, you know, it's an engineer. And if it's an engineer or a group of engineers, it's usually, you're usually selling something that's very project-driven. Because that's the world they live in, right? They have to deliver and move assets to get, you know, the hydrocarbons out and do something with them, right? Move them, transport them, produce them, refine them, etc. But if you're selling a product that's a little bit more aspirational, especially in the SaaS space, right? Then it'll often include other people outside of the engineers. So it'll include maybe like a COO or VP of operations, who needs to standardize the way that things are being done across their organization. And in the oil and gas industry, you see a lot of silos because the companies, especially the larger ones, they have assets all over the world. And so you get these subcultures that are built and they have their own leadership structures and hierarchical structures in the Middle East and in North America and in, you know, Europe or wherever. And what you find is they're not all doing things the same and it creates problems. And so when you're selling at that level, you're typically selling to someone who is tied in with operations. Of course, then you can't get anything done though unless you talk to CIOs or CTOs in the SaaS space because you get everybody excited about buying this thing and then they come in and they just, they shut it down and say, no, it's never gonna work. The implementation is too difficult or it's not secure enough. And so they may not be the ones you have to convince from a value standpoint, but you have to get through them. They're definitely, they're definitely, they can be a gatekeeper.

Yeah. And so who do you lead with? Is it the person using the product or is it the person who owns the problem or?

It often depends on the size of the company, right? If it's a smaller company, typically there's a strong correlation between the size of the company And how close you can get to the person who has the day-to-day problem, right?

Yeah.

If the company is larger, then typically you may have to go to someone who doesn't actually have to experience the pain every single day, but the outcomes of that pain cause larger organizational challenges for them that they want taken care of. So you'll do more of a conceptual sale with that person, maybe a VP of operations, And then you'll get that person involved. And then what they'll typically say is, okay, I need my teams at the local level to test this out. And you'll, you'll move into, you know, some sort of, hopefully not too extended, but POV or POC phase where those people get to put their hands on it and say, okay, I understand what this does. And at that point, you're just getting consensus from the day-to-day users. that you can then repackage up to the decision maker.

Yeah.

And that's typically what I see in the larger, you know, the companies that we, that we work with. And it's necessary to kind of approach them that way because some of these larger oil and gas companies, they are so big that if you don't take it one bite at a time and start with this business unit for this region and this one here, Not only will you not be able to get this sort of incremental buy-in that you need, but most companies can't really support, you know, most companies who are offering a B2B SaaS offering can't support flipping on a switch and actually taking on a true enterprise deal for, you know, some of the largest oil companies in the world, Aramco or Shell, for instance.

So is that your strategy, kind of baby steps, get one division? One group and then—

Usually, yeah, that's usually the strategy. But even if, even if, uh, usually that's dictated by the client and we're willing to reciprocate because, um, it's, it's a great way to get started. It's manageable, right? We'll start with the drilling assets in this region, or we'll start with your production facilities in Region A, right? And you see how it goes and then you work to expand. Um, and sometimes what these companies will do is You know, they'll pit you against a competitor. They'll give a competitor one portion of their assets and then you'll get another and everybody will do a big evaluation. And so you may win that business and they're paying and they may be paying for, you know, a couple of years, but it takes that long to really win the entire account. And it'll culminate in a big comparison battle with you and maybe one or two others. And so that is something that, you know, we find ourselves in quite frequently.

And how do you win against your competition?

Well, you have to understand—

I won't tell anyone.

Well, it starts with really just understanding the problem that the client wants solved and making sure that you know what that is and being super intolerant about assumptions. That's one of the mistakes that I've made many times in the past. And I think, you know, in recent years I've done a better job. Of getting out of that space, but wishful thinking doesn't win deals. And human beings, we're all tempted, right? We want to hope for the best, right? We hope it works out, but wishful thinking doesn't win deals. And so, you know, how do you beat the competition? You need to communicate better with the client, and you need to understand what they need better than they do. After that, you know, that's upstream of everything else. If you know that, and you're like, I know exactly what they want, everything's super clear. The outcomes have been well defined. This is what they want. If you know that, then it's just, well, how, you know, how well do you run operations, right? Do you have capital, right? Can you deploy, right? Can you maintain? Can you train? What's your client success team like? Can you scale the product and its usage? You know, those other variables come in, but unless you know exactly what they want and how you're delivering the solution to get rid of the pains, you're gonna miss the mark and you gotta make them tell you. And I think a lot of people, and I've been in this situation too, they don't want the client to tell them because they know in the back of their mind, I think we're gonna fall short. So what I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna ask the client to explicitly tell me where my gaps are. I'm gonna hope they don't notice. And that rarely works out very well.

Yeah. I think salespeople, I call it the confidence paradox where once a sales rep becomes confident, They forget that there's certain times where they shouldn't be very confident.

Right.

And I think you nailed it in that sometimes they understand their requirements and they articulate them very well, but a lot of times they don't. They have a point problem that turns into, you know, this cascading of problems that you can fix.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think one of the, the interesting things— this has been a realization in the B2B SaaS space that me and my teams have had. And it's that you really wanna be effective at sales, you need to sell internally and externally. So for instance, right, if let's say you wanna understand the client's problem better, we both agreed that this is very important. We need to communicate well with them. It's like, well, what role do the people who built the product play in that? Right? So we call those, you know, our product team, right? That's a discipline that's really matured and become, you know, at the forefront in the SaaS space for the last, you know, 10 years, especially 20, maybe depending on how you look at it. And so if you're, if you're a salesperson, you say, well, I gotta bring in product, you know, and I've gotta, I've gotta let product talk to the client because, you know, this, you know, you sell the dream and they have to implement the nightmare, right? And so one way that you, one way that you can understand what the client needs better is by including the right people at the right time. And that's not just stakeholders on their end. That's stakeholders on our end. So if you're doing an enterprise, you know, B2B SaaS sale, you've been working on this thing for 6, 7, 8, 9, 12 months sometimes. You have to be really savvy at creating buy-in from a lot of people. And that includes your own stakeholders at your company. They need to understand why it's important for them to not undermine your sale by not speaking about, you know, the offering in a certain way. but also why it's important for them to come in and supplement the effort that you've done over the last several months so that they have a great understanding of the deliverables in the first, you know, 3 to 6 months after implementation with the client. And if you manage that the right way, you can take an internal asset like your product team who knows legitimately your product inside and out better than anyone. They built it, right? And you can turn them into sort of a sales weapon Where the client's super impressed by these experts who have come in and you are also using them as a tool to get crystal clarity on what the deliverables are and what the pain is, right? And then what you can do is you can turn that into a roadmap and you can come back to the client and said, well, you've told us it's A, B, C, and D. That's what you want. You've met with our head of product. You've met with our experts, right? And we're here to deliver that. And then when you start to deliver it and you show that you're knocking down those delivery points, right? Whether that's implementation, number of users getting onboarded, et cetera, right? They start to feel really excited and confident in you. And really that's a careful orchestration of the salesperson on both external stakeholders and internal stakeholders. And there's often frictions in an organization wherever handshakes happen, right? And one of the things as a sales leader that I mention a lot to my salespeople is I say, listen, it's not personal, it's a function of the roles. Right? So don't personalize it. And then 2, use it to your advantage. Don't think, well, I just sold to the client and now I'm done. Everyone else has gotta come in and do their part. No, you never stop selling. You're selling to the client, you're selling to your product people, you're selling to the engineers. Oh, and once they're all bought in, guess who you gotta sell to next? Client success, because they gotta manage it. And so there's the selling never stops. And if you really wanna be great, especially in the B2B SaaS space, You've got to sell internally very well. Yeah.

And is this something that your competition doesn't do well or is this just put you on par? What gets you above the finish line?

I think if you, well, that's a great question. I think a lot of it has to do with the internal culture at the company. Yeah. And so I take that very seriously being in leadership position. You know, everyone's responsible for the culture at the company. But when you're in a leadership position, the onus is definitely on you and the other members of the leadership team to make sure that there's a standard that's set. And to your question, if that's done well, then the internal collaboration typically improves to such a degree that it gives you a competitive advantage. And so you have to do a bit of a WIFM, what's in it for me, with the people at your company because, you know, I'm always selling, right? I'm selling to the, to my employees. On trying to get buy-in on the way we're doing things or why we do things. And one of the things I tell them is I say, look, your great collaboration, right? And your personal culture that creates wonderful relationships with the product team or the dev team or the client success team. That is another way to beat your competition into the ground. You want to beat them, don't you? And they're like, oh yeah. And if you've got salespeople who are actually salespeople, They'll respond to that because they want to win.

Yeah.

Right. And so you have to frame these cultural and interpersonal interactions internal to your company as a way to build competitive advantage to your salespeople. And it's not just lip service, right? I believe that. And so I wouldn't say it's table stakes because I don't know that ubiquitously it's done very well. It's a tremendous challenge.

It's hard.

But if you do it well, I do think it puts you ahead of the pack.

It does because it kind of bonds the 2 companies together.

Right.

And it surfaces so much more. And, you know, salespeople, we can learn a lot, but we, we're never gonna be that deep. And usually when we go that, try and go that deep, we, we sink, right? We kind of get in over our head. Right. And what do you look for in a salesperson when you're hiring?

Well, they need to have a really good attitude and have a commitment to having a great attitude. I don't, one of the things that I look for in their personal culture is just, is this a person who's gonna create toxicity in the environment that we have here at the organization?

Right?

Um, there's a lot of adjectives and that, you know, that may change based on the company. Some companies maybe favor a little bit more hypercompetitive. Some of them are a little bit more collaborative. I'm not saying it's a one-size-fits-all, but in general, um, despite being a Type A competitive person who wants to hunt, right? And carry quota. How are you going to treat people? Are, are, are you going to treat all of the, you know, people at those handshake points, right? So for the B2B SaaS example, you know, the product and the dev team and the client success team, right? Are you going to treat them like they're lackeys who don't understand the incredible skill and agony that you've been through as a salesperson to bring them this deal, right? It's like—

You've never seen that. Come on, you're exaggerating.

If you're that way, then you may be darn good, you may be damn good. But if you're making my job and everyone else's job harder, then you're causing a slowdown in delivery and especially at the closing phase of a big B2B SaaS deal because in the closing phase, it's like I need so much help. I need finance, I need legal, right? I need product. I need product to say, yeah, we, that roadmap will work, we'll do it, right? I need client success to start interacting and prepping. I mean, it's, I need a lot of people to get involved just internal to our company, not to mention all the other stakeholders. So If your, if your personal culture is grinding the organizational mechanism to a halt, that is a deal breaker. We can't have you, even if you're great. And then right after that, I look for humility and coachability, right? They kind of go hand in hand. If you're, if you can't humble yourself to learn something, it's probably not gonna work out because we need people who are dynamic. And who are willing to learn and want to learn, right? So like the best salespeople that I've ever worked with, typically without being prompted, they always go, hey, give me some feedback. They don't hide and go, well, I hope I did great. They will come to you and insist. And if you, if you, if you're kind of being a lazy leader and you go, ah, no, everything was great, right? Right. That's never the case. There's always something, right? But if you do that and you say, oh, well, you know, everything's great, they'll go, uh-uh. I want to know, right? And you can get that in the interview process. You can tease that out with a series of questions or some role plays and see if they want to be coached and if they're insistent on getting feedback. And if they are, that's a good sign.

It is, but it's hard to find, isn't it?

It's incredibly difficult to find. Well, I blame the information economy for that a little bit and Not, not that it's a bad thing. It's just a double-edged sword. You know, there's so much information out there that everyone can become an expert. And objectively, people do have more access to info than they used to. And so I think conceptually, we're more well-informed than maybe we were in the past. But that doesn't always translate to practice. So the concepts are good, and I'm glad that people have them. You need them. It's a framework. But the house doesn't stand just on that. You've got to, you've got to flesh out the walls and build it out. And that comes from doing the sales day in and day out, getting burned, losing, making mistakes, and being resilient enough and coachable enough to persist through those and come out the other side in a, you know, a better framework than you had before.

And why do you think most reps aren't Or don't crave feedback, that they kind of assume that they're great?

Well, I mean, to rob from what you said, I think there's a confidence paradox there. It's challenging because you got to really believe in yourself in this profession. This profession can be terrifying.

Sure can.

I mean, it is there. I've seen so many people come in it and then go, Right back out. They don't want to carry quota. They don't want the pressure. They don't want the uncertainty. And just you get told no all the time. And people don't like that. You know, they want to hear yes and they want affirmation and you just get told no a whole lot. And so I think that to overcome that reality, you find that there's a lot of people Um, who have a very high level of confidence and they're willing to push themselves through things even if they don't have it all figured out. And I think that's a good starting point.

Yeah.

To get you brave enough to walk into this profession, but it's not where you end. And I think that's one of the reasons why, to answer your question, people start there, they're very confident and they just think, well, my confidence and my sort of like blind bravado will push me through the sale. But it's like, that's not a replacement for thinking. That's just enough to get you into the arena.

Right. That's to make you look like you're not sweating to death, right? That's quite different. And, but that's right because once you leave the meeting or the sales call and you're in the parking lot with somebody, you should be like, okay, how do you think it went? You know, grade it, dissect it. How was the opening? Do you think we lost them?

Yeah. Well, and I, you know, for sales leaders, I put the ball in their court on this one. I mean, every individual has a level of responsibility, but as a sales leader, you should create a culture where people are comfortable to do that, knowing, knowing that that's already the dynamic that's typically involved in this profession. So you should be very conscious of that. And you should create a culture that's very explicitly open and okay with that type of dialogue. If you punish people for showing a little vulnerability and saying, you know what, boss, like, I just didn't feel good about that, or I don't feel confident about this presentation coming up, I need help. If they feel like they have to fake it till they make it all the time, that's your problem as a leader. You created that environment and you need to take extreme ownership of it, or else your salespeople are going to lie to you all the time. They're going to lie in the data they put in the CRM. They're going to lie to you in the QBR. Okay, they're going to lie to you about how they feel before they go into an important client. interaction or sales call, right? And if they're lying to you, you say, well, it's their fault, right? It's like, start with the assumption that everything's your fault as a sales leader and then work from there.

Yeah, it's like a football coach, right? That, you know, you got this clay to grow with and build and, you know, did a football player ever have a hard time taking feedback? Sometimes, but we all think we're right. Until we watch the tape, right?

The tape doesn't lie.

Right, you can't argue with the tape.

No.

What one thing do you wish you learned earlier in your career that you now value highly?

Well, that's a great question. Okay. One thing that I really value highly that I wish I had known early on is it's okay. It's okay to get turned down and to actually trigger that action. What I mean by that is don't be afraid to walk away from a deal. And the reason I say that is because And this comes with experience. We talked about this, right? Conceptually, you're like, wow, hey, I could win this thing. It's like, well, yeah, you know, you could play in the World Series, kid. But, you know, it's like, is it really going to happen? Right? Taking a very sobering assessment of what you've got in your pipeline and being honest with yourself and just saying, look, I just don't feel good about this one. And here's why. And you should be able to talk to your boss about that or your peers and etc. and get some feedback, right? You know, you shouldn't just be finger in the air guessing. But I wish I had known how okay it was to do that because actually that's one of the secrets to actually winning some deals because you don't realize how, how much time you waste on things that aren't going to convert. And I'm a— this is a shameless plug, but I'm in a program at University of Houston, which is a master's in sales leadership program. It's a wonderful program, specialized master's degree. Not a lot of universities have them. So shout out to University of Houston for doing this. But the, one of my professors, Carl Herman, who you should interview, he's fantastic. He says the most valuable resource a salesperson has is their time. And so I wish I had known it's okay to walk away from certain deals so that I could get more time back to win the deals that actually have a chance of winning.

That's it. And we think we're giving up, but no, it's just focus. It's just focus.

It's a tough lesson, but I wish I had known that earlier.

Hey, Paul, really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

They can follow me on LinkedIn. It's Paul Hajek, H-A-J-E-K. And that's really where I am. I stick there. It's a B2B space. It's a professional space for the most part. And so I like that. And yeah, if you reach out to me there, I will respond.

One thing I learned a long time ago is if you want to do a big deal, A huge deal, a deal that takes a lot of finesse. Selling inside at the company is critical. I've tried it as a lone wolf. It's really hard, near impossible. But if you try it as what I call we're all in this together strategy, where you really kind of marry the 2 companies together, Yeah, I'm talking about big deals, huge deals. That's the way to do it. And the other side effect of what Paul was talking about, selling inside, is that if you ever want to get into leadership, that is the key skill. Instead of just brown-nosing your way into leadership, doing it from what your reps are going to want, because that's what they want leadership to do, is help them sell internally to get the things that they need to go after and close those big deals. It's a great skill. The other thing I got out of this is I'm finding that confidence has this valley between— well, maybe it's more of a sinkhole because in sales We spend a few years trying to build up our confidence about what we sell, how we sell, how we present, how we converse, how we get the deals done. And then we kind of hit a plateau, and if we— and we miss the next level of confidence. I think the next level of confidence is the ability to hear feedback, ask for Want feedback and then take feedback. We get confident enough to sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot. It turns into cockiness or it turns into blind spots. But if you can be confident enough to ask others for feedback, how did that call go? Did, did I miss something? Did I talk too much? Did I get what they were asking? Those are great questions to ask after a sales call. Now, we too often are just trying to make sure that that spot is blind instead of trying to correct it for the next time. And we look at that. Isn't that confidence? I think that's the best type of confidence. If you can build up that type of confidence, take the confidence that you have about your skill and build it into what else do I need to work on? How else can I get this better instead of just rationalizing why you're good enough. Because is that confidence or is that insecurity? If you're focused on just covering up or reassuring yourself, I don't think that's security. I think that's insecurity. That's not confidence. Let me know what you think. I'm going to be doing a whole series of things that I learned last year and sharing them early next month. Look out for them. So the show will be— I'll try and keep the interviews consistent, once a week, maybe me and Dustin doing something once a week, but I'll be popping in with kind of more short-form monologues on what I learned and try and give you the distinctions. Like this confidence thing is one of the big ones, and I thought I'd just share it today since we talked in the interview about it, that this distinction of, you know, if you can build that confidence, keep going, keep going so that you can take feedback. Because what you hear in these interviews, the very best, they ask for it. They're okay. They know they're not perfect. No one is. And if you think there's perfect in sales or perfect with any human interaction or any performance profession, Uh, you're kidding yourself. You're insecure. You're trying to rationalize confidence instead of build it, where you become more confident asking for feedback than what makes you initially feel a little insecure. And it's okay to feel that, but push through it and build the confidence to ask. Reflect, write down, contrast. That's how you get better. You got to be aware first and then take action. But if you're unaware or you don't want to become aware, you're blind and maybe insecure. It's up to you.

You decide.

We all, we all skin the cat our own way. Thanks for listening.

All right.

Also, if you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. Check out the courses at b2brevenue.com. There's 2 videos there. Watch both of them before you sign up. One is the overview of how the courses work mechanically— website, the sessions, all of that, office hours, one-on-ones. And then the second one is how to pick which course is right for you if it's not obvious. The summary is, if you need to prospect cold outbound, it's Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. If you're working on a complex sale, many stakeholders, large dollar amount, likelihood to go no decision versus closure, Closing the Complex Sale is the course for you. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.