THE 3 THINGS THAT MAKE THE BEST B2B ENTERPRISE SALES REPS

This one's a little interesting. It starts off, we talk about personality types, what we naturally like to do, and then we evolve into what makes great salespeople. And the P word comes up a lot— process. Now, a lot of people misinterpret this or get a little too extreme with it because In sales, like in anything, we're playing a game. And I use the word game to kind of confine what we're doing into something that's understandable. I'm not playing— not the use of the game as play, like in child play, but more as how do you come up with a metaphor for what we're doing. And the word game comes up quite a bit because everybody knows what a game is. There's typically some structure, some objectives, some players, some rules, some process to winning the game. And a lot of people take the word process and they try and turn it into what's in the CRM or what their company says is the process or some silly checklist of things that a deal has to have. And that's the process what we want it to be. You know that. You hear it all the time. Discovery call, presentation, demo, proof of concept, proposal, negotiate, close. Well, guess what? No one buys that way. Or at least not many people. That's what we would like it to be. And that's what it is when someone comes to us maybe in the beauty contest. Where you're one of the contestants and there's the talent, there's the bathing suit part, which I try to avoid, and at the end somebody has a little chart and they check the boxes and they put the votes together and the committee goes away and comes back. That's not most of us. Most of us, We have somebody who likes our product and wants to use it, has a personal win associated with it, and needs the company to buy it for them. And how do we get that done? Because yes, it does a lot for the company, but the company isn't initiating this. Somebody internally is. Let's get into this interview. This is a great sales rep. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'll sum it up at the end. And if you want to become great at sales, go to b2brevenue.com. Check out the courses. Sign up today. Also at the end, I'll give you a little hint about what sales coaching is and isn't.

Here we go.

Hey, Chris. Thanks for joining us today. Where are you getting started? Give us a little background on yourself.

Absolutely. Yeah. So right now I am the global vice president of strategic sales and enterprise sales for Five9. I've been at Five9 for 9 years and I've run the gamut. I started out in enterprise sales as an individual contributor, top performer for 4 years, then pivoted to leadership and have done a lot of cool things. I've built new territories, I've done good market regions and built new regions in different countries such as Canada as well as Europe. And then yeah, expanded and built teams over in for global, for strategic sales. You know, it's a very different movement. You know, a lot of cross-functional teams. But before Five9, I was at AT&T for 3 years, done leadership development training there. And before that, I worked for a private jet maintenance service company selling their services. So I'm all over the board.

Yeah.

And why sales for you?

You know, I feel like sales for me, and I think it's the same thing for a lot of people. You, I don't know too many people that are good in high school and in college and they're like, I want a sales degree or I want to go do a sales career. But what happens is you inherently were doing a lot of those things and it falls in your lap. And I think it's It takes a little bit of time, but you have that awakening moment where you realize this is a very rare and valuable skillset that can be applied everywhere. Because I started wanting to be in marketing because I thought I was going to be in Mad Men one day and, you know, come up with these great ads. But I realized even as a kid, I mean, starting out, I worked at McDonald's and then I went to an electronics company and I was working on commission selling just consumer electronics and then internships were cold calling and it fell into my lap and I just excelled at it really quickly and it turned into what I'm in today. So I absolutely love it.

And what about you or your mindset or skillset allowed you to accelerate at it? Did it feel natural, an extension of your personality, or?

That's a great question. Number one, it felt natural. It is my personality. I think this is a differentiator for me too, is my personality has molded into my style of selling. So everything is very, very natural. And a lot of times in sales and what I see when I'm building up new teams or when I'm mentoring quite a few younger individuals, but I see it, they try to be someone else. And for me, it just, it comes really natural. So everything that I do is, you need to understand there's not one type of way to sell. The best way to sell is to sell with what's natural to you, and then you can start layering on some of these strategies and techniques and building processes around it. But yeah, it, it, the best way to put it is it comes natural to me, and I found a way to build processes around what works for me to make me more successful.

And when you meet somebody who's not natural at it, do you think it's something that you're born with, or do you think it's something that just is aligned with your goals and you just naturally develop it to achieve the things that you want to achieve? Or do you—

Right.

Were you always gregarious and social as a kid and you just liked working with other people and Right.

So me personally, I was always very social too. So that's, that came through. But to answer your first question, which is when I come across someone who is pursuing a sales career or coming into sales for the first time, or even that has been in sales for a while and maybe has just not really done well, and I can tell that just 'cause it's not coming natural to them. I think it's a loaded question because there's 2 ways to look at it. Number one, I think that you need to evaluate some very important core things. The first thing that you need to evaluate is how does this person feel from a comfortability standpoint when communicating to other individuals?

Yeah.

If you aren't just very nat— if you feel very unnatural to talk to strangers knowing that the reason that you're talking to them is to sell something and that's uncomfortable to you, Well, is it uncomfortable because you are nervous that you don't have a process to sell, or are you uncomfortable because you don't know this person? If it's you don't know them, then, you know, sometimes it's good to know that upfront because this may not be the right career for you. Or figuring out within sales where, where could you better be suited? For instance, net new selling and going after a customer, net new acquisition that's not a customer before. That's really difficult for that type of person. But if they do a great job and they're organized, they're responsive, they're diligent, and they can build a trusting relationship with someone that they know and they're comfortable with, well, something like account management would be a great fit for them. But it's understanding your interpersonal communication comfortabilities. And if you're not comfortable with strangers or other people, then it may not be the right career path.

And were you always comfortable talking to strangers?

So yeah, I was always comfortable talking to strangers, but it would be unfair and not accurate for me to say that I was always comfortable in every situation, right? So as I came up through the ranks and I hit different business segments, small businesses, B2C, then go to B2B, mid-market enterprise and strategic, you know, It's different. You start talking to office administrators or individual consumer buyers at one conversation, and then you start talking to decision-making committees, and then you start talking to executives, and then you start talking to boards. And those bring on different levels of anxiety. And I will tell you, getting to the high-end executives and the boards were very uncomfortable early on until you surround yourself with the right people. who have been there before and you're open to learn how to handle these situations to make it comfortable. But sales is pretty much just being comfortable being uncomfortable all the time. That's what it is.

True. Yeah. And I've kind of noticed that a lot of salespeople have like the adventure gene, meaning that they like being uncomfortable. They like scary movies, roller coasters, traveling. Being thrown into new and unusual situations. Does that ring true for you?

Well, that rings true. So the thing about sales is if you are, if you have, a lot of people say you have that sales gene. I think what they're referring to is do you have that very outspoken, big personality? So if you have that really outspoken, big personality, I like to think that I'm one of these people. What inspires you and motivates you is really about sales is really the art of the possible. That's what brings on what I think you're referring to with the adventure side of things, because you need to self-motivate. And you, and the way that you self-motivate is you create a journey for yourself. And it could be, and it's typically a mixture of career titles and money. And, you know, then it's not always the same. But what happens is you're able to go on that adventure because you know that in order to get to where you want to go, you need to go into these adventure-like jobs. I mean, I travel, I think I travel 3 to 4 days a week. I'm in different countries. I'm talking to different people. It's, but it's all because of the end goal. And if you, sales is really unique because You can start out in direct selling and you can end up being the CEO of a Fortune 10 company someday. So really it is the art of the possible and the world's your oyster when you go into sales. It's up to you to determine how far you want to take it.

And when you got into enterprise sales, how did you learn all that complexity? Because I'm assuming a TNT was failing. Trial and error.

Yeah. So, but you gotta, in order to learn about all that complexity, you know, the best way to do things is to experience them.

Yeah.

A lot of people I talk to, a lot of the younger generations that are trying to enter the workforce and build sales careers, they're always asking me like, what books can you read? Books are a great foundation to help you understand, but they will never prepare you for a situation. You'll never mentally be ready to step into that meeting. So I failed a lot, but failing is defined very differently. When I talk about failing, I think of it as a positive, right? It doesn't mean that I did bad because honestly, my first venture into enterprise, I mean, even talking about back to, I think, what was it now? 12 years ago? Nope, 14 years ago. With my AT&T career, my failures still resulted in me being, you know, number 30 out of 900 salespeople in the entire company. But when I say I failed, I meant I would go into meetings and realize I was unprepared in these areas. I didn't have talk tracks ready here. I didn't do my due diligence and have pricing prepared to the way that they wanted. So I would go in and I would experience a lot of frustrating meetings where the customer or the prospect was frustrated with my ability to anticipate what they wanted to get at. Yeah. So you start realizing that. And the other way that I did it was I found really great mentors. There's a lot of great people out there that want to help others because just natively inside of them, find those people. Because they just wanna help you. The people that don't wanna help you, they're in it for themselves and they probably have a lot to learn as well.

Yeah. Well, you know, I identify with the book questions. I hear that a lot and I almost rarely answer it because that's the knowledge mindset, meaning that once you learn everything about sales, you'll be a great salesperson. It's like, okay, you can learn everything about swimming and be a great swimmer without getting in the pool. You're gonna drown, right?

Yes.

But then you brought up a great word, preparation, because in sales we, we can't really practice that well. You can role play a little bit, but preparation is the second best thing to execution, right?

Yeah.

How do you execute unless you're prepared?

Yeah. And how did you kind of adapt from that? You kind of got, you know, your head smacked a couple times on some deals you weren't prepared for. How did you work that into your workflow, into your process?

You know, I think that that portion of it, a lot of it really started having me go back and thinking about what I missed and their feedback, but that's like spot fixing. And I was always asking for feedback at the end of the meetings. But the thing that really made a big difference when I came to Five9, my boss and mentor, Nick Dellis, he is now, he's the senior vice president of strategic and global and across the gamut. What he did was he helped me understand turning the preparation and the feedback that I get and identifying what is the consistent feedback that I'm getting and how do I build it into a process to make sure that those consistent things I am always prepared for. I have the same questions on every single discovery paper that I have to make sure These are the areas that have tripped me up in the past, or these are the key areas where really it's what everyone cares about understanding when you walk into that meeting. Make sure that you ask these questions early before you get to the meeting so that you can prepare and have those deliverables ready to be presented at that meeting. So it really came from learning, but having someone teach me how to build it into my own process. And that process actually turned into the processes that I built to scale go-to-market teams and build new teams. So I would say figure out processes for yourself. That's really important.

Yeah, because I think we're, we're playing a game that isn't really well defined. It's different a little bit in each game. There's all kinds of players, but there are patterns. And if you can identify those patterns and prepare for them, And too many people just look at the number of years they've been selling and say, I know this. Big mistake. And I got to imagine you guys, I think the scariest thing is if you go ahead, finish.

Well, all I was going to say is I think the scariest thing is I'm very big on trying to really do, be very self-aware, very focused on If I want to get to this next stage or achieve this next goal, I need to figure out what I've done in the past and who I am. It gets really scary when you ask yourself those deep questions. And if you truly understand what you need to do next, what deal you need to win next, and you're like, how? Oh, I can do that. Any salesperson's confident. Oh, I can do that. I hear that all the time. Oh, I can handle this. I can make those connections. The scariest thing is if you actually take the time to ask yourself privately in silence at 6:00 AM in the morning before you work, before your phone starts ringing, what is my process? What, how do I do this? You realize if you've never done that before, just how blind you've been flying. So I focus every day, and if I miss it one day, at least Every other day to reflect on what did I do and how did I do it?

Yeah, that's important. That's the first question I used to ask when I went into a new client. I'd ask them to draw out their process. It never got past the first step. Never. Hundreds of companies, you know, it was always like, make a cold call, you have this meeting and then there's like 50 branches that it goes off in and it's like, ah, come on, you've been selling this for 10 years. There's a consistency, but they can't. It's all gut feel and reaction. Sounds like you're a proactive guy.

The only way that you could have a good gut is if you do the good discovery.

Well, yeah, it's this, you're playing a game and it's like, right. And I think that's where the adventure gene gets us in trouble sometimes is that we want the completely new game because it's fun. It's exciting.

I agree with you.

Unless we lose, then it's not exciting. Now, when you went into leadership, did that help your sales game as well? Because now all of a sudden you're in a different vantage point of looking at the deals and the people and the process.

Yeah, going into leadership was was interesting and a challenge. I think the hardest thing about going into leadership specifically in sales is understanding how do I get my sales process across, but in a way that others can adapt to it and you can adapt your process to them.

Having—

going into leadership is was hard from the standpoint of watching other people do things their way that isn't my way and taking the time to understand, but will that still get them to step 2? If I go about doing step 1 in this way and the person I'm managing or leading is going through step 1 a certain way to get to step 2, if they're both going to get you to step 2, with the same level of quality, and they're following a macro process to kind of step back from the micro element. And I think that that was a big hurdle for me, um, because what happened is I just tried to mentor lead everybody and say, watch me do this and I'll do it with you. And then you realize you can't scale that way. And you're like, wait a minute, I'm doing the work of 20 people. So that was interesting.

And what did you see either them doing wrong or that wasn't your way? Because some people are like top-down, some people are bottom-up, some people focus on the relationship, some people focus solely on the champion. Some people do the analytics of the deal, other people do the vision of the future. There's a lot of ways to skin the cat.

So the thing that I, the thing that I do that I noted right out the gate that I noticed a lot of others didn't do, which is part of identifying who's uncomfortable in doing what they're doing, was everything that I do has to have a story around it. And you're taking somebody on a journey with you so that they understand, well, let's go backwards to understand why you came to talk to me. And then you gotta skyrocket forward to figure out where you want to get to. And then I, you need to weave all of that together so that they understand you're not just spot selling products or solutions. You're taking them on a journey and you're telling that story. So what I noticed early on was a lot of salespeople wanted to rely on the same 5 to 10 PowerPoint slides and talk to the slides and hope that the company messaging sold the product for them and that they are there just to read what it is and not put the story together. Because in order to put a story together, it's uncomfortable because you need to go and break down barriers and talk to people that are hard to get to, don't want to talk to you, don't want to share everything with you, and you have to get across to them and speak to them knowing that they don't want to talk to you until figuring out eventually you may actually save their job. You may change their career. So understanding that next step I did was understanding how does this project or product affect their life personally and professionally? Those are the 2 areas I saw were the biggest misses when I took over, is people didn't incorporate that into their process because it's a lot of work. It takes a lot longer to figure that out.

And it requires you to learn how to talk about other people instead of yourself.

Right.

We get really good about talking about us, the product, what you get out of it, how it beats the competition.

Right.

But you're not going to do enterprise deals with that.

No, no, no.

You need to get the personal wins, what they get out of this, how this is driving their career, making their life better.

Right.

And it's not going to be about the number of mega flips per second. Nope. No, it's not.

There's no such thing as mega flips. So—

I don't know what a mega flip is, but I'm sure you can do a lot of them in a second. But I mean, did someone teach you this? Was it an epiphany that you came about yourself or you observe it on someone else? You get your butt handed to you on a deal that you, someone else did it to you?

I think that it, I think that's a mixture of things, right? So early on, I kind of, we joked around, you and me joked around about the book thing, right? But a lot of the books I did read a lot of books early on, I didn't spend a lot of time on sales strategy books. I spent a lot of time on psychology books and understanding how the human brain works and how it likes to interact. So those books helped me to understand the rationale of how people think. But then I'd mentioned earlier that I always was seeking mentors. I am a forever student and, you know, I, everything that I do, I am always getting feedback from others. I'm like, Let's run through this. I do something with my team and all the teams I've run. It's, I call it think tank culture, but essentially it's building a strategy with one another or running, being able to talk things out all the way through and getting other people's feedback from it. So that was the second thing that I did. So books mixed with that collaboration, and then finally just going and doing it and having the experience in front of a customer. And you start learning like, why did I get shut down in this meeting versus why did I excel in this meeting? And if you're open enough to really dig deep and look at the negatives instead of just thinking about the overall, we did great, you will start seeing the comparisons of what works and what doesn't. So I think I put those 3 things together.

Yeah, I love the psychology thing because I mean, evolutionary psychology is much more important than any sales technique because it's— and I keep using this mammal-to-mammal thing in that we're mammals having a human experience instead of humans having a business experience.

Right.

Because those executives, those board members, they're gonna go route of least resistance every time. They're fear-based and we have to work with that.

Right. And one thing to think about is like, you think about the human brain. What were human— what is the human brain really made to do? Survive. It's made to give you conscious decisions on how to stay alive. Are you going to eat? Are you breathing? Are you in pain? Do you need sleep? What do you need to do to get these things? Business, business. The cavemen were not putting up board meetings together. They were figuring out how to eat.

Yeah.

So that transition, if you think about it, all those sales trainings that a lot of people say there's only one process, follow these processes, that'll work for one portion of the population, but you never will win a decision by committee by only doing that. You go get a psychologist or a therapist and give that and say, hey, listen, you just need to go get these people to buy this. I would take, I would take a therapist versus someone that's been in sales for only 2 years out of college. I would say the therapist would do better because they're just selling from understanding how is, what are their facial expressions? What's their body movement? How does the brain work? How do people want to do things? So. I'm in agreement with you. The psychology, it's a huge focus.

It's a huge focus. And did some of your side activities help you with that? I noticed that you did some stuff with Ronald McDonald House and soccer coaching.

Yeah. So a lot of that, a lot of that really helped from the standpoint of being in, being in situations that you're not paid to be in, right? So you're, so you start realizing that you're in a situation for a different reason.

Salespeople don't do that.

No.

So a lot of that really helped me because it helped me understand that, okay, why am I being a soccer coach? I'm super competitive. I played soccer. I want to win, but it's a, it's kind of a different thing. But at the end of the day, I started learning how to motivate people without being able to pay them. Right. You know, going and doing things like Ronald McDonald House, Special Olympics coaching, that for me allowed me to meet a lot of different types of people, different walks of life. Appreciate, not only appreciate what I have, but understand how to talk to people that are not exactly like me. And when we're in sales and you're in like a sales career that's B2B, you talk to a lot of similar people. But understanding that there's different types of people give you a perspective that allow you to take different angles in sales. Yeah. And evolve, be it your business-to-business selling and make you really strong at business-to-consumer selling. So yeah, I think it helped.

And I'm sure you've been exposed to a lot of salespeople, competitors, coworkers. What do you think differentiates the very best? You know, the A+, you know, you've been at the awards dinner, that person who gets called up there from the rest.

2 things, desire and thoughtfulness. If you're motivated enough, you can achieve anything. But in sales, if you're not thoughtful about what you're doing and why, You will be a face value surface level person and you will have a glass ceiling. Yeah, that's my belief.

And, and some of those things can be counter, they can get in the way of each other because the hyper-motive, the person who walks through walls is rarely the top salesperson, but the person who walks through walls and is thoughtful, The Ivy League street fighter, right? The, the person with both the motivation and the personality and psychology and empathy is pretty unstoppable.

Right. I, I agree.

And when you're interviewing salespeople, do you have particular questions or approaches to ferret that out? Yeah.

So when I interview salespeople, I have ideas of what I'm looking for, but I don't have key questions because a lot of things that I do is really reading them, seeing how they thought about an answer. So my questions are, they're conversational, like what you're doing with me right now, right? This is a conversation. Because what I really look for is how does somebody organize their thoughts and answer a question that they were prepared for versus answer a question that they were unprepared for? The way that you answer a prepared question gives you a baseline. The way that you answer an unprepared question will show you how you deal with adversity in a sales job. So when I'm interviewing, I want to understand, do you have a process in general? What led you to that success? And then why are you interviewing with me? I want to know what this job will lead you to. And if you tell me that you want to be in this job for the rest of your life, that's hard to believe. You have no career ambitions. So, I mean, understanding what their motivations are, understanding their process, understanding How they respond in uncomfortable situations, if they're flustered, gives me good insight and a good gut to how this person is going to handle adversity, but also be willing to listen, adapt, and learn new things.

And what's your least favorite type of salesperson? I'm sure you've run into people that are not at the top in a kind of a Take up a lot of your time. A lot of the team's time.

My least favorite salespeople, I'd say it's broken down into different categories. Number one, the excuse maker. Someone that has an excuse for everything and has a reason why they couldn't do their job the way that they were supposed to do it, right? They didn't invest the time and effort into doing the discovery. They didn't build the story, couldn't take their discovery and put it into a folder so the team knows what's going on. You know, tells, reminds me how much time, how much they have on their plate in order not to get something done, right? So that's number one. Number 2, the person that only cares about money. They don't care about the quality of what they're doing or why they're doing it or how it affects the team or myself. It only, all they care about is, I just want to know how I'm getting paid. And then the third thing, there's only 3. The third thing.

The 17th thing. No, no, no.

There's only 3 of them. Sometimes they're mixed together, but they're also separate, are the people that only want to talk about how to, their career trajectory and what's next for them. That is very frustrating because that conversation only really needs to happen once. And if you're doing all the right things, a great leader will Start positioning you to learn new things and get you there. But if everyone has a timeline, well, I, you know, I've already been in this role for 12 months. I've already been in this role for 2 years. I have a friend in another company that got promoted after 1 year, so I want to know what my plan is now. That type of person is someone that is uninspiring to me and probably uninspired and will just go title hopping and they don't even know what they really want. So that's my 3.

Cool. Those are good.

Yeah.

Chris, I really enjoyed this. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

Absolutely. I have a LinkedIn. I'm sure that you'll post it on the page. Once again, my name's Chris Silver. I work for Five9. I think it's Christopher B. Silver is at the end of linkedin.com/christopherbsilver. I have Twitter accounts. I'll get all that over so I can post it, but I'm happy to connect with anyone that can ever look for any advice, assistance. And then Brian, as always, I love watching you, so I will be in your audience as well as being someone that you'd be speaking to and being grateful enough to bring me onto your podcast. So thank you so much.

How many of those things at the end do you fall into? Do you focus solely on money? I made that mistake a couple times. It really limits your growth. It does hyperfocus you, but people smell it a mile away. They sense it. It becomes selfish. It becomes annoying. Also, the moving up in the org, I get that too. And that was never Really my issue, but I saw it in a lot of people. And I think today a lot of people focus on that. And if that's really what you want, go for it, but you have to earn it. But you also have to speak up because let's say a manager has 10 reps and 2 of them want to become leaders and one of them isn't talking about it and one is constantly talking about it. The one who talks about it is probably going to get it. You know, that squeaky oil thing. Oil and grease and wheel. Squeaky wheel. That's what I'm saying. Also, I did want to share with you kind of the misinterpretation of what I think a lot of people either want out of a sales coach versus sales training. Because most of the stuff I hear about from sales, the need for sales coaching is really Sales therapy where somebody wants, how do I deal with a jerk of a manager? How do I deal with a crummy comp plan? How do I stay motivated? How do I push back on all the admin stuff? I mean, do you really either not know or don't want to face it or you just want to vent? I think it's a lot of venting, a lot of pressure release. I need— no one wants to listen to it at home. I need somebody to listen to it. But that doesn't get you to become a better salesperson. That becomes, you know, more comfortable, less stressed. And a therapist might be a better fit for that, or a dog, or a friend, because the eureka moment— there won't be a eureka moment. You're pretty much— what if someone asked you about that, what would you say? Show them what they want to see. Basically, go, go for a walk. What does solve the problems instead of just make you feel better about the problems is revenue. Revenue solves all problems in sales. You want your manager off your back? Become the top rep. You want to not have to do any CRM work, become the top rep. I've seen a lot of reps just ignore the CRM completely because they were the top rep. The company needed them more than they needed the company. When you're producing enormous amounts of revenue, you're like— it's like a license to kill. You may not have felt it yet. But believe me, it happens. They're not going to tell you this. This is kind of like an open secret, but no one says it. It's like faking the crap in the CRM. Nobody admits it, but everybody knows it. Everybody knows that the 300% of the pipeline is total horseshit, but nobody says it. Whoops, I just said it. Well, that's why we call it The Brutal Truth, because I cut through the crap and tell you the brutal truth. Everyone else gives you the politically correct virtue signaling snowflake approach with your little cadence of stupid shit you do all day. Look at me. Well, I don't do that. Why? Because it's bullshit. It's lies. It's phoniness. It sends you in the wrong direction. I tell you the brutal truth, the truth you want to hear, but you don't know you want to hear it. Everyone else tells you the politically correct company line. Isn't that sweet? If you like that, you can go listen to somebody else. But you won't sell anything because they don't sell anything. They're just little failed SDRs parroting what they heard from some other failed SDR. Let's learn how to sell. Let's learn how to start conversations, get meetings, and close large complex sales. If that's your jam, you're in the right place. Go to b2brevenue.com, sign up, but watch the videos. And if you, if you need a sales therapist, you can go to any therapist for that. If you want to learn how to sell so you don't need a therapist, become great at sales. Honestly, it works. You know that feeling. That when you start a new job, you have to be smiling and nice and nodding all the time until you start crushing it. And then you're like, okay, get out of my way. I'm not coming to the goddamn QBR. I'm leaving early. I'm leaving when I want. You don't like it? Find someone else. Believe me, people put up with it. I did it for 25 years and They needed me more than I needed them. Not all the time, not every time, but guess what? They need that revenue more than they need your obedience. I remember a manager calling me insubordinate. I go, what is this, McHale's Navy? You may not remember that. It was a comedy from the '70s, but insubordination was often mentioned. It basically means you are ignoring me, you're not doing what I say. It's like, because I get paid on what I close, not on what I cooperate with. You want compliance? Pay me my target income and base, and then double it on what I want. And that may sound arrogant, but this is business. If you want to be a B-player and hide out, go ahead. But guess what? Every year it gets harder and harder to make that same amount of money.

Why?

Because your territory gets cut every time. Well, they do it to the— they do it to the best people too! Yeah, but the best people know how to sell instead of taking an order. Anyone can take an order. Very few people know how to sell, how to make a deal bigger and faster and understand where it is. That's what you want. Sign up today. Take a decision. Get a little backbone there. Or you can go to a therapist. It's up to you. We'll see you next time.