The Skills You Need to FAST TRACK Your Tech Sales Career Path 📈

I've been fortunate to learn a ton of skills in a variety of sales roles across my career, from SGR to AE to Manager to Regional VP and now a Global vp. In this video, I'm going to break down the key skills and knowledge that I found I needed to succeed in each of these jobs, hoping to help some of you going along your path in a sales career. Let's start with sdr. The first skill is having confident conversations and great tonality. And in a world full of social media, a lot of written communication, this is becoming a bit of a lost art, so. So as an sdr, learn how to have uncomfortable conversations with confidence. The second skill is mastering the Personas you sell to and the problems they're facing, not just a focus on your product. I love it. When an SDR can clearly communicate who we sell to, what they care about, the problems they're facing, how they try to solve them, then it's much easier to go layer on the relevant product knowledge with that foundation. And Then finally for STRs, persuasive storytelling decisions are made emotionally validated with logic. And so when you're cold calling, cold emailing, you're not trying to convince someone through logic to take a meeting, you're convinced them through emotion. And the better you are at persuasive storytelling, the higher your conversion rates are going to be across all of your cold outreach channels. Now for AES, let's look at some of the key skills across the deal cycle, starting with discovery. The biggest skill important for discovery is finding and defining the top large problems, not just sticking with the first buzzword that you hear that you think you might be able to solve, and then sprinting with in solution presentation. The skill that's critical is differentiating with relevance. AES get really focused on the product differentiators. What you do that looks cool or different, they're not always as good at tying it back to what matters most to the customer. And so combining where you're different, what the customer cares about is a critical skill. Another big skill in solution presentation is answering the question for your buyer, if I had access to the technology today, how would I actually use it? Get good at demos that show the use case as close to their environment as possible, so they leave the demo knowing exactly how they would use your technology or service if they bought it that day. From a deal progression standpoint, one of the most important skills is translating value across different levels and titles in the business. It's critical to define for a champion why they should care for their boss why they should care, and other departments why they should care, and it's going to sound a little bit different across all those different roles and levels of the organization. So great AE should be learning how to translate the value based on the Persona and the level. Another key skill in deal progression is maintaining control of the deal by enabling your buyer. The best AES I work with make it easy to buy because they're always supporting the buyer with relevant information, guided next steps, and helping control the process start to finish without letting the buyer go off into internal conversations where the deal is likely going to be lost. And finally, for AES, the biggest negotiation tip I could give is Understanding your leverage against the next best alternative. One of the first things I ask whenever an AE is telling me about a deal that wants a discount, they're pushing us hard as I ask, well, if they didn't go with us, what is their next best option? If we have a great leverage against the next best alternative, we can negotiate in strength. If we haven't built leverage against the next best alternative or we don't understand the next best alternative, the negotiation becomes a lot harder. Now, moving along the career journey from AE to leadership, here are a few of the skills that are most critical in my opinion for a sales manager. The first one is knowing when you should be teaching, when you should be showing, and when you should be doing. And this is completely based on who you're working with, which rep, and what skill it is, and how proficient they are. I see a lot of managers that will just go do all the work for their reps, which isn't very scalable and gets exhausting. Plus your rep doesn't get any better. I see a lot of managers that will show good examples, but they haven't taught the foundational elements to help the showing of the example stick. Knowing when you should be teaching the broader skill, showing good examples and doing the work is critical for a successful leader. The next skill that sales managers need to develop is to hire great talent. I have never seen a team succeed when they had the wrong people on the team. I have seen managers do a great job with developing the wrong people and have it not work out and so hiring great talent is critical. As we're doing that. It's important to understand the difference between traits and versus skills. It's important to understand and analyze what are the foundational traits that make somebody great on my team. For a lot of people it's their work effort, it's their iq, it's their eq, then the Skill standpoint. As a sales manager, understand what are the skills that your best reps have and how can you go hire people that already have a good head start towards obtaining those same skills themselves to improve their likelihood of success? The next skill is retaining great talent. If you hire great people but you lose them shortly after you have an impossible job. You need to be able to motivate and keep your team by developing them, showing them the path to success, and ensuring that they always feel your support as they progress their careers. That way you're not having to restart your team every few quarters. And the final skill is the difference between execution and vision. A manager that is great at vision can explain this incredible place we're trying to get to. They paint this picture of all the success we can have, the money we can make. However, a vision without how we're going to get there is fairly empty. The execution piece is what do we do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to get us to the vision? These have to go hand in hand because if all we do is execute reps, burnout. If all we do is have a vision, we don't know how we get there. We need to understand where we're trying to get to, how we're going to get there. And a great sales manager balances those two to enable and motivate their teams. As I moved from a frontline manager into a second land role into regional VP role, I had to add on additional skills to be effective. The first one was forecasting at scale. When you're forecasting at the more micro level, you can go dig deep into all the deals and get a really good picture for how things roll up. When you're managing several teams, it becomes a lot more nuanced. And so learning how to forecast across a larger group is critical. As you expand your purview as a leader, the next skill is prioritization and delegation. As a regional vp, you're going to have tons of problems to solve. You're never going to be able to solve all of them at once. You need to be able to isolate what is most impactful to the business and stay laser focused on that, then there's never enough time to do everything that has to be done. If you don't get great at delegation, knowing what you are able to uniquely do that you have to do versus what others can do as well or better than you. If you don't have that combination figured out, you're going to sink trying to do too many things at once. So the next skill I had to learn in. The second line of role is managing up. As I was working with more senior leaders, it was important for me to 1 understand the scale of my problems compared to theirs. I did not want to bring what I was stressed about and make their life more difficult. I wanted to make sure I only brought to them problems that were important enough for them to care about. Then I also had to learn how to show progress consistently without bragging about it. I had to learn how to just show very factually based on here's where we were, here's where we're going, here's how we're going to get there, here's what we've done so far to help them see the progress that we're making. And the final skill that was critical to learn as a regional VP was performance management. Unfortunately, in sales, not everybody is the right hire. Not everybody does all the work they need to do to be successful. If you don't learn as a second man leader how to identify poor performance and coach up poor performance and coach out, you have a really hard time scaling an organization that is high performing. And finally, a few of the skills I had to learn as I moved into a a global role, the first thing I had to learn is to not take criticism personally. When you're in more senior roles, you're going to be constantly called out for the gaps in the business and the risk in your business. You need to take it as an opportunity to get better and understand that when there's flaws in the business, it's not because there's a problem with you as an individual, it's because there's a problem in your team. Nobody runs a perfect org. You need to go embrace the criticism and go get better. The next thing I had to get better at was being decisive. I had to be able to go look at data, form a hypothesis, go confirm the hypothesis with context through conversations and more in the details observations. But then have immediate decisions and take immediate action. You can't afford to float around and think about things for a long time in more senior roles. You have to take quick action once you have a strong idea of the direction to go. And then the final skill I've had to learn moving into a more global role is ecosystem alignment. There are all sorts of supporting functions across the business to support revenue. You have to learn how to row in the same direction for compounding results to maximize the efficacy of your team. Look, this is in no means comprehensive. I know there's a lot of skills across these areas that are important to gain from an SGR all the way through leadership, but hopefully it's helpful to get a little bit of an idea of how the priorities and skills change as you evolve your career. That's it for today's video. I hope you enjoyed this topic and that it was helpful for you as you progress your sales career. If you're looking for more ways to improve, I've linked some free resources for you in the description of this video and in the pinned comment below. Simply visit that link, input your name, and tell me which email I can send this to you and I'll get them to you immediately. And if you've enjoyed this, please like subscribe and comment and I'll see you in the next video.