Show Notes:

In defense of sales. “You hear the word ‘sales’ or ‘salesperson,’ and everyone’s like, ‘Oh God no.’ You have a visceral reaction. You feel defensive, and I definitely thought that way. There are bad salespeople. There are grimy salespeople. There are sleazy salespeople, just like there are shitty software engineers and there are shitty versions of everything. But salespeople are people-facing so they get the bad rap. I learned (especially in tech sales, which is my background) that there is oftentimes demonstrable ROI, like you can have a business discussion. It doesn’t become like, ‘Oh, you’re trying to con me.’ You can have the numbers to back it up. You can present a business case. So you’re selling it in what I would consider more intelligent and less sleazy like you’re trying to play psychological games with someone to try and trick them into something. You actually would believe for good reason and for real reasons that what you’re doing can help someone’s business. My cognitive dissonance is strong, but I still believe that, and I felt like there is some honor in this. Sales is essentially the Marines of business. Okay, don’t blow me up, everyone, for comparing it to the military, but they’re the front lines, right? You send them in first. They’re getting blown up. There are legs flying everywhere. Once you get past that and you realize that without that, you’re not going to get places. Without selling, without the salespeople, without your sales team selling, this company doesn’t really exist. Someone’s got to sell something for something to happen. It kind of makes the world go around. It’s the oldest, largest profession on earth.”

Sales and marketing go hand in hand. “I’m also of the belief — and it’s maybe just because I’m so biased towards sales — that I think marketing and sales really should be one function and one team working together. It shouldn’t be like marketing does XYZ while sales does something different. Marketing brings in the leads, and sales closes the leads. It really should be the two communicating with one another, of sales saying, ‘Here’s what’s working; here’s what’s not,’ and then marketing adjusting the messaging.”

What sets the best salespeople apart. “You don’t know if it’s the best quarter of their life or the worst quarter of their life. They’re just very even. They’re very consistent. They’re also very process-oriented, and I think that’s for a lot of people in life. IBeing a baseball guy, I always think about it like this: You’re a pitcher, and you want to win on every single pitch, but you also can’t get hung up on every single pitch. But if you throw your best pitch every single time, you can start looking at it over a week, a month, a season, a career — and if you’ve done that, you’re more likely going to succeed. If you get hung up or you lost a deal — you make an error in the field — and it eats you and it eats you, it hurts everything else that you do subsequently. So the best salespeople are just honing that process and working on that process. Everything is part of that process, but they’re not stuck. They’re very focused on doing the little things right, but they’re not stuck on those because if they do the little things right over the course of a year, things will work out better for them. So that’s what I think typically separates the best salespeople.”

How to stand out on social media. “Try to figure out what your voice is. Who are you? Don’t try to be someone you’re not because it’s just never going to work. Figure out what your little differentiator is and just hammer that. Again, everyone knows this, but people buy from people, and as much as you can infuse your own voice and humanity into it, it’s going to feel different and it’s going to feel truer. I obviously love comedy, and I know the legal world isn’t exactly funny all the time, but take a risk. See what happens. Do something. Do something crazy.”

Be who you need to be. “The idea of ‘be yourself’ is true, but it’s not quite there. Be what you need to be. You’ve got to be malleable in a lot of situations. Being yourself is the core of it, but also being what you need to be when you need to be it to get things done. There are a lot of facets of who we are as people, but to me it’s always ‘be what you need to be.'”