Making the Most of Your Tech Sales Career

This episode is brought to you by ChatAE. ChatAE is the account planning platform built for strategic sellers. Now, if you're someone who's spent a bunch of time bouncing between different tools just to build out an account plan, and by the time you finish it, it's completely out of date, or you've already moved on from that deal, then take a look at what ChatAE has built. It takes everything you normally stitch together across different platforms.

That's things like research, stakeholder maps, white space, customer health, and all your CRM data, and it brings it into a living workspace that stays completely current. Think of it as a complete operating system for strategic selling. It's got real-time alerts when org charts shift, instant visibility into risk or expansion signals, and a single hub that helps you sell smarter instead of working harder. I've been using it and honestly, I wish I'd had this tool years ago.

Chatty turns every rep into a super rep and you can go check it out for yourself. You can get started today using the link down in the show notes. This is Sales Players, and I'm your host, Jesse Woodbury. I've spent my career selling for early stage companies, and now I'm on a mission to help reps and operators find tips, strategies, and resources for generating more pipeline, closing more deals, and building wealth in tech sales.

To learn more, visit salesplayers.co. What's happening, Sales Players? It's Jesse here.

And as you know, I've been AWOL for the past month. So I'm here to give you an update and get another episode out there. Just to get you up to speed on what I've been up to for the past month. And transparently, I have been on the hunt for my next opportunity.

And I'll get into that a little bit more later. But I also spent two weeks traveling Europe, specifically Germany and the Netherlands, which was an amazing trip and a chance to just get outside of my bubble for a little bit and go check out a new place. Had a fantastic time and was able to recharge. and now I'm back and still kind of getting back into my day-to-day routine and getting back into the, of putting podcast episodes out.

It's been really hard to stay consistent for the last couple of months on the podcast front, but I'm very excited to share that I've got some guests coming up, some guest interviews coming up here in the next few weeks and a bunch of great content still ahead here on this channel. If you're not already on my weekly newsletter mail list, be sure to go to salesplayers.co and get started. Be sure to go to salesplayers.

co and subscribe every single Sunday morning. You're going to have an email in your inbox from yours truly that walks through a topic related to tech sales careers performance tips tricks strategies all the good stuff Make sure you subscribed to that weekly newsletter Putting that together every week has become one of the highlights So let get into the topic of today episode I wrote down a couple things here just around making the most of your tech selling career. These were some thoughts that I had specifically around the idea that we're very fortunate to be able to work in tech sales.

This is the only profession that allows you to basically double your income every single year if you can produce results. And it comes down to building a key set of skills, building a network and a few other things that I wrote down here that I want to get into in more detail. But it's such a privilege to be able to work in this industry. I know there's been a lot going on over the last two years in tech and it's been a little bit volatile.

but at the end of the day, if you look back and you work in this industry, hopefully you can have some gratitude around the fact that we get to wake up every day and sell technology and solutions to businesses and make crazy money doing it if you do it the right way and if you learn the right skills. So I thought I would share a few ideas around how to make the most of your tech sales career, how I've made the most of my tech sales career and how I will continue to do that. So just wanted to share a couple of those ideas with you today.

So the first one that I wrote down was actually building a personal brand. This is something I've talked about a lot recently. I've been pretty introspective about the journey that I've had on the podcasting front, but most don't know that I started posting on LinkedIn and doing some personal branding activities long before I started this show. And by the way, personal branding doesn't have to be on a public social media channel.

It can be an internal thing, especially if you work at a large company, having an internal personal brand that says, you know, I'm the person that gets things done here within the organization. I'm the person to go to for this, this or that. That's also part of building a personal brand. And that's something that you can start doing today.

And you've probably already started doing that in some way. So build yourself a brand, a personal brand of being reliable, being intellectually curious, being passionate, being someone who is easy to reach and responsive. All of those things are really good things. And they're going to do wonders for your tech selling career.

The next thing I put down was focus on building the skills. And you probably already know what those skills are in your industry, in your specific company, but focus on building the most important skills that are going to help you hit your targets and make the money that you want to make. In my mind, some of those really important skills are things like discovery, qualification. Of course, negotiation is a big one for me.

I'm a big fan of learning how to negotiate Executive presence which is something I talked a lot about especially in the newsletter is building the skill of being able to deliver a presentation deliver information to executives and hold yourself like an executive So executive presence presentation skills creative skills, being able to create assets and documents and put those in front of your customers and your prospects that's gonna then enable them to go and sell internally.

That is how big deals get done is through that internal selling as well as customer enablement, if you will, building assets that are going to help you do that. So those are all skills that I would highly recommend investing in. And if you're looking for some other complementary skills, go and learn a little bit more about online marketing. Learn about lead generation and demand generation and those sorts of things.

I also think it's really important to learn tech skills. So if you sell tech, you should probably learn a little bit about software development methodologies and how tech gets built. So those are a few ideas for different skills that you can go and invest in. Project management is another one that comes to mind.

The list goes on and on and on. If you need some ideas, be sure to hit me up. I'm happy to share what I think are the most valuable skills that ultimately lead to those commission checks and those W-2s that you can get excited about. The next thing I put down here was building your professional network.

And especially over the last couple of months, I have realized how important that effort has been for me personally. And that's because I have reconnected with a lot of past colleagues over the last few months. And it's been amazing the amount of new opportunities that have come from that, not just financially, but just personally fulfilling opportunities that have come from staying connected with people that I've worked with, staying connected with prospects and clients and customers.

So it's really, really important to not only develop and build those relationships, but continue to nurture those professional relationships that you have. Part of that is trying to be someone who adds value to the people in your network as often as possible. And not in a cheesy or corny way, just being able to make an intro when someone needs an intro somewhere or being willing to hop on a call and help somebody with something very quickly. So those are the things it also kind of ties back into that personal brand thing.

If you're someone who has a really strong personal brand, you're probably also going to build a really strong professional network. Those two things together are going to continue to open doors for you in your career and put you on a path towards success, fulfillment, and all that good stuff. All right, the next thing I put down here was intellectual curiosity, just being a curious person, someone who wants to find the answer to something, whether that's the answer for an internal process or you very curious about how your prospect does X Y or Z Curiosity is such an underrated skillset in tech selling I think it one of the most important skills in business period And if you can come in and approach things with curiosity and ask good questions and try to figure out the answer and do your research you're going to do incredibly well in this business, especially as you start to move into more strategic or enterprise type deals where you're working with large brands, lots of stakeholders, lots of big painful problems in the organization.

If you're someone who can get curious and really dig in, you're going to do incredibly well in tech sales. So I think try to approach everything with a curiosity mindset and you're going to do very well. The next thing I put down here was take some risks early on in your career. I did a post about this recently on LinkedIn.

The reality is if you don't take some calculated risks in your career, you're going to miss out on a lot of really big outcomes. And some examples of big risks that you can take is things like joining a startup, moving to a new city where you can find a lot more like-minded people or starting a company of your own. These are all calculated risks that you can take over the course of your career. And they're not all going to pay off perfectly, but eventually you'll find that getting into the habit of taking calculated risks is going to set you up for big rewards.

And the last thing that I put down here was approaching your performance, your career and your lifestyle like an investor. And I've talked about this concept on the show before, but the way that you can do that as a seller, there's a lot of ways you can do that as a seller, honestly. The first one is to actually just start by investing your commission checks. Get into an investor mindset.

Put those commission checks to work for you because that will compound and help you generate real wealth. But there's also some other ways you can approach your career that way. You can start to think about the companies you go work for as an investor. Would this company be one that's going to have a successful outcome for me personally and for itself?

Is this the kind of company where I want to invest the next few years? Is this where I want invest my time? Are these relationships ones that I want to invest in? Is this side hustle something I want to invest in?

So start to approach your tech selling career in the same mindset that an investor who's doing due diligence might approach a potential investment. If you can do that, you're going to land at the right companies for you and you're going to continue to be very successful because of that compounding effect. Again, starting with just basically investing your commissions, great way to get started or putting yourself in a position to have a major your financial outcome. All of that I look at as approaching your career and life as an investor.

So that's all I got for today. More episodes coming your way and thanks for tuning in. Take care.