How does anyone stay in sales?
I was at a mini golf bar in 2013 (back before it felt 90% of bars had a mini golf course in them), and I noticed bumps all over my hands. It was the last weekend before the end of quarter, and I had stress hives. No job is worth your health, and this should be concerning to anyone… but it was especially concerning to me because it was really just another quarter. It was Q3. I was an SMB rep. I hit quota, but unremarkably. I was thrashing to stay afloat when the water was shallow enough for me to touch the bottom. I was in my third year as a sales professional, and I had never had an end of quarter without severe anxiety.
Maybe it’s easy for me now that I’ve turned in make sales career for the placid greener pastures of founding a company (he lied), but I believe now… as I did then on hole no. 8 and old fashioned no. 2 that there has to be a better way.
So, here it goes… an attempt to explain how anyone stays in sales without just recommending bamboo sheets and a white noise machine. Instead, I believe the answer to how anyone stays in sales is that you come to “believe the truth as though it were true,” and here are just a couple of those truths.
1. You are not a number.
I get it. You’ve heard this before. Maybe this is our Good Will Hunting moment where I just repeat it over and over again. Anyway, you’re not a number. You’re not a good number. You’re not a bad number. You just aren’t a number. It’s a really good thing because people aren’t any good at being numbers. We’re good at being friends, family, artists (well, some of us) and all kinds of things that require nuance that numbers will never have. BUT, our chemistry is incredibly unstable when we’re distilled down to just a number, and it can be really hard to bounce back.
2. Health is holistic and doesn’t care about hustle.
Health can feel like a moving target, but I believe that’s really just because the target is much more expansive than our aim. Health, like a human, is not a number. It’s not a series of goals. If you’re 125% in physical health, you don’t get extra credit for spiritual health. A healthy balance isn’t just adding equal weight to the work hard and play hard sides of our scale. Salespeople have a tendency to take the soundboard of their life and just keep moving every slider up because they can’t hear something well enough. Guess what? That’s never going to sound good. Good sound engineers constantly make adjustments (big and small) to fit the plan they rehearsed AND sound right in the moment. That means having a plan. It, also, means listening to the music, the environment, and the moment.
3. We’re in this together.
Sales teams are obsessed with competition. Competition is fun! Every family board game night at home ends with my dad throwing the Taboo buzzer against a wall because my little brother should never have that kind of power. Honestly, competition is for games. The truth at the center of our profession is that we are people working to solve problems together. Sales is, fundamentally, deeply human. Your co-workers and customers are your community. They’re the people outside of home that we spend the most time with, and we are much better off learning to thrive with our community than fighting against it. Many people who stay in sales for the “long haul” do it because they love working with a team of strangers-turned-friends to pull off the impossible… over and over again. Sales, at its best, provides a sense of supercharged community. It binds people together in purpose, and that feeling is hard to find in the same concentration and frequency outside of sales.
Maybe you’re at the end of a quarter. Maybe you’re feeling incredibly high or incredibly low. As a founder, I get it. I haven’t had a stress rash in years, but I would be lying if I said I slept every night in the past month. How does anyone stay in sales? They find truth that gives them rest when rest feels impossible. These are just a couple. If you’re struggling with significant anxiety, seek professional help. It makes a huge difference.
Just know… there’s something incredibly real about sales hiding behind all the nonsense. You can do this. You don’t have to, but you can… and I hope you find something really beautiful in your work when you do.
