What if it’s the heat AND the humidity?

I run a lot. Sometimes, I even run long races. But before I run long races, I just run a lot of miles on a lot of different days. Yes, that means running in summer. Yes, that means having some really tough “go”s of it.

Inevitably, when recapping a challenging summer run, you are reminded that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” My friends know how much I hate that saying. Specifically, I hate it because the effect of the humidity depends on the pre-existing heat. No one cares if it’s 65 and humid.

For a sales team, your number is the heat, and your culture is the humidity. Sales is about accomplishing really hard goals. As an industry, we tend to attract chefs, performers, athletes, and soldiers at incredibly high rates… because there’s something we love about really hard goals.

While there’s no escaping that certain runs will include battling the heat, it’s the humidity that becomes suffocating.

In sales, humidity looks like a micromanagement, incredible pressure, and wage theft in the form of unattainable quotas. Last year, only 20% of sales teams hit quota. That’s an incredible amount of humidity that can make our work exhausting at best and impossible at worst.

Let’s take a second to remind ourselves about controlling what we can control. It isn’t 2021, and no one in SaaS is just trying to remember all their orders. It’s mid-July, and the heat is real… let’s build sales organizations with enough shade and breathable air to run our race.