🔑 In 1994, I stepped into the sales world armed with Novell NetWare 3.0, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and Lotus Notes. It was a time when fax machines still had street cred, and email was the future. Since then, I’ve weathered the Dot Com euphoria, survived Y2K hysteria, dodged the GFC, and ascended into the cloud. Along the way, I’ve won big, lost bigger, and earned a lifetime membership to the “Lessons Learned the Hard Way” club.
In the '90s, as data networking reached a fever pitch, I closed a $30 million Cisco deal at full list price. By the second month of the FY, I’d hit my annual target, and kept my foot on the sales gas pedal.
Since starting Keystone in 2017, I’ve sat on the other side of the table. I’ve been privileged to work on countless deals and observe firsthand what separates great salespeople from the rest.
🌟 What Separates the Great from the Average
They help customers achieve what matters. Not what makes for a good quarterly report or PowerPoint presentation, but what actually solves the customer’s problem.
They uncover or create opportunities that can be closed. Pipe dreams don’t count.
They close deals. Shocking, I know.
⏱ The Myth of Busyness
The best salespeople operate with unnerving calm. They’re not rushing between meetings or buried under admin tasks. Yet they consistently exceed their targets.
The rest? They’re drowning in busywork—spending more time on internal reporting than customer calls and obsessively updating their opinion management system (a.k.a. the sales forecast, where hopes and dreams masquerade as certainty).
What separates the winners from the also-rans is their ability to say "no." No to tasks that don’t move the needle. No to pointless meetings. They know the difference between activity and progress—and they act accordingly.
🧠 Sales: A Skill, Not a Sport
Sales is a skill-based profession, not an endurance sport.
Activity is excessive forecasting, endless reporting, and attending time-sapping meetings.
Skill is knowing:
What needs to be done,
How to do it,
And, most importantly, doing it.
Great salespeople map every action directly to closing deals. Anything else is theater.
🛡 Sales Managers: Air Cover, Not Anchors
A great sales manager is a force multiplier, protecting their team from distractions and nonsense. Their role is to ensure the sales team spends their time selling—not wrestling with bureaucracy or the tyranny of the sales prevention unit (finance and operations).
🎯 A Message for Hiring Managers
When hiring, it’s easy to focus on traits like professionalism, polish, and the appearance of being busy. But being busy doesn’t close deals.
Hire closers. Hire the ones who know that calm beats chaos, skill beats activity, and deals beat opinions.