How Quitting My Job Made Me Successful in 2007

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Part of a series called “The One Thing I Did in 2007” - other posts here and here.

“I changed my mind on you working remotely, I want you to move to New Jersey”.

Those were the words of the President of the company I worked for, at the end of 2006.

For a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, such as myself, having a mailing address in New Jersey was about as appealing as “Now Open - Britney Spears’ Daycare”.

I resigned my position as Sales Director for an Enterprise Knowledge Management Organization, giving up my six figure base salary, generous expense account, and a Rolodex of the elite in the Federal Government and Life Sciences industries.

The resignation was inspired in part by the fact that with the perks and prestige came a lot of road time away from my family, a really bad diet, a nice beer gut, and enough stress to support several gastric-centric ailments.

I called in a personal favor and with one phone-based interview took a job as part of a team selling tactical software to small banks. As “the new guy” I received the smallest territory, the fewest products, and the least amount of respect. Combine this with the large percentage drop in compensation and yes, by all accounts, my career took a steroid-grade leap backwards.

What else did I do? I listed and learned. I went back to the basics and started from scratch.

In the first few weeks I was in a mad scramble to gain some workable amount of knowledge that would allow me to speak with some level of plausibility to prospects. As I sat in on the rep’s demonstrations, it was obvious that many of them sold on features and functions, with their “demos” looking reasonably close to “training”.

After watching one rep spend 15 minutes demonstrating our “non-business day calendar” , I asked “how many of our existing customers purchased our solution because we have a non-business day calendar?” A semi-confused look and silence was the only reply.

Realizing that any useful knowledge would have to be learned directly, I worked backwards from how the product was actually used to how it was purchased. I spoke and visited with existing clients and learned how they achieved their desired results. As I started to organize the characteristics of my top performing clients from the under-performers, I realized that the our software had very little to do with the overall success of the client. It was the planning, marketing, selling and the quality of execution that made the difference.

After I had gathered this information, I started packaging my proposals with additional professional services that included marketing and sales training, along with a short subscription to our online ad agency.

After spending so many years in the enterprise world, where ROI was done with spreadsheets and discussions centered on the hypothetical, it was refreshing to witness the direct benefit gained from the use of your solution.

In a year in which my career did not move forward, I rediscovered some passion, my stress and weighted dropped, my kids started calling by the right name again, and I closed the year with the highest average contract value per sale on the team.

It was a well-needed change, one that laid the foundation for success in 2007 and beyond.