#91: 10 Things Lessons I learned in 2024

Hi Friends,

Hoping you all had a Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday season.

I deeply appreciate each and every single one of you for following along on this journey with me.

Half of the reason I write is to get all my ideas out and make sense of some of the tactics and strategies that I use every day on the ground floor. It’s important for me to document everything so that I can use these lessons in the future for myself and my teams.

Along the way, I hope you’ve all learned a few things as well :)

I hope you all had an amazing 2024 and are looking forward to an even greater 2025.

With that said, here are some of the main lessons that I’ve learned this year:

1. People truly underestimate how hard it is to be consistent over a long period of time

Take this newsletter for example. When I started, I didn’t have a specific goal in mind. But a year and a half later and I’m now writing my 91st edition. I haven’t been able to be consistent every single week for the last year and a half, but I’ve been pretty consistent.

This newsletter has grown to 10K subs, and I’ve realized that I’ve pretty much written a books worth of content. I’ve also been posting on LinkedIn for 10 years.

Not a lot of people have taken the time to do that. Let alone dedicated the time to truly be great in other more difficult things.

2. Team performance tends to be distributed along a bell curve

Even if you think you’ve hired a team of top performers, you will get a bell curve distribution of performance. As a manager, focus more than half your time on making your middle performers better and making sure that you are continuing to enable your top performers to do what they do best.

3. The news is toxic

The news is toxic, but it’s based on human nature.

I used to be flabbergasted by the fact that people still watched news. It’s so negative and terrible for your mental state.

However, I realized that humans are hard wired to pay attention to negative news because throughout history it could be detrimental to their survival. It’s not the media’s fault that they take advantage of this psychological fact. It’s human nature.

Stop watching the news if you hate it. But don’t hate on why it’s constantly negative.

4. AI = instant gratification

Having things like ChatGPT has led to us seeking an answer without wonder.

Take time to wonder and think through answers before finding them.

It’s important that you continue to train your mind how to think through problems and find solutions logically.

5. Selling a well known brand or product is easier

Selling a brand that is well known is significantly easier than selling an unknown one.

Take this into consideration before choosing where you want to work. Also, think about this before taking general advice or comparing your metrics to sellers at more well known brands.

6. As a manager, your life becomes 10x easier if you can hire well

I’m estimating that about 70% of your success as a manager comes from hiring the right people. Spend a significant amount of time recruiting and learning how to interview/identify talent.

Unfortunately, this is not something that’s taught at most orgs, you have to learn to do it yourself. I also highly recommend you do backdoor employee reference for every single hire.

7. LinkedIn is an echo chamber

If you are in sales, LinkedIn is a pretty big eco chamber of advice from salespeople selling to other salespeople and agencies giving sales advice

Absolutely nothing wrong with either (I sell to salespeople now as well).

However, the advice given here is largest designed for early-stage sales motions and is sometimes just blatantly terrible sales advice.

Take general advice with a grain of salt. There are a lot of factors at play that need to be considered for your buyer, industry, product etc.

I promise you that getting good at building Clay tables or using signals is not in itself going to save your company.

8. Your platform can be another company’s feature

The biggest threat to most newer companies (even if they are in a hot market), is not other new competitors. It’s incumbents that can build your platform as a feature in 1 month.

9. You MUST teach execs something new for them to take you seriously as a seller

Most salespeople suck at this. They come into calls and haven’t formulated a POV on the buyer’s business. You aren’t going to know their business better than them, but you should understand the specific problem at hand and the solution better than an exec. You do this all day. If you can teach a exec something, you will build trust.

10. Understanding your customer is the best sales advice

If you understand your customer deeply and can provide real advice, you are better than 90% of salespeople. You don’t need to read a sales book.

Just spend time with your buyers. Go to events they go to, find out where they hang out online, listen to the words they use.