Why I left the highest-paying sales job I ever had
Back in 2018, I was making 6-figure as a sales rep for a tech company. I had just left my previous job, where I took the French market from 0 to €2.5M ARR in two and a half years.
A bit of context
I started the job in April 2018, right after a dream holiday in Holbox (Mexico), with my girlfriend Ara (who’s now my wife).
A view from our hotel in Holbox
I was so excited to start working for this company. The salary was great, I had a good stock-option package and comfortable benefits.
Around July, we left for a Sales Kick Off in California. We spent one week over there, doing team-building activities, chatting with colleagues from HQ, and attending various training sessions.
That’s where I met Skip Miller, who’s now my business partner and mentor. Skip was delivering a sales training session and after 3 hours of training, I knew he was doing the job I always dreamt of doing. When I learned how much he charged for it, I started seriously thinking of it as a career option.
But I had just started a new job and I quickly dismissed the idea of doing anything about it.
As weeks passed in Berlin, I started having doubts. We were a small team of 10-15 in a WeWork on Potsdamer Platz, and we kept missing our targets by large margins, quarter after quarter.
Plus a lot of my colleagues weren’t really putting their hearts into their jobs. I left my previous position with the impression that I could become a key part of the early EMEA sales team. A few months in and it was clear I was wrong.
The spark
Around September 2018, we were going through rounds of interviews to hire new colleagues for the EMEA team. I was regularly asked to take part in interview panels for sales positions we tried to fill.
We had a colleague in India who was responsible for organizing interviews, and with time zones, things sometimes got confused.
She ended up booking me for an interview on a Friday evening at 7:00 PM. If you know me, you know I value my time immensely, and my Friday evening isn’t made for work.
I slacked her and told her I wouldn’t take the interview. Things were not going well in my job, and I was clearly not constructive. I used a passive-aggressive tone and wasn’t willing to compromise.
She didn’t like it and started lecturing me about not being willing to take an interview on Friday evening. The slack conversation escalated to a point where I thought we had to jump on a call to disarm the conflict. I knew it would do no good to keep exchanging heated messages.
So I wrote her I was sorry about the way I wrote her and proposed to jump on a quick chat so we could get this interview booked, and find a way to communicate better in the future.
And you know what she replied?
She answered she wasn’t comfortable speaking with me and had no choice but to report my behavior to HR, which she did.
I was shocked.
In my world, when someone tries to disarm a conflict, you accept their gesture and try to solve the problem.
The week after, my boss told me the Head of HR knew about the situation and that it wasn’t good for my image in the company.
I knew I was totally burnt in this company. It also made me realize how vulnerable to people who see themselves as victims I would be.
I started resenting everything related to my job. I couldn’t stand my incompetent boss anymore, I was getting into conflicts with a lot of my colleagues, and I was protesting against processes.
I was basically becoming unemployable. I knew I had to fire myself before they did.
The escape plan
I stumbled on a few blog posts from Mark Manson and bought his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I was spending most of my working days reading blog posts about why having a boss was the riskiest choice you can make in life, and I was spending my evenings complaining to Ara that I couldn’t stand this job anymore.
I met with my friend Pierre-Yves who helped me get the job (he’s now running a kickass low-code agency) and told him how miserable I was feeling.
He suggested I explore becoming a sales trainer and asked me to do a sales workshop with his wife who needed help structuring the sales efforts of her startup.
We did the workshop and I absolutely loved it. I felt so much passion helping someone else figure out things that seemed obvious to me. I realized I had more expertise than I thought. Now I just needed to find someone who would pay for that expertise.
Pierre-Yves introduced me to his current boss at Smunch, and my friend Alex (who’s running the agency with Pierre-Yves) introduced me to his boss at Circula.
I booked meetings with both of them and grabbed a coffee to chat about their sales processes.
These meetings generated my first two opportunities, and my first €40.000.
But I’ll tell you more about that in the next article.
Learnings
Going through this experience has been life-changing. At the time, I was desperate and couldn’t understand why this was happening to me, but this was a blessing in disguise.
Here’s what I learned:
Working for someone else was the riskiest position to be in for me.
I have a strong character, I value my time and freedom, and I can’t stand having someone incompetent telling me what to do.
I have valuable, sought-after expertise, and people willing to hear my advice.
I am unemployable
Want to escape the hamster wheel too?
If you’re interested in going further, here are 3 ways I can help you:
Go listen to my podcast “Escaping The Hamster Wheel“