“I thought I did my job. I thought I did everything right by getting the right people involved. I thought I did everything right by having a POC plan. I thought I did everything right by showing up early to the customer and making sure that the customer is available for at least two days for me. So that we can work on it together, I thought I did everything right. And still, everything went wrong.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“Clearly I needed to shadow a couple of demos before I went out on my demo, I needed to talk to the other SEs to find out what are the objections you get? What do you typically struggle with? What do you think you need to shy away from? What are the things that you need to accentuate? I ignored a lot of that. I basically focused on here’s what the demo script is, I understand the IT and IT organizations. So I think I probably know everything that I need to know.” – Bill Balnave

“I’m in the generalist world, and there are always a million questions that are some little things that they have as a requirement that we may never even think about. And it only comes out as we’re progressing through the sales cycle. And next time I learned it, I put it into my checklist. Do you need this? No, perfect. We keep going. I feel like it’s always going to happen. How we deal with these different situations could change it from being a horror story into a hero story.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“I’ve had situations where I’m doing the wrong thing. At that point, maybe it’s better to pause, and reset. Let’s just have a discussion about what you want to do. Forget about the presentation. What do you need to this customer, you’re my priority. How can I help you? How can we salvage the rest of our 45 minutes and make me not look stupid in front of my boss and my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss?” – Ramzi Marjaba

“Sometimes you just have to call people out. Sometimes you have to stand your ground.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“You’ve got to lead with empathy no matter what you’re doing in any type of relationship, whether it’s a prospect you’ve never met before your spouse at the end of the day.” – Kerry Sokalsky

“Click every click. There’s no way to deliver a perfect demo, you’re never going to pass absolutely avoid every possible thing that can happen along with practice. There’s also the acceptance of the fact that if something’s going to screw up and happen, don’t let it slow you down, just keep going. – Bill Balnave

“Prep for all contingencies and have backups, But just becoming more comfortable with how you’re going to handle the unknown. When we’re gonna get thrown a curveball that we don’t know how to handle. If we knew we were going to get it, we would have prepared for it. Prepare how you would deal with the unknown. – Kerry Sokalsky

“Be present at the moment. Too often we’re so focused on our demo, we’re so focused on remembering the words that we wanted to say, sometimes down to a script like we’re not present in the moment. I heard this interesting analogy from another gentleman. He said, whenever you’re presenting to the group, there’s sort of there’s two magnetic pulls, right? There’s one magnetic pull, pulling you toward the audience. There’s another magnetic pull pulling you towards your own material. Imagine you’re in a room and they’re all on one wall and you’re on the other wall. And you’re constantly being pulled. If we’re pulled too close to the audience, we forget what we’re going to say. But if we’re pulled too close to our material, we’re not paying attention to the audience. Right? I think we need to find that equilibrium, that balance right, that presence.” – Chris White

“It’s preparation, anticipation, and communication. You prepare for the worst case scenario, you prepare for when there’s a crash.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“We always learn more from our losses and mistakes than we do from our wins and successes.” – Bill Balnave