I don’t have anyone IRL I can tell this to without sounding like a clown so… hello internet.

Enterprise SaaS. 7-figure quota. Deal was sitting at legal. Champion leaves. New CFO “re-evaluating vendors.” You know the drill. Then: silence. For. Ninety. Seven. Days.

I did the usual: polite bumps, new thread, forwarded thread, “bumping this to top of inbox,” value adds, case studies, the whole parade. Nothing. Pipeline rotting. Manager asking “any updates?” god I hate that but it works.

Day 98 I snapped (in a calm way). I got a ping on nationgraph that their board was meeting that friday. Clock was ticking. I printed a one-page note on actual paper, signed it with a blue pen like a psychopath, and FedEx’d it to the CFO’s attention. The note said:

“If you’ve moved on, totally fair—please tell me so I can move on too. If not, here are the 3 things blocking value on your side (from your team’s words, not mine):

1. SSO risk sign-off

2. 90-day opt-out language

3. Training for the field team before Q4

4. Give me a 10-minute ‘no-slides’ call this week and I’ll walk you through how we de-risk all three without changing price. If I can’t, I’ll write the breakup email for you.”

No deck. No link. I put my cell at the top in huge font like a Craigslist ad.

His EA called the next morning: “He can do 12:10–12:20 today. Don’t be late.”

We did it in 7 minutes. He said, “If you include the opt-out and own the training schedule in the MSA, I’ll sign.”
Friday 4:36pm: DocuSign ping. $1.3M TCV, $280k year one. Commission pre-tax: $104,000. I sat there staring at my screen like it was a wild animal that wandered into my apartment.

What worked (in my very unscientific opinion):
– Physical pattern interrupt. Email = background noise. Paper on a desk = “who is this maniac?”
– Specific friction list in their language. Not “value,” not “synergy.” The three actual bricks in the road.
– Risk reversal. I offered to write the breakup email. Takes the pressure off saying “no,” which ironically makes “yes” easier.
– Ruthless brevity. Ten minutes. Humans can tolerate ten minutes.

I’m not a wizard. I lost two other deals this quarter that still make my stomach flip. But this one… this one reminded me why we play the game.

If you’re stuck in ghostland, try getting weird (professionally). Paper. Loom to an EA. A 90-second voicemail to the CFO’s assistant with a single, specific ask. Something that doesn’t look like every other email in the pile.

Shoutout to you if you cared enough to read this far. AMA I guess

Fucking kill me

Those who messaged me

I work for a manufacture and spent 5 Fucking months flipping residential new construction builders to our product so many hours conversations getting contractor buy in supplier buy in.

Fucking wasted and now I'm way down in my numbers focusing on this specific path and instead of securing my year now I have to scramble to pivot.

Final edit: I am not a retard therefore I did not vote for trump. You're in the sales sub. If you can't tell what a shitty lying con artist is why are you even in sales?

Hi ya'll - so yeah, I closed a deal I've been working on since November of last year, and it's my biggest so far. It includes $320k in revenue up front, and another ~$540k in ARR over the next 3 years.

The initial presentations for the prospect org's directors went really well, with subsequent demos, review meetings and cadenced follow-up discussions progressing as expected. I thought I had it in the bag. I found out on a random Tuesday earlier this year that they decided it needed to go to RFP to satisfy procurement. Of course. I stayed confident though, and we submitted our bid in May. I've waited patiently for the past 4 weeks to hear back.

Today, we finally were awarded the deal! Most of my leadership team is off on holidays, and the collective eyes of my family gloss over at the mere pronunciation of the word 'procurement' so, I figured I'd share it here with you lot.

Hopefully it encourages someone to make that follow up call tomorrow, and never lose hope. LFG.

Literally convinced big merchant to do banking with us. They made 5 million in volume and I am entitled to 20%.

Losing my mind. In front of PC and cannot tell anyone. FK YEAH BABY!

As title shared, closed the biggest deal of my life. 600k of new arr for 3 million total over 5 years. I’m in the cyber security sector, PKI to be specific.

Honestly almost cried. This puts me at 120% of my number for the year with 1.5+ in pipeline left to close and all in accelerators.

I’m not hear to brag, but more so give motivation to you and rant 😅. I graduated high school with the lowest at GPA in my graduating class (my dean let me know this). I got denied from 10+ schools but one, got addicted to Xanax, graduated in something I hated and worked a job 5 years ago making 39k a year. I completely stumbled into tech.

I got denied 5+ promotions from sdr to AE, moved to another company to be a founding SDR, got denied another 2 promotions. Guy on our team quit and I finally got a chance. Last year got 100% and now this year I’m in August and I’m at 120% in the enterprise space.

We’re one decision, skill, or conversation away from changing our lives. Keep your foot on the gas and I PROMISE you will eventually catch a break. I love how supportive and motivating this sub is and just hope this gives someone the words of encouragement they need.

Now, VOO or bitcoin?

Update: holy cow this exploded 😂 thank you so much y’all. Yall are going crazy in the comments and I love it

Do you ever notice many of the "marketing qualified leads" turn out to be garbage - the leads don't remember filling out your form, don't know who you are, or don't seem to exist.

The reason this happens is due to marketing's KPIs.

Let's walk through a common scenario.

The marketing team have been told their KPIs are:

• The number of visitors

• The number of leads

• Low cost per lead

These KPIs are impossible to achieve. Why? Real traffic is expensive. Real leads can be really expensive. So what can they do?

They choose to buy cheap traffic. This will be things like Google Search Partners, Google Display, the Meta Audience Network, and the TikTok Audience network. A great side effect of this cheap traffic is it submits loads of leads.

Sounds great, right? They're getting lots of traffic, lots of leads, and the cost per lead is low. The KPIs are being smashed.

But there's a problem. The traffic is fake. It's bot traffic doing click fraud. The scam works like this:

• Publishers (the websites showing your ads on Google Search Partners, Google Display, the Meta Audience Network, and the TikTok Audience network) earn money every time someone or something clicks on the ads on their websites.

• So they use bots to click on the ads. As long as these bots are made properly (change IP address for every click, fake the device fingerprint, and created using a "stealth framework"), the ad networks will consider the traffic valid.

• To ensure the bot traffic looks even more real, the bots are programmed to submit real-looking fake leads. These fake leads trick the ad networks into thinking the bots are high quality human traffic.

The above, known as click fraud, is a massive problem, and steals over $100B from advertisers every year. To give some numbers, have a look at the click fraud rates by audience network below:

• Meta (Audience): 67%

• Google (Display): 27%

• Linked In (Audience): 24%

• Microsoft (Audience): 24%

• TikTok (Audience): 79%

The above numbers are from objective detection (100% provably bots) and should be considered the minimum rates.

So, marketers are advertising on these crappy networks, getting lots of cheap traffic, and that traffic submits loads of fake leads. The end result? You waste your time chasing leads which don't exist. Marketing blames you for not following up fast enough, or not being good enough at your jobs.

The solution

As you've probably guessed, the problem is marketing's KPIs. They're going to do what they have to do to hit those KPIs. I've spoken to at least 1,000 marketing teams and marketing agencies, and almost all of them are the same - instead of doing things properly they're focussed on their KPIs. And can you blame them? That's what their bosses told them to do, and getting lots of cheap leads is near impossible.

Option 1

Have a meeting with your manager and your manager's manager (it needs to come from the top) to change marketing's KPIs to be sales qualified leads and revenue. No more vanity metrics which can be easily faked using bots. That will force them to do things properly and stop buying fake traffic.

Option 2

Marketing will resist Option 1. The CMO will threaten this will ruin the company. And the CEO may follow their lead, as he'll be afraid of messing things up. In this case, you get the marketing team to use bot protection. That will stop the fake leads and re-train the ad networks to send real, high quality, targeted leads. They'll resist this too of course, but they'll take it instead of Option 1.

Good luck!

PS I'm doing a doctorate in this topic.

After nearly 20 years in sales, I'm going to have my best earning year yet, finishing at least at 170% of quota, with a final deal outstanding that could push me to 180%+. While it's not my highest percentage to quota to date, my current OTE is the highest it's ever been. This is my 7th year with my current company.

At my present attainment I'll be receiving a bonus check of $260k in Q1. If this last deal closes, I'll be getting just north of $300k. (previous high single commission check is ~$170k.)

Role Details:

• Enterprise Software

• Quota= ~5M

• OTE is just under 400k

• W2 history for this role:

  • 2024 = $475k

  • 2023 = $400k

  • 2022 = $470k

  • 2021 = $515k

  • 2020 = $300k

  • 2019 = $280k

  • 2018 = $200k

2025 will be more than likely be my best earnings year by far with the ~250k-$300k paycheck incoming.

Why am I posting this? Because I'm fucking stoked and I want to tell someone about it, and I can't really yell this from the rooftops IRL. So I guess I'll have to brag on the internet.

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about my experience, the sales process, or anything else related to my career. I'm currently in a holding pattern until the end of the year, awaiting final signature on that last deal.

Sales is a great career if you can find your spot. Keep learning and don't settle for a shitty role/manager.

Keep pushing and I with everyone sales success in the new year.

Update: My company is a MAMAA company and we sell a software that every company uses and buys for each of their employees. I sell to the Enterprise segment.

I also just checked our career website and we are not hiring for most regions, there are some international roles available but nothing in the US. For privacy purposes I won't get more specific than that but I'll try to answer other questions that people have.

I overheard a few old fellas at the bar doing business. This is, word for word, what I heard:

"Jim, I got 10 tons of 6061 aluminum sitting in my warehouse. $400 per ton."

"Bit steep."

"$385 if you take it all tomorrow. Includes loading. Paperwork's one page."

"Done. Cash on delivery?"

"Yep. Been doing business this way for 30 years."

spits in palm, handshake

— end scene —

I was shocked. Is it really that easy? For context, I come from B2B SaaS, where we say things like, “Our revolutionary Al-powered cloud-native enterprise solution…”

I might be in the wrong industry?

I don’t have many people in my life I can share this with other than you guys so here goes.

Until now, I’ve mostly lurked this sub, but I am ecstatic to say that after a cycle that took 1 year, 4 months, and 4 days, I just closed my first 7 figure deal. $1.7 million dollars.

Looking at about 122k commission pre-tax. Frankly it’s life changing money for me and I haven’t fully processed it. But boys…it feels pretty damn good.

2 years ago, I was a BDR at a Vista SaaS company where I felt I had no impact and no autonomy. Fast forward to today and I am a bona fide Enterprise technology rep running full cycle deals like this one. While it’s still not what fulfills me in life, closing this today has renewed my belief that sticking it out in this game is well worth it.

AMA.

Has anyone else ever absolutely finessed a comp plan loophole before leadership patched it?

2025 was hands down one of my best years ever.

•	Cleared $300K+

•	Hit President’s Club

•	Basically became a “top performer” overnight

The funniest part?

I maybe worked 10 hours a week. Maximum.

My company has the dumbest ROE rule imaginable: if you log any form of contact with an account during the fiscal year, you get ROE credit.

So what did I do?

Early January I spent ONE day sending an email blast to literally every contact in our entire Salesforce database. Thousands. Absolute carpet bomb.

Then I just… sat back.

Throughout the year I magically ended up on four massive enterprise deals as a 50/50 split. Didn’t source them, didn’t run point, didn’t do anything meaningful.

Just showed up on the paperwork like:

“Yeah I touched that account 😌”

Now my team hates me, leadership is seething, but they can’t do a single thing because technically I played by their rules.

I punched my ticket to P-Club, I’m taking the trip, and then I’m bouncing to another org with:

President’s Club | $4m closed | Top Rep

on my resume like I’m some kind of sales god.

Anyone else have legendary loophole stories or am I just built different?

I used to think the coolest thing possible was to climb the corporate ladder and make the most money possible. Man, I was ready to sell my soul when I got out of college.

After almost a decade in sales I’ve realized there is nothing more lame than selling your time, personality, and energy to take the face of a corporation.

I see someone ask everyday on this sub, “how can I make 200k+?”

And look - making a metric shit ton of money is awesome. You can have an awesome life and an awesome paycheck.

But if you struggle to answer “what do you like to do outside of work?” you’ve completely missed the point of sales and all the BS we deal with in this profession. Please don’t sell the best years of your life. You have less time than you think.

Sit back, take a breath, go enjoy your money and have fun, be around the ones you care about. Then go close some deals. Repeat.

The most common objection for cold calling? ..... I'm Busy.

Sounds like many things at the start of the call -
"I cant talk right now"
"Can you call me back?"
"Can you send me an email?"

Over and over I hear reps fumble it - bad.

"Sure when is best to call back"
"Sorry I'll send an email over"
"My bad!"

It is the easiest objection to handle but I rarely see it done well.

Here is the only response you need.

"I know I caught you cold, can I level with you briefly to see if it even makes to follow up in the first place? "

It will move you forward 80% of the time. Keep in mind you will go into a short elevator pitch / current state question after this.

Good luck and happy calling sales anons.

My BDR died yesterday in a random, tragic accident. It shouldn’t have happened. He moved to my company a year ago to take a step back into a BDR role after being an AM at another tech company. He wanted to be an AE, and he eventually would have made it. He had a big family that he was close with, he was about to move across the country with his girlfriend that he was going to marry, he had a lot of good friends and everyone in the company really liked him.

Remembering that work and sales isn’t everything. Thinking about my loved ones a lot today, and how short life is. I love you, Charlie!

Posting this here because none of my friends work in sales, and I need to tell someone.

I'm in my 20s and sell into financial services. I just got a signed contract sitting pretty at slightly over $1.6m. Total size of the account is likely to grow into $2-3m over the next few years.

I went through hell to get here. From the SDR grind, constant dissapointment, missing targets, watching my peers succeed and do better than me while I felt worthless (with evidence and numbers to show how worthless I was). The only reason I haven't been fired was because I kept improving, slowly but steadily.

This deal itself took around 10 months, countless demos, several iterations of proposals, people joining and leaving the client's business, everything that could go wrong going wrong.

Never. Give. Up.

Tonight to celebrate, I'll be watching "Eyes Wide Shut" on my laptop.

Happy selling everyone!

I just turned 27 two weeks ago, and my paycheck just hit, putting me over $100k! I don’t want to tell my friends because I don’t want to come off as gloating, but I wanted to share this accomplishment with someone.

Hitting $100k has always been a goal of mine. After growing up in lower middle class, I knew I wanted to be able to provide more for my family than what was provided to me. I dropped out of college and struggled hard at times, but I never settled.

Don’t take the easy road—bet on yourself! It would have been easy for me to take a job at a factory and be content making $50k a year, but it’s worth it to push further!

I’m grateful I did what was uncomfortable and started a career in sales.

My wife passed away this year and recently I came back to work from bereavement leave.we were together for 10 years. My wife was my rock, she was the reason I got up every morning and put in at least 100 dials a day, she’s the reason I made presidents club, and now she’s gone.

I didn’t mind cold calling when she was alive, but ever since I got back to the job every time I try to dial my heart starts to race and I feel like I’m going to have panic attack. This has never happened to me in my 6 years of sales. I’m not sure what to do and at this point I just want to quit sales and pursue a less stressful career so I can just focus on recovering from her death.

I don’t know what to do fellow sales pros, I could use a hand.

Today I was not in the mood for cold calling, so I was shuffling through accounts and selecting the ones I was pretty confident they wouldn't pick up so I could at least show some activity for the day.

Was going great until one I was 100% confident wouldn't pick up.... actually answered. Didn't even look at his title or the company info before calling. Here's how the call went:

Them: Hello?
Me: Oh hey.... is this Joe?
Joe: Yes, who is this?
Me: This is ___ with ____....... (awkward silence).... ummmm I'm going to be completely honest I was not expecting you to pick up and this is a cold call and I don't even know if you guys even work with people like us.
Joe: *actually laughs* ok well what do you guys do?
Me: *gives the schpeel*... is any of that relevant to you guys?
Joe: Actually yes, and we are about to start evaluating vendors. Can you send me an email with more info?

IM SORRY WHAT

Joe ended up looping 4 people into our email convo and sending over an NDA so we can have an official meeting. Joe is a homie. Joe is getting a massive discount if this works out.

We hired a new junior hybrid AE + lead gen rep (25F) from college 5 months ago

Since then she's generated 0 qualified meetings or sales.

In the last 1 month she set up a meetung with me and a 'junior shopkeeper' of a retail account. Our target personas are supposed to be CFOs....

She has no exp and clearly isn't committed to learning as she ignores advice given to her by me and enablement manager. At times she will walk out of the room during call reviews and say I am "being too much".

I've wanted her out of the org so we can get a more experienced rep. But my VP (45M) always defends her saying "the economy is tough and we need to create a culture of cultivating. Not hire and fire".

The other night, I saw my VP and new junior rep at a hotel bar. She had her legs cross his and the VP had his hands on her knees.

It lines up with rumours I heard about the VP buying tickets to an industry conference in Dubai where only him and the junior rep went to "do some prospecting".

Is this a battle worth fighting or should i start looking for new jobs?

Some may agree with me in this or not. However, when it comes to sales. Let’s just say, I’m tough and I want results, not excuses. I’ve got hookers to pay.

Unfortunately, this quarter we don’t have as much leads. Also, my lead salesman is going through a divorce. I asked him why, and he said one of his leads, turned out sour.

I asked for more details during happy hour. Turns out, that this moron invited an executive of a big company to his home. They both got too drunk and that lead banged his wife. He started crying and said he was so ashamed.

“But did you close the deal?” I asked. He said no. I slapped him.

I then went and called his lead, went to his apartment, and had him bang my wife. I even gave the lead a “ZJ”. I closed the deal. 2000 custom branded duffle bags sold.

Some people just don’t have what it takes to be a true salesman.

Sr. Enterprise AE at a tech startup. Have been trying to get a foot in the door with a prospect who's a picture-perfect ICP, their contract with another vendor was up for renewal, and potentially a deal north of 2 million that's very feasible within two quarters.

Finally scheduled an intro call with our prospect, told my VP (mistake #1). He insisted on joining.

2 minutes into the call he cracks a joke about my small penis which I'm already very insecure about. Something akin to "Before we dive into the details, I just have to say, I didn't realize we'd be bringing in the company's baby carrot today. I mean just look at that shine... must be a sign of good things to cum!" Yes, he was referencing my small penis.

Never in my sales career have I heard something like this, let alone from a boss. Call ended up being awful and that legitimately could cost me tons of commissions... also, he's a total boomer so I know he doesn't go on Reddit...

Not here to flex or shit on anyone. I fucking love this subreddit and don’t have many people I’d be willing to share this with. Just got comped out at 55k for a commission check.

Borderline in a manic/ crying state over this. I joined this sub in 2020 during covid. I was making 28k a year doing security, and cold called for a shitty B2B security sales job off of advice from people here. Went to 60k a year then got a SDR job and grinded like a mf at 70k OTE and got promoted to AE with 100k. This was a great quarter for me and I got a commission payout north of 55k.

I know its cliche but drink the juice here, Ive had ups and downs but people are so supportive here.

Selling in this market is hard. There is light at the end of the tunnel my friends.

Long story short, I’m burnt out.

Mentally, emotionally, and physically; I’m out of gas. I’ve spent the last 10+ years joining early stage startups as an AE, carrying $1-2M quotas, and luckily doing well most years but it was hard.

Constant stress, relentless competition, trips around the country and world to move a deal down funnel, increased quotas, new leadership every year, comp plan changes, etc.

But… career-defining and wealth-generating deals (Eg multiple $250k+ commission checks accompanying a $100-$165k/y salary).

Since ~2012, I’ve amassed ~$2M that I’ve saved or invested so I’m finally at the point where I can take my foot off the gas and be present with my newborn.

Not working is incredible. I’m sleeping better, I stopped drinking, I exercise 4x/week, have cut meat out of my diet, and I’m the most emotionally available and present I’ve ever been for my family.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, brothers and sisters in sales. Just make sure you’re selling something that can consistently get you annual commissions of at least $100k. If not, you need to find a place with larger deals or better profit margins (preferably both).

***Update - who knew eating less meat would be such a hot take! LOL***

No one else really appreciates the peaks and valleys like other salespeople.

$546,000

7x the average deal size for our market.

(EDIT)

Thanks for all the responses. I added a comment in the thread that went into the deal structure.

Guys idek how but here I sit on the last day of April having sold $346k in residential HVAC.

Sold in this case = signed revenue. All of it has either been approved for financing or 50% deposit taken already. 60%+ of it is already paid in full with job complete.

I started on Feb 10th this year. Zero HVAC experience. I was calling my oil boiler a furnace. (What an idiot)

Previously, I was in tech for 8 years as an engineer, prod manager, SDR, account exec, and then national (and only account exec).

I quit because I was bored and knew I was wasting potential… working remote and selling to government product they didn’t give a single fuck about.

In one month I’d typically make $7-8.5k at old job.

This month I made $34.6k and it’s honestly just silly.

The last year I’ve been saying, if I can sell well, why not sell something people NEED and a product that’s expensive.

HVAC is the answer.

Of course SOOOO many variables.

Team size, territory, quality of my install team (A+), etc etc.

All I can think is god damnit did I waste so much time being loyal to bullshit. I was brainwashed on the mission and being employee number 1 with equity.

What a fool I was.

Yes this sounds like a shit post. Sorry - I don’t know how else to explain lol. I stepped in golden shit with this job

Stop selling “wants”. Sell “needs”