The Deal Director
@thedealdirector
Followers
3,240
Following
70
Media
1,899
Statuses
11,843
Cloud Infrastructure Software • Enterprise AI • Cybersecurity • Sales Community (start here):
Joined January 2023
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
FEMA
• 1602165 Tweets
Joker
• 180765 Tweets
Grammys
• 154376 Tweets
1005 CHEERS TO XIAO ZHAN
• 143896 Tweets
Mayorkas
• 138649 Tweets
Mancuso
• 111923 Tweets
Record of the Year
• 89629 Tweets
Best Record
• 87656 Tweets
Ülke
• 67130 Tweets
Pogba
• 66451 Tweets
Fatih
• 60691 Tweets
Uyuşturucu
• 55857 Tweets
#turkishwomenareindanger
• 51375 Tweets
Valencia
• 34917 Tweets
Marseille
• 27839 Tweets
#ikbaluzuner
• 23345 Tweets
Jamie Dimon
• 21426 Tweets
Semih Çelik
• 19984 Tweets
Celtics
• 19138 Tweets
Dolly
• 18942 Tweets
Angers
• 15490 Tweets
Leeds
• 12621 Tweets
Greenwood
• 10644 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
TECH SALES has now launched.
It's been 18 months since I first started sharing my views on the industry and the role that sales teams play in it on X.
It's been a rollercoaster, to say the least. As quota attainment plummeted and layoffs kept hitting across the industry, many
2
1
34
@randomrecruiter
You can’t have the highs (keeping your job) without the lows (using Windows on daily basis).
8
25
1K
@KateKozuch
This is a good bear market bottom indicator.
Minimum wage staff forced to clap after a customer bought a launch item.
17
14
399
What most guys under 30 really struggle with is understanding that it takes a while for you to reach high levels of success in multiple parts of your life.
Tech sales W2, side hustles, properties, cars, being very fit, expensive hobbies, style, dating success, family life,
10
25
264
@PaulSkallas
This man was born to be an Enterprise Sales Rep closing the biggest deals of his company.
For the time being he has settled with gators and Lana.
2
2
182
Once you realize that most SaaS products are glorified database and infra wrappers, you will understand why sales execution is the real moat.
11
4
95
There is an Oracle sales rep out there who is currently updating a $10 billion TCV deal to Closed-Lost.
Thoughts and prayers in this difficult time.
Called it.
Oracle's largest GenAI customer will be an open-source LLM that doesn't have the cash to actually pay for the deal.
Imagine the discount Musk got.
0
0
4
8
2
93
There are a lot of excuses why you are not progressing towards getting the tech sales role that you want.
Less excuses, more bias for action. "My CV is not good enough" is not a valid excuse.
10
8
86
@EthanEvansVP
“Here is what getting my wife seduced by my CEO thought me about B2B sales…
Like and subscribe!”
3
0
86
Your success in tech sales is ultimately correlated to your ability to take pain and stress.
Flaky and rude customers.
Incompetent teammates.
Slow progress on anything meaningful.
Pushy leaders who keep asking for more without giving back.
Yet you…
Keep…
Going…
9
4
80
Every top performer has a moment of clarity.
In order for you to win consistently in tech sales, you need to stop thinking of it as a job.
It's a lifestyle and you need to optimise your day for it.
Once that clicks, its very difficult to come back to any other way of working.
6
4
74
Enterprise tech sales rep after switching to the third competitor in the same niche.
2
2
67
@dvassallo
Well besides the ego boost, the hope is that they’ll barter it for a higher pay check in their next company.
Whether that’s worth it over cold hard cash is a different topic 🦁
4
1
65
This is what early retirement from tech sales looks like.
Except that ideally you'll do it within 10-15 years rather than 30.
Pay attention to the last part - building such a network that afterwards you can keep doing interesting work whenever and however you want.
5
2
63
@mattjay
It’s probably a joke but a connected app mattress is a good way for somebody to learn extra info about you besides sleep patterns.
“We noticed strange activity on our Corpo IoT mattress while your wife was on a work trip. Would you like to subscribe to Privacy Ultra package?”
0
5
65
“Tech sales is an easy game, it only took me 5 companies, 2 layoffs and 1 PIP to get to Enterprise.”
Mitch, 47
4
2
62
@PaulSkallas
The euro lifestyle done right is really reserved today for the elite of earners.
Mostly in tech sales, manufacturing, own businesses.
1
0
61
Filing taxes with my wife.
“I can’t believe you made 5x my income last year. I know you are smarter than me but not 5x smarter.”
Welcome to the land of opportunity.
We call it tech sales.
2
2
60
Signs of a rookie tech sales rep:
-Thinking that product and marketing have figured out the right positioning and pitch.
-Thinking that the quality of the product alone will lead to an outcome.
-Thinking the goal is sell the deal.
-Not wanting to go out and develop a public
5
1
60
18 months ago we barely had a few people willing to discuss big leagues tech sales on this app.
High ticket, yes, generic sales process, yes, ecomm, yes, sales motivation pr0n, yes.
But actual complex tech sales cycles, the quota attainment recession, cloud infrastructure
10
6
56
Sales anon, rate this cold email.
1. 19yo Harvard Econ student Wesley Wang spends 2+ years on a short film
2. Posts the 12-min video on YouTube in Sept
3. Darren Aronofsky watches it in Oct and emails him “watched your film, can you drop out of Harvard?”
4. TriStar buy rights and Wang will adapt for big screen
75
855
10K
7
5
56
Databricks is expecting to finish the year at 60% YoY growth or $2.4bln ARR.
They also have one of the strongest GenAI plays in the industry.
I'm just leaving it out there.
4
4
55
Enterprise tech sales is all about the team performance.
Most of you are not ready to accept this because you have this concept in your mind of the LONE WOLF REP KILLING IT.
I have bad news for you, lonely sales anon.
The reality is that an exceptional rep surrounded by an
5
3
52
The majority of sales training oversimplifies the experience of being a sales rep and the skills/behaviours required for success.
So you get taught a process and some tactics. Then you go and apply it in the field, with the hope that it will bring some results.
When it comes
9
5
51
He is not going to get fired, he is just on a performance improvement plan that helps him work with his manager on identifying things he can do better.
It's really a success plan, if I'm honest!
6
3
47
Kyle literally spelled it out for you:
- If you want to develop in sales, you need a high growth company.
- Growing companies will often be chaotic.
- The best way to monetise the opportunity is to stay for prolonged stretches and evolve as the company evolves.
Long term goals.
Tech sales is a brutal career.
Even more so when you feel like you don't know how to successfully shape (and accelerate) your career.
I've had a good run so far, but my most valuable lessons have been earned through the most painful periods.
This short video breaks down the
8
3
65
3
3
44
This is how tech sales reps looked like before remote work took over.
8
3
46
Tech sales reps during customer calls when they hear:
"There is an additional budget than what we discussed before and we would like to spend it now".
1
1
45
No sales engineer
No marketing content
No existing customers
Just you, whitespace that nobody has tried talking to, a grind mindset, and your desire to win
4
1
45
STATE OF THE SALES ANON UNION 2024
260k+ tech layoffs + many "PIP and Exit", companies experienced significant growth deceleration which led to low OTE attainment, benefits were cut for profitability, equity was worth pennies.
This was the tech industry, so how did the sales
8
6
42
Mr. Goodman is the hero tech sales didn't know it needs but it deservers.
3
2
43
@Carnage4Life
The funny thing is that most of those winners stayed in a place and built for 5+ years.
Many will never get there purely due to lack of patience and ability to understand the opportunity.
2
4
42
While you've been slacking off on exercising, we have a tech sales rep working for Abnormal Security winning bronze medals at the Olympics.
And no, I don't think they'll put her on a PIP for missing out on the quarter.
5
3
42
That’s because they get paid on showing metrics not outcomes.
Then they game the metrics since they are the one that report on them.
It’s the equivalent of reps signing their own order forms and invoicing a fake email address.
Most are not brave enough to say it.
I refuse to believe anyone employed in a b2b software company's marketing team have any idea what drives conversion
6
3
46
8
3
42
I never thought tech sales will become a prominent part of this election.
2
1
41
Working from home and being in SaaS sales can often get…contrasty.
Today I spent an hour in a deep negotiation strategy call for a 10M ARR customer.
Then I went outside to throw away two large bags full of poop diapers.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
4
2
41
A long look in the mirror before dialling in your VP to tell him that your only deal for the quarter just slipped because they actually didn’t have any budget.
5
1
40
Once you understand that the majority of tech companies simply follow THE RULE OF 40 as their corporate strategy, then it becomes obvious that there are really only 3 type of companies:
High growth (50%) and negative profit margin (-10%)
Moderate growth (20%) and moderate
6
5
41
This is an entertaining bear case for GenAI which has a lot of data but completely misses the point. This is a bit of a long response but worth the read, sales anon.
The rough outline is - we are not seeing growth in semiconductors so there is no growth in GenAI related hardware
The semiconductor industry is screaming at us that AI is all hype. Yes, lots of orders for H100 GPUs, but even an AI datacenter still needs CPUs, memory, and HDs. Then you have AI implementation, such as in computer vision and controls, robotics, etc, which require specialized
337
837
4K
7
5
38
Average Enterprise Account Rep with her Sales Engineer during SKO's Gala Dinner event.
1
1
40
Sometimes it takes one session with sales enablement to turn you bearish on your company’s GTM vision.
4
0
40
Hardest part of the tech sales game is the cycle of 4 and 5.
Giving everything you have to close the whale, only to have to do it all over immediately afterwards or risk a PIP.
3
3
39
I miss the old tech sales, the big ticket deal sales.
I hate the new tech sales, the cloud optimization sales.
The always rude customers, outage in the news sales.
I miss the sweet IPOs, the easy new business sales.
The pre-layoffs tech sales, the golden bull run sales.
8
2
37
Enterprise Account rep after signing a big ticket digital transformation with a new customer that he knows will fail implementation but he is already interviewing for the next gig.
3
1
38
The dark side of tech sales layoffs is not just that they keep happening but that many companies completely fumble how they do them.
Cisco announced a 7% layoff two weeks ago but would only actually inform the impacted employees in a month.
So everybody just...gave up.
5
1
36
The Cloudflare SDRs are definitely not playing around when trying to get that upsell meeting.
5
1
36
The dumbest thing I heard in a sales cycle this week is that a big four consultancy is advising a large legacy institution to BUILD NOT BUY.
We are literally in a bear market and you can get deep discounting + fixed price for many years, while the top vendors are about to
10
1
36
Once you see how many senior sales leadership hires are literally just dragging along from company to company because of one guy that can sell himself well as a C-level.
It's difficult to unsee it.
"Merit based hiring" is definitely not the default after a certain point.
5
5
37
Cold calling in tech sales for non-essential tools, circa late H1 2024.
5
3
37
Most tech sales training is too influenced by the mental model of a “rational buyer” and not enough by the practical reality of the “foolish, emotional and ignorant buyer”.
Most of the time you can’t even say this outloud because it’s “disrespectful towards the customer”.
5
2
36
"Tech sales is a demanding job but I loved every minute of it. Even the layoffs give me a push to continue growing! Open to work!"
John, 29, SDR, ex-Okta, ex-New Relic, ex-Splunk
2
2
34
@aakashg0
Tbh you have a lot of the "old guard" who are extremely negative on GenAI and this attitude is carrying over in their work.
The end users want to tell the thing to do the thing.
If that works, there is a whole world of computing power utilisation that was hidden before.
5
4
36
Who does this remind me of...
If a LinkedIn profile says someone was there for 12 months, it’s really closer to 9-10 months (assuming they are being accurate with the dates - and many aren’t!)
3x 12 month stints?
Probably closer to 3x 8 month stints
4
0
26
14
1
36
Seat-based businesses are getting pummelled.
Tech sales in 2024 is about consumption growth with customers that already have valuable workloads, not hoping for a magical white space full of million of seats to sign.
$OKTA - % of Team Quota Attainment vs YoY Revenue Growth
Quota Attainment in Fiscal Q125 is down 25.7% YoY
3
0
7
2
2
35
Why tech sales anons are the future of VC.
There are several main ideas that this account advocates for:
1. Computing power is the most important resource in the world together with oil.
2. Cloud infrastructure software is the closest to a high yield beta to computing power
4
6
35
This is what sales leadership needs to demonstrate when we talk about "improved productivity".
4
1
34
@buccocapital
Most ransomware orgs at this stage are just tech sales orgs with a shady product.
1
1
34
Average tech sales reps want to be left alone.
Good tech sales reps want to lead.
Great tech sales reps want to know the truth.
4
1
34
This is your weekly reminder that LinkedIn counts any click on a job posting as an "applicant".
It's the same way that marketing "generates" 1000 MQLs, but then at the end you end up with 3 SQLs.
6
0
33
@levelsio
The real move is a mixture of different local LLMs and subscriptions to Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT and your preferred coding companion like (Gemini sucks right now).
Barely costs 80 bucks or so per month for infinite value that gets better every few months.
2
1
34
When people ask me what my long-term goals are in tech sales, I always mention that I'm putting money aside to acquire brick and mortar businesses/physical assets.
This is a bit surprising to everybody since they see tech sales as a constant progression to the next big thing.
3
1
33
Tech sales rep and sales engineer trying to convince a decision maker with a custom demo.
2
2
33
The implications of founder mode for tech sales are significant.
2024 has been a strange year. It's a bit difficult to pinpoint the precise "big event that led to X". It's been more of a slow accumulation of many factors that is driving cultural change in tech.
Founders are
3
3
33
How does one hire sales reps for a Series A startup in the year 2024 and none of them have done any outbound or can do it?
Asking for a fren.
12
0
33
Whether or not it gives techies an aneurysm, the reality is that GenAI is now the new industry name that B2B customers associate with ML implementations at a scale.
Your average 55 year old CEO approving a 47 year old CTO's budget doesn't care about the technology. They care
Let’s be very clear what we are talking about here. I think you are mixing machine learning driven process optimization with generative AI. The former has been around for a very long time and has clear value add to businesses. Optimization is obviously good.
That has nothing
22
11
171
5
3
33
What most don't understand is that cybersecurity is quickly becoming a mandatory investment for any company that has something material to lose in the case a breach.
The reality is that there is insufficient capacity and capability to serve the actual TAM.
What happens next?
7
4
32
@randomrecruiter
We are just reverting to the mean - tech companies in the cloud infrastructure space are prioritising remote-first culture, while everybody else is scaling back to what they know best (office politics and water cooler dad jokes).
2
1
32
The only failure in your early stage tech sales career is inaction.
Take the risky startup gig, pitch the VP on your promo, challenge that prospect, close the big ticket deal nobody believed in.
It's all trial and error that will bring you one step closer towards success.
2
3
32
Deal Confession is now The Deal Director!
Sales anon, it's been 8 months since I launched this account to help build and scale the SaaS Sales Twitter (X) community.
I think that we all agree that it's a difficult time in the tech industry and actionable info that helps you get
9
2
31
We need a tech sales referral board. Where sales reps and SDRs on here can refer others for the please of building a winners network.
We need a referral board. Where software engineers on here can refer other software engineers for $1k, $2k, $5k bribes
3
0
29
3
0
31
Sales anon, you know what to do with this information.
6
1
32
"TDD, why do you keep talking about how tech sales reps in the cloud infrastructure space should have a point of view and deeper understanding of the technology they sell?"
Because sooner or later you'll end up in a meeting where run queue latency is discussed and you'll not
6
4
32
Survive long enough as a tech sales leader and all your proteges will end up competing against you.
7
4
32
If they are rushing you to get pricing and refuse to get on a phone about it, time to progress the opportunity to CLOSED LOST.
Most struggle with this immensely.
Pricing, deal terms and proposals are NOT for inbox.
They're for the phone.
So instead of shooting an email pick up the phone and follow up with :
0
0
13
2
2
30
Charts that make me upset.
Software IPO in 2024
-when are they coming?
-is $500M of revenue required?
2
2
9
6
4
31
August ended up with 26k layoffs in tech companies.
September is close to matching that already.
2024 is about to get shaky towards the end.
5
4
31
The reason why bias for action is one of the most critical tech sales skills is simple - you need to do things in order to obtain information.
Whether you can actually utilise this information in a way that helps you perform is the difference between a PIP and President's Club.
3
1
31
One of the biggest mental jumps in tech sales happens when you stop thinking about what things are called and instead focus on what they do.
“We already have X.”
“Okay, but does it achieve this and that?”
“Erm, no.”
“Then we should probably focus on the outcome, not the name.”
2
5
31
Ya’ll get 1 year of slight layoffs and OTE pullback after 10 YEARS of tech bull market and suddenly everybody is scared and not making any money.
I bullieve the best is yet to come for any tech seller who is touching the creation, deployment and utilisation of computing power.
3
1
31
You need to believe in the technology you are selling.
You need to work for leaders you respect and to be able to trust their judgement.
You need to work with a team that you like working with and makes you better.
If one or more is missing and is not fixable soon - move on.
6
2
30
The IBM strategic account rep pulling in for QBR.
3
3
31
Pricing remains one of your best ways to prevent people from stealing your most important asset - time.
Early on there should be a conversation about indicative pricing. Give them a range of what “typical projects of this scope and your customer size buy”.
One you get to the
I've found many reps dodge pricing questions early in fear of sabotaging negotiation later.
Avoiding the topic is a waste of everyone's time.
Stop making pricing a drawn-out mystery.
7
1
32
3
2
29
This account will not give financial advice.
This is your Christmas day reminder that OF girls and Dubai rented cars is not the way forward.
3
2
28
Don't forget sales anon, soon they'll all be looking for a man in tech sales.
If you learn how to sell cloud infrastructure software that is.
0
3
29
When she grabs your phone from your hand to see what you are staring at so intently.
Nothing babe, just counting the days until liquidity is back to buy my software.
0
1
29
There is a change in the air.
Top performers want to get into the details.
Connect in person.
Drive change trough their bias for action.
Can you feel it, sales anon?
Had yet another call yesterday with a killer sales rep
"I can't stand it. I NEED to be back in an office and meeting with customers"
This is not the party line
But it is a more common sentiment than you might think
5
1
18
5
2
30
This tech sales rep spent months prospecting and building relationships.
Sold 80% of quota.
Last deal got delayed because the champion literally died.
I put him on a PIP for missing target.
Life is hard, he took it well.
This kid saved up all week for an ice cream.
Spent $5.
Dropped it after the 5th lick.
I didn’t buy him another one.
Life is hard, he took it well.
20K
3K
93K
2
1
30