The End of Year Burn
I hope your holidays have been both festive and profitable! The end of year can be sweet relief once you have made goal and you can sit…
I hope your holidays have been both festive and profitable! The end of year can be sweet relief once you have made goal and you can sit back and take some much needed downtime. But maybe you missed goal and got “burned” on some deals.
Because of the risk of getting burned, enterprise sales is a continuous effort. The 2019 sales year already started for top reps back in 2018, prospecting and establishing relationships to build a solid pipeline for the following year. They have enough deals to avoid surprises.
That is not the burn I am talking about though. I want to talk about another type of burn. It is burnout, the mental, emotional and physical manifestation of the stress and work and wide swings of highs and lows when selling. When selling is a continuous effort, burnout is very real and very common, even if we do not openly talk about it.
So let me share my own experience with burnout and what I faced this year. As you may have noticed, there has not been an ESF newsletter for a few months now. Some of you wondered whether the Enterprise Sales Forum still exists (it does, all is good there).
While many of you know me as the person behind the Enterprise Sales Forum, I also have a day job doing enterprise sales for Stack Overflow. It is a wonderful company and role, one which I have been doing for over two years now, helping to launch a completely new product and line of business.
This was a “startup” in a much more mature and established (and profitable) startup. So while it was not starting from nothing per se, it still entailed a lot of discovery and research and learning over the first year. It required recalibrating my approach to prospecting, something that I discussed in a post called “The Prospecting Manifesto”.
My second year involved scaling and expanding the market. We understood clearly our optimal company and persona profile as well as the messaging and motivations, enabling us to sign up customers in a more predictable manner. This gave us the comfort to expand the sales team from two to nine reps across North America and EMEA. It also afforded me the opportunity to explore the markets in APAC, which I shared in my post “Opening Up New Markets”.
As the business at Stack Overflow was accelerating, I was also making some adjustments in the Enterprise Sales Forum. I bought on a partner to help manage the organization and also hired someone to handle operations. This allowed the chapters to be more self-sufficient while also allowing me to see what was working and not working. This led to mothballing some chapters so we could better focus our efforts where we were having success.
The Enterprise Sales Forum is on healthy footing for 2019. We are looking forward to celebrating our 5th year of existence this coming August and reopening some of the prior chapters as well as expanding to new cities in North America and globally.
With all that was going on this year however, I failed to realize the stress that I inflicted on myself. It is not something you even want to acknowledge because it feels like weakness, especially when your whole professional image is built on success.
For all the positive news I publicly shared, there is much that is hidden away. You do not see the deals that were lost, the chapters that capitulated, the last minute ESF event foibles, the shattered relationships, the sponsors that got shafted. If the highlights are a ten minute video, the blooper reel would be a ten hour mini-series.
What you do not realize when you are experiencing burnout is your propensity to make epic mistakes. This can explain why some leaders make the most baffling decisions. The mental fatigue emboldens you towards stupidity, like a meeting I had with a senior banking IT leader in Singapore where I pretty much bumbled through the entire 30 minutes. I had an out of body experience looking down at myself making every terrible mistake you can possibly make. That was just one of many embarrassing screw-ups during the year.
Your best efforts simply do not matter when you are operating at half-speed. That is what I realized in August as I was on a family trip in Thailand, but still working. But I was not really working as my brain was completely fried from lack of sleep and exercise.
Looking out at the beach one evening, I cracked. Nothing dramatic, other than yelling “Fuck this shit” towards the sea. I decided to stop working on Enterprise Sales Forum stuff, so I paused the newsletter, stopped attending events and planning calls, and avoided any discussions over email or our Slack channel. It was the only option I had in order to keep my sanity.
Even with the lightened load, the past few months have been difficult. Even with the wins, there was little enjoyment. Deals that closed felt more like relief than excitement. Prospecting felt like a grind. Everything moved in slow motion, even as my travel this past quarter vastly increased. I woke up one night not knowing where I was for several minutes before coming to my senses and realizing I was in Toronto.
I am glad that I had downtime this past week. I did nothing, at least work-wise. I cooked. I walked around my neighborhood. I got back to the gym. I did not step on a plane. And I took some time to reflect on the year and how to avoid the burnout heading into 2019.
Aren’t stock photos great?
Like an athlete, it is important to establish pace and focus. I did not do either every effectively last year, but then again the circumstances dictated more of a sprint than a marathon pace. What is different this coming year is I have more people that can help and I have a much more focused set of objectives for Stack and the ESF.
More importantly, I am taking care of myself. I am not a meditation guy, but I will take more breaks in the day to decompress and refocus. Using things like the Pomodoro Technique can help introduce regular pauses in the workday. I am also monitoring my health, something that my friend Tony Hughes is doing after a recent health scare also due to the stresses of constant work and business travel.
Do not do what I did which is let stress build up for months and ignore the signs. There is nothing heroic in damaging your health and long-term goals by sacrificing for short-term gains.
If you are feeling stressed because of work, do not be ashamed! Everyone gets stressed and everyone needs rest. Your mental, emotional, and physical health is at stake. Talk to someone you trust, seek professional help, give yourself some space away from work to heal and re-energize. Take care of you first so that you can be ready to take care of the work ahead.
If this essay resonates with you, if you want to talk, I invite you to reach out to me or others in the ESF leadership team and share your story. And if you know others that can benefit from this essay, please forward to them. The ESF is a community and we are all in this together.
Take care, rest up, and may you have an awesome 2019!
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