I walked into a small SAP consultancy with no sales experience and no SAP experience. Ten years later I was its Chief Sales Officer, and the firm had grown from $8M to roughly $50M in revenue and from about 40 people to more than 500.

Nobody handed me a playbook. There was no sales function when I started, so I built one: the process, the qualification standard, the compensation plans, the territory models, the forecast cadence, the CRM and the reporting underneath it, the partner ecosystem, and the marketing that fed the pipeline. Then I hired the people who ran inside it and coached them every week.

I also carried my own number the whole way, $6M inside a team target of $25M, and we hit or beat both in seven of ten years. I mention that because it matters when someone tells you how to sell. I never stopped doing the thing I was asking other people to do.

My clients were Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences, Moderna, United Therapeutics, Bausch Health, Camber Pharmaceuticals, and Hollister on the life sciences side, and Eastman Chemical, Rust-Oleum, Ecolab, Milliken, and Composites One on the industrial side. Long cycles, real procurement, regulated environments, and buying committees that spanned IT, operations, quality, and finance.

Before that I spent six years in the U.S. Army as a Psychological Operations Non-Commissioned Officer, including a deployment to Afghanistan. That is where I learned to stay steady when things are not going well, and to say the true thing plainly.