The new year always sneaks up you, right!?!?!
Some years I’m super dialed in and have a bunch of goals and plans made months in advance.
Some years there’s no plan. Just keep on livin’.
Both are fine! Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have a bunch of goals and whatnot.
If you are trying trying level up in your professional life in 2025, you probably fall into one of two camps…
staying where you are but making more money
leaving for greener pastures
If you’re staying put, but looking to get more, my best advice is to build a robust business case to support your ask.
If you’re working for a promotion and you know the job description for that role, build a deck with a slide for each bullet under qualifications and requirements on the job description.
Provide proof showing that you’re already hitting those requirements.
One thing I like to do is to keep a highlights folder in Notion with screen grabs of every shoutout in Slack, glowing client email, even call snippets where people are talking about how great my work is.
Include them in your business case.
I recently got a promotion, and it was in part due to the business case I presented with all those receipts showing I was already performing at the level necessary for the promotion.
With sales a lot of it will come down to numbers, but you can also highlight…
deals you closed above your segment
deals you helped close for others
instances where you mentored and helped train new reps
best practices you established that the rest of the team adopted
any initiatives and experiments outside of your team that you had a part in
and more along these lines
It’s a chance to show them that you’re not just another rep.
Also, do a Google search for “(exact job title) salary” and see what comes up.
Take some screen grabs of those salary ranges and include them in the deck. On the last slide, provide three compensation scenarios bassed on the salary ranges you found in your research.
Sort of a high, medium, low.
It’s always worth a shot, and I’m a firm believer that you should always try to get more out of your employer, because they’re always going to try to do the same to you.
@dankow.ski "If you’re a hustler, you should find somewhere to capitalize off that and turn it into some money." Nipsey Hussle “What’s worth doing is ... See more
“What’s worth doing is worth doing for money.”
"If you’re a hustler, you should find somewhere to capitalize off that and turn it into some money."
If you’re looking to go work someplace else, now is a great chance for you to really narrow in on where you should be looking.
A framework you should use goes like this:
Determine your preferred company funding type:
- PE Backed - They want fast results and will have a heightened focus on performance. Structured growth and career advancement opportunities.
- Bootstrapped - Stability and a close-knit culture. Slow growth and limited resources.
- VC Backed - High growth. Career acceleration. Uncertainty and frequent pivots.
- Public - Clear career path. Market recognition. Lots of bureaucracy and little personal influence.
Determine the best size for you:
- Small - greater influence and potential for career growth. Unstructured. Lower base salary
- Large - clear career path and loads of resources. Not a lot of flexibility or opportunities to make an individual impact.
- Mid - Balance of structure and flexibility with some growing pains and pivots
Decide what buyer persona you want to sell to:
- B2C - transactional. Price sensitive.
- Finance/Accounting - risk averse
- HR - tight budgets and attached to old systems
- IT/Security - skeptical of sales. Long evaluation periods
- Legal - cautious, detail oriented, really concerned with compliance
- Marketing - demand fast results and need to integrate with existing stack
- Sales - won’t tolerate a steep learning curve. Already juggling too many tools
Is this rundown exhaustive? No, but it should get you started in the right direction.
Ideally you’ll be able to come up with something like “My ideal employer is a Mid-Sized Publicly funded company that sells to HR”.
Once you have that you’re a big step closer to finding your next great opportunity in sales.
At any rate, best of luck in 2025! We’ll be in touch.
Looking to level up your career in 2025?
Want to:
avoid picking a shitty company
make more money
move into enterprise sales
move into leadership
make the BDR to AE jump
I’ve got you!
In addition to the course, my coaching and consulting calendar is always open:
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