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CEO Insight

What An MBA Didn’t Teach You About Sales

The sales profession is challenging. You need to work hard at it to succeed. You need to learn from the best. You need to improve your skills continuously. If you think you can sell since you are a hit at parties and have a lot of friends, you may soon find that you are a failure as a salesperson. Blunt truth:

because the sales profession is so hard, you have to focus on doing everything in sales very well, or you will be considered a failure.

I call this blog, Skinned Knees because I try to relate all of the learning that I have done over the past 4+ decades (while skinning my knees in the learning process).

I hope that you learn from my mistakes so that your business will grow!


CEO Insight podcast: Sean O’Shaughnessey, CEO of New Sales Expert, LLC

The following is a transcript of the podcast video above. It has been sparsely edited to increase its readability, but many of the idioms and poor spoken grammar have been left in place. The transcription was automatically generated by Sonix.ai and, as capable as that product is, there are times when words are missed, or sentence structure was incorrectly interpreted. We have tried to catch all of these software misses, but we are confident that some still remain. The below text is provided for those that would rather read than watch a video.

Earl Ameen: [00:00:00] This is Earl Ameen, with a 20/20 Foresight podcast, where CEOs of small-to-global companies share their insights. It is six questions in nine minutes because top CEOs know how to listen and be concise. So let’s get to it. First of all, welcome. Tell us who you are and what you do in just a few sentences.

Sean O’Shaughnessey: [00:00:22] My name is Sean O’Shaughnessey. Thank you very much for having me on your program. I am a Fractional Vice President of Sales. My company goes into other companies, and we run the sales department for those other companies. We help them grow, we help them accelerate their revenue, and we help them create a process that makes predictable revenue possible.

Earl Ameen: [00:00:45] Outstanding. Well, tell me, Sean, what’s the best thing about being the CEO of your company?

Sean O’Shaughnessey: [00:00:51] So for me, the best thing about being the CEO is actually not just being a CEO, but actually giving back and allowing myself to help other companies. So, I am in the service industry. As I said, I’m a Fractional VP of sales. I like having the ability to take a company that is struggling to make its revenue targets and help them achieve those revenue targets. I can help them become a prosperous, sales-oriented culture. So, I love doing that for other companies and doing it for multiple companies at the same time.

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