Who Is Scott Silverback?

Why should you or anyone else in sales listen to me?

If you’re on an uninterrupted trajectory toward success, maybe you shouldn’t. You may not need any of the insights I provide. I wouldn’t want anything I say to throw you off course, provided you’re already on a good one.

Myself, I’ve been around the block a few times. And it hasn’t always been an easy stroll.

I’ve been in sales and marketing for 30 years. About 10 of those years were in business-to-business marketing for a Fortune 100 company. The balance of that time has been spent in sales.

Insights from a ‘Checkered Past’

Since I began selling 20 years ago I’ve worked mostly for small companies in the software industry. But I’ve also worked for the largest.

I’ve known both the extreme highs and the extreme lows of a sales career. I’ve worked for great companies and terrible ones, for great managers and jerks.

Pretty Good Performance for a Guy Who Can’t Seem to Hold a Job

I’ve sold more than $200 million in software and services in just five years. My deals in those days ranged in size from about $750,000 to about $14 million. I landed 90% of them after the Y2K feeding frenzy that energized my entire industry.

I sold all that software to companies with annual revenue ranging from $1 billion to about $40 billion.

I know how to close big, complex deals with big, complex organizations.

It hasn’t been smooth sailing or a straight course.

From One Extreme to Another

Initially I wanted to be a writer or an artist.  In college I studied architecture, painting, English and French.

My poor, patient parents.

Unlikely Sales Profile

You might say I wasn’t born to sell. I’m an introvert and have to make an effort to be more friendly.

I’m not easygoing. I tend to be anxious. I work at being more optimistic.

I’m skeptical — unless, that is, I’ve swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.

Bypassing the Bar

I’d thought about going to law school, but it seemed boring. It still does.

By the time I thought I might be willing to put up with the straightjacket of law in exchange for the money, it felt too late. I had three little kids and it seemed out of the question.

Lessons from My Father

My dad was a self-employed manufacturer’s rep who probably would have made a great university professor. He was brilliant but didn’t get past high school because of WWII and the Great Depression.

Dad was a first-generation American. He helped put two of his 10 siblings through college instead of going himself. If he had any regrets about that, he never shared them with his kids.

He was classy, well-spoken, creative, funny, eccentric, and mostly self-educated.

He was a brilliant teacher who got me through high school chemistry and physics with simple, down-to-earth analogies that made complicated things much easier to understand.

I wish he had been my professor in college. Maybe I would have done better in the sciences.

I think my father was often miserable in sales, though he never admitted it to us.

Unlikely Role Model for Sales

Big parts of my dad’s life looked to me like quiet desperation. But he soldiered on without complaining, just as his Great Generation had always done.

And though he drank too much for years, he raised and educated four kids. Two graduated at the very top of their law-school classes, and another became a medical technologist.

I’m the family’s sole business guy. You could say I landed in sales because of my fateful decision not go to law school.

Selling was the next best way to make the money I felt I needed to raise my family well.

Detours on the Yellow Brick Road

I’ve had 17 jobs since I got out of school. I’ve made hundreds of mistakes along the way. Thirteen of those were in choosing the wrong employers. (You’ll learn about some of those mistakes in my blog posts.)

I’ve been fired from four sales jobs — though only once (my first) for incompetence. That boss, a Harvard MBA, told me I could probably succeed in nearly any career other than sales.

He thought he was being helpful and encouraging.

What he said was probably true at the time. True or not, it took me three years to fully recover from the self-doubt he’d raised in my mind. That wasn’t so helpful.

I don’t blame him. He was immature, and so was I.

A Spectacular Failure of My Own

After losing that job I started my own business. I was trying, in part, to prove my former boss wrong. I sold on 100% commission as an independent contractor.

Despite not knowing what I was doing, I made a good go of it till my main supplier started delivering a defective new product.

Soon I was spending most of my time fixing the problems it caused my customers, and my revenue fell off sharply.

I told my supplier I couldn’t sell his product in good conscience until he fixed it. He pulled his line, sending me and my little business into a death spiral. I worked hard to find other products to replace it, but I couldn’t do it fast enough.

A Galvanizing Experience of Shame

I was the sole support of our family. When our oldest child was eight and our youngest six, we found ourselves living in the suburbs, trying to maintain appearances despite our financial Armageddon.

We had so little money that we couldn’t afford to change light bulbs that burnt out. Parts of our house were getting too dark to use at night.

We wondered how we, as educated and intelligent people, were finding it so hard to keep our heads above water in an environment where everyone else around us seemed to be thriving so easily.

With the house growing ominously darker, we survived for a few months on the kindness of friends and the generosity of family till I found my first job selling software.

We were so deeply in debt that my dad wondered if we’d ever climb out. He died later that year and never saw us do it.

In the Land of Oz

My sales career, like my dad’s, eventually took off as I learned the many things I needed to know. As the kids grew up, my wife also took a series of jobs in sales. Now she has a successful and stable sales career of her own.

Despite years of uncertainty and doubt, selling finally enabled us to raise three great kids and educate them all through college.

By then we were mostly out of debt and could pay cash for two private-school tuitions at the same time. We were also paying to operate five cars.

The kids have been independent adults since they got out of school. Ironically, all work in law. I didn’t push them in that direction.

Can My Pain Be Your Gain?

My endless mistakes have strengthened me along the way. I don’t often make the same ones twice.

I’ve worked hard, devouring every lesson or topic I can learn that’s directly and indirectly relevant to happiness and success. (I’ve never equated success, money and happiness. In my mind they’re all very different.)

Among other things, I’ve studied human psychology, the principles of persuasion, negotiations, interpersonal communications, general business management, sales management, marketing, finance, and selling skills.

I’ve always read about a book a week, sometimes two. Some years I’ve spent more than $2,000 on books.

I’ve carefully protected my reputation and my good name, at times at the cost of short-term income.  I’ve burned no bridges, and my network is strong.

At this late point in my sales career, I’d like to pass along some of what I’ve learned. Sadly (to me at least), most of it is of no interest to my kids.

When I’m gone, I imagine my wife and kids tossing my business library in a dumpster and complaining about all the work. I wouldn’t blame them.

Let’s Not Waste These Hard-Earned Lessons

I only hope they’d take the trouble to give my books to some young person with a burning desire to learn as much as I have from reading them.

For anyone else who’s on a path headed in the same direction as mine, I hope we can find a better route together, with fewer mistakes and missteps–and with a lot less wear and tear on ourselves and the people we love.

Alpha Ape

Scott Silverback is a pen name. It conjures the image of a mature gorilla.

That image is not so much how I look as how I feel.

I’m not using my own name here because I want to write honestly, without risk of embarrassing anyone or burning any of the bridges I’ve managed to leave intact so far.

Please join me for the journey.

– Scott Silverback