Harshvardhan Mishra 👹

I was in my very first Sales Job, right out of college, I was more excited than scared. 

Probably that's a good thing. 🤷 

But yeah, one fine day, I asked help from a Senior Director in my team, to give me some e-mail templates & cold call scripts, if the lord had it.

Lord smirked at me, and said: "You are a wild horse Harsh, you have not been tamed yet"

My eyes wide open, in disbelief, I questioned, 'if I was a Horse all this time?  " 

First of all: "Excuse me, what??" 😮

But come to think of, I do love open grassfields, have empathy and am intelligent but still, the confusion prevailed. 🤔 

Only to realise that he had left me on my own. 

And probably that's a good thing too. 🌼 

Because dramatically getting hurt by his one small comment, I ignited fire in me, called another founder ( Sridhar - B2Brain ) and said:

"I can't take this anymore" 

"We need to build a support system" 

"He said, 'I hear you'" 

"Let's do it" 

And thus somehow a Sales Community for SaaS Sellers was born 🥂

In the midlife, it became to be known as Sales 101, and man we did and do some great fun 🤩 

- Brunches ( Mixers ) 
- Workshops 
- Rant Sessions / Zigs 

and much more. 

So that little idea is now a movement, where we want to build an ecosystem for Indian SaaS Sellers and provide a home, a village, a shoulder to take them forward together 🫂

Account Executive

Working in SMB Sales

Harshvardhan Mishra

I have been a big advocate of Generalists. 

The Jack of all trades, master of few ( or none sometimes ). 

But after doing a lot of general work, I have started to feel the following:
_____

1. General Work helps you identify what you like the most and you are good at. 

That is, you can find where you can be a specialist, by being a generalist. 
If that is clear to you without doing general work, no worries then. 

_____

2. General work is needed at different stages of the org that you are working in. 

Either in early stage, where they don't know what will work the most for the org. 

Or in the later stages, where they need to unlock new or run experiments without disturbing the core business. 

_____

3. General work helps you develop yourself really well, you build your talent pallet across fields. 

_____

4. Generalists often find it hard to express what is that they do well?

They hit a wall, no one wants them, except if they ( the org)  have that exact problem. 

_____

5. Specialists have leverage which goes way beyond the generalists but specialists have least flexibility. 

Example - Someone who built their career by doing code review or inbound lead qualification, they are really good at it, but one day suddenly their work gets assigned to AI or people at lower pay. 

They often don't have any secondary skill or expertise to fall back on. 

But in right opportunities, no one will even look at the Generalists over specialists. ( Generalists are risky, volatile and value add to a specific field is not clear at times ) 

_____

As Bruce Lee said: 

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

____

Conclusion: 

Be a generalist early on, and then become a specialist. 

If you are a specialist already, try more things, get an edge over other specialists.

India’s OG SaaS Sales Community | Sales 101

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The Battle

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