AJ Tennant: Sales skills are entirely learnable, not innate personality traits
AJ Tennant · AJ Tennant: How to Build a Sales Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | E2118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 23, 2024 · at 0:58
AJ Tennant is VP of Sales & Success at Glean and former sales leader at Slack and Facebook. He discusses whether sales talent is born or learned.
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“I fundamentally believe they can be learned. You know, I think a lot of people would say it's innate, you know, you, you're born with it, it's that your personality, someone that's outgoing, but my philosophy is that pretty much humans can learn anything if they're taught and they have the motivation to do it, and so I've seen in my career someone that's joined, you know, both Facebook and Slack that many people are like, oh, they're not outgoing, they don't have that gregarious nature, But they were able to navigate just, like, figuring out how to do sales because they had the work ethic, they had the desire to learn, and ultimately, it's about inputs, and it's not just about being a personable, like, gregarious person.”
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