Why “Quiet Quitting” is just quitting yourself

Quiet quitting isn’t anything new.? I know, because I was almost a quiet quitter myself 20 years ago.

I remember the frustration of feeling underemployed.? At 28 years old with an MBA and prior experience running marketing for a small company, I was certain that I could make a big contribution at Dell.? But the only offer they made me was to join as an inside sales representative. I decided to go for it - hoping that getting experience with a big brand would be helpful to my career.? I had convinced myself that with my education, a little bit of prior sales experience and a strong work ethic, I was going to be annihilating my quota in no time.? Being a computer nerd certainly was going to help too, since I knew all about setting up RAID configurations, installing RAM and mounting CPUs.? How could I not be successful?

But things didn’t pan out as I’d planned.?

Every day, I walked in and stared at my $1.6M quarterly quota - a number that I had to chase with the help of little more than my trusty telephone and desktop computer.? And I wasn’t winning the battle - every day, I fell a bit further behind.? I started working longer hours, staying in the office until they turned out the lights - entering my orders at night and working the phones all day.? But still I couldn’t make quota.

My boss was nice - but he didn’t have the time to sit and train me on how to hit my numbers.? I started convincing myself that the problem was my territory.? It was all small government and not for profit accounts, and there was no way they were going to buy enough equipment for me to get to my quota.? And there was certainly no way they were going to be buying enterprise level equipment, for which I carried a specific quota.??

Plus, the phone wasn’t ringing enough - there just weren’t enough leads coming in.? Worse - about 10% of the revenue that I booked every quarter was claimed by other teams that identified those customers as named accounts.

After 6 months of hitting ~90% of quota and working non-stop, I was ready to quit.? I had decided that this was an impossible job.? I was angry and frustrated.? I just didn’t understand why I was so bad at this.

That weekend, I traveled to NY to go to a wedding.?

The whole way down, I’m sure I complained about my job to my spouse, who has always been an amazing listener, but I’m sure she was tired of hearing about this topic.? I was fuming throughout the weekend though, and couldn’t stop thinking about it.? I had decided that I should dial back on how hard I was working and try to find a new job in the process - something that today we would label “quiet quitting”.? Then the universe placed a woman beside me at our reception table that ended up changing everything for me.

After we sat down and introduced ourselves at the table, I asked the woman beside me what she did for a living, and she told me she was the head of HR for a local firm.? She asked me where I worked and that opened up a torrent of complaining.? I told her about my job, how it was all based on getting paid on accelerators, but that those only kicked in above 100%, and that was impossible because of my territory, and the lack of leads, and the loss of revenue to other teams at the end of the quarter.? I mentioned the lack of any kind of contact management system, no email marketing going out.? And why didn’t they just promote me to a marketing manager anyway - given my skills and background?? By the time I stopped my diatribe, we had gone all the way through the buffet lineup, served ourselves and sat back at the table.

When I finally finished, she paused and took a breath.? She looked over at me and said:

“Well, your choice is clear.? You either quit, or you double down and figure out how to succeed at this job.? But I can tell you that complaining about it at a wedding isn’t helping you get where you want to go.? And nobody at your company is going to promote you when all they see is someone who can’t hit their numbers.? Why would they?? You seem like a really smart guy.? So either figure it out, or don’t - but the choice is up to you.”

20 years later, I remember her words almost verbatim, because I felt that I had been slapped across the face.? How could she say that?? How could she not understand how hard I worked, how much I cared, and still I couldn’t make my numbers.? Wasn’t it clear that the problem was my territory?? I was pretty silent as I thought about this all the way home.? Her feedback didn’t seem fair - she didn’t understand the situation.??

But I did.? And she was right - whether or not I was successful was a choice.?

That is the conclusion I came to when I woke on Monday morning.? I had all the tools and people around me to figure out how to be successful in the role.? I decided that I would attack this with what I knew how to do well - using marketing to make myself more productive.

I went straight to my boss and asked him for a few hundred dollars to purchase a contact management tool (this was long before the days of salesforce.com and we had no CRM tool at all).? A big challenge we had was remembering what quotes and orders customers had made in the past.? I purchased 4 licenses of ACT and set it up for myself and 3 other inside sales reps that manned the queue with me.? I customized it with the fields we most needed to track.??

Every time a customer would call, we would fill in their information in the system, and I would track every quote and order.? Now when customers would call, I would look them up by the phone number on display and greet them by name - and they loved it!? I started calling every customer back every 24 hours after sending them a quote - and my close rate started going up.? I started asking every customer for a referral - someone else that might need my help - and the number of connections I was making started growing.

Now I had a database of customers.? I could use my marketing skills to segment the database, and figure out which types of accounts were most likely to buy.? I could then use online databases to figure out who else I could sell to.? I started building my own email nurtures and sending them out to clients - using mail mergers to send out updates and monthly newsletter.

I got my manager to sign me up for all the internal enterprise software and hardware training I could do - and I started talking about servers and storage with every customer that called.? Many times, they weren’t sure who handled that - so I used that as a lead-in to finding more people within their departments or other areas of government where I could sell enterprise technology.

But the most important thing I did is build connections with the other inside sales reps around me.? We would share hints and tips at the end of the day - what worked for us and what didn’t - and we would help each other with difficult clients or deals.

It was also around this time that I started realizing that I needed to shift what products and solutions I focused on based on the compensation plan presented to me.? If printers were the most important item to focus on that month - then printers I would sell!? I quickly became known for winning special incentive prizes - including enterprise hardware oriented ones.? Because what I originally thought was a weakness within my territory became a strength - even though my clients were small, I had so MANY of them that I could eventually find a buyer for anything I wanted to focus on.? It was just a matter of doing proper segmentation and targeting.??

By the 6 month mark, I had transformed myself as an inside sales rep and was overachieving quota.? By the end of the first year, I was crushing it.? And my success caught the attention of the marketing leader, who approached me about moving into a product marketing management role for enterprise technology.? This was the step in the door that set the foundation for my career in B2B technology marketing.

Looking back now, I realize that I simply didn’t feel empowered to use the knowledge and skills that I had to make myself successful.? And the secret is that the only person holding me back was myself.??

If YOUR job is driving you crazy - take a step back and ask yourself what role you are going to play in solving your challenge.? Even in the most difficult companies, you are likely a part of the problem, and you are also the biggest part of the solution.? They hired you for a reason - probably because you are smart, experienced and capable - so think about how you can apply what you know (process, technology, people skills) to come up with unique ways of finding success.

So if you are the random person who sat next to me at a wedding and changed my life - thank you - I promise to do my best to pay it forward.??

But if you are thinking about quiet quitting - please don’t.?

Because you will only be quitting yourself.? Find the passion, energy and intelligence that made you successful and pour it into what you do.? I guarantee you that you will find renewed motivation to succeed.? And even if you find that the company you are at isn’t the right fit for you in the long run, the skills and experience you will pick up will leave you better prepared for the future.? More importantly, you might even find you have a little bit of fun along the way!