Why your network is your most valuable sales asset
It took me four years to meet these people in person.
Four years of masterclasses. Four years of contributing to articles, buying books, promoting other people's work on social media, and showing up consistently for a community I genuinely cared about. Then Salesforce flew us all to San Francisco - people from across the USA, and me from Ireland - and we finally sat in the same room together.
Here's what that trip taught me about networks, habits, and why relationships in sales matter more than most people realise.
Quality relationships are the foundation of every sales career
There's a saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Building a business works the same way. You need more people around you than you might think - coaches, advisors, peers, cheerleaders, the occasional honest critic.
My own network includes coaches Gail Biddulph and John Espirian, trusted advisors and friends Corina Goetz and Holly Christie, and the people I met in San Francisco who I'm still learning from now. None of those relationships happened overnight, and none of them started with me asking for something.
That's the bit most people get wrong. A strong network isn't built by collecting contacts. It's built by being genuinely useful to other people. Listen to their podcasts. Share their work. Support their launches. Buy their books. Ask how you can help, and mean it. Recommendations and referrals work the same way - they come to the people who've already been giving, not the people who suddenly appear when they need something.
As a bonus on that trip, we were invited into LinkedIn's San Francisco office. Having visited their London office several times and Dublin for the first time that year - you can read about the Dublin visit here - it was something else to be inside the San Francisco building. Talking to LinkedIn employees about what they're working on, what they're excited about, and eating very good food while doing it. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
How a breakfast room in San Francisco became a networking opportunity
On my first night I went to Chipotle. Everyone was eating alone, staring at their phones. Nobody spoke to anyone. It felt like a wasted opportunity, but I let it go.
The next morning at the hotel, I walked into breakfast and the same atmosphere. Tables of people, silence, everyone buried in a screen. So I smiled and said hello to the people sitting by themselves.
Some were polite, had work to catch up on, and that was that. Others were glad of the company. By the end of breakfast I'd spoken to people from Europe, Canada and across the USA. The week after I got home, I had a Zoom call booked to help someone understand LinkedIn better, a conversation with a potential 1:1 coaching client, and a promise to give someone advice on their first book.
None of that happens if I keep my head down and eat my eggs in silence. Taking a chance on a conversation costs nothing.
Your habits in sales matter as much as your skills
I read a quote on that trip that stuck with me. "You don't decide your future. You decide your habits, and your habits decide your future."
The hotel breakfast was a good test of that. Sugary cereals, croissants, coffee with creamer. Easy to justify because you're travelling, you're tired, it's there. I fasted instead, walked everywhere, and hit 17,000 steps a day. I hadn't had that kind of energy in years. It affected everything - my mood, my focus, the quality of the conversations I was having.
The habits you build around your health, your relationships, and how you show up for other people don't stay separate from your sales results. They feed into them. If you want to go deeper on the habits and lessons that actually change sales careers, 30 years in sales taught me a lot worth sharing.
If you want to work on the habits, skills and relationships that actually move your sales forward, I offer 1:1 coaching through the Success Generator Programme and group sales training for teams. Get in touch to talk about what you need.
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