Part of The ABC of Sales series — Authentic, Business,
Connection. Real stories, practical lessons, one letter at a time.
He was closing deals in the cubicle next to mine while I was
struggling to keep a prospect on the line for sixty seconds.
Same product. Same territory. Same scripts. And I had,
genuinely, more relevant sector experience than he did. I had come from
Healthcare administration. He had come from retail. By any objective measure of
industry knowledge, I should have been the one building rapport with the Life
Sciences and Fintech prospects we were both calling.
But I was hitting a wall. After a month of cold calls and
polite rejections, something had happened to my voice that I had not noticed
happening. It had flattened. My posture had followed. I was following the
script correctly — hitting the right points, asking the right questions — but
something invisible was missing. And the prospects, who could not see me and
did not know anything about my background, could feel it.
One Tuesday, after a prospect hung up mid-sentence, my
neighbour leaned over.
“It’s a dance,”
he said. “And your energy sets the rhythm.”
E is for Energy. And it is the sales element that almost
nobody talks about in formal training, that cannot be found in any product
manual, and that separates the account executives who connect from the ones who
merely communicate.
📊 What Energy Actually Is in a Sales Context
Energy in sales is not enthusiasm. It is not the performed
positivity of someone who has been told to smile more. It is not volume, pace,
or the artificial brightness of a voice that has been instructed to ‘sound
happy’.
Energy in sales is presence. The specific quality of being
genuinely interested in the person on the other end of the line or across the
table. The invisible signal that communicates: I am actually here, I actually
want to understand your situation, and I am not going through the motions of a
script I have delivered thirty times today.
That signal travels through a phone line in ways that are
difficult to explain and immediately apparent to anyone who has spent time on
the receiving end of calls from salespeople. You know the difference between a
call from someone who is present and a call from someone who is performing. The
present one gets sixty seconds of genuine attention. The performing one gets
the polite decline.
In high-stakes sectors like Fintech, Life Sciences, and
Renewable Energy, where the people your prospects are buying from will be
involved in their operations for months or years, the energy question matters
even more. A CFO in a Healthcare organisation making a significant SaaS
investment is not just buying a product. They are choosing a professional
relationship. And the energy you project in your first three interactions with
them is their primary data point about what that relationship will feel like.
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“Product knowledge is your engine. Positive energy is
the fuel that makes it run. One without the other leaves you stationary.” |
🎯 The Dance: What My Colleague Showed Me
The three things my neighbour gave me that Tuesday were almost
insultingly simple. I share them because they worked, and because the
simplicity is the point.
The first was physical. Before any significant call, stand up
and stretch. Not a full workout. A sixty-second physical reset that tells your
nervous system you are about to engage rather than endure. The posture of
engagement and the posture of someone waiting for the day to end are different.
The physical state precedes the psychological one. Change the body first.
The second was breathwork. Three deep breaths before dialling.
Not a mindfulness practice. A physiological tool. The tension of quota
pressure, the residue of the previous call that ended badly, the low-grade
anxiety of a pipeline that is not where it needs to be — all of it lives in the
breath. Three deliberate, slow exhales shed enough of that residue to create
the conditions for genuine presence.
The third was the smile. Even if they cannot see you, they can
hear it. This is not a metaphor. The physical act of smiling changes the
muscular configuration of the face and throat in ways that are genuinely
audible in vocal tone. A prospect receiving a call from someone who is smiling
experiences a measurably different tonal quality than one receiving a call from
someone who is not. The smile hack, as my colleague called it, is the fastest
available route from the flat, script-fatigued voice to the warm, present one.
The next morning I tried the reset. I stood up, took the
breaths, visualised the person on the other end as someone I genuinely wanted
to help rather than a number on a call sheet, and dialled.
The conversation flowed. Not because I had learned anything
new about the product. Because I had shown up differently.
🏋️ The Mid-Career Energy Advantage: Quiet Confidence
Here is something I came to understand over the months that
followed that Tuesday conversation: energy in sales is not the same thing for a
25-year-old and a 45-year-old. And the difference is not a disadvantage for the
mid-career professional. It is a genuine asset.
Younger salespeople bring a specific kind of energy that is
real and effective: the high-vibration enthusiasm of someone who is genuinely
excited by the newness of everything, who has not yet had the experiences that
produce caution and who communicates an unguarded positivity that clients
respond to.
Mid-career professionals bring something different. Something
that cannot be performed and cannot be manufactured: quiet confidence. The
specific energy of someone who has seen enough to be genuinely unfazed, who
brings their expertise without needing to prove it, who is present in a
conversation because they are secure enough not to be anxious about the
outcome.
In Renewable Energy, that quiet confidence projects your
genuine passion for the sector you have spent years working in. In Healthcare,
it projects the empathy and reliability of someone who understands what is at
stake in clinical and operational environments. In Fintech, it projects the
security of a professional who is genuinely excited by innovation rather than
performing excitement about it.
The work is to keep that quiet confidence accessible. To have
the rituals and the tools that mean you walk into every significant client
interaction — every cold call, every discovery session, every high-stakes demo
— in the energy state that your natural authority deserves rather than the
depleted state that a grinding sales day can produce.
🌱 The Growth Room: Three AI Tools That Protect and Restore Your
Energy
The energy management described in this article is
fundamentally about reducing the cognitive and administrative load that
depletes genuine presence. When the mechanical parts of the sales role are
handled by smart systems, the energy you were spending on them is available for
the human parts that only you can do. In the Growth Room, we explore tools that help sales
professionals protect their most finite resource. Here are three directly
relevant to E for Energy:
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🤖
Three AI Tools That Free Your Energy for the Work That Matters 1. 🎙️ Otter AI — Be
Fully Present in Every Conversation The mental energy spent on
note-taking during a client conversation is energy that is not going into
listening, responding, or building the genuine connection that the energy-led
approach requires. Otter AI transcribes meetings in real time, capturing everything
accurately so you can put down the pen and give the conversation your
complete attention. The quality of presence that the transcript enables — the
full eye contact, the genuine follow-up question, the moment where you catch
something the client said that only a truly present listener would have heard
— is worth more than any note you could have written. 2. 📊 HubSpot AI —
Eliminate the Admin That Drains Your Energy After Every Call The post-call administrative
load — CRM updates, follow-up scheduling, pipeline stage management — is one
of the most consistent energy drains in a high-volume sales role. HubSpot AI
automates much of this, logging interactions, surfacing next actions, and
managing follow-up reminders without manual input. When the energy you spent
on administrative tasks is available instead for client-facing work, the
quality of that work reflects the difference. You arrive at your next call
with more available presence because you have not spent the previous hour on
data entry. 3. 🤔 ChatGPT —
Prepare for the Calls That Require Your Best Energy The highest-energy state
available to any sales professional is the one that comes from being
genuinely prepared — from arriving at a discovery call or a high-stakes demo
already informed about the client’s context, already thinking in their
language, already confident that you understand enough about their world to
add value from the first minute. ChatGPT helps you prepare for those
conversations quickly and thoroughly: researching the client’s sector
challenges, anticipating their likely objections, developing the specific
questions that will open the real conversation. The confidence that genuine
preparation produces is the foundation of the quiet energy that closes deals. Explore all three — visit the Growth Room → |
⚡ Five Energy Rituals for the Mid-Career Sales Professional
1.
The physical reset before every significant call. Stand
up. Stretch for sixty seconds. Change your physical state before you attempt to
change your psychological one. The body leads the mind.
2.
Three breaths before you dial. Not a meditation.
A physiological tool. Exhale the quota pressure, the previous bad call, the
anxiety of the thin pipeline. Create thirty seconds of clear space before the
conversation begins.
3.
The genuine intention reset. Before any
significant client interaction, spend thirty seconds explicitly reminding
yourself why this specific person’s situation is worth your genuine attention.
Not as a motivational exercise. As a reorientation from transaction to
relationship.
4.
The mid-afternoon energy audit. At 2:30 PM,
check in with yourself. Is the voice flat? Is the posture collapsed? Is the
energy available for the next call the energy you would want to project if this
were the most important call of the week? If not, a five-minute physical reset
before you continue.
5.
Protect your pre-call time. The ten minutes
before a high-stakes call are not administration time. They are preparation and
presence time. Use them deliberately.
🏁 Energy Is the Differentiator Nobody Teaches
My neighbour in that cubicle was not a better salesperson than
me by any conventional metric. He did not know more about the products, the
sector, or the clients. He did not have more experience or more industry
credibility.
What he had, every single time he picked up the phone, was
genuine presence. The energy of someone who was actually interested in the
person on the other end rather than performing interest while waiting for the
outcome.
That is the dance he described. The rhythm is yours to set.
And the mid-career professional who pairs decades of genuine expertise with
that quality of presence — who has both the content and the energy to deliver
it — is genuinely rare in any sales environment.
Set the rhythm. The dance will follow.
👉 Next up: F is for Faith — Moving from PIP to
Powerhouse in Mid-Career Sales. Don’t miss it.
💬 What is your pre-game ritual to get your energy
right before a big demo or discovery call? Share your tips in the comments
— the energy strategies in this community are always the ones that spark the
most useful conversations.
Tags: E is for Energy | energy in sales | sales presence | ABC
of Sales | account executive tips | mid-life career change | sales mindset |
cold calling energy | Fintech sales | Healthcare sales | Renewable Energy sales
| Life Sciences sales | sales rituals | pre-call routine | Otter AI | HubSpot
AI | ChatGPT for sales | Growth Room | B2B sales | sales confidence | quiet
confidence in sales
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