The ABC of Sales: U is for Unlock: Why It Is Okay — and Necessary

Part of The ABC of Sales series — Authentic, Business, Connection. Real stories, practical lessons, one letter at a time.

There is a specific kind of discomfort that arrives not when things are going badly but when things are going well.

I felt it for the first time about eight months into my sales transition. I had just had my best month. A complex deal in the Professional Services sector had closed after three months of work. I had navigated a procurement committee, addressed a compliance concern that had almost derailed the whole thing, and built a relationship with a Healthcare executive who had initially been deeply sceptical of switching vendors.

I went to a Friday evening dinner with friends I had known for fifteen years.

The conversation turned to work — it always did — and I started to share the story. Not boasting. Just telling it the way you tell a story when something genuinely exciting has happened.

The table went quiet in a particular way. The kind of quiet that is not really quiet. And then someone said, with a smile that did not quite reach their eyes: “You’ve really changed, haven’t you?”

It was meant as a gentle deflation. And for a moment, it worked.

I sat with that comment for longer than it deserved. I examined myself for evidence that I had become someone worse. What I found instead was evidence that I had become someone different. Someone who had unlocked something that had been waiting to open for a long time.

U is for Unlock. And this is the letter about what happens when you stop being afraid of your own growth.

🔓 What It Means to Unlock Your Potential in a Sales Career

The transition into a Sales Account Executive role in your 40s is not just a career change. It is a frequency shift. You are not simply learning new skills — you are learning to operate in a different mode entirely. One that requires you to be more visible, more accountable, more self-directed, and more comfortable with the discomfort of growth than most professional environments have previously asked of you.

Unlocking is the process of discovering, often slowly and non-linearly, that you are capable of more than the story you had been telling yourself. That the expertise you built in operations or management or healthcare or engineering is not a ceiling on what you can do in sales — it is the foundation of something entirely new.

In high-growth sectors like Fintech, Renewable Energy, and Life Sciences, this unlocking process has specific dimensions. The regulatory complexity of Fintech rewards the person who can translate technical detail into business consequence — a skill that operations professionals have often spent decades refining. The long sales cycles of Renewable Energy reward patience, relationship depth, and the ability to navigate multi-stakeholder complexity — qualities that mid-life career changers bring in abundance. The clinical rigour of Life Sciences rewards the kind of intellectual honesty and attention to evidence that people who have operated in high-stakes environments understand instinctively.

Your unlock is already underway. The question is whether you are going to let the discomfort of other people’s reactions slow it down.

“You aren’t doing anyone a favour by playing small. Your growth is not a threat to the people who matter. And for the ones who find it threatening — that is information too.”

💡 The Dimming Your Light Trap: Why Playing Small Costs Everyone

There is a social pressure that mid-life career changers feel with particular acuity — the pressure to minimise their wins, downplay their ambition, and perform a kind of professional modesty that reassures the people around them that they have not ‘got too big for their boots.’

This pressure is real. It comes from people who genuinely care about you. It comes from relationships that have real history and real value. And it is still, ultimately, a trap.

When you dim your light to keep others comfortable, two things happen. First, you rob your clients of the best version of the professional they have chosen to trust with something important. A Healthcare executive who has selected you as their vendor deserves the fully unlocked version of your capability, not the version that is performing modesty for an audience that is not even in the room.

Second, you deprive yourself of the momentum that growth requires. Professional development is not linear. It builds on itself. The confidence that comes from one unlocked capability creates the conditions for the next one. When you suppress it, you do not just stay still — you actively create friction against your own progress.

Your mentor was right. You are not doing anyone a favour by playing small.

🚀 The Four Dimensions of Your Professional Unlock

1. The Solution Mindset

The first and most visible sign of unlocking in a sales career is the shift from a problem orientation to a solution orientation. Not because problems become invisible — they do not — but because your relationship to them changes. Where you once sat in difficulty, you now scan for the way through. Where you once vented, you now strategise.

In Sustainability and Professional Services, this shift is immediately visible to clients. The account executive who arrives at a challenge with energy and direction rather than anxiety and blame is not just more pleasant to work with. They are more valuable. And value, in complex B2B relationships, is what gets you into the room for the next conversation.

2. The Trusted Advisor Transition

There is a specific moment in the development of any high-performing account executive when the nature of the client relationship changes. You stop being the person they call when they want to buy something and start being the person they call when they want to think something through.

This transition does not happen because you sold more. It happens because you unlocked a different quality of presence in your client conversations — one that is more curious, more strategic, more genuinely invested in their outcomes than in your commission. Healthcare executives and Fintech leaders in particular are highly sensitised to the difference between a vendor and an advisor. When you unlock the advisor dimension of your capability, the relationship changes in ways that protect and compound your commercial results.

3. Professional Fulfilment as Fuel

One of the most underestimated aspects of unlocking your professional potential is what it does to your relationship with the work itself. When sales stops being a job and becomes a craft — when you are genuinely absorbed in the problem of helping a Renewable Energy procurement team make a better decision, or in the challenge of navigating a complex multi-stakeholder deal in Life Sciences — the energy dynamic of your working day changes fundamentally.

Work that is a craft does not drain in the same way that work that is just a performance drains. It challenges. It stretches. And at the end of a hard day it leaves you with a particular kind of satisfaction that people who have not experienced it often mistake for arrogance. It is not arrogance. It is the feeling of someone who knows they are operating at the level they were built for.

4. The Network Upgrade

Growth changes your circle. Not because you become better than your old friends — but because shared interests and shared frequency matter in professional relationships as much as shared history matters in personal ones.

As you unlock more of your professional capability, you will naturally begin to attract mentors who operate at the level you are reaching toward. Colleagues who ask ‘how can we go further’ rather than ‘why are you working so hard.’ Clients who want a thinking partner rather than a pitch receiver. This is not disloyalty to your history. It is alignment with your trajectory.

🌱 The Growth Room: Three AI Tools That Accelerate Your Professional Unlock

Unlocking your potential in a modern sales environment is not only about mindset. It requires the right systems to help you learn faster, reflect more accurately, and show up more effectively in the moments that matter. The right AI tools can dramatically compress the timeline of your development.

In the Growth Room, we explore tools that help sales professionals grow faster and smarter. Here are three that are directly relevant to U for Unlock:

🤖 Three AI Tools to Accelerate Your Professional Unlock

1. 📚 Blinkist AI — Unlock Industry Knowledge at Accelerated Speed

Unlocking your potential in a new industry requires building knowledge fast — not just sales knowledge, but the deep sector intelligence that turns you from a vendor into a peer. Blinkist AI condenses thousands of non-fiction books into fifteen-minute summaries with AI-powered recommendations based on your goals and reading history. For a career changer building expertise in Fintech regulations, Life Sciences procurement, or Renewable Energy project structures while simultaneously managing a demanding sales role, Blinkist makes it possible to develop genuine domain knowledge without sacrificing the rest of your schedule. Use it to identify the books worth reading in full, and to maintain broad knowledge across the disciplines that unlock your credibility with senior clients.

2. 🎯 Chorus AI — Unlock the Patterns in Your Best Conversations

Chorus AI records, transcribes, and analyses your sales conversations, surfacing the specific moments where your performance is strongest and the patterns that distinguish your best calls from your average ones. For a professional in the process of unlocking their full sales capability, this kind of objective feedback is invaluable. You can see exactly when your confidence and expertise create a shift in the client’s engagement, and exactly when old habits or uncertainty create friction. Chorus does not just record what happened — it helps you understand why, and what to do differently in the next conversation.

3. 🧠 Otter AI — Capture Every Insight From Your Best Learning Moments

As you unlock new capabilities, the moments of genuine insight — in a client meeting, in a mentoring conversation, in a training session, in your own reflection — become your most valuable professional currency. Otter AI captures and transcribes these moments in real time, making them searchable and actionable rather than lost to the demands of the next thing on your calendar. Build a personal library of your own growth moments. Review them quarterly. The pattern of your unlock — where it is accelerating and where it is stalling — will become visible in ways that no performance review will ever show you.

Explore all three and build your personal unlock toolkit — visit the Growth Room →

⚡ Five Ways to Honour Your Unlock This Week

1. Tell the story without the apology. The next time you share a professional win, resist the instinct to minimise it. Tell it straight. Notice who responds with genuine enthusiasm and who responds with subtle deflation. Both responses are information.

2. Identify one area where you are still playing small. Where in your sales role are you operating below the level you know you are capable of? Name it specifically. Then ask what it would look like to stop doing that in just one interaction this week.

3. Reach out to one person operating at the level you are reaching toward. A mentor, a senior colleague, a thought leader in your sector. Not to ask for anything. To start a conversation. Your network reflects your trajectory. Adjust it deliberately.

4. Use Chorus or Otter to review one conversation where you felt genuinely unlocked. Identify the specific moment. What were you doing differently? How do you do more of that consciously?

5. Write down what the fully unlocked version of you looks like in a client meeting. Not aspirational. Specific. What questions does that version ask? What do they notice? How do they follow up? Then do one of those things in your next meeting, deliberately.

🏁 Your Growth Is Not Optional

The Friday dinner table moment I described at the start of this article is not unique to me. Almost every mid-life career changer I have spoken to has a version of it. The moment when someone they love, or someone they have known for a long time, reflects their growth back at them as if it were a problem to be managed.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then: the growth was not the problem. The problem was the assumption that staying the same was an option.

In Fintech, Healthcare, Renewable Energy, and every other high-growth sector where the landscape changes faster than most people can track — staying the same is not neutrality. It is decline. The professional who stops unlocking starts falling behind, slowly at first and then all at once.

The tick inside you — the drive to learn more, do more, become more — is not ego. It is the signal that you are operating in alignment with your own potential. Do not suppress it to make others comfortable. Honour it. And watch what it builds.

👉 Next up: V is for Values — Your Invisible North Star in Modern Sales. Don’t miss it.

💬 Have you ever felt the pressure to play small to fit in with old friends or colleagues? How did you navigate that feeling as you grew into your new role? Share your story in the comments — this community was built on the understanding that we all grow faster when we grow together.

U is for Unlock: Why It Is Okay — and Necessary — to Outgrow the Old You