This is a guest post from a friend Eyal Worthalter, who leads security sales at Marvell. Eyal calls himself a “recovering VP of Sales” who’s spent 15+ years scaling cybersecurity teams. As an engineer-turned-sales-exec, he’s seen enough challenges hiring sales leaders to fuel a lifetime of LinkedIn rants about what doesn’t work in cyber sales. In this guest post, Eyal shares the hard-earned lessons from the trenches to help founders avoid some painful mistakes.

Introduction and the ‘why’ of this blog post

I’m an electronics engineer turned into a tech salesperson. I was lucky enough to realize early on in my career that I had more strengths on the business side of technology than behind a screen coding and building it. I’ve had every possible sales job in a tech company you can think of: I’ve been a sales engineer, an account manager, a country manager (for Mexico), led a small team in a region, led a slightly bigger team in multiple regions, you name it. I’ve even done sales enablement reporting to Marketing. I’ve had the experience to look at the function of sales from different angles. Throughout my time, I’ve tried different things, made many mistakes, although some of them had zero impact on my success or failures. I’ve also noticed that the actions of others, mainly the CEO or founder, along with the board, have had a high impact on my ability to succeed in my role.

My career, with all its ups and downs, has been and continues to be very rewarding. The one thing I absolutely love about sales, is that you have to keep learning about your customers, and being in front of customers is my absolutely favorite part about the job. But, there are days when the job is brutal. I’ve come to accept it as part of the ride, but I’ve also felt that there are things under my control that can help improve how I go about crushing or failing at my job. I tend to share these things with others in order to help cyber sales and sales leaders improve their game and hopefully thrive, rather than languish.

If you are reading this and you are building out your company or you are a VC that invests in cyber, please read ahead. Look, I won’t sugarcoat it. Following this advice means saying no to quick fixes and yes to ...