15. Hunters and Unicorns - 202020 Mastery Mission - Thea Mayes

Welcome to Hunters and Unicorns, 20/20/20 Mastery Mission. 

20 topics, 20 guests for 20 minutes. 

We're here to unlock tribal wisdom from tech sales legends to help you get one step closer to mastery. 

Today we are joined by Thea Mayes, Major Accounts Executive at Snowflake.  

In this interview, we discuss Thea’s experiences as a former Olympian weightlifter and how she transitioned into tech sales. We explore the importance of self-belief in sport and its application to the world of sales as we delve into her journey to the top as a high-level, competitive athlete and how it prepared her with the essential characteristics needed to win in the field of sales. 

“Even though Olympic lifting is an individual sport, you're always training as part of a team, and that's very much the same in sales. You compete against your team; however, you're competing against yourself the most. You use your team to help you move on - if you think someone's doing better than you, or you are doing better than them, you use that conflict to get better.” 

As a top athlete, Thea intrinsically enjoys competition and has, through dedication to regimented training and self-development, cultivated a mindset to achieve excellence, making her well-equipped to stand out in deeply competitive environments. She explains how, just like elite athletes, great salespeople continually push themselves to meet increasingly ambitious goals and aim to outperform themselves and their peers to reach the next benchmark.  

“In boxing, you learn your combos, you go to training, you get faster, you get lighter, you get quicker, but if I wasn't eating correctly, or showing up every day, twice a day, I wasn't going to get better. It's the same thing with MEDDIC. There is a framework and every time that you go back to that framework you should be adding more to it and getting better at it.” 

Having recently transitioned to a Playbook company, Thea offers her tips on how to choose the best coaches and organisations to work for as well as how to overcome adversity and treat setbacks as speed bumps rather than stop signs. She believes that discipline is the secret to success in both sports and SaaS and explains the importance of consistency, organisation, and preparation if you want to scale a career in either of these industries.  

Listen to our story session to discover how to apply Thea’s strategies to real life scenarios and learn how to adopt the mindset and apply the discipline of a top performing athlete to improve your sales performance.