SELLER’S SECRETS

The Deal That Changes Everything

Someone posted on r/sales this week about closing a $2.2M commercial HVAC deal. Twelve-month territory, grew it from $10M to $22M. Old school. Travel, face-to-face, catered presentations. He's drunk celebrating because no one else around him gets it.

I get it.

There's a deal in every seller's career that rewires how you see money. Not necessarily the biggest deal you'll ever close. The first one that makes you go: wait, people actually pay this much?

As discussed in our podcast this week, for Jake, it was $3,500. A coaching offer he built himself during COVID after quitting corporate. He hadn't even mapped out fulfillment yet. Fourth sales call ever from his first ad set launched. The client eventually churned because Jake had no idea what he was doing on the back end, but that didn't matter. The money hit his account. Three times his rent. He realized the whole "make money online" thing people talked about was actually real, and he could do it.

For me, it was a $120K residential roof in San Antonio. Bougie house, designer shingles, custom copper flashings. The homeowner called about mold. I found hail damage, negotiated with insurance for seven months, and flipped a ~$600 leak repair into a $120,000 roof replacement. Over ten grand commission. I was a year out of college with maybe $10K-$15K to my name. I remember sitting in my van with the down payment check thinking: there's no way you make this kind of money this easily and don't completely recalibrate what you think is possible.

The HVAC guy clearing $250K this year probably had a similar moment years ago. Maybe it was his first $100K deal, maybe his first $500K. At some point, the ceiling you thought was there just... wasn't.

These deals do a few things:

They prove you can operate at a level you didn't think you could. You stop seeing big numbers as something other people close. You see the commercial HVAC rep's $2.2M deal and think, yeah, that tracks. Long cycle, complex sale, engineers selling to engineers. That's what good work in that space looks like.

They shift your baseline. After Jake closed that first $3,500 offer, smaller deals felt different. After I closed that roof, $5K and $10K deals started showing up regularly because I stopped being weird about the money. The HVAC guy went from $10M to $22M in his territory because at some point, he stopped thinking $250K deals were remarkable.

They give you leverage. Not just financially, but leverage to take bigger swings. Jake's now running operations for a massive online coaching company doing real volume. I used roofing as a launchpad into remote closing, then into running my own things. The HVAC guy probably has recruiters in his inbox every week because he's proven he can move serious numbers in a space most people can't.

If you haven't had your deal yet, you will. It might be $3,500. It might be $2.2M. The number doesn't matter as much as what it unlocks: proof that the game works the way people said it does, and you can play it better than you thought.

And if you've already had it, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

PS. if you want the hiring sauce behind 1000’s of sales hires, from top recruiters and sales managers, checkout Hired: The Secret Manual today!