When I was younger I played a lot of poker. At casinos, with friends, online. And I learned a universal truth most poker players understand: I can't remember the biggest pots I ever won, but I remember with excruciating detail every bad beat I ever suffered.
In the last 25 years of B2B selling, I've won some incredible deals — including GoDaddy's largest-ever enterprise contract, WP Engine's first five-figure monthly hosting contract, and Alembic's first true enterprise deal. And still, the details I remember most clearly are the deals I didn't win. The ones where I felt blindsided at the finish line. Where I had the verbal approval for an order form that never came. The ones where I later learned a deal I had committed to the board had gone to a competitor.
Sell for long enough and your own "bad beats" start to stack up. If you've made it this far, they probably already have.