u/Direct_Addition_4463

i am 31. hyderabad. tech recruiter at a series A startup. company is global so my day is hyderabad mornings (interviews with US east coast candidates), afternoons (india team standup), evenings (interviews with US west coast candidates). i counted the calls last week because something was wrong. 31 in five days. 22 of them video. 9 audio. thursday night last week i was making chai at 9pm. my mother was on the couch. i started crying without warning. my mother heard me put the cup down too hard and came in. i did not know what was wrong. i still don't fully. what i can name. i have been on camera for so many hours each day that the version of my face i now know best is the one in the bottom right of the zoom window. the way it nods. the way it smiles slightly slower than i used to in real life. i learned the smile from watching myself on calls and adjusting it. i do not see my friends in person on weekdays. weekends i am too tired to plan. when i do see them on saturday brunch we both bring our laptops "to maybe finish one or two things." i live with my mother. my father passed in 2022. she is alone with me. i am alone with her. we are alone together. my hiring manager noticed something last month. she said "you seem a little quiet on the eng candidate calls." i said i would do better. i did not say "i talk to 31 strangers a week and 0 of them have any context for who i am." i do not know how to fix this. quitting is not the answer (i need the income and live with my mother). switching companies will get me a different 31 calls a week. what i have started doing. wednesday mornings i drive to a temple in jubilee hills before work. i sit there for 30 minutes without my phone. it is the only 30 minutes of the week i am not findable. if anyone has dealt with this scale of video work and made it through, dm. i am at the start of figuring out what to do.

Writing this for any agency owner who has tried to build a sales playbook and ended up with a 60 page google doc nobody reads. For three years our agency had a sales deck that was customised per prospect. Every salesperson built their own. Every deck was slightly different. Every deck took 90 to 180 minutes to build. Close rate hovered around 38 percent. In january i tried to write a sales playbook the way the internet tells you to. Long doc. Nobody read it. Things didn't change. In february i did something different. Built one master sales deck template. Not a playbook. An actual deck. With placeholder slides for the parts that vary per prospect (industry vertical, pain point, case studies, team) and locked slides for the parts that never vary (our process, our pricing structure, our timeline framework, our contract terms). Moved it to Gamma so the team could co-edit and the placeholder system worked cleanly. Each new prospect deck takes 22 minutes to assemble instead of 90 to 180. Three things changed. Close rate moved from 38 percent to 51 percent on first-pitch deals. Nothing in the locked content changed. Consistency just made our positioning land harder. Junior team members can run a sales pitch now. They couldn't before because building the deck from scratch required senior judgement. With the template they only need to make placeholder decisions. Average deal size went up 18 percent. The locked pricing slide forced us to stop discounting under pressure. The template forced us to write down what we actually charge and how we actually work. The doc i'd been trying to write was the wrong artifact for that. If you want consistency in sales, build the actual sales artifact, not a playbook describing it.

They were 38 percent of our retainer revenue. A US fintech that had been with us for two and a half years. The relationship had quietly turned bad over the previous six months. Three different points of contact. The latest one was a head of growth who liked to leave Loom videos with the words "this should be easy" in the title. They sent the offboarding email on the 14th of January. Bank transfer cleared a week later. We had eight people on the team and four of them were primarily allocated to this account. I expected it to feel like a loss for at least a month. Instead within ten days my senior designer was finishing personal work she had not had time for in eight months. Our project manager rebuilt our intake process. One of my mid level designers shipped a brand sprint for a smaller client that turned into our case study of the year. We took on two smaller retainers within six weeks. Both clients are easier to work with. Both pay less but together they cover about 70 percent of what we lost. The team works fewer evenings. I had been telling myself for a year that we needed the big client to survive. Turns out we needed them to leave to find out what survival actually looked like. Sometimes the customer you are scared to lose is the one keeping the team you would build if you were brave.