u/Jiesen-Lee-4566

Drinking a beer right now trying to mentally prepare for tomorrow morning.

My VP pulled me aside on Friday. Because I'm top 3 in the office, he wants our new guy to shadow me for the next month. Translation: I get to do my grueling 60-hour week, but now with a puppy following me around asking me to explain everything I do.

Here’s the problem: You can't teach the art of this job to a kid who is obsessed with corporate rules. This kid is a Salesforce robot. He sends these stiff, 5-paragraph corporate emails that my clients will instantly delete. I tried to explain to him that my biggest whales don't want an official email. He looked at me like I was speaking alien.

Bro, I don't give a fk about the points, I care about the commission check!

How do you guys handle this forced mentorship BS without letting your own numbers drop?

This morning my VP spent 45 minutes preaching about hunting and cold outreach, basically telling us if we aren't bringing in completely new blood, we are failing.

I’ve been in the high-ticket game for over a decade. Right now, upselling my existing whales and farming their referrals takes 10% of the effort and closes 5x faster than grinding cold lists.

But apparently, because my net new acquisition metric isn't off the charts, I'm getting treated like a lazy piece of sh*t, even though my total revenue closed is top 3 in the office.

It feels like insurance leadership wants us to act like desperate SDRs forever, instead of actual business owners managing a portfolio.

For the veterans actually making real money, what is your true split? Are you guys still out there killing yourselves for new logos, or is your existing book paying the mortgage? Because I’m about ready to tell my VP to shove his cold-call metrics.

Over the last 2 years, I've noticed my win rate goes up significantly when I move a prospect off regular texting and onto WhatsApp. The voice notes, the read receipts, the ability to send decent quality PDFs without it compressing into a potato... it just builds rapport faster. Half the guys in my office are still living and dying by regular iMessage/SMS and complain about getting ghosted. Am I crazy, or is WhatsApp just the undisputed king of high-ticket communication now? What are you guys actually closing on?

A week ago I posted about how 90% of my deals happen off the company CRM and entirely on my personal phone. The response was wild—glad to know I’m not the only one committing CRM treason here to actually get deals closed.

But here’s the new headache I’m hitting. Because I let clients dictate the channel, managing this shadow CRM in my head is getting brutal as my volume scales.

Right now, my actual money-making split looks something like this: 70% WhatsApp (Mainly older money and international clients; 25% iMessage; 5% LinkedIn DMs and calls

I'm trying to figure out if I need to start setting hard boundaries and forcing everyone into just one app, or if juggling multiple apps is just the unavoidable cost of doing business

For those of you also living in the trenches on your personal phones, how fractured is your communication?

I know the compliance and RevOps folks lurking here will hate this, but it’s the truth. The company wants us to use their clunky official outreach tools, but my clients want me to text them like a normal human being.

So, my official CRM looks like a ghost town with just basic milestones, while the actual relationship-building, the negotiations, and the closing all happen in my personal WhatsApp and iMessage.

It’s a nightmare to manage mentally, but it’s the only way to actually close deals in this market. Are we all just living this double life? How are you guys surviving the split between 'how the company thinks we sell' and 'how we actually sell'?