Self Care is Customer Care

The fourth quarter is upon us. Our shoulders are hunched up to our ears, our jaws are clenched, and we’ve spontaneously forgotten how to take deep breaths. As quota carriers and contributing members to Revenue teams, there’s an inherent stress that comes with driving for results. And working in tech Sales can be difficult. This isn’t news. But for many of us who chose careers in this field, this challenge is a welcome part of our day-to-day.

Some challenges, however, are a little too out of left-field to be completely taken in stride. You know the ones – major life events that seem to pop up out of nowhere and disturb our workflow with their sheer unprecedented-ness. How many of my fellow New Yorkers actually planned on wading through flood waters on your way into the office? Or a few months ago, how many Sales teams in Texas had to navigate your way through Zoom calls with spotty internet while also tending to your frozen pipes when the snow storms hit? And don’t get me started on the new levels of anxiety that must have been unlocked last year when teams across the Pacific Northwest made their morning customer calls under an entirely red hellscape, complete with smoke laced skies from raging wildfires.

Yeah, things are weird. How can business not be affected when their employees are? The truth of the matter is that everyone is affected when we don’t stop and take a breather, which is why I’m here to remind you to take care.

In recent years, self-care has become an overused buzzword, but given the current climate, it’s a concept worth exploring.

Recently, I sat down with Hilarie Williams, a Customer Success Manager at Demandbase, who shared the top 3 ways her self-care translates into customer care.

Organization as self-care

Hilarie: I like to organize…so on Fridays I book 90 minutes of self organization time. [For example] My bookmarks bar is extremely organized, specific to categories. On Friday afternoons, I’ll go through and put things in the right folders. It reminds me to look back at the documentation I have saved, and I clean up my inbox and make sure everything is in the proper folders.

Me: Are there any specific tools that have helped you keep yourself organized?

Hilarie: At my last company we used a service called Mixmax …and the gmail plugin … was plugged into our CRM so [Mixmax] would tell us ‘hey, you have a renewal coming up in two quarters, start preparing.’

And you can hack it however you want if you don’t have a tool like [Mixmax]. But yes, I keep everything organized in my customer folders so at the end of the week if I haven’t kept up with labeling my inbox properly or all of my emails I do that in my organization time block.

Awareness as self-care 

Hilarie: I like to be so busy I can’t breathe because it keeps me productive as somebody with ADHD. It keeps me extremely focused, but I also recognize that can’t be every day.

I think it took me a really long time to realize I needed to go through a full day of diagnostic testing to figure out what was setting off my anxiety. I do have really bad anxiety and a lot of times it gets worse, or set-off much more frequently, if I don’t have my boundaries…

I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 21 as a senior in college…

What did that mean? And how did it impact things? Well, I was working more hours than everyone else. I really leaned into the ‘first in, last out’ mentality at my new job after I graduated.

But I had to learn pretty quickly how to say things like ‘hey I do these tasks slower than some of my peers do.’

Collaboration as self-care

Hilarie: [While onboarding at Demandbase] I got really lucky with my mentor match. [Although] We both have a lot on our plate with customer work… she’s someone who is super understanding of how much time onboarding actually takes.

I’m always going to give context ahead of time, like on a mock call to say, ‘hey maybe this isn’t to the letter of the assignment, but I’m prepping for real life customers in a couple of weeks so here’s the customer background and this is why I chose to do this type of call this way.’

The importance of being yourself

Unsurprisingly, through reflection and intentional planning, Hilarie continues to service her Demandbase customers with style and grace. Hopefully her display of authenticity inspires you to find the self-care hacks that work for you!

Happy Selling.