Post by Kristi Thiele

As I prepare for an in-person session with a class of newly hired sellers who will be coming to Gigamon HQ in a few weeks, I was struck by a post that happened to land in my inbox from a speaker who inspired us at our last in-person SKO. It was a great reminder that preparation comes in many forms. Yes, preparation means knowing your material. But it also means being ready for the hard questions, the objections, and the pushback you may face. When you take time to think through and even practice out loud those moments in advance, you show up with more confidence because your brain has already been there. That kind of preparation can make all the difference. "You would sit down, close your eyes, and mentally fly the entire mission before you ever touched the jet. And not loosely, not just a vague sense of what was going to happen. You would walk through it at the level of specific moments and decision points. What am I going to do at this phase of the mission? What might go wrong here, and how am I going to respond when it does? The more detailed the rehearsal and the more times you ran through it, the more prepared you felt when the moment actually arrived. Sometimes our lives depended on getting that preparation right. So we took it seriously."