shannon Demoisey

I attribute my success to surrounding myself with positive people and great mentors who have inspired and motivated me throughout my career. People like Ray Drohand, who I've worked with at three different companies and would work with again - he has such a positive attitude, strong leadership, and is always willing to help. Jeff Moltz is another leader who's been extremely positive within the industry and someone I continue to have conversations with about jobs and technology. My current founders at Arcon are incredibly humble despite having a couple thousand employees across three companies. They're willing to take a phone call from any employee, readily hand out their information, and actively work at a booth as if they were just any other person. I appreciate their hard work, their work ethic, and how humble they are. If you're looking for positive influences, they're there - you just have to surround yourself with the people that you want to be like. I also think being a true saleswoman who can sell anything has been key. It's about elevating what I'm selling and the price point throughout my career, from clothes at the mall to cars to mortgages to technology.

I would say sales is hard and challenging. You have to get comfortable with the rejection, and I think that takes a while. It doesn't faze me anymore, but I remember as a young girl I would sometimes be sad and take the rejection so personally and be upset by it. You have to get through all the no's to find the yes, and it is a numbers game - I look at it like math. You just keep going until you find your yes. The biggest thing about sales is not coming at it from a place of desperation. People that are like 'oh, I gotta get this, I gotta go get this' will never close anything. It has to be 'if this one doesn't happen, the next one will.' Being casual with it - not being casual with the work ethic, doing all the steps, following up when you said you're gonna follow up, doing all of the process, not skipping any corners - but if you're desperate and saying 'I'll go this much cheaper, I'll give the discount,' then people think there's something wrong with it. Hold your line, hold your price. There's value in what you bring to the table. Know your value and don't be afraid to hold the line. You have to normalize that this is sales and you're gonna only get maybe something like 25% success rate, so you have to get a little tougher skin to be able to accept all the rejections. Build your network - I haven't interviewed for a job in probably 25 years. Usually somebody will ask me. That's how I got this job. Somebody asked me to come here, the offer was nice, I didn't interview anywhere else, and I've been happy. Make sure you're staying in contact with your network, not only when you're actively looking, but all along the way, building those connections and engaging in networking events in your space.

The industry is changing with agentic AI and AI agents, and then there are the non-human identities (NHIs). There's definite interest in those areas. The book I'm writing talks about those three things because those are what's hot in the industry right now. I'm actively studying the subject matter because these are the emerging trends that are reshaping the identity and access management space.