Valeen Wallace

I attribute my success to pure grit and tenacity. The refusal to be a product of my upbringing and circumstances. I come from a background where the odds were heavily stacked against me, but I refused to quit. I never took no for an answer. If you give me a 'no,' I don’t walk away; I ask for the 'why' so I can fix it. I’m the person who will go back to the drawing board for six months just to come back and turn that 'no' into a 'yes.' We’re going to figure it out, every single time.

An SVP at a company I worked for early on in my career told me bluntly, "Don't let your starting point dictate your ceiling." It doesn’t matter where you come from or how many times you have to go back to the drawing board, maybe even take 2 steps back to take 3 forward, what matters is your refusal to accept a setback as a permanent state.

Sales isn't for the weak, and tech sales is a whole other ballgame. For as long as anyone can remember, sales has been a "boys club." But after spending my career navigating male dominated industries, I can tell you the landscape is finally changing. The old school, high pressure scare tactics no longer work. Modern sales requires relationship building, value driven solutions, and high emotional intelligence. This shift heavily favors women. We have an innate ability to connect deeply, establish trust, and serve as a sounding board for our clients true frustrations. My advice is to recognize that your empathy is a strategic advantage. You don't need to adopt a hard charging persona to win. Your ability to listen, connect, and solve problems with integrity is exactly what the industry is desperate for right now. To add, you don't need to know every single detail of the tech stack on day one, but you do need an absolute refusal to fail.

The industry has moved almost entirely to as a service models. This means customers are no longer buying a box; they are buying a guaranteed result. For sales teams, this creates a challenge because you can’t just close and move on. You have to ensure long term adoption and value, or the client churns. When you move from being a vendor to a strategic partner who owns the outcome, you build a barrier around your accounts that competitors can’t touch.

You can look at all the buzzwords people put on paper, but in my life, everything starts and ends with integrity. I’ve found that if you simply move with integrity, if you do exactly what you say you are going to do, every other piece of the puzzle falls into place. It’s the one value that guarantees all the others. Sometimes the truth stings, but in the end, that's what builds trust within personal and professional relationships. Laying it all out with transparency is how you build real partnerships.