Annie Zavoral-Kurth made the leap from agency life into SaaS sales with limited formal training and learned by doing. Now an award-winning seller at NinjaCat, she’s built her career around buyer empathy, honest relationships and solving real problems—not blindly following a methodology.

In this episode, we opened Annie’s metaphorical CRM to talk about the wins, the failures and the deals that should have been disqualified three calls ago.

Topics we covered:

Saying “fuck it” and making the leap into SaaS sales
Building genuine trust instead of bribing buyers with coffee, dinners or Gucci sunglasses
Why buyers can smell a self-serving salesperson
When sales methodologies help—and when they become box-ticking exercises
Understanding the buyer rather than interrogating them for your CRM
Selling through education and honesty instead of pushing every product
Why rigid KPIs can encourage terrible sales behaviour
Trusting your gut and disqualifying the wrong opportunities
The ego trap of trying to be the hero of every deal
Bringing in the right experts and getting comfortable saying, “I don’t know”
Asking uncomfortable questions about money, budgets and broken processes
Why not every salesperson is motivated by commission
Detaching your self-worth from lost deals and uncontrollable outcomes
Finding joy in the competition, variety and unpredictability of sales
Creating more visibility for women in sales and sales leadership
Raising a child with two salespeople for parents—and accepting that she’ll probably be closing them both soon