The saying lives in sales like air. You're only as good as your last deal. Every quarter resets. Every year clears the slate. It's supposed to be motivating. It isn't. It's a cage dressed up as freedom.
I believed it for a long time. Not consciously. It was in the water. The culture knew it, the compensation structure enforced it, and the person next to me was operating from it, so I operated from it too. Your value is no older than your most recent close. Everything before that is precedent. Everything after is irrelevant until you prove it again.
Living inside that belief does something to a person.
It makes you live backward. Your identity is always chasing the previous quarter's results. You're either exceeding them or you're failing. There's no flat ground. No place where you can just be solid. The machine requires constant proof, so you become the kind of person who's always one deal away from knowing whether you're actually valuable.
I watched it destroy people. Good people. Brilliant people. People who could see the system was insane and couldn't get out of it anyway. The fear of not hitting the number becomes the whole organizing principle of consciousness. You take risks you shouldn't take. You cut corners you shouldn't cut. You hurt relationships you should have preserved. All in service of proving your worth for another quarter.
The worst part isn't the grind. It's the way the metric becomes identity. You stop being Chris who happens to work in sales. You become the Sales Number, and Chris is just the body that carries it around. When the number is good, you're good. When the number is bad, you're bad. The whole equation.
I noticed it first in how I talked about myself. Everything was backward-looking. I was my last quarter, my best year, my closest miss. The value was always in the rearview mirror or the projection ahead. Never in who I was right now. The present moment was just a vehicle for the next metric.
Teams absorb this faster than anything else. It cascades. The whole operation becomes a machine for generating proof. And the proof is never enough, because by the time you generate it, the quarter's already moving.
I ran on fumes for years. Pushed the team to run on fumes. Told myself it was what the job required. And I watched people I respected burn out trying to win a game that had no finish line.
The question became: what if the metric isn't the identity? What if you can be valuable independent of what happened last quarter? What if a leader's job is partly to protect the team from the tyranny of the metric, not enforce it?
That's heterodox thinking in sales. But once I started thinking it, I couldn't untie it. The people who perform best aren't the ones most afraid of the metric. They're the ones most secure about their value independent of it. They can take risks because they're not betting their identity on the close. They can make decisions based on what's right for the customer, not just what moves the number.
This isn't about lowering expectations. It's about grounding expectations in reality instead of in fear. A person who knows she's valuable won't sandbag. A person who knows his place in the organization won't thrash. A team that's not constantly trying to prove itself will actually perform better than a team that is.
The belief that you're only as good as your last deal is self-fulfilling. People run scared, so they behave in ways that doom the next quarter. The fear creates the outcome. And the outcome reinforces the belief. The machine sustains itself by making the belief true.
Breaking it requires a different kind of leadership. One where the metrics matter, but they don't define. Where quota is real, but it's not the whole story. Where you protect your team from the message that they're only good if they produced last quarter.
I didn't do that for a long time. I was too bought into the system. Too convinced it was the only way to win. It took watching good people quit, and better people stay but change in ways I didn't like, for me to see that the system was the problem.
The belief almost ate me. It nearly ate the people who worked for me. The person I became when I was running on that belief wasn't the person I wanted to be.
You're only as good as your last deal. The doctrine. The truth is quieter. You're valuable independent of the metric. The metric measures one thing. You're not one thing. Once a leader starts believing that, everything changes. Not the results, at first. But the people. The way they show up. The kind of risks they take. The kind of careers they have in your organization.
That matters more than the number.