Peter Ahn

S7E2: When Identity and Sales Collide with Peter Ahn

About our guest:

With over 15 years of enterprise sales experience, Peter Ahn has built a career at industry leaders such as Google, Dropbox, Slack, Front, and Twingate.

Recognized as a top seller at Dropbox and Slack, he has successfully closed multimillion-dollar deals with major clients including Disney, News Corp, National Geographic, NBCUniversal, and Conde Nast. Peter's expertise extends beyond corporate giants, having worked closely with over 40 founders, guiding them in building sales from the ground up.

As a Korean American tech sales coach, Peter also actively contributes to the dialogue on the full inclusion and representation of Asian Americans in leadership. Described by clients as someone who envisions selling beneficially for both parties, Peter's unique superpower lies in transforming strategic frameworks into tangible actions that genuinely work, all while fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is celebrated.

Peter

Culture is not just this homogenous, monolithic concept, it carries with it both positive unity in terms of community, it carries with it trauma from having to adapt to different scenarios coming from a specific culture, and then it comes with an experience of how you deal with that trauma, right? 

Anika

Welcome back to Root Seed, a podcast about tradition seekers who are sparked to explore, define, and celebrate their family and cultural identity. I'm your host, Anika Chabra. Season seven is all about how our histories and heritage show up in the workplace and in the community. Our last guest, Michelle, helped us to see how you have to go inward first and understand yourself if you're going to be your best in a corporate environment.And she does so in a way that is grounded in data and studies, harnessing all the information for us in her new book.  

Did you know that research also states that for children, knowing their family and community's histories empower them with the self confidence and resilience to be what they're meant to be in this world, whether that's an artist, an engineer, or even a chef, and to pursue those passions with the pride and knowledge that they're standing on the shoulders of generations before them. 

The path of life is rarely linear, but we are ingrained with the notion that if we work hard and start to do adult things, including pursue a vocation seriously, then we'll get the job and the title. It means that we've made it, right? Hmm.  We might even get that seat at the leadership table, but it doesn't feel quite right.

Our next guest, Peter Ahn, proves it is never too late to find the strength in your skills, even if they aren't historically the norm. Embracing your authenticity builds connections that are real. And in today's world, that's what truly matters.  As a Korean American tech sales coach, Peter uses his 15 years of corporate enterprise sales experience at industry leaders like Google and Dropbox to now help his own clients and community understand that business relationships need to be mutually beneficial.

Leaning into a collectivist mindset, he actively contributes to the dialogue on the full inclusion of people who are often underrepresented in leadership and sales. 

Peter

So today I coach founders, tech founders, primarily on how to show up authentically within large stakes enterprise deal cycles. So these are usually five to 10 person startup founders.And they're trying to sell to the Fortune 500 in some cases, and companies that are 10, 20, 30 times larger than they are. So a lot of what I do is not only teach these founders sales, but also teach them the mentality of becoming a confident business person. 

Anika

And what are their biggest barriers?  

Peter

One is being able to weed out the stereotypes of traditional salespeople. And embodying sales in a way that feels comfortable to them.  So if I'm going to distill that down, I think one of the biggest barriers is confidence.  A lot of these founders - as brilliant as they are, as much funding as they have, because a lot of these venture firms are like “take my millions because you're MIT, this Stanford, that, or you had an exit at,,,Meta or Google”. So you must be like a brilliant person where your product's going to just fly off the shelves. I think in reality,  even with such high horsepower and IQ,  talking about a brand new product and positioning it is extremely complex and difficult. So I think that's actually the main problem is how do you have a confident mentality  for something that's supposed to sell, but that, you know, is not going to sell on its own, right?

It's going to require some individual discipline,  really digging deep into your roots, no pun intended, and figuring out what truly you have beyond your product that is special and unique where people will gravitate towards wanting to talk to you and buy from you. 

Anika

So I have two things to say.

The first thing is I grew up in a traditional family and when I decided on what vocation I wanted to pursue, the first thing was what my family did, which was teaching.  And I made a switch very quickly from my Bachelor of Education into advertising. And I swear, Peter, I think my family thought I would be standing on the side of the street with a sandwich board on.

Peter

Yeah, totally. 

Anika

Because it was not a profession they knew. A big part of my inability to see the confidence, like you said, in myself, particularly in my early years in the industry, had to do with my familial background and a sales job. And the second thing as a founder of a platform that has technology, we are constantly being bombarded by sales calls and sales emails. And one of the things I realized is I had to reframe my relationship with sales and those sales outreaches because I'm selling my business every second of every day. And unless I reframed those inbounds that were coming to me, um, I couldn't have a good relationship with sales, if you will. So what I've actually adopted is every time anyone ever reaches out to me, I always email them back and I say, I'm sorry, I'm not interested or, um, thank you for thinking of me because I am trying to elevate what is my familial paradigms against sales into a place where I can respect sales. And in doing so, I can sell my business. 

Peter

I think that’s very generous of you. And you're trying to be empathetic towards salespeople. I think it has to go the other way around too, because I also firmly believe that sales has to change, we shouldn't be getting this barrage of emails into our inbox that are selling products. And so a lot of what I coach founders on too… don't try to sell your product, try to understand the problem that people are going through. And then offer a solution, even if it's free initially, offer a nugget of advice that could help them, even if they don't buy anything from you. And so I do think the relationship from sales to buyers also has to change.

It's a two way street. And then to your point around stereotypes of salespeople, I felt like that too. Also from my community, because with Asians, it's like, you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, I feel like those are the only two professions that are really put in front of you. But also from my educational background, right? Because I went to Stanford, I was an Econ major. And I can't tell you the number of times people would tell me at my 20th reunion, “Hey, like you went into sales, you're the only guy that went into sales, but it worked out for you.” Almost as a backhanded compliment. Then I think, and I'm like, okay, I see what you thought of me when I was going into sales. You thought I might as well have been I don't know, like a janitor, it felt like they were saying, Hey, you kind of went into this very low level job, but somehow it worked out for you. And so I think we hit this on a societal level too.  And it's really interesting to see it play out. And now a lot of what I try to do is tell the younger generation, the path less taken actually can be the most fruitful.  And you really need to try and unshackle yourself from a lot of the expectations of today's society. 

Anika

Peter, you nodded to your background earlier. Can you talk a little bit about how your background shows up in the way that you connected with people when you were in corporate. And also now.

Peter

Yes. So my background culturally, I'm Korean American, I was born in Korea, but then moved to the States when I was a year old. I've moved six different times growing up between when I was a baby to graduating high school. And so I've lived in Korea, Michigan, California, and New York. And so I think like in a lot of ways I had to reshape my identity pretty often growing up. And being Korean was part of my identity but it was also this kind of 1.5 generation Korean that was stuck in the middle. And because we kept some traditions, but then had to adopt - felt like we had to adopt other traditions on the American side.

But then there was always this awkwardness of my parents assimilating and fitting in because they never did like to truly fit in. And so fast forward to corporate America.  Obviously, I feel very grateful and privileged having gone to a great university and starting my career at Google, but I felt similar dynamics within tech sales of not feeling like I truly belonged because a lot of my counterparts and leaders were older, white men.

And they just had a completely different upbringing. They weren't struggling with cultural identity growing up. They had three kids in a white picket fence and generations of wealth built up for them. Whereas I felt like I was just trying to make it. And that's a lot of what I use today in my coaching.I share these stories of being an outsider, both from a child's perspective, but also a young professional perspective, because a lot of founders, I think also feel misplaced when they're trying to start something from scratch. And, obviously there's a lot more minority founders. There's a lot more women founders who are still largely dealing with heavily homogenous groups of people.

When you think about the venture side or sales side or business side. And so I think that affords me the ability to really reach out and be like an olive branch versus like a prescriber of sales.  And what’s really central to my practice is how am I in there with you and how can I bring my trauma even and my insecurities and vulnerabilities from the past to truly help from a place of “I've been in your shoes” or I know what it feels like to not have things like fire perfectly.

Anika

Hmm.  So being that outsider, that's the word that really resonated as you were chatting. How does that put you in a place of strength and how do you advise your clients?  

Peter

Yeah, so I think there's a couple ways that that comes into play. One is as an outsider, you're never first to speak. Tactically and tangibly speaking in a meeting setting. I remember feeling very insecure in internal meetings.

I was much more confident in meetings with customers when I was driving the conversation. But when I'm in a room with a bunch of sales bros, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don't belong here.” There this guy goes talking again about really nothing, but the VP values him so much that he's going to get promoted next quarter. And here I am, the timid Asian guy, just trying to figure out what the heck is going on.  And at the time it was really not a very happy time for me because I felt like I was a failure in corporate America and that I could never go up the chain of command. But now everybody wants to be heard and everybody feels like they're not heard.

And the concept of being very high EQ, being aware of what's happening in your surroundings is very important in sales, by the way, because your buyers are going through tumultuous situations too at their own company. So the ability to say, “Hey, I see you dealing with this challenge. Let me help you.” Or “I'm listening very intently to what you're saying and I'll sell you what I have later, but I want to just make sure I truly understand where you're coming from, from a challenge perspective.” That's what sales is. I think really high level elite sales is how do you receive the room and how do you actually direct the conversation? Not from a listen to me standpoint, but from hey, I hear you standpoint. And I'm going to find the solution that is going to get us to a better spot because right now, clearly you're talking to me because you're not in a good spot. So I think that type of universal modern sales interaction is happening more and more with very skilled salespeople, whereas 30, 40, 50 years ago, it was all about banging on as many doors as you can. And talk about your product and force people to sign. It's just not the reality today.

Anika

There's too much competition. There's so many people doing a lot of what you're doing. And it's actually quite sad if you don't  do it the way that you're saying, because I don't think you will connect with the right people. It's very much a match, right? It's not just about a transaction. 

Peter

Yes. A lot of my clients will proactively say, I've heard this so many times. This very much feels like dating. I don't bring up that because, you know, that could be like… it's kind of risky to bring that up, depending on what scenario you're in, but they're like, Oh, so this is like dating! And it's like, yeah, actually it very much is like dating and the best folks who get to their match fastest are the ones who are extremely transparent  about not only what they can provide, but also what they can't provide and are very authentically and genuinely interested in you versus like having an ulterior motive.

Same thing with sales. You have to be very confident in who you are, what you can do, who you're, you're not, what you can't do. And then you have to be genuinely interested in helping the company or the person you're selling.  

Anika

Can you give us an example of how you work with sales folks or founders to help them really understand their identity and understand how that plays out and uses it as a point of strength versus those barriers we talked about earlier. 

Peter

Great question. So I'll give you a very specific example. I love to do call coaching, meaning that to start off the relationship, I don't even want to provide that much advice until I listen to a sales call  because it's very real world.  And so what I'll do is before our 1st 1st coaching session, I'll ask the founder to send me a call.

I'll write up like a 2 page document on my observations and things that went well as well as things that I think are big opportunities, right? Or missteps that I saw in the call and. Most of the time in the intro, people don't talk about themselves actually say like nine out of 10 times. And the intro sounds very much like, Hey, I'm Anika, I'm the founder of Root and Seed. I'm really excited to chat with you about our product.  Right. And  I think a lot about how I unlock inner confidence and somebody's style of sales. I start to ask in the coaching session, tell me about your origin story. Like, why did you even create this? Let's not even talk about the product, but what are you trying to do at a high level? 

And inevitably they start talking about personal things, professional things, how they came across founding the company.  And so what I do at that point is I say, why don't you mention some of those things in your intro? Cool. Because enterprise organizations are buying into you as well, by the way, they're not just buying the product. They want to have trust, credibility, and rapport built through you as the person who is in charge of the vision. And so that's example of what I do - I get my clients to talk about themselves. In a way that they have never done before and then incorporate it into a sales scenario because obviously you also can't just talk for 10 minutes at the beginning of the call.

So there's a lot of tips and tricks around like how much you say -, how much is enough? How do you weave your story into the course of the entire pitch versus trying to do everything in 15 minutes? So that's one example of how I coach. 

Anika

I love that idea of listening in on a call. Like, I just think that is step one, right? It's auditing, it's seeing the starting point, and then you take it from there. And I'm sure you're able to like, really spot some of the opportunities to strengthen that relationship, which I think is really important.  Peter, what do you think is the value of understanding some of your childhood, cultural family stories as it relates to the work that you do.  Yeah. So, or do you see a relationship? I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth.  

Peter

No, I do. I'll go out and say publicly, cause I'm like an open book. My childhood wasn't all like Rosie, right? There were a lot of tumultuous events that happened. Unfortunately, I had a sister who died by suicide right before I was getting into college. My dad moved to Korea for a few years and left my mom and me and my sister in Michigan to kind of figure things out. I hold a lot of resentment towards that. But then, you know, there's also a lot of things that my family taught me where it was always about, it's not about you only, like, you have to think about the other party and there's a very Confucian ideal in collaboration and making sure you put the group ahead of yourself and making sure you're really like thinking about the unit versus only what is in it for you. And so I, I think I have this very complex childhood where I still am grappling with a lot, what is specific to my family? What is specific to the Confucian values in Korean culture? And then what is specific to me going through struggles? And so I'll go to how does this help my business? Because obviously,  I show up as my full self and the way that this helps my business is. Nothing is ever perfect in business, nothing is ever ideal in business I would say no matter what you see in the headlines even the most successful companies go through huge dips and lows and highs and so I think it helps people relate to the fact that I am very adaptable. And that I understand culture is not just this homogenous, monolithic concept. It carries with it both positive unity in terms of community. It carries with it trauma from you having to adapt to different scenarios coming from a specific culture. And then it comes with an experience of how you deal with that trauma, right? And I think that is a lot of what makes me who I am today. And I say I use the word superpower a lot. I like to use that word because for so long, I felt it was a weakness. And for so long, I felt resentful of my past. And only recently, over the last few years to several years, am I like, you know what, this is amounting to something where I can truly help people now, because it's really hard to get help from somebody who hasn't gone through trials and tribulations. I don't know if that's what you're getting at…

Anika

No, it really is. And, listen, we've said since day one. Family stories are not sunshine and roses. This is not about blindly collecting the stories just because they exist and they happen one day like this. There is a responsibility of our generation to sift and sort and decide what we want to take forward, what we want to voice, and then potentially like let go, right? It’s giving voice to something. It doesn't mean something like, “Oh my God, it's great. It's positive”. And I, I would say it's becoming more pronounced as we move into the workplace because there are things that people do not want to take forward.  Unless you take the time to understand what those stories are, and they may be stories you're telling yourself, or they may be stories that, to your point, belong to someone else, or to your culture, or to a family member, and you want to put boundaries around that too, unless you really understand where it's coming from and you start to think about it and be more intentional about it, of that awareness around things like that, then you really can't give it away, right? It's like, it's never yours to give away. You have clearly done the work. I don't know, the other day somebody called it “warrior work”. Like you've done the warrior work to, to get to a point where you understand who you are. Well, in order to understand what your gifts are to the world. 

Peter

Appreciate that - it means so much.I feel like I still have a long ways to go, but you know, I'm on the path hopefully to becoming better.. I like that. The warrior work! 

Anika

The warrior work! Peter, may I ask you a question from our workplace conversation cards? 

Peter

Yeah, please do. Yeah. Is it a random one? Uh, it is. Nice. 

Anika

Oh, I like, I like this one.

Okay. Um, so it's under the category of stories and it says what song makes you most nostalgic. 

Peter

Wow,  that is such a great question. So I'm gonna have to go with a song that probably a lot of people know, very Korean, it's Psy, Gangham Style.  And the reason why it's nostalgic is because it represents me. It came out I think in 2012, that was when a lot of my identity was being shaped in sales and it was like a turning point in me deciding to truly lean into my identity and culture.

And so for a lot of the deals, I actually took my prospects to karaoke bars and sang Gangnam Style. And it became this thing with my prospects where a lot of them started talking about me  within their companies as the guy who knows how to sing Gangnam Style, who's this Korean dude taking us to Korean barbecue. And really like making an impression on us. And so I, that's like the most nostalgic because it is emblematic of me, really starting to lean into my identity and then seeing it work. Whereas right before that there was a decision point around like, do I do this or not? Am I going to be the laughing stock or am I going to be like a really authentic, memorable salesperson that people can trust? And luckily it was like that second category. And so that's the song I'll choose.  

Anika

That's it. Amazing. I love it. Oh my gosh, what a great answer! I feel like the entire podcast could be edited to that one question and answer. That is just so much brilliance, literally, thematically, exactly where we're wanting to go. My most favorite part was that you put yourself out there in a way that you were not sure about what the reception would be. That's life, right? If you want to grow, if you want to change where you are, you can't get to where you want to go in the same way that you got here. You were in a great place. You were a Stanford grad  you worked at Google and, and Slack. Was it Slack or? 

Peter

Yeah, Slack. 

Anika

I mean, that to me has made it right. Like, I'm sorry, but those are great places to be, but there was a yearning in you to do something else. Right? And so in order to get to that other place, you couldn't do the same things that you did before, even though you accomplished so much to get to that place. Um, and to me going to karaoke bars and singing with your prospects is exactly quintessentially an example of you doing things differently. So beautiful. 

Peter

Yeah. I tell my clients, I think to be great at sales, you have to be authentic and take risks. And that's how I view my life. I want to take risks, but I also want to be true to myself, right? 

Anika

Take risks, but be true to yourself. That is sage advice coming from someone who's actually living it. If you want to learn how you can get in touch with Peter, check out our show notes or find his podcast at DecodingSalesPodcast.com for more incredible tips for building meaningful business relationships. 

In the corporate world, relationships are as unique as organizations themselves. From relationships with our boss, like Michelle helped us better understand, to relationships with clients and potential partners, as Peter demystified. But maybe the biggest variance comes in our relationships with our colleagues. 

This season wouldn't be complete without exploring culture, and in this case, we mean the one that exists in corporate America. So in our next episode, we are thrilled for you to meet Carol Ann Lawrie, who works to ensure corporate values aren't just a plaque on a wall. She is the type of person who gets to know everyone in a room because she believes everyone's story matters. Carol Ann is a connector, an energizer, and is exactly the type of interview that will make your whole week. Root & Seed is hosted by me, Anika Chabra, executive produced by Jenn Siripong Mandel, and edited by Camille Blais. Bye for now. 

Episode Credits

Hosted by: Anika Chabra

Brought to you by: Root & Seed

Executive Producer: Jennifer Siripong Mandel

Sound Editing by: Camille Blais

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