The best way to beat imposter syndrome? Know your sh*t, and share it.

Read on : )

Learning to ask the questions

As a kid, I never “tinkered.” I loved Barbies and American Girl dolls, and playing “house” or “school.” Coding? Nah, computers were for Carmen San Diego or flirting with boys on AIM. My math anxiety was bonafide and no one batted an eyelash when I dropped out of high school physics. I was a wordsmith, a people person!

After majoring in French and linguistics, I spent my first few years out of college living abroad and learning languages. What does that mean? was an important question I posed many a time to native interlocutors, and felt no embarrassment. I was there to learn, n’est-ce pas?

But years later when I landed a job as a technical salesperson (Solutions Consultant) at a leading Silicon Valley Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, I sheepishly found myself at a loss of words.

I could talk seamless simplicity through software all day, but I had no vocabulary with which to dive into the nitty gritty of our cloud-based CRM, our robust API and SDKs, our AWS-powered platform, JSON payloads, and whatever IPaaS was.

Looking to beef up my technical prowess, I tried learning to code. Aside from the fact I found it relentlessly boring and math-adjacent, coding didn’t give me new words. It was clear a person could code without needing to articulate what was going on or how it worked.

Which for me, a customer-facing technical salesperson, was not going to cut it.

I needed to learn concepts over code, but that would require revealing just how little I knew to those who knew the most.

Technical beginnings

At first, I was loath to admit to any of the fast-talking, more tenured guys on my team that I didn’t know where the cloud was or why my API calls threw errors.

But I quickly realized that voicing my gaps and feeding my curiosity was the best way to go deep fast. Google wasn’t great at answering But what does that mean? - a desk buddy could provide much needed context or partnership.

People proved supportive over judgey, and I noticed the little ego boost people got while talking about things they knew. What’s more, I had the sense my colleagues benefited from my “dumb” questions - forced to explain a concept they perhaps only knew in their heads, they reinforced their expertise out loud.

I got answers, they got practice.

It was also clear that I wasn’t the only person in the dark - plenty of other people didn't know things either, but were more hesitant to expose their blindspots.

Hmm.

Sharing it out, reaping rewards

I started writing down everything I could, synthesizing my notes into digestible giveaways. I served up all kinds of references, 101s, and video tutorials to new joiners or teammates who also found themselves with a lack of words.

After a while, I had a reputation as a person with answers myself. In our Women in Presales group, I created a space where we could discuss technical questions out in the air. Through creating in-depth trainings on our tech, I sought input from people across the business and forged new cross-team connections.

Beyond making a name for myself, I did better in my job. SaaS and APIs went from intimidating jargon to concepts I could speak about with confidence and authority. I won more deals, got promoted, and jumped at the opportunity to take on the UK fintech market. Financial services may have stoked that latent math anxiety, but if I could teach myself to talk tech, I figured I could speak fluent finance too.

When a new role emerged to enable technical sales teams on our products and technologies, my work made me top of mind. In that role I went on to launch an internal course to get Go-To-Market employees up to speed on SaaS and cloud so they could sell smarter. Engineers even Slacked me that it helped them better explain their code and communicate with non-engineers.

SaaS Savvy

These days, I’m founder of SaaS Savvy, where I’m building an online course teaching customer-facing professionals (SDRs, AEs, SCs, and CSMs) to talk tech, not code it.

I am a firm believer that anyone can learn enough to be dangerous about anything, and that concepts compound with the right foundations.

Pushing past the nagging fear of asking a “dumb” question was the best way to learn quick; sharing knowledge with others was the best way to reinforce it, build community, and drive the knowledge home.

Treat your curiosity as a skill to have and to hone, and remember that the best way to know your sh*t is to share it with others.

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I’m launching my first ever SaaS Savvy pilot program this June, and would love to welcome some Elpha ladies as part of the first cohort.

Comment and let me know - how confident are you in talking about technical cloud concepts like APIs, IPaaS, platform, or even SaaS itself?

What kinds of SaaS or cloud-based conversations do you wish you could lead with more authority, confidence, and expertise?