This piece is the first in a series that delves into the inaugural inductees of the Maestro Group Hall of Fame. These twelve individuals embody the principles of true sales professionals. We recognize them for their grit, their commitment to learning, and their dedication to elevating the sales profession.
July 10, 2024
Seth Peters had a feeling he would get into sales before he even started college. What stands out to him as an early marker was a workday he remembers at Sears. “There was a specific Sunday where we were absolutely getting crushed, and I was working with someone in Men’s. The lines were long for both of us, and I had like nine straight people in line that I signed up for a Sears credit card.”
His coworker was amazed. (We were amazed.)
“Most of them were like, I don’t want the credit card, and I was immediately like, ‘Well, that’s interesting, what made you say that? You don’t want to save fifteen dollars today?’”
They would say, ‘Well, no, I want to save fifteen dollars.’
Seth came back with, “Okay, great. Well, let’s figure out how to get you the savings and no issue on the credit card.”
“I know why these people have a friction,” Seth told us. “I’m going to remove the friction by offering the value of what they could get.”
He’d ask his customers, “If I can get you the savings today and a bill in the mail in fifteen days with a zero-dollar balance, how would that work for the outcome you want, which is to save?” He would follow this up with, “How were you planning on paying for this today?”
“Oh, I was going to do cash.”
“Okay, great,” said Seth. “Well, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll open a line of credit. We’ll charge it to that. You get your fifteen dollars in savings. Immediately, we’ll go and make a payment on your card. I can do that here at the register. So when you get your first bill in the mail, it’ll be a zero-dollar balance.”
After Sears, Seth pursued a hopeful career in football with a minor focus on school. An injury led him to transfer back home and attend the University of Kentucky in Lexington where he doubled down on school and sales. In addition to bartending at night, Seth worked at an Enterprise car dealership, starting with car shuttling and car cleaning and then moving into rentals. For many salespeople, Seth included, customer hesitancy is an opportunity more than a calamity.
“When I was at Enterprise,” he told us, “someone would walk up to the register from a body shop or from a car dealership, and the first thing they would say is, ‘I’m here to pick up my car, and I don’t want your insurance.’ And I would always get this massive smile on my face, because I’m like, little do they know they’re probably about to get the insurance.”
After his time at Enterprise, Seth moved on to become a tech consultant for General Motor’s dealership network. This, too, shaped much of what he understands about sales today. He finds a particular piece of advice from his boss at GM especially relevant: “It’s a lot easier to get someone to go from five to ten percent, than from zero to five percent.” This stuck with him because it changed his focus from trying to enlist people who were oblivious to what he and his product had to offer them to those who had given him a chance. “I should be putting my inputs there. I should be building my relationships there. I should be building my trust within there. And then that’s going to help me show value to other folks who haven’t been giving me the attention. And that’s where I took off. I went from kind of middle-of-the-pack, lower-middle-of-the-pack (from a performance on a national scorecard) to top three every single time, without a doubt, in one of the smallest markets competing on the national scorecard.”
In 2020, Seth found himself heading sales operations at a successful startup in Washington, DC. “I was set up to have a massive year for our company, bringing on tons of new business like Jack Daniels as an official spirit sponsor. We’d never had any spirit sponsor. We just inked a three-year renewal with Molson Coors. It was a big time, like we were really booming.”
Then came Covid. The seven-million-dollar startup was worth the proverbial penny. “I was about to get married. We just got engaged like soon before, so it was like, we’re trying to buy our house. We’re trying to do all these things.”
Seth shifted course. He took 55% compensation at the startup and also began working at an Amazon factory. He started out scanning packages. “I remember seeing these guys that were just constantly moving stuff around the place, kind of looked like they were working with a lot more like autonomy versus what I was getting the ability to do. I was like, ‘I wanna do what those guys do.’”
His competitive nature—the one that had carried him through sports and sales—never ebbed. “My scan rate was one of the highest. I was constantly in motion, moving around, doing this, doing that. And I guess those guys saw me.”
A few weeks in, one of them approached him. “We’ve seen you ever since you’ve been here, and you’re on the move constantly. You should come do what we do, and we’re gonna tell our boss to move you over to our team.”
“I got put into this role where it was: here’s your sheets of deliveries, and you had to load the trucks before they went out. But I got my own walkie talkie. So I felt like I already got a raise.”
While at Amazon, Seth continuously applied to technology roles. The responses he got were a broken record: “Hey, Seth, you have a great sales background. You have great sales acumen. We just don’t think tech is for you.” He kept on keeping on, but so did the responses. “And I remember one day, I was beyond frustrated, and I just said, you know what? I’m over it. Tech doesn’t want me. I’ll find another job in sales, and I’ll figure it out.”
One day, his wife saw a post on a neighborhood Facebook group from someone who was hiring in sales. “I know you’re really pissed off right now, and down, but I think you should reach out to him,” she said.
“I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe now is not the right time.”
“I’m gonna reach out to him,” she said.
As it turned out, Will lived not fifteen minutes away from Seth. They took a walk in the neighborhood. Will was impressed by Seth’s grit and sales acumen. He said he had some opportunities.
About two days before Christmas, Will called again, “and he’s like, “Hey. I have a role. I’m gonna come in as interim sales leader at a company, and I’d like you to come join the sales team with me. Are you in?”
As Seth recalls, “Will was invested in me very early on, when no one else would be.”
It wasn’t long before Seth was inducted into the Maestro family. In 2021, he started as a senior sales trainer and enterprise SaaS sales executive.
When asked which Maestro teachings have stayed with him the most, he said, “I think it’s some of the fundamental things, right? The pillars: control what you can control, mitigate risk. I think I always did some of that to an extent without knowing I was doing it, but when you just have that constant reminder through the Maestro way, you’re like, oh. I get it. It’s more than just maybe landing there and doing it on occasion. It’s like, you’ve got to be very calculated on both. It does a lot of good for you and what you’re trying to get done.”
Also top of mind for him are the non-negotiables. The time check, the tech check. “I say that, because what I learned ultimately through both of those things that are just so fundamental to everything else that Maestro teaches is, that sets the pace right out of the shoot, and it also builds the best process. And what I’ve learned is having that consistency, specifically with the non-negotiables, helps me build a tighter process in every other part of the sales motion.”
But for Seth, it’s not just about the uniformity. There’s a very real benefit to staying consistent: “what that helps me do is find those things that are a risk when one little thing goes astray from the other side of the line. Because I’m running my plays the exact same way every time, every call. And when that little behavior change happens, I’m like, ding, ding, ding! Something’s not right here.”
There are a lot of obstacles facing salespeople in their day-to-day roles. Seth’s advice? “Trust the process. But I would also say, have thick skin. You’ve got to understand you’re going to lose, and I think that’s no matter what role. I don’t think that changes. I think your first sales role, for the first six months to a year, you’re gonna lose way more than you win. You absolutely will.”
That doesn’t go away. “And then you go level up into your next sales role, new solution, new industry, new buyers. Same thing. You’re gonna lose more than you win. So you have got to understand that like, that’s just the world you’re in. So you gotta have really thick skin. People are tough. People are challenging on salespeople.”
Seth’s counterpoison is what he calls “his north star,” his professional raison d’être. For Seth that north star changed when he had a family for whom he was working. He and his wife just welcomed their second child, and Maestro can’t wait to welcome him, too.
Seth is currently an Enterprise SaaS Sales Executive at TrueAccord, a machine-learning powered, industry-leading recovery and collections platform. You can learn more about Seth here. Be sure to congratulate him while you’re there!
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