Arush Lakhani took his first sales job for the least romantic reason possible: out of his MBA, it was the firm paying the most. He'd already interned at a consulting firm and knew that world wasn't for him. What he found instead, almost by accident, was a career built less on charisma than on a habit he's carried since: treating sales like a system with obvious, learnable parts, rather than a talent some people are born with and others aren't.
There's Nothing Non-Obvious About It
Asked for the non-obvious best practices behind scaling high-performing teams at Airtel and Gartner, Arush's answer is almost anti-climactic: there aren't any. The instinct to look for a silver bullet, some hidden trick the top 5-10% are using, is itself the trap. His actual method is to gather the obvious list (he says you could ask ChatGPT for ten things great enterprise sales teams have done for fifty years and get a perfectly usable answer) and then be brutally honest about whether those obvious things are actually happening on the ground. Strategy, communication, support: that's the whole framework. The difficulty was never in knowing what to do. It's in being diligent enough to keep doing it.
The Post-Midnight Conversation
Arush traces a real shift in how he manages to one specific night, three or four years into leading a team, after a bad quarter. He'd been pushing a rep hard, and past midnight, in a one-on-one, the rep finally told him something raw: he'd known this outcome was coming, but hadn't felt confident enough to say so, especially not in a team setting, where admitting doubt out loud feels like a risk to how you're perceived. That moment reset Arush's whole approach to team structure. He moved from roughly 70% team meetings and 30% one-on-ones to the reverse: 80% one-on-ones, with team time reserved mostly for recognition, because high-level strategy doesn't need to be repeated to a group every week, and the honesty that actually helps a struggling rep rarely surfaces in front of peers.
Give Away the Idea That You Need to Be Liked
The boundary Arush draws around that closeness is deliberate. A manager should be genuinely connected to each rep, but not their friend, and not obligated to be liked by them. Sometimes the job requires being a pain in someone's life on a given week, and a manager who needs to be liked will avoid exactly the conversations that matter most. Letting go of that need, in his experience, is what makes the one-on-one actually useful instead of just comfortable.
Why Relationships Don't Close the Deal Anymore
Arush is direct about where he lands on an old sales debate: hiring reps purely for their existing relationships or industry Rolodex. Relationships get you in the door: a warm intro, a first meeting. But in his experience nobody today is signing a $30–50K software contract on relationship alone. What actually closes it is separating the product from the problem and making space for the problem first, especially when selling something non-obvious, the way Gartner's advisory work was non-obvious, or the way SaaS management, the category he sells into now, still requires explaining what it even is before a feature gets mentioned. A rep who's deeply curious about how the business actually works will outperform a rep who's simply "sold in this industry before."
Where in your own team is comfort, being liked, avoiding the harder one-on-one, quietly standing in for the honest conversation that would actually fix the problem?