Your Gut Called. It Says Disqualify the Deal.

Annie Zavoral-Kurth made the leap from agency life into SaaS sales with limited formal training and learned by doing. Now an award-winning seller at NinjaCat, she’s built her career around buyer empathy, honest relationships and solving real problems—not blindly following a methodology. In this episode, we opened Annie’s metaphorical CRM to talk about the wins, the failures and the deals that should have been disqualified three calls ago. Topics we covered: Saying “fuck it” and making the leap into SaaS sales Building genuine trust instead of bribing buyers with coffee, dinners or Gucci sunglasses Why buyers can smell a self-serving salesperson When sales methodologies help—and when they become box-ticking exercises Understanding the buyer rather than interrogating them for your CRM Selling through education and honesty instead of pushing every product Why rigid KPIs can encourage terrible sales behaviour Trusting your gut and disqualifying the wrong opportunities The ego trap of trying to be the hero of every deal Bringing in the right experts and getting comfortable saying, “I don’t know” Asking uncomfortable questions about money, budgets and broken processes Why not every salesperson is motivated by commission Detaching your self-worth from lost deals and uncontrollable outcomes Finding joy in the competition, variety and unpredictability of sales Creating more visibility for women in sales and sales leadership Raising a child with two salespeople for parents—and accepting that she’ll probably be closing them both soon