Carolina Baffigo

I switched to sales in my 40s as a single mom with three teenagers approaching college. In debt. Needing flexibility and real income.

Every training I sat through felt not me. "Always be closing." Scripts. Pressure tactics that made this engineer feel like a fraud. And even that type of training didn't apply to building products. Nothing addressed the actual complexity of our industry -- the specs, the stakeholders, the project lifecycle, the way a single conversation at the wrong time with the wrong person can kill a deal months later.

So I built my own system. I leaned into what I actually knew -- technical understanding, years of visiting job sites, project flow, stakeholder dynamics. I failed a lot. I paid obsessive attention to how different stakeholders actually wanted to be engaged. I systematically mapped who they were, what they needed, when, and why. And I learned what actually worked.

It worked. I went from nothing to the number-one commercial rep nationally. Then to VP, leading an entire business unit -- not just sales, but marketing and positioning, go-to-market strategy, operations, project delivery, SKU strategy and innovation. I rebuilt a struggling GTM system, restored profitability, and grew a multi-million-dollar pipeline. I've been grilled in board meetings on pipeline quality, growth expectations, and forecast accuracy. I've been in the job trailers, the crane lifts, the value-engineering meetings, and the "your product better work or we're all screwed" conversations.

What I saw over and over again was this: smart, well-intentioned reps losing specs not because they weren't working hard, but because they weren't job-site fluent. Our industry doesn't need another "rah-rah closer." It needs professionals who can move between design studios and job sites with equal confidence, speak every stakeholder's language, and turn that knowledge into consistent pipeline growth. That's what I teach now. Building products sales isn't personality work. It's technical credibility that builds relationships.