Hint: Sales reps want better sales tech – so much so that 66% would rather clean their bathroom than update their customer relationship management (CRM) system, which is supposed to make their life easier. I'll get to that in a bit.

Let's start here, and for full disclosure, I've never had a job in sales.

However, when I started my career in marketing, I worked in media relations. I spent all day, every day, calling and emailing reporters trying to sell them on something newsworthy my clients had done to earn coverage. Back then, I had a media database application that was supposed to keep track of the most current email address and phone number for each journalist which helped me keep them organized in different lists based on their geography or the types of news they covered. Phone numbers were often wrong, and emails often bounced. We also had newswire services that could tell us who we had emailed press releases to, but there was no way to tell who had opened them or read them.

The one thing that always failed: "Hi Joe, I was just calling to see if you got my email...." Click.

To successfully sell the news, I had to build personal connections with reporters and media outlets - and that required legwork. Researching recent articles, following journalists on Twitter (I'm talking early Twitter!), and if you were lucky, you'd occasionally get someone on the phone for five minutes to ask them what they and their readers cared about. But mostly, it was a lot of guesswork and intuition. Even just deciding which person on my list to call first required a Jedi master level of awareness.

It was a tough job. Mainly because reporters are incredibly busy, and to get their attention, I had to develop the skills to build common ground with them in a matter of seconds (assuming I was speaking to the correct person in the first place, of course).