RISEUP AT WORK

If you are interviewing for a sales role, being qualified is not the problem. The real challenge is making sure you do not sound like every other qualified candidate.

If you are trying to differentiate yourself in your next interview, Sales Uncharted Feature #39 is for you.

I recently spent nearly 72 minutes with close to 100 sales professionals from IndoSales, India’s largest B2B sales community curated by Shahjad Khan, exploring how salespeople can prepare for interviews in a way that makes their judgment, commercial value, and readiness difficult to miss.

The premise is simple. Stop trying to predict every possible interview question. Decide what you want the interviewer to conclude about you, then build the evidence that leads them to that conclusion.

In the article, I unpack 10 practical principles from my 20-page Unfair Advantage Interview Playbook, including TALK, which stands for Tension, Ambition, Leadership, Knowledge, and VOICE, which stands for Vivid, Outcome-focused, Individual, Conversational, Expandable.

A huge thank you to Shahjad and the entire IndoSales community for the energy, questions, and conversation.

The complete 72-minute video is embedded in Feature #39, and the article includes instructions for accessing the full Unfair Advantage Interview Playbook inside the private Sales Uncharted Community.

If your next interview matters, read this before you prepare for it.

#39: The Unfair Advantage Interview Playbook: A Session on Sales Interview Preparation with IndoSales Recently, Shahjad Khan invited me to speak to a group of sales professionals from IndoSales, India’s largest B2B sales community, on a subject almost every seller eventually has to confront: How do you prepare for a sales interview without sounding as though you prepared for a sales interview? We ...

Some firms do excellent work and still cannot build predictable growth.

That is the problem we unpacked in TV Show #12 of RISEUP@work with Sabrina Kinckle.

This conversation is for founders, consultants, coaches, fractional executives, and B2B service firms that are tired of relying on referrals, random networking, occasional outreach, and disconnected content to create a pipeline.

Sabrina delivered a clear message: growth becomes more sustainable when positioning, authority, outreach, nurture, follow-up, and conversion work as a single, connected system.

We discussed four big ideas:

Core Idea #1: Expertise must be translated into the buyer’s language, not the expert’s.

Core Idea #2: Positioning gives buyers a faster way to understand your relevance.

Core Idea #3: LinkedIn authority works when prospects can see how you think.

Core Idea #4: CRM, follow-up, and nurture protect momentum in long sales cycles.

What I appreciated most is that Sabrina did not reduce client acquisition to tricks, hacks, or more activity. She brought the conversation back to clarity, trust, consistency, and infrastructure.

If your growth depends on memory, timing, luck, or scattered effort, this episode will make you think differently.

Watch RISEUP@work TV Show #12 with Sabrina Kinckle:

TV #12: Why Growth Breaks When Your Business Development Is Scattered: A Conversation with Sabrina Kinckle | Deepak Bhootra Some firms do excellent work and still cannot build predictable growth. That is the problem we unpacked in TV Show # 12 of RISEUP@work with Sabrina Renée K. of Kelbree Consulting. This conversation is for founders, consultants, coaches, fractional executives, and B2B service firms that are tired of...

Your career is the biggest asset you will ever own, and almost no one manages it like one.

We will research a used car for a weekend and give the thing that pays for everything zero real thought.

Almost all of your growth is built in the first decade of work. That account pays the highest interest early, and it opens only once.

So I gave the whole idea a name. Careeronomics. Here is the case for running a career like capital.

Careeronomics The case for managing your career like the appreciating asset it actually is.

I keep meeting professionals who cannot defend their own best work.

The deck is clean. The analysis is sharp. It reads better than anything they would have written three years ago. Then someone senior asks a real question underneath it, and there is nothing there. The model built the surface, they shipped it, and the understanding that used to come from building it never formed.

Here is the part that worries me. The ability to stand behind your work is not a switch you flip once you make it to senior. It is built years earlier, from thousands of small calls you actually make, get wrong, and get corrected on. When AI does the hard part for you, that learning quietly goes missing.

This is not a reason to put the tools down. It is a reason to use them with your eyes open. Do the first pass of the thinking yourself. Before you send anything, find the one decision you cannot yet explain out loud, and close that gap.

Your role is rentable. The judgment you build while doing the work is the one thing that stays yours.

I wrote about where that judgment actually comes from, and how to protect it. Link in the comments.

The Edge AI Cannot Hand You Chris Chambers wrote a sharp piece on owning outcomes in an AI world. I want to carry his idea somewhere he did not take it, into how a career is actually built, and where the judgment to stand behind

At 54, I (Dr. Deepak Bhootra) started building something people kept telling me was a game for younger people. And here I am proving it is not. Absolutely not!

In the last year, my work with RISEUP@work and my B2B sales consultancy has grown to 34,000 followers on LinkedIn, 9,000 on LinkedIn newsletters, 12,000 on YouTube channels, 6,000 here on Facebook channels, and a small TV show, RISEUP@work, on NowMediaTV, which has now reached 11 episodes.

Am I tired? Yes.
Am I excited? Yes.
Did I imagine doing all of this at 56 (yes, my age today!)? No.
Am I as excited doing it as I was when I started working at 22? Yes.
Has it been easy? No.
Was it supposed to be easy? No.

Those who know me know that I carry my emotions openly and that I believe, deeply, in the goodness of people. The last two years since I left the corporate world have tested me in ways I did not expect. So I'm showing you my vulnerability here, too. And those who know me know that this, exactly this, is what defines me.

Here is the part I am proud of. The first version of RISEUP@work, my career progression platform, is live, and we have already onboarded 500 early adopters. We are not done. Not even close. I will keep building.

If you would like to walk this next stretch with me, come on board.

Join here: https://riseupatwork.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fbdb

Signing up normally gives you a 14-day trial of the paid Builder Tier. Use the link above, and as an early adopter, that trial gets upgraded to a full year of Builder Tier, free. I am doing this for the first 2,000 who join, because I want to learn from real users what works, what does not, and what needs my love and attention to get better.

And if you just want to stay close to my work with RISEUP@work, I have started a WhatsApp channel for RISEUP@work with daily insights and tips, curated from everything I share across my various channels. It is a one-way channel, so your phone number and your name stay completely private.

Follow the WhatsApp channel here: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vb89GdEElagzKGnz730E

Once again, thank you. Truly.

RISEUP@work | Daily Career Building Tips & Tricks | Dr. Deepak Bhootra - WhatsApp channel Follow RISEUP@work | Daily Career Building Tips & Tricks | Dr. Deepak Bhootra's WhatsApp Channel. RISEUP@work is a career progression platform for the first fifteen years of working life. We show you the forces shaping your career, and we help you act on them. This channel is where we share what we keep learning.
-- Dr. Deepak Bhootra

🎯 What people bring us

A promotion is coming and you cannot tell whether you are ready or two years early
Your manager is not respecting your boundaries and you do not know whether to raise it or leave
You are doing good work that nobody senior can see
You have an offer in hand and no idea whether it moves you forward or sideways

🧭 How we work

We start with knowing exactly where you stand.

Advice without a baseline is guesswork, so diagnostics come first.

After that everything writes back to one profile, so what you record in month 1 changes the advice you get in month 3.

💬 What members tell us

"The structure and content really helped me to dig deep and figure out what my true challenges are and where I stand in my current career, patterns, and behaviors" -- Olivia, Product Coordinator.

"I'm discovering so much about myself that I never realized before" -- Victor, Graphic Designer.

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Your name and your number stay private here. Nobody can see them, including us.

✅ Start free

Sign up to the EXPLORER tier for no cost and get a 14 day trial of our upgraded Builder tier.

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📺 Watch us

RISEUP@work has its own show on NowMedia Television Networks, where we take the same career questions people bring us and work through them on air.

🎬 https://www.nowmedia.tv/riseupatwork

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This is the whole ecosystem and none of it expires. Take your t. Join 215 followers for the latest updates.

A client hit the exact title she had chased for ten years, and within a month the good feeling was gone. Another never found her one calling and quietly decided she had failed. Same wound. Both were taught that purpose is a place you arrive at. The career research says otherwise. It is not about having a calling, it is about living it, week to week. Point yourself somewhere true, take the next honest step, and let the milestones keep score.

You Made Your Purpose a Destination. That Is Why It Keeps Failing You. Careers built to arrive somewhere break on arrival. The career research points to a better way: run purpose as a direction you live.

Nobody lands on a Performance Improvement Plan, a PIP, by surprise. It feels like an ambush, but it is almost always a year of quiet feedback someone stopped hearing, finally printed with a deadline. The signals came gently, wrapped in "great, next thing," and were easy to file under noise. By the time it becomes a document, it was months in the making. I wrote about how to catch it while it is still just a conversation.

Nobody Lands on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) by Surprise A PIP is almost never a surprise. It is a year of feedback you quietly stopped hearing, finally printed on letterhead with a deadline.