When someone is starting a career in sales, it's tempting to think that there is a formula for where and how they need to learn. How do I open the call? What discovery questions should I ask? How do I respond to an objection? What do I say when someone tells me the price is too high? How do I get the prospect to the next meeting?
These are important skills, but after more than four years of having Shira Harash teach Salesclass students, we've seen her impart a much more valuable lesson: great salespeople learn how to solve problems.
That perspective comes from a career in which Shira has seen sales from a number of angles. She has been an Account Executive, worked in enterprise sales development and customer success, sold different types of SaaS products, managed salespeople and carried individual quotas herself. She has worked in both product-led and sales-led environments, and today she works as a Solutions Engineer at Deel. Throughout that journey, she has continued coming back to Salesclass to share what she is learning with people who are just beginning theirs.
From Sales Development to Sales Leadership
Shira's career is particularly interesting for new salespeople because it hasn't followed a single narrow path. Her early career included digital advertising sales at USA TODAY andWPP. She then moved into technology, working in Enterprise Sales Development for North America at ClickTale. From there, she moved into roles spanning sales and customer success at Hotjar, giving her exposure to what happens with customers well beyond the initial sale.
A major chapter of her career came at Similarweb, where Shira progressed from Sales Manager for Sales Intelligence to Senior Sales Manager and then Sales Team Manager. Along the way, she over-achieved annual target as a Sales Manager and as a Senior Sales Manager. She then made a big move... joining Deel as an Account Executive and subsequently moving into Solutions Engineering.
For someone entering sales, there is an important lesson in that progression. There isn't one version of a successful sales career. Sales can lead toward management, enterprise selling, customer success, technical solution selling and many other directions. The skills you develop learning how to understand customers, communicate value and solve commercial problems can continue opening doors throughout your career.
Sales Is Really a Series of Problems to Solve
When you're new to sales, it is easy to become obsessed with saying the "right thing." Experienced salespeople tend to see things differently. If a prospect isn't responding, they want to understand why. If someone raises an objection, they try to understand what sits behind it. If a deal slows down, they look for the missing stakeholder, unanswered concern or lack of urgency. If a product is difficult to explain, they work out how to connect its capabilities to a problem the customer actually cares about.
That problem-solving mentality is something Shira brings into her sessions with Salesclass students. Instead of treating sales as a collection of scripts to memorize, she can draw on situations she has actually encountered across different companies, products, roles and stages of the sales process. For a new salesperson who has yet to accumulate those experiences themselves, that access can be incredibly valuable.
"What Would You Do Here?"
Some of the most useful moments in sales training happen when we move away from the presentation and into an actual situation. A prospect pushes back on price. Someone likes the product but can't get the rest of the organisation on board. A seemingly promising opportunity suddenly goes quiet. You're on a call and aren't sure whether to push further, ask another question or simply stop talking and listen.
These are the moments where experienced salespeople can give new salespeople something that is difficult to get from a textbook: pattern recognition. Someone who has spent years selling has encountered hundreds or thousands of variations of situations a new salesperson may be experiencing for the first time. They may not have a magic answer, but they have a much larger collection of experiences to draw upon when deciding what to do next.
That is one of the things Shira has been able to give Salesclass students since she started teaching with us in 2022. She can take a problem that feels completely new to a student and help them understand what might really be happening, what questions they should be asking and how an experienced salesperson would think through the situation.
Learning From Someone Who Is Always Learning
There is another reason we particularly value having active sales professionals like Shira teaching at Salesclass: she is teaching something she is still actively doing and developing herself. Over the years she has taught with us, her own career has continued evolving. She has moved between management and individual contributor roles, sold in different environments and most recently moved from Account Executive to Solutions Engineer at Deel. The perspective she brings to students has therefore evolved alongside her own experience.
That matters in technology sales because the profession keeps changing. Buyers change, products become more technical, AI changes how salespeople research and prepare, and sales organisations experiment with different combinations of product-led and sales-led growth. The fundamentals of understanding people and solving problems remain important, but the situations in which salespeople apply those fundamentals continue to evolve.
Having instructors who are encountering these changes themselves keeps the Salesclass classroom connected to what is actually happening inside sales organisations today. Students aren't simply hearing how sales worked five or ten years ago. They get to learn from someone who can bring current situations, current challenges and current thinking into the conversation.
Giving New Salespeople a Head Start
One of the hardest things about beginning a sales career is that you don't yet have much experience to draw upon. Your first difficult objection can feel enormous. The first prospect who goes silent after appearing interested can be confusing. A bad week can make you question whether you're suited to sales at all. Eventually, experience teaches you that these situations are normal and helps you recognise the patterns behind them.
Over time, you learn which problems require action, which require patience, which require a different approach and which simply come with the profession. The opportunity for Salesclass students is to borrow some of that experience before they have accumulated it themselves. They still need to make the calls, handle the objections and develop their own instincts, but they can begin with insights from people who have already encountered many of the situations they are about to face.
That is one of the ideas behind Salesclass. We want students to learn the techniques and tools required to succeed in modern technology sales, but we also want them to have access to people who have already faced the problems they're about to encounter. Every story, example, objection and problem Shira brings into the classroom gives someone beginning their career another situation they won't have to encounter completely unprepared.
Four Years of Paying It Forward
There is something else about Shira's involvement with Salesclass that deserves recognition. Sales professionals are busy. There is always another target, customer, forecast, internal meeting or problem requiring attention. Teaching people who are trying to break into the profession takes time, preparation and a willingness to share experiences that have taken years to accumulate. Shira has continued doing that with Salesclass since 2022.
Over her career, she has accumulated experience across digital advertising, enterprise sales development, SaaS, customer success, sales leadership, account executive roles and now solutions engineering. Rather than keeping those lessons within the companies and teams where she has worked, she continues passing them down to people who are several steps behind her on the same journey.
At Salesclass, we believe that is one of the best ways to build the next generation of sales talent. New salespeople need tools, techniques and practice, but they also benefit enormously from experienced people willing to look at a situation with them and say, "I've seen this problem before. Here's how I'd think about it."
For more years, Shira Harash has been one of those people for Salesclass.
