What's the one piece of sales advice you got early that turned out to be completely wrong?

I'll start.

Early in my career someone told me: "Always follow up with value. Never just check in. Every touchpoint needs to add something."

I took that seriously. Spent hours crafting follow-up emails with links, case studies, relevant articles. Every message had a reason. Every reply had a resource attached.

Turns out, I was overcomplicating it.

The best reply I've ever gotten to a follow-up was a two-sentence email. No value. No resource. Just: "Hey, we spoke 3 weeks ago about X. Still the right time to reconnect?" That deal closed.

Genuine beats resourceful almost every time. People are tired of being impressed. They want to feel like they're talking to a human, not a content machine.

The advice wasn't wrong exactly. It was just incomplete. Value matters. But so does brevity. So does timing. And so does sounding like yourself instead of sounding like you read a sales playbook and took notes.

I build Genie 007 partly because of this lesson. The product is a voice AI — you talk, it captures and acts. No friction. Just the direct path from thought to action. The less friction between your intention and the output, the better the thing usually is. That's true in sales. It's true in product.

So: what's the piece of advice you were told early that you've since stopped following?

Not looking for "hustle harder" takes. Looking for something specific — the actual advice, why you followed it, and what made you realise it was off.