Why Top Performers Still Feel Empty | Armen Avanessian with Dan Pascone | Ep #59

Armen Avanessian has spent more than 25 years in payments, banking, and fintech, starting as a part-time bank teller while still in school and working his way up through service and sales roles into his current position as Head of Sales and Partnerships at Anthem, where he's building out a new offline payments channel. In January, he added another title: author, with the release of Selling Senses.

He's candid about what almost kept the book from happening. Like a lot of leaders, he says, he wrestled with imposter syndrome, the quiet voice asking who's going to read a book by someone who isn't already a known author. What pushed him past it was personal. His family has a history of dementia, and his mother, diagnosed several years ago, is now in late-stage decline: she can't speak and doesn't recognize her own children. Watching that, Armen says, is what made him think seriously about what he wants to leave behind, not a legacy in the usual sense, but what he calls a testimony: a record of the opportunities he was given and what he did with them.

That's the same instinct that sits behind what we see in executives who are burned out at the top of their game: the income and the title were never the actual goal. Something else was, and it's easy to lose track of it for years at a time.

Selling Senses starts from a simple premise: people are wired to be sensory, experiential beings. "We have two eyes, not one. Two ears, two hands, lips," Armen says, and the best salespeople engage as many of those senses as the situation allows, not as a checklist, but as an environment. He describes walking into a small business owner's shop with a demo device: the prospect sees the presentation, holds the hardware, hears the pitch, and sometimes reacts to something as unconscious as the salesperson's cologne, which can trigger an emotional association that has nothing to do with the product itself.

The data backs this up. Brands that engage three or more senses see significantly higher recall and emotional impact, multi-sensory experiences can increase memory retention by up to 70 percent, and Harvard Business School research from Professor Gerald Zaltman found that roughly 95 percent of purchasing decisions happen at the subconscious, emotional level, not the rational one. Armen's caution is that leaders overcorrect toward facts, features, and benefits and end up with what he calls "data kill," where more information creates more confusion instead of more clarity. His fix is to lead with open-ended questions built around who, what, where, why, and how, and let the data support the answer instead of replacing the conversation.

Of all five senses, Armen says active listening is the hardest to master and the most important to start with, because salespeople are naturally already thinking about their next question instead of hearing the answer to the current one. His fix is the 80/20 rule: ask two or three good questions, then let the other person talk 80 percent of the time. Afterward, reflect it back: "What I hear you saying is X, is that right?" That confirmation is what makes someone feel heard instead of processed.

He makes the case that this works even in a fully virtual setting, using a cooking-class example: a client signs up for an online class, a box of ingredients arrives with a personal note from the chef, and the unboxing alone triggers smell, touch, and anticipation before the video call even starts. By the time the class begins, the salesperson (or in this case, the chef) has already engaged sight, sound, smell, and touch, without ever being in the same room. The lesson for anyone doing business over Zoom: the senses aren't optional just because the meeting is remote, they just take more intention to create.

Armen's most candid answer in the episode comes when Dan asks what he'd tell a revenue leader who's crushing their number and still going to bed feeling empty. He points to his own experience at Bank of America Merchant Services: carrying the bag in field sales, six-figure income, awards, recognized as a top performer, and still going home to ask himself, "Is this going to be it?"

His answer was to make himself intentionally uncomfortable. When he took his current Head of Sales role, a job leading leaders for the first time, he admits he wasn't ready for it. "This has been the toughest role I've taken on in my 25-plus year career," he says, and also the most rewarding. His litmus test now: if an opportunity carries healthy fear, a real mix of nerves and excitement, it's probably the right one. If it feels completely comfortable, you're likely just chasing something familiar instead of something that will actually stretch you.

When the conversation turns to money, Armen doesn't soften his own record. Two mistakes stand out to him. First, he didn't start saving early enough, because he assumed the good income would simply keep coming. "Start saving early and have a plan for savings," he says, a lesson that applies just as much to a revenue leader in a strong comp year as it did to him. A strong income alone doesn't build wealth; what you automate and put away during your peak earning years does.

Second, he went all-in on single positions instead of diversifying, whether that was one stock or one opportunity at a time. He's since moved to what he calls a more balanced approach across savings, retirement accounts, and other holdings. It's the same concentration risk we see constantly in executives whose company stock has quietly grown to 30 to 50 percent of their net worth without a deliberate decision to let that happen.

Most people treat "healthy fear" as career advice: take the stretch role, raise your hand for the project that scares you. What most people miss is that the same litmus test applies just as directly to money, and most high earners apply it backward. Diversifying out of a concentrated stock position, actually automating a higher savings rate, or having the real conversation about what "enough" looks like, all of those carry a version of healthy fear too. If moving money out of your favorite, most familiar position doesn't feel slightly uncomfortable, you're probably not moving enough of it. Comfort in your financial decisions is often just as reliable a warning sign as comfort in your career choices.

Take an executive we'll call Priya: 44 years old, a VP of Sales earning $340,000 a year in base and commission, with roughly 45 percent of her net worth sitting in her employer's stock after eight years of vesting RSUs she never got around to selling. She was offered a stretch SVP role at a smaller, less established company, more equity, more risk, and by her own admission, "terrifying."

Using Armen's litmus test, the fear itself was the signal that the role was worth serious consideration rather than an automatic no. She took it. At the same time, she applied the same test to her portfolio: systematically selling down company stock to below 15 percent of net worth felt uncomfortable too, since that stock had made her career look good on paper for years. She did it anyway, on a scheduled basis over several quarters to manage the tax impact. A year later, both decisions, the job and the diversification, were the ones she was glad she'd made while they still felt risky, not after the fact once they'd become obvious.

This conversation is for revenue leaders and executives in their 40s and 50s who are hitting their numbers, earning well, and still privately wondering if this is it. If your income has outpaced your sense of purpose, or if your portfolio has quietly become more concentrated than you'd ever choose on purpose, this episode is built for you.

If your income has grown faster than your sense of purpose, or your portfolio is more concentrated than you'd choose on purpose, a real plan can close both gaps at once. Book a Free Wealth Strategy Call with Tailored Wealth and we'll talk through where you stand today.