What do a retail worker, a high school English teacher, a recent business school graduate and an industrial engineer have in common? They can all succeed in sales.
A survey conducted in 2017 by Hubspot revealed that while almost a quarter of sales employees surveyed had a degree in business, almost as many — seventeen percent — came into the field with no degree at all. Several other degrees were also represented, including English literature, marketing, economics and engineering. Where a person comes from doesn’t have to matter in sales; what matters is what is done with that background.
There are a number of critical transferable skills in sales: strong work ethic, interpersonal skills, organization and problem solving, among others. To elevate to sales management, one also needs to be a mentor and leader. Someone with an aspiring career in sales management can pick up these skills from countless different jobs, including climbing the sales ladder; the door is wide open for those willing to put in the work.
Divvy Homes VP of Sales and Marketing Lucia Franzese and Braze VP of Strategic Accounts Tony McRoberts put in the work and advanced to sales leadership positions from very different backgrounds. Built In San Francisco sat down with them to learn more about their journey and hear their advice on how to use an unconventional background as a springboard to success.
What is your career background, and how did it prepare you for a leadership role?
While I have not had a typical sales career, many of the lessons from my past roles in microfinance, strategic growth and nonprofits have set me up for success as a sales leader.
My first job was in microfinance: standing up a randomized control trial in Peru. Being entirely responsible for project execution in a new country, I quickly learned that both persistence and creativity are necessary for success.
In the nonprofit space, I learned the importance of aligning stakeholders. I found that by finding the right donors who aligned with the mission, we were able to have greater impact and drive higher rates of fundraising. This translated well into sales — I learned to focus on the right customers and focus on one segment at a time.
Prior to joining Divvy, I was responsible for managing the partner relationships that drove our customer acquisition at a consumer lending fintech. Asking questions to both build trust and understand each stakeholder’s priorities was instrumental. In a world where your customer’s needs are ever changing, it is critically important to understand those needs as you’re working to build programs for them.
What are the most valuable sales leadership attributes and characteristics?
Have a growth mindset: Leading a sales org, especially at a startup, is hard, and sales leaders won’t always get it right. Approaching the role with an excitement to continually refine one’s skills is one of the most important attributes for long-term success.
Balance performance management with great team morale: It wouldn’t be sales if we weren’t pushing for strong performance! Being laser focused on hitting numbers is core to every sales role — but it’s important to balance urgency with team morale. Whether it’s offering exciting career opportunities, building a fun and supportive team culture, compensating outsized performance or all of the above, a sales leader needs to give the team a reason to hit the plan.
Another attribute is the ability to do the role. When I stepped into the sales role at Divvy, I spent a month working as an account executive to get a sense of what the challenges and opportunities of the role were. I think being unafraid of the weeds can continually help inform the roadmap.
Being a coach is also important. To make a team great, it’s important to take the time to coach them up to where they want to go. That means a sales leader needs to know where their teammates want to go and how to get them there.
Sales is fast paced — and if you don’t change quickly, you could be facing months of not delivering on your goals to the company and commitment to your customers.”
Give an example of those sales leadership skills in action. What’s a recent example of how they helped you or a colleague solve an issue?
In August, thanks to our continual focus on metrics, we noticed that our conversion numbers were slipping across some of our markets. The sales leads and I put our heads together to understand why our numbers were coming down. Because our sales lead role is scoped as a player-coach model, it allows them to keep a pulse on what is happening on the ground.
We noticed that one of our key input metrics had started to slip — so we decided to implement a competition geared toward account executives doubling down on one of the main actions that drives conversion for us. Very quickly, we saw upward movement in our numbers and were able to catch back up, landing at one of our best months ever in terms of performance.
Since then, we’ve baked these key metrics into our coaching activities so that they are discussed on a regular basis and to help ensure we don’t unexpectedly dip again in the future.
The takeaway here: If you’re not hitting your targets, act quickly, dig in and test ways to change trajectory. Sales is fast paced — and if you don’t change quickly, you could be facing months of not delivering on your goals to the company and commitment to your customers.
What is your career background, and how did it prepare you for a leadership role?
I look at my career in two segments. I was on the agency side for many years, and then I transitioned to SaaS startup life about 10 years ago. While working in the agency world, I started at a very small experiential marketing agency with two other people. We eventually grew into two offices, with me running a team of 16 in the San Francisco office. Early in my career, I had to manage a diverse range of teams — from event and experience execution, to sales, to accounts. This prepared me for sales leadership — part of that remit early on was leading our sales efforts, but more importantly the range of teams taught me how to manage different personalities and to focus on a common goal.
I use these skills everyday in my role at Braze. I oversee three teams that are focused on different objectives — new business versus retention, verticals and global expansion versus organic growth. Ultimately, we are all driving for the same thing: Helping our customers ensure better, humanized engagement with their customers.
What are the most valuable sales leadership attributes and characteristics?
The ability to understand what is important to each person or team and driving toward the common goal is really important. Empathy and focusing on being a servant leader are also both incredibly important. At the end of the day, we’re trying to get the most out of each and every person. It’s better to help and lead by example — roll up your sleeves — to get that maximum output from your team. This approach also creates a culture where you win and lose as a team, collaborate and get the most out of everyone around you. I also have a number of relatively cliche characteristics that are important like conviction in communication, collaboration and curiosity — about the product, partner ecosystem and customers we serve. Building and managing plans with milestones, dates and hustle helps to focus on getting the job done and delivering value.
At the end of the day, we’re trying to get the most out of each and every person. It’s better to help and lead by example to get that maximum output from your team.”
Give an example of those sales leadership skills in action. What’s a recent example of how they helped you or a colleague solve an issue?
An example of this is our recent endeavor to reach our end-of-quarter goals, ensuring our deals and customer commitments are carried out according to plan. As sales leaders know, this is no different than any quarter, but we leveraged some of the skills above to deliver on expectations. Collaboration across departments and within the sales org to deliver against milestones and dates, and servant leadership to hold all the leaders — including myself — accountable for specific actions against the timeline were essential, and planning was the core of the execution success. We created a plan and executed it every day. If a date slipped, it was documented, addressed and then adjusted. Finally, we had conviction in the plan and process, which enabled the team to get buy-in from the customer and gain partnership to deliver.
