#StrongerTogether: Following Your Passions
Monica Roberts, Strategic Accounts Director – Enterprise Sales at Salesforce Following her unique combination of talents and inner passions, Monica Roberts started her college journey with pre-med aspirations, ultimately graduating from Baylor with a degree in finance. Continuing a pursuit of medicine because of her love for helping people, she achieved a Master’s in Healthcare Administration. I asked Monica to tell me a little about her sales career, her journey, how she landed at Salesforce, and what advice she would share with others about success in sales. In your college days, you considered a career in medicine. How did you decide to enter the tech industry and how did you pursue a leadership role once there? I’ve taken a path less traveled in comparison to my peers; however, it’s a path that has allowed me to follow common threads of passion for people, process, and change. While pursuing my Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration, I came across an opportunity to be an auditor, which gave me the ability to travel and explore various processes in different departments. This job allowed me to spend time abroad and change scopes of work quickly, but the way I was received as an auditor didn’t really jive with my personality. During this time, I advanced my accounting knowledge through the achievement of an MBA and due to my skill set in process analysis and improvement, I was selected by an IT manager to move into a Business Analyst (BA) role. This is where I was introduced to Salesforce and the value it and its ecosystem bring to the table. Shortly thereafter, I was promoted to IT Service Manager, leading a team of BAs and supporting the entire front office. After that, I joined one of the top consulting firms in the world and was then recruited by Salesforce as a solution engineer. After 3+ years in the role of SE, I made the transition to Strategic Accounts Director. Through many transitions, I availed myself to the possibility of change; however, sales was something that I never set out to do. My passions and hope to drive change, guided me here. I am passionate about Salesforce, passionate about the solutions that we can bring to drive value for my customers, and passionate about my customers. I tell my customers all the time how user-friendly Salesforce is: “This is easy configuration, ‘click not code,’ and if I can figure this out, you can too.” One of the reasons I am enthusiastic about Salesforce is because I understand the benefits from the customers’ perspective. That’s one reason I accepted a role in sales for the company—because I know it works! I like to think that my story could be inspirational to people who are on a certain career path, like finance, and realize, “This is not for me.” I love numbers. I always thought that I was going to be an accountant. I realized the role I was playing in accounting, as an auditor, did not allow me to be seen in the best light by customers as they would hide or shut down when I approached them. It wasn’t a fit with my personality and didn’t really provide the opportunity to be innovative—which my role in sales does. What do you love most about working in sales and what advice would you give to someone considering a career change? Being customer-facing, being innovative, and working with a team are all aspects of sales that I love. Look at what you’re doing now, and consider how the different aspects of your current or past roles are transferable: process, people, interactions, or improvements. Examine how you can transform that into the career that you want. Too often we get stuck in the lane that we’re in and assume it’s the only way that we can go forward. You demonstrate two important traits for success in sales: being open to risk and determination. How do these two traits help you succeed? You certainly must adjust your level of risk aversion in sales because of the compensation model. It’s important to move at a fast pace and pivot on a dime based on customer decisions or changes in the customer’s environment. In my role as a Strategic Accounts Director, I have leadership and coordination responsibilities and also stay on top of customer accounts and am always working to deliver value. I’m incentivized to make a difference in sales. Having that drive and willingness to get up every morning and say, “Okay, I’m willing to dig a little deeper in order to make something happen,” is essential to my success, my team’s success, and my customers’ success. Listen to your customer. Sometimes you get so caught up in the narrative that you are working, but if you’re not listening to your customer, then there’s a total disconnect. You’re wondering why you lost the deal, but much of that hinges on whether you were truly listening and what you were actually listening for. At the end of the day, were you able to respond to their concerns in the right manner? What is the best career advice you ever received? I regularly connect with one of my mentors, Bret Taylor, who is the President and Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce. I recently expressed concerns about being afraid to ask for recognition or compensation. One thing he said was, “Monica, don’t ever apologize for wanting to be compensated for work that you’re doing and for the value you’re bringing to a company.” I responded, “I don’t want you to think that I’m money hungry. I don’t want you to think that I don’t appreciate where I am.” But in that moment, I recognized that as a Black woman, like many others, I had been indoctrinated into this mindset of just appreciating opportunity. That’s why I am proud to work at a company that is committed to equal pay for equal work, conducting an annual audit to account for any potential discrepancies. Another of my
#LevelUp Your Sales Career: Finding and Leveraging Your Sales Superpower
Like many people, Joy Dempsey fell into sales. After studying English at Oxford University and an early career as a police officer, Joy transitioned to sales development. Joy was motivated to become a police officer because she wanted to make a difference in her community. As a police officer, people sometimes saw the uniform and not Joy. Not the empathetic, kind, and driven woman that she is. However, Joy’s empathy, one of her sales superpowers, has been critical for her success in sales. “I had zero sales experience going in and I really didn’t know much about it as an industry. In my experience, people from sales don’t come to career fairs and say ‘come and get into sales.’ Sales sometimes slips under the radar. Making the leap feeling quite uninformed was difficult, but I’m so glad that I did it because I found a career that I absolutely adore.” Currently, Joy is a Manager of Sales Development at Dataminr. Joy attributes her success to believing in herself, having the support of good leaders, and acting with conviction, empathy, and confidence. I asked Joy, what skills do you need to level up in order to become a sales development manager? “You are absolutely good enough. More than that, you are better than good enough…” Be Yourself Maybe it’s silly, but I worried so much about my hair coming into a sales role. I’m just so conscious that my hair is so big. And then with the pandemic this past year, people have had two schools of thought about what working online has done for equality. In a video conference, everyone is just a face and you take up the same amount of space on the screen. As a result, I’ve started to believe myself that my hair is professional, ‘I’ve come to feel comfortable in the fact that natural Black hair is professional too’. This is my natural hair, washed and clean, and this is what it looks like. One of my pieces of advice is don’t change what you look like in order to fit in. ‘One of my pieces of advice is your work, (not your hair!), is the measure of whether or not you fit in – energy spent worrying about what people think of your hair can be better spent doing the job’ “I want to say: you are absolutely good enough. More than that, you are better than good enough. And if you work hard, you deserve to be in the room that you’re in. Even if you don’t look like anyone else, you deserve to be there.” I think what successful SDRs do well is show that they are enthusiastic. As a hiring manager, I don’t prioritize experience. I prioritize enthusiasm and an ability to communicate. And another thing is just honesty and integrity. Just being honest about who you are, because when you’re working in sales development, you’re trying to connect with other people. And you can’t do that successfully if you’re pretending to be something that you’re not. Just be authentic. Creativity I wanted to be a manager because I really love competition, hitting targets, and being successful. But I realized when I was an SDR, I needed that element of helping others to really feel fulfilled. So, I thought, this mentality around competition and achievement could really work well in a management position. I will say that being an SDR and managing a team of SDRs takes a lot of different skills: coaching people, supporting people, and letting them try out those things. And it’s hard because you shift from doing one role to doing a very different role at times. You don’t just want to be that manager that’s always right. Being an SDR is about being creative and standing out. And it’s not just about replicating exactly what your manager has done in the past. The pandemic has really taught us that a multi-tiered approach to prospecting is always the best way. SDRs may have relied heavily on mobile phone numbers to contact people before the pandemic. Now, they have to pivot to email or to LinkedIn. And so just having a presence across all the platforms is the best way to be successful in sales development. About Joy Joy is training for her first triathlon in July 2021 and her experience summarizes her keys to career success: “I have an incredible triathlon coach who she is all about getting women of color into swimming, because I didn’t realize until I got into a pool that being a black woman in a pool is something that people don’t see every day. I had to seek out a swimming cap that would fit my hair, just one of the barriers to entry. When a sport focuses on you as the usual person participating in that sport, you don’t have to worry about barriers to entry. It’s really nice to have a triathlon coach that understands.” Whether you are looking to level-up your skills, your career, or your network, Kelley has shown us a successful approach – believe in yourself and take a leap. You may find yourself in an exciting new industry or company. Watch the #LevelUp Your Sales Career panel discussion here to #levelup your sales career with help and insight from savvy, global sales thought leaders. – CherilynnChief Learning Officer, SIS Cherilynn Castleman, Global Sales Keynote Speaker/Trainer/Executive Coach, has been a sales executive for 20+ years. With her natural talent for teaching and a drive to sell, Cherilynn uses her skills to coach and train other executives and sales professionals. Author of What’s In the CARDS? 5 Post Pandemic Sales Strategies. Sistas in Sales, LLC (SIS) is a community for women of color sales professionals to network, advance their careers and most importantly, find sisterhood – offering events, thriving Slack community with companies hiring now, and career coaching services. Learn more about Sistas In Sales membership here, connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. 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