#WantMore: Viewing Challenges as Opportunities
Meet Gabrielle Mazaltarim, Senior Account Executive at Gong “The only difference between you and the person that got the job, is that that person applied for the job. Just do it!” On Not Being “Qualified” When Gabrielle Mazaltarim first heard about Gong, she knew it was going to be something special. Not as a fleeting thought, or just something to say later in an interview about working there, but with conviction. She even stated it out loud to her partner: “This is going to change the world.” At the time, she was not working for the company. She was a sales representative on a team elsewhere, at a small startup company. They were trying out the Gong product and she wanted to be a part of it, from the inside. The time to do just that came a few months later, and like anyone serious about joining a company they admire, Gabrielle looked for what positions that company had available. The first obstacle revealed itself immediately. The positions she was interested in required at least three to four years of experience. She had just over eight months under her belt. “I’m like, well, I’m underqualified,” she pauses. “Let’s apply.” In the process, she spoke to a talent coordinator, who, as she recalls, was trying to qualify her out. “I thought to myself, I’m not going to take no from a guy that would never be able to say yes to me for the job itself. So I said, hey, how do I get in touch with the recruiter? And I put time in with the recruiter. I went through a couple of interviews and I got the job.” While Gabrielle has been working at Gong since 2019, and is a mentor to plenty of women in sales within the company beyond, she has kept pushing and working towards what she thinks she is capable of. On her responsibilities, she shares that while she is expected to book about six or so meetings per month outside her media brothers, her goal is to book at least eight to 10 meetings, as well as to hit one hundred and fifty percent of her quota in the next six months. “I had a really good first half of the year that I was really, really excited about,” she says. “And my goal for the remainder of the year is to exceed that in the next half of the year, which will be really, really difficult.” She is also working towards a promotion. “I think I can get there,” she adds. On Getting There Her tenacity and confidence comes from her early years working in a variety of positions seemingly far from what she is doing now, from waiting tables as a teenager six months after moving to the US from Lebanon, at fourteen. What started as a way to earn a little money, understand the culture in a new country, and learn English, turned into a lesson in people-watching and sales experience that still serves her well today. “I learned how people behave and was able to customize my personality,” she says. From there, she went to California State University, San Bernardino, and graduated with a double major in international business and Arabic. “The intent was I was going to be this international business woman working in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and traveling the world because I speak Arabic and English,” she says. But she also didn’t want to be “one of those people that graduates and doesn’t have a job lined up.” Her first job search took her to recruiting, not quite all the way “sales” yet, or anywhere geographically near Lebanon, but still critical to the skills she accrued to do sales, like the ability to sell her potential and leverage her network effectively. “One of my good friends that studied at Berkeley told me ‘hey, I have a friend that went to this recruiting firm called AppleOne,” she says. On Making the Calls Gabrielle walked confidently into the opportunity. “I met with him in Pasadena and they were trying to give me jobs like “Administrative Assistant Receptionist,” she says. “I thought, that doesn’t sound like my alley. So I asked him, how much money do you make? I started asking questions like, ‘What do you do day to day?’” She also asked if she could get connected to someone on his team, and after meeting with his manager, said they would call in a few days. A week passed with no follow-up. “So I called them back and I said, hey, I’m going to come in. I went into the interview as if I was interviewing for a receptionist job.” The job she landed on was not working at the reception, but a mix of recruiting, sales, and a little bit of finance. “And the recruiting part was interesting,” she says. “I didn’t like it. I tend to like to work with businesses more than one on one consumers. So then I rallied towards the sales part of it and I enjoyed making cold calls.” She demonstrates just how good she is at making those cold cold calls: “My strategy was I go to Indeed, in Los Angeles, I look at the job ad and I’m like ‘Hey Florence, this is Gabrielle with Apple One. I know you’re busy, I see you’ve been looking for somebody for H.R. Director. I just met with Carolyn, who’s had three years experience. She knows ADP, blah, blah, blah. Let me come by, introduce her.’ I did that and I got really good at it and I liked it.” This hot passion for cold calling was also ignited in high school — Gabrielle remembers the days when people still called to find out if the school bus was delayed. “I would be panicking, calling,” she says, to her sister’s annoyance. “I just kind of got used to it and I was like, it’s OK if you act like there are people on the other call.” Gabrielle credits all