Created by Eric Friedman, Dave Greenberger, and Evan Bartlett BTSM is a platform and event series designed to help and connect people who are building sales teams, sales operations, and revenue operations within organizations of all shapes and sizes. Having built sales and revenue machines for her entire career, we are excited to have Emmanuelle Skala as our next guest at Building the Sales Machine.
Emmanuelle is Vice President of Sales & Customer Success at DigitalOcean and advises several startups including serving as an executive-in-residence for Argosight.
Prior to DigitalOcean, Emmanuelle led sales at Influitive where she scaled the business tenfold in 2 years, and served as the VP of Global Channel Sales at Sophos, where she won the CRN Channel Chief award for two years in a row. She is also a recipient of CRN's Top 100 Women in the Channel.
Emmannuelle was the first hired salesperson at two B2B software startups, Endeca and Vertica, seeing both through rapid growth and successful acquisitions by Oracle and HP respectively and resides outside of Boston with her husband and 3 daughters.
Here’s a quick and motivating answer to the question in a musical format; I’m your typical list-driven, A-type personality. I do the same three things right away, every day: I review my task list, my inbox, and my calendar.
For tasks, I keep track of medium and long-term action items in an online service called Trello so I’m looking in there for items to pull out and get done soon. I still use a handwritten list to keep track of today’s actions that must get done before I’m done working (hopefully, but rarely, no more than 4 or 5 things)
I like to joke that sales teams have their own laws of physics. In the real world, what goes up, must comes down, that’s gravity. On sales teams, most sellers believe that any semblance of process is just busy work getting in the way of making money.
The reality is that when it’s done poorly, the criticism leveled by sales people is spot on. Bad process can be a huge barrier. So let’s take a look at how to do process correctly, and why it tends to get overlooked.