First things first…

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What am I seeing this week: Is Inside Sales the future of sales?

COVID has shown organisations that SaaS can be purchased virtually. It also showed an appetite to reduce customer acquisition costs to improve profitability.

It also showed that buyers don't want to be wined and dined. They want to have anonymity in making their sales decisions.

The opportunity is incredible to have a velocity sales engine that can drive engagements and move deals forward to where prospects are in their buying cycle.

Therefore, building a talent engine, with Sales development representatives as your sales organisation's foundation, is about building a precise alignment from the top down, not the bottom up.

The C-suite needs to be aligned with the strategy. Product marketing needs to create clear messaging, and enablement needs to create a holistic enablement programme, from entry-level to sales.

If something in your sales process is considered problematic or too complicated, it means your customer thinks the same; reducing the complexity of your solution is a 3-5 year project, but it will provide you with the talent needed to understand the product in summary.

If you want to ensure your company is future-proofed, invest in building your organising from the ground up, but ensure you are aligned top down.

What do you think? Add your thoughts in the comments below!

Five questions of the week

This week, we have the incredible Ailie Patten, SDR leader for Snowflake in ANZ and India. Today, Ailie will give her unique perspective of leading at Snowflake in Asia!

Who are some leaders you admire, and whose leadership styles have you replicated?

I recognise I sound like a politician, but if I name individuals, the message behind the attributes may be lost in an experience a reader or listener may have had. So, I’ll make this faceless and share the attributes that I value and that have resonated with me. It’s fair to say my style of leadership has been shaped by notable leaders throughout history, but also those less well-known — the leaders who’ve led me personally.

I’ll start by saying that I don’t believe there is one style, recipe or blueprint for the right leader (otherwise, we’d churn them out!). I believe the right leader reads the room, the team, the landscape, and the ecosystem in which they operate and adapt to that. And I certainly have adapted my style according to these factors. What remains consistent and what I always wanted to emulate was enthusiasm and energy. I also knew and experienced that leaders who form ‘the collective’ were the ones I admired — those who stood with and behind the people rather than in front. I value leaders who are approachable and who are trusted to have open and honest conversations (however hard). I respect directness and transparency (give it to me straight!). Above all, David, it’s authenticity for me. The above attributes are those that feel right instinctively to me. They are how my past and present leaders have gotten the best out of me and how I get the best out of my teams.

When did you realise that leadership was the career path you wanted to follow, and how did you make it happen?

I get asked this question often. The realisation was solidified when my boss trusted me with this role, but I'll rewind slightly before I get into it.

I started here at Snowflake as an individual contributor to SDR. Most who start in this way move through to the sales team. After a year of my tenure, an opportunity arose to step into a leadership capacity for the APJ SDR team (8 countries, 8 SDRs in 5 hubs). Here’s where my boss comes in…

Against a fair few odds, he trusted me and extended the opportunity to leap. I remember him saying, “There are times we’re ready for the job we’re applying for, and there are times when we’re not, and we have to learn in the deep end”. My situation was the latter. But with the trust and the life-changing opportunity he gave me, I found my “why”. And that was to be in a position where I could do the same for others. There is incredible fulfilment in guiding others to grow and excel. And even more when you have the chance to change someone’s life. Building an SDR team here at Snowflake and hiring young and ambitious individuals allows me to do this. And I hear time and time again that we have done just that.

Leadership is not for everyone, and it’s not always glorious — it’s never really about you. But the impact you can have on someone else and their families, and knowing that you played a small part in them going on to do incredible things… that’s what gets me up every day.

What are the main challenges you face running a multicultural team in APJ? How have you overcome it?

I’ll start by highlighting what I love most about the APJ region (Asia Pacific and Japan). And that is its diversity. As mentioned earlier, you’ve got eight countries that we operate in. We have 6 SDR hubs across five countries and 45 SDRs in total. Each sub-region we sell into has different languages and cultures (and time zones!).

APJ’s challenges lie in its beauty — diversity. That’s why I’m drawn to it. Navigating these differences in a business setting and a collaborative team environment presents obvious challenges but brings different perspectives, unlike anything you’ve seen before. Until now, I tried to avoid using cliché quotes, but allow me one — “Strength lies in difference, not in similarities”. Fortunately, at Snowflake, we operate in line with our core values, one of which happens to be “Embrace Each Other’s Differences”. Where else is better to put this into practice than in APJ (I guess EMEA too!)?

Overcoming language barriers and cultural nuances is only achieved when you embrace them. Acknowledging these differences is critical, but knowing that we can learn from and adopt techniques from our brothers and sisters across the pond is even more critical. I’ve witnessed cross-collaboration and knowledge sharing from India to Japan, Japan to Australia, and Singapore to Korea. The way we fostered that is to build an environment where all heads are in the same (Zoom) room, where problems and wins are shared, and you feel as though your team is not limited to the country you operate in. I’ve seen beautiful examples of SDRs in Australia simply Google Translating their strategy into Japanese to share with their team members. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do need to foster the mentality that we all have something to share and something to learn from each other.

Creating common goals across cultures is where we thrive. When you have an army of SDRs with one target to achieve (whether that be a quota, a Spiff challenge, etc.), all challenges fade into the background, and you witness 45 different ways to get to the top of the mountain.

Taking on all your experiences so far, what would you tell a young Ailie in her first day as a manager?

I mentioned earlier that my boss had trusted me, with limited experience, to take on a pretty big role. I mentioned that there is no recipe or blueprint for leadership. And I mentioned that I would be learning in the deep end. Young Ailie is looking down the line at a relatively daunting task!

If I were standing next to her today, on Day 1… the message would be to strap the heck in, trust your instinct as it develops, be human (that means screwing it up sometimes)… and with the hindsight I have now, I’d tell her she can do it, and she will do it. That last point is important — it’s a reminder for me and anyone else reading this who may battle with imposter syndrome. I’ve proven myself wrong time and time again when those thoughts come knocking.

How do you see the SDR role changing in the next two years?

I tried hard to get through a conversation without mentioning ‘AI’ (like everyone else)! Undeniably, this world is changing in the face of Artificial Intelligence. Chat GTP showed us in the SDR industry how much faster this will happen than we thought. There’s a general sense of anxiety and an equal sense of curiosity around this topic… “Are bots really going to take over my job?!”. I’m going to err on the side of optimism here and suggest, rather than a complete takeover of the SDR role, that we'll see a more informed SDR engine with AI as another tool in the belt. One powered by better research behind organisations (efficiently sourced — digesting an entire annual report in 3 seconds thanks to our trusty LLMs) and client profiles. I see SDRs doing more with less. I see leaner teams able to use technology, data, and AI to complete the job faster and more thoroughly.

My experience tells me that humans want to talk to humans. They want personalisation and connection (which AI can help us achieve). The power the SDR will have over the bots is their innate fire and passion for solving business problems. For developing deep connections and understanding of the challenges, the person on the other end of the phone is experiencing. In two years, I think we’ll still have the upper hand. Come back to me in 5!

The job of the week from Nobel Recruitment

Book of the week

And finally…

Want to take part in the newsletter as an interview subject? Drop me a message!