Editor’s Note: Guest post by Craig Jordan, Co-Founder at Red Bridge.
The Sales Hacker team interviewed our speaker lineup for the Sales Hacker Conference on April 30th in New York City. We’d like to give you perspective on who our speakers are and insights into their B2B startup experience, covering a variety of Sales topics such as Hiring, Building, Measuring, and Scaling sales.
Next up in our interview series, we have Ash Alhashim, the Global Director of Sales and Market Development at Optimizely.
Some of the Topics Covered in the Interview:
- What is Optimizely
- International Sales Expansion
- GROW-ROI
- Key KPIs for Sales Development
What is Optimizely and Your Role as the Worldwide Director of Sales and Market Development
Optimizely is the world’s leading mobile and web optimizing the platform and they’ve been around since 2010. Ash has been there for a little over two years. He leads both the inbound and outbound sales functions.
Have You Been Going International for Awhile, or Is that a Newer Transition?
Optimizely has had an office in Amsterdam for about two years, and they recently expanded to London and New York City. And they just opened an office in Tokyo, to expand their Asian Pacific presence.
Were You Responsible for Building the Current Team?
Ash joined as an AE originally, with the sole responsibility to close new business. But when he started he noticed the lack of processes in place for the company, so he took on more responsibility to help build out their internal processes.
How Did You Scale Internationally While Maintaining their Respective Culture?
There are some serious differences in the way folks buy and sell software in the US than they do overseas. The short answer is, it depends. Some places it makes sense for separate roles to handle inbound, outbound, and the final close whereas in some countries it makes more sense for one person to be responsible for the whole process.
Advice to other VPs of Sales Who are Looking to Expand Internationally
Run an experiment – Spend some money in the new market to grow some awareness to get some leads and see what happens. Always look at what the data tells you and make your decisions appropriately.
What are the Metrics and KPIs Optimizely Uses Internally to Measure Success?
Optimizely measures their SDRs based on three things: appointment setting, number of opportunities accepted, and dollar amount of pipeline revenue generated.
