Conversations With Women In Sales

Jill Fratianne is Partner Channel Manager at Hubspot, where she has been in various sales roles for over 10 years. Jill came to Hubspot when it was a startup and has been through massive growth of the company, including seeing it go public. Jill received her Masters in Music from Northwestern University and was going to be a Violist but ended up getting an insurance sales job right out of school. Jill talks about the great lessons she learned in this role and how it made her appreciate future sales roles. 

This is the beginning of "Act 2" for Conversations with Women in Sales. Lori Richardson and Women Sales Pros will continue to publish episodes with interviews of amazing women in sales roles. We want to carry on Barb Giamanco's vision and mission. Your feedback and support welcome. This conversation was with Lori, Joanne Black, and Deb Calvert on Barb's passing and the future for CWWIS. 

There is often a stigma associated with failing but never making mistakes means never learning and growing. In this episode, I talked with Ashley Zagst from Zagst Consulting. She is a professional dancer/choreographer turned digital marketer. She is the former Head of Marketing at Bravado.co, the first digital community exclusively for sales professionals committed to elevating the profession by changing the stigmatized perception.

Hilda Kwa, Regional Director at VMware is my guest in this episode. Your employees are your company “brand ambassadors”, as such they are your organization’s greatest asset. Too often companies forget that employees drive the customer experience – either positively or negatively – and that impacts revenue in the same way.  

Julie Hansen is a sales presentation expert and the founder of Performance Sales and Training, helping sales professionals communicate with greater confidence, clarity, and influence. Julie spent 20 years as a sales contributor and leader. She also worked as a professional actor, performing in over 75 plays, commercials and television shows including HBO’s “Sex and the City.” 

Mary Grothe, is CEO and Founder of Sales BQ. She is a former #1 rep in the MidMarket B2B SaaS Payroll / HR industry. After 8 years and millions in revenue sold, she founded Sales BQ, and leads a team of fractional VPs of Sales across the country as they rebuild their clients' sales departments, all while focusing on the behavioral quotient.

In this conversation, I was joined by Kate Bradley Chernis the Founder & CEO of Lately, which uses Artificial Intelligence to automatically turn blogs, videos and podcasts into dozens of amazing social posts, which is then syndicated across unlimited channels. Lately customers use the platform for personal branding communications, brand marketing management, executive thought leadership, employee advocacy and social selling.

Marietta Davis is VP North America Communications and CSI, IBM Global Markets. Marietta is a seasoned sales executive with an extensive career in the technology industry holding high impact positions at IBM, Lotus Development, Ameritech, and Tata Consulting. At Microsoft, the highest ranking African American in North America, Canada and Latin America, Marietta led an organization of more than 400 sales, marketing and technical experts serving Microsoft’s business customers with Dynamics ERP and CRM Solutions. While at Microsoft, Davis successfully managed and grew multiple businesses to $1B and triple digit growth milestones. Her diverse leadership portfolio extends to mentoring strong leaders into key roles and acting in an advisory capacity to incubation and small startups.

Tracy Eiler is the Chief Marketing Officer at InsideView. She has been driving marketing strategy at both cloud-based and traditional enterprise technology companies for 25 years. At InsideView, Tracy leads the end-to-end marketing strategy and initiatives. Tracy came to InsideView from her own marketing consulting firm. Previously, Tracy held executive roles at Replicon, Cloud9, MarkLogic, Postini, and Business Objects. She also founded and ran a successful technology communications agency.  

Keri Schull grew from a real estate solopreneur to one of America's most successful real estate agents, according to REAL Trends and The Wall Street Journal. She has scaled multiple businesses including The Keri Shull Team, with over 80 members and counting; DKA Development; and the HyperFast Agent coaching platform and academy, which teaches real estate agents everywhere how to grow and scale their real estate businesses.

Monique Russell teaches individuals and teams to have positive and productive relationships at home and work using effective communications strategies and tools. She is the managing partner of Clear Communication Solutions, LLC and is a frequent guest on local, national and international radio sharing her advice as a subject matter expert in leadership and effective communications.

Joanne Black is America’s leading authority on Referral Selling. She is an author, speaker, and sales contrarian. She's written two books, No More Cold Calling™:The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust, and Pick Up the Damn Phone!: How People, Not Technology, Seal the Deal. 

Alli Rizacos is a Regional Sales Manager at Salesforce, and she has been in sales for over 10 years. We talked about why sales leadership suffers when not provided enough training or support.

Rakhi Voria, is the Director of IBM Global Digital Sales, and she manages a team that is responsible for the strategy, implementation, and revenue of the Digital Development Representative sales function globally. We talked about how she made the big decision to move to IBM to take on a new leadership role.

Catie Ivey is the Regional Vice President of Sales at Demandbase, which is a leading B2B marketing platform. Prior to joining Demandbase, Catie ran revenue teams at Marketo, Insightpool, Salesforce, and Meltwater. She has deep expertise in MarTech specifically and how to better leverage technology to scale revenue teams. Catie is a huge advocate for getting more women into sales and sales leadership, so many of the topics we talk about here on ‘Women in Sales’ are topics she speaks passionately about.

Diana Cappello brings over 15 years of experience in sales, marketing and revenue operations to her current role as Lead Sales Engineer at Clari. Prior to Clari, she was a SE Manager at Apttus. And before becoming a SE, she was a Business Systems Manager for several startups. If she’s not selling through demos, you can find Diana exploring Tahoe with her husband and 2-year-old daughter.

Judy Frank, Consulting Partner at RAIN Group is my guest in this interview. She has been building and leading sales teams in the Fortune 50 to achieve aggressive growth for over 30 years. Years ago, Judy taught 5th and 6th grade and many of the lessons she learned then has proven to be invaluable in creating and leading teams.

Alexandra Adamson is the Executive Director of Women In Sales Everywhere (WISE), a digital platform dedicated to developing the next generation of female sales leaders. She is also the Head of Organizational Strategy at CloserIQ, a modern recruitment firm offering a holistic talent solution for building engaged, diverse and high-performing sales teams and parent company to WISE.

In this interview with Kelly Del Curto, Director of Sales at Lever, we talked about imposter syndrome and how that can impact your success. At any stage in your sales career - especially when you're new in a role - it's easy to get this sense that somehow you ended up in that role by accident and you don't really belong. Our fear leads us to try to fake it until we make it when opening yourself up and asking for help is usually the better way to go. 

Caroline Gregory is an Enterprise Regional Sales Manager with Okta. She has 16+ years selling IT infrastructure and software to CIOs and CTOs to medium - fortune 500 companies for Workday, EMC and Okta. In our interview, we talked about the importance of salespeople remembering to choose the right culture fit at a company for them.