From AE to SVP: 3 Ways to Accelerate your Career Trajectory w/ Rigor SVP of Sales Stephanie Elsesser

I we have background. So like I said, I'm Stephanie Alsesser, SVP of sales at Rigor in Atlanta based bootstrap startup focused on improving site speed and web performance. I was an early hire at Rigor. I actually started as a marketing intern and I moved into sales. I was top performing rep for a while and then I eventually was promoted into a leadership role. So we actually very recently had a very successful exit and now I'm a regional sales director at Spring. So you know, it's 22 or so weeks of M and A and keeping things under wraps and a secret and finally that news is public and we are so excited about it. So this is something obviously that I'm super, super proud of being that we are a bootstrap startup. So we really didn't have any name recognition in the space, which you can imagine is a gigantic challenge and also a lot of fun. So you'll probably get some of that vibe during the session today. And what we speak about, just kind of that scrappiness and being able to do a lot with virtually no resources. So that's really central to who I am and how I operate. And at Rigor we worked with some of the most well known brands actually in the world. So really exciting to tell you a little bit more about that. So before we get started, let's level set a little bit here. My goal today is to give you some practical suggestions for ways that you can think differently for your career. So before we dive into that, it's important to recognize that my journey is very different from yours. Right? You can only control what you can control, but you really do have a lot of agency in your own job. That's the perspective I want you to approach the session with today. So that being said, my hope is that the lessons I share in the session today will be applicable to you no matter what your role is. And that will help you identify the areas you can be proactive moving forward. So the first one that I want to start with is your attitude, right? So I wrote Think like a CEO. I think one obvious thing that you can control is your attitude and the way that you show up to work every day. So it's one thing to be a nice person. I think there's a lot of nice people in the world and it doesn't mean you would necessarily lend them your brand new car for the weekend or you know, you know, babysit your kid for the weekend. I think there's a huge difference between being nice and being trustworthy and consistent. Dependable a leader being respected, really having an attitude of ownership. So thinking more about the broader implications of your decision. So thinking about those and what's the ripple effect of those? Since I started really early at Rigor, I kind of automatically had this really deep, passionate. I was just very passionate about the business and as a result I took certain actions throughout my career there. So this could be anything small or large. One example could be maybe, you know, if you're traveling for work, maybe flying southwest or staying in an Airbnb when you travel. I used to travel to New York probably every other month for work and I'd always take the subway. It was wildly more cost effective over an Uber or any other rideshare and I actually enjoyed it a lot, except when it was really hot, you know, in July. But things like that, it's like how can we operate as if this is our business and not as if we are just a number. And this is just, you know, me caring about my quota or my deals, you know, in the quarter. So I did that stuff even as the top rep, you know, I don't really. No one ever owes you anything. You're not too good for something ever and you shouldn't, you know, you're not special. So believe it or not. So the other area here that I wanted to hit on is just being positive. Right? So again, time back to attitude. I've had a lot of people on my team who. Not a lot actually. I've had people in general throughout the years on the team that have been negative or non players and they just haven't lasted. Right. If you're okay to just think in your own narrow frame of reference, then what's wrong with over promising what your software can do? If it doesn't have that functionality, you're causing pain for your CS team, which could lead to churn negative word of mouth. So those are examples of broader implications of how your attitude affects the business. Even having negative people on the team, a quite obvious one is it's creating a toxic environment very quickly and you can't model that, you can't normalize that. So just in general on this one, some questions to ask yourself really are how can you be a leader even when you don't have influence yet? Or how can you exert influence without authority? Being trusted is being earned, right? People don't listen to you because they have to. They listen to you because they trust you generally. So think about the business beyond your deals, beyond your number. And the bullets that I listed here just encapsulate that. How can you cultivate this in yourself? So the next area of things to consider that are within your control are your aptitude. So know your business onboarding is not a finishable feature. You know, I think a lot of times when folks are new to a company and they go through an onboarding, they learn the product, they learn some of the, you know, the positioning and the competitors. Maybe if you're in sales, you have a sales engineer to help you demo. You really need to do continuous education always. You know, this is your art, right? A lot of us, you know, we're not in school anymore, we might be, but this is really our focus, this is our art and we need to own this. We need to really care about becoming, you know, experts in the space, knowing the competitors, the business, the broader climate, right? That's always changing and evolving. And as a sales rep, you want to look like you're, you want to be aware of those things, right? You immediately earn trust and credibility just by demonstrating that you're paying attention to those things. You're curious, you're fostering healthy, cross functional relationships even internally, right? So the output is that you know, you're trusted by your prospects and your customers and your cross functional advocates, which are extremely important. But then you're also a lot more confident in general. And the benefit to that on your career is managers also recognize when that's the case. So when you take the responsibility to step up to the plate, you know, more people will overall advocate for you internally if you do more than the baseline. And then other people will view you as someone who's playing at the next level. So this is helpful when you want to have hard career conversations. You want to have advocates around the business. And this stuff really sets you apart from the rest of the pack. And again, it's not just about your number and your accelerators, it's about moving the business forward. How can we do that? How can we help the rest of the team doing that? So some of the things that you could think about in order to continue to develop your aptitude could be, maybe it's been a long time since you've read industry publications, as simple as that. Or maybe you have new people on your product team who joined recently and since you've been remote, you haven't met them. Introduce yourself to them and see what they're working on and then just make a plan for how you can improve these areas and enhance your aptitude. Always it's never a finishable feature or thing, right? It's just it's ongoing. It's ongoing learning and having that mindset. So the next area that I'll discuss today is within your control is your actions. Right. So something that I've picked up on and noticed over the past several years is that I think that sales reps view their one on ones as their manager's time and it's really your time, you know, so come in with a strong agenda, have a strong perspective. Like for example, here's where I'm great, here's where I need coaching. Being super self aware is a huge differentiator. And I think being vocal about your accomplishments is good, but being really aware of the growth areas and asking for help where you need it and then specifics for how you're going to respond to those growth areas is even better. That's next level. So, you know, for example, really simply, if you spend way too long, you know, maybe writing outbound emails, you miss your activity targets because it takes you too long. So owning that and you know, the ability to say, how can I improve this? You know, talking to maybe someone who's really good at their email targets internally, asking them for advice, taking action. Right. So one important thing to call out here is to try your best not to get discouraged. Right. So we talk about just promotions in general, you know, it might not happen for you right away. My experience was there were two VPs before me at Rigor and it wasn't my time yet, you know, so it's always just thinking about like, how can we take what we've learned and apply it to what we're doing now and growing now. So even even though I had a long track record of success in a long tenure, you know, there's, there were two VPs before me and I just kept focusing on having an impact. So I think I eventually got the role because my peers advocated for me and believed in the investment that I made in the business. One other thing I wanted to touch on here is when I think about SDRs that get promoted to AES just in general, I think it's a pretty obvious thing that we all know is they're taking initiative, they're maybe learning how to do their product demonstration, even though it's not under their purview at that very moment and at that time asking if they could run smaller deals, asking a lot of questions, being ultra curious, and then using their one on one time as their time and not their manager's time. Someone that I, that I mentor, she shows up to every one on one with all of her metrics. Right? So, and it's not just saying, you know, here's everything that I'm great at, but it is saying, hey, guess what? I'm very consistent. Here's what's been really working out for me. Here's how I've shared it internally. Here's what I'm doing to get better every single time, like clockwork. That's her structure. She comes with a structure. Instead of taking that time to talk about other things, she's making sure that that's prioritized and that that's out in the open. When I see folks get promoted into leadership, they're actively the ones that are helping people around them while managing their own book of business. So there's no guarantee that if you do those things, you know, you'll immediately be promoted. But these are things that will help you get set up for longer term, longer term success. So own, you know, own your career. So I guess the takeaways for today are you can control your attitude, your aptitude and how you act. Figure out where you can improve in those areas to move forward. Make a plan, do it, trust the process. Hopefully I've given you some ideas on where to start in identifying the areas that you can be proactive.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Stephanie. So we have plenty of time for questions, everyone. So please make sure to use that raise hand function. You can access it by clicking on Participants and then choosing that option to raise your hand to let us know if you have a question. We'd love for you to join the conversation. Just scanning right now to see who has a question. Please don't be shy. This is exactly what we're here for, for these sessions to make sure that we have plenty of questions, plenty of time to pick Stephanie's brain. Sounds like we may have. Jacob, do you have a question? Oh, sorry, I mute myself. Yeah. What do you say is the, the biggest way for you to currently put.

Yourself in a state of learning where you're at currently? So where I'm at currently, my company just got acquired. So my state of learning is getting an understanding as fast as I can and ramping on all of their products. So luckily they have a ton of resources for me to be able to do that. But outside of my own company, you know, it's continuing to follow thought leaders in the space, follow my competition, follow earnings calls. So there's always different avenues or lenses that you can look at things from. A lot of times I feel like since now I've been in a management role some of the things that I forget to pay attention to often are more top of the funnel continuous learning. So I would say for me, I don't want to get behind on that just because I'm not, you know, an sdr. I'm not necessarily an ae, but the people I'm managing are. So I try to say, besides just management continuous learning, what can I do to keep myself, you know, in line and up to date with, you know, more of the top of the funnel type roles and more entry level roles. So that could be, you know, prospecting or different outbound messaging strategies, things like that. So that I'm useful, you know, when, when anyone comes to me, it doesn't have to just be anyone. That's like on our, you know, my same level of, you know, managing a team of seasoned reps. Right. Does that help?

Yeah.

Thank you.

Anyone else? Stephanie? I may have you also stop your. Yeah, that may be easier for you to see too.

Yeah.

Anyone else has a question, feel free to raise your hand or go ahead and go off mute. Elsa? Yeah, go ahead and join. Looks like we have a question from Elsa.

Hi, Stephanie. Great presentation. I wanted to just ask how you. What challenges might have come up when you switched from being an individual sales contributor to becoming a sales manager or, you know, managing people and then eventually the leadership role? Yeah. How did you make that jump and what did that look like? Yeah, so I think the most challenging part for me was I was actually more of a player coach before exclusively managing. So a couple things come with that. You're used to running your own book of business and then you're balancing that with managing a team, which is very challenging. You can't really do both exceptionally well. So the idea is to eventually segue off of being an IC into a leadership or management role. And then that transition is very much like you're used to being in control of everything and in control of your own destiny. And now you have an entire team to, to coach and to sort of manage through really hard deals or manage through pandemics, things like that. So it's a totally different mindset and it's kind of letting go and being able to trust the team and trust that the directives that you're giving them day to day, they're taking action on those. And I think for me, being at a smaller company, having a team of folks who were really self sufficient, self starters was the only way that we could be successful. That was kind of the DNA of a smaller company with no name recognition, you know, bootstrapped Startup. So I think that helped ultimately with the transition is that there were already people there that I had brought on or that were already there who were very much like self starter, self sufficient, but not afraid to ask questions either, but really good at thinking outside the box. I think that's going to be the case. No matter what size company you're at, you know, that transition is going to get to feel like, okay, everything is in control. I have control of everything. I'm running my own book of business. I'm essentially a CEO of my own company. Right. That's kind of. That is what it's like when you're an individual contributor and then kind of stepping back and letting go of that. So that's the one that sticks out to me the most. And then just managing your calendar, I think you want to say yes to everyone and be a part of every. Everything that you can every, you know, call. You want to try to add value to everything and kind of team up with everyone in the business. That's what I like to do. And then, you know, eventually find out that you have too many meetings and you're not, you know, you're not even drinking enough water throughout the day. So I think that's a problem that's common too. It's just protecting your time. So those two stick out the most. Thank you. Yeah, Yeah.

Anyone else can feel free to raise their hand or take yourself off mute. Stephanie, one thing I was thinking of is do you mind sharing example where maybe things didn't go like, quite as planned? Like maybe there was a mistake along the way and what you learned from it.

Definitely. Yeah. So one of the most memorable. I talked about going on site a lot in New York. So one of the most memorable times like, of my career was when I was an individual contributor and running around, you know, stacking up like 10 meetings every three days and running around and just we did had a lot of success doing that because you're in person and you're kind of like amped up. You're ultra prepared usually for meetings because you're on site. But there was one where we couldn't connect to the Internet and we didn't have a slide deck.

And.

And I sold a very technical product and it didn't make sense to have any slides about. It wasn't like a slide for a demo. It was a live demo. So you would open it up with a few slides of background. But we were selling to engineering leaders who didn't like to see any slide decks. And that's why we didn't have any prepped. So not being able to connect to the Internet, not being able to do live demo isn't the best reaction. It's not what you want when you're on site and you've got folks who are taking 45 minutes to an hour out of the day who are executives. So that was definitely a big time lesson. Is even though you might sell a technical product and your prospects and your buyers might hate to see slide decks always have stuff like that to be on backup or ultra prepared just for the absolute worst. It kind of sounds like common sense, but sometimes it just really has to happen to you and you have to be very embarrassed to learn from that and then it's never happened again. So that was definitely one of those biggest learning experiences. We didn't win the deal that time, but we came back a year or so later and, you know, they're great customers of ours. So now we laugh about it, but.

Yeah, sometimes you just need to have that memory burned in your brain.

Exactly. Yes.

All right, well, any other questions before we close out with Stephanie? And Stephanie, you want to share a little bit about how people can get in touch with you and connect with you?

Yeah, definitely. The best way is probably on LinkedIn. So happy to chat. If you think of any other questions, just find me on LinkedIn and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Thanks so much for the time, Stephanie, and thanks everyone for joining. Hopefully you'll be able to tune into some other sessions throughout today and tomorrow.

Sounds good. Thanks so much, everyone.

Bye.

Bye.