Sales Assembly’s Leadership Safari is a monthly collection of tips, trends, and tactics to help you navigate the vast landscape of Revenue Leadership – featuring yours truly, Ranger Christina Brady, Chief Strategy Officer here at Sales Assembly.

Let’s Get Exploring!

A Head Start on Q4

Prospecting is more important (and harder) than ever.  That’s why our dear friends at Gong studied which email CTAs work best for cold outreach.  What they found was that asking for interest in cold emails is 2x more successful than asking for time.  What does that mean for the efficiency of your team?  That means twice more meetings with the same amount of emails.  Share the full list of email CTAs here (all 43 of them) with your team to give them a head start this quarter. 

Career Development Best Practices

As a leader, there’s multiple careers you have to pave, navigate, and bring to fruition.  Your own, and your direct reports.  Charting a personal career plan isn’t just important, it’s essential to your growth.  Your career development plan should be comprised of at least the following:

  1. Your ideal future role, based on the description and scope of responsibilities vs the title.
  2. The skills you possess today will help you get to your next step and succeed.
  3. The skill gaps you’ll need to enable in order to be ready for 1,2, or 3 steps ahead in your career.
  4. Your plan to address your skill/behavior/experience gaps.

Step 1: Develop your plan, and share it with your manager/leader and/or mentor.

Step 2: Check-in on your plan, and progress quarterly.

Step 3: Make changes if necessary.  If your desired path changes, that’s ok!  A Career Development Plan or CDP should be fluid and change when necessary.

To manage CDP’s for your direct reports, ideally, you’ll create a document for each of them and dedicate a section to each of the 4 items above.  On a quarterly basis, revisit their CDP and discuss the current progress, potential opportunity, and traction on development.

Strong leaders prepare their teams for their next steps and train them to have an improvement and learning mindset.  Set the expectation by owning your career first!

Below are a few tips from leading Tech Sales pros throughout our awesome community:

Natalie Lambert: VP of Marketplace Growth & Enterprise Success at Upwork

Q: How did you determine that advancing to a VP level was the right career move for you?

A: Moving to a VP level was an important decision for my career because I knew my org needed more strategic vision, more coaching, and more time dedicated to building the team’s long-term roadmap.  The move to VP allowed me to do more for my direct reports, peers, and overall company.  I had a stronger, more influential voice at the executive table.  I was able to “paint the picture’ of the future I knew my team was working for, and at that level, I knew I’d be able to advocate for what my teams needed whether it be tools, resources, or training.  The authority and autonomy to discuss, debate, and gain collaborative commits with the leaders that made decisions that impacted my teams allowed me to set my teams up for the most success.  Everything listed above was also in line with my passion, and what I desire to do every day.  Passion + meaningful work = success!

Career Progression Trends

While tech is known for its trailblazer-like promotion timelines, the last 18 months have created some ripples in the equity for certain employees as they look to advance their careers.  HR Executive recently reported that COVID-19 drove women out of the workforce at record numbers, and for those who remain, career progression and pay increases took an abrupt halt, or significant slow down. 

An excerpt reads: “The toll of the pandemic on women—millions of whom have dropped out of the workforce to manage added childcare responsibilities and for other reasons—is threatening to reverse decades of progress.  Now, many women have real concerns about returning to the workforce and may have to restart their careers to catch up to their male colleagues.”

This is an excellent time to review the data for your company specifically, and innovate where necessary to ensure that diversity of gender, race, culture and orientation isn’t stalled as B2B Tech experiences some historic cash flow and growth.  Leave no one behind!

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Let’s chart this path towards scale, together!  As our industry’s only Scale-as-a-Service platform, we’re the partner for 160+ leading B2B Tech companies on their journey to Scale Better, Scale Faster, and Scale Smarter.  Interested in learning more about membership and how it works?  Contact us for more information.