SPEAKER_01 0:19

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Your Intention Matters the Podcast. Thank you very much for being here. My name is Paul Madott. Today we have Sarah Gross. She is VP of Global Enablement at a company called Ring Central coming to us from South Carolina. Sarah, thanks for being here. Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Thanks, Paul. Happy Friday. Excited to be together.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah, happy Friday. How are things?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Things are good. It's my first week back from maternity leave. So it was one of those uh eye-opening learning a lot weeks, uh, and I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Well, do me a favor, say hi to everybody, provide a real quick introduction, if you would.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Absolutely. So, hey y'all, I'm Sarah. As Paul mentioned, I I do reside in the Southeast. Um, and I I love that about my background and how I've grown into a sales career. Um, I started as a BDRS tier back in the day. Uh, and what was the worst is that they tried to beat y'all out of me uh because they thought it put me in a bucket of people that would take meetings with me. And the reality is that's what became who I am, and being true to that helped me in becoming a great salesperson and moving into sales management and leading with empathy, which is the thing that I uh especially in the world of AI believe is empathy and being a human is a really big part of making AI work for us and with us. Um, I then took uh the sales management job, was given a quota and a dashboard and was like, oh my goodness gracious, this is a lot more than just reading this dashboard every morning, uh, which is what led me into enablement to really break down quantity, quality, balance, velocity. How are you successful as a sales leader? And how do you make more and more successful sales teams? That led then into the post-sales organization. And I now lead a global organization across the entire customer journey, getting the chance to really think about how to make them more productive, especially in the world of AI, right? And how to ultimately bring in the money, uh, bring in more money, if you will, uh, and be that amplifier across my team. So I love, I love the enablement world and love what I do.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

You know, as we were talking before before I hit record, and uh I'm from Toronto. You mentioned to me that that's where the accent comes out. Well, as soon as I heard y'all come out there, I knew you were from the south, so I love it.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Yeah, but you gotta you gotta own who you are. Don't hurt.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Totally, totally. Well, again, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate it, appreciate your time, especially coming back into uh into into the fold, so to speak, after you know, uh some Mad leave time. So I appreciate the time, really. And so, you know, sir, as again, as we were talking before I hit record, you know, from my perspective, when I think about sales and sales training and sales results, mindset from my perspective plays a massive role in that if you take, for example, at Ring Central, your organization can provide your salespeople with every tool in the toolkit to go dominate. You can give them product training and systems training, and you can give them competitive intel, you can you can give them marketing collaterals and this marketing arm to drive inbound leads as well. Also, but if they don't have the right mindset going into it, from my perspective, most typically will not get the results they want. So it could be, it just can't really just be about tactics, it has to be mindset and tactics first. And I'd love your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

I I completely agree. And especially in the world we're living in now, right? Having the right mindset is key. Like you have to embrace leveraging your Gemini or your Claude, right, as your starting place, and that you're not the 101 anymore. You might be the 301 in whatever task that you're going to complete. Um, and having the right mindset that this is good, is this is good for us, right? Versus it's gonna steal your job or whatever, you know, negativity is is spun around it, um, it's so important. I think that just thinking through who do I want to be when I grow up, right? When we were little, uh evolved into having your first job and how do I do the best versus how do I get to the next level. In today's day and age, it's how do I use all the tools at my fingertip to ultimately make me well-rounded in the job that I'm doing as today's society is is is changing and advancing. That's a lot an enablement, right? Because learning how people learn has massively evolved from the folks that are in their 50s and 60s in the workforce, right, to the newer 20-somethings that are coming, right? If we don't as think of our salespeople as AI first, um, they're very quickly getting bored in the job. You can't no longer just give them a sales methodology, right? They want a bot that will guide them through the conversation. They want a um bot that will take that information from the call and give them the next steps and the fields to fill out. And Salesforce are automatically filled out for them. So um we're just in, we're living in a very different world where um that role uh that we've all played before is evolving. Um and I think it's evolving in a really cool and fun way, but you've got to have the mindset to embrace it.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

You know, so I think that was so well said, especially around those of us that are Gen Xers, so to speak, versus the newer generation. You know, my kids are not working yet, they're 10 and 12, but they're on this like all the time. And I didn't I didn't grow up with this at all. I I grew up with like Nintendo, like maybe for an hour a day. I was not, I didn't have a computer attached to my my hip every day, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:44

And so but if you actually tried to get my three-year-old to to have a Tamagotchi the other day. I was trying to teach her all that the you know responsibility of a human before we had a baby.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

How'd that go?

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Uh, she was very quickly bored with it. It was clear that it was just too much. Like, well, too much, probably for a three-year-old, but also just too much work. They're used to things being much easier. It's a push a button to get it done versus having to feed the baby, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

You know, sir, I'm curious about something. If I uh when I took a look at your LinkedIn profile, I saw that you went to the University of South Carolina, and you also studied in Barcelona for a while as well, correct?

unknown 6:23

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Okay, and so I'm curious about that decision to go to Barcelona. Was that an easy one? Was that made for you? Did it take some time? What prompted that decision to go across the pond into Spain?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Yeah, so um, first I was in the international business school. So it was a natural part of the overall education. Um, but I also, like I mentioned, I grew up in the Southeast, which is an awesome place to live and to grow up. Um, but it also comes with having a limited mindset, right? If you haven't seen different cultures, different parts of the world. And so Barcelona, why I loved it, is it was Catalonia, right? Uh a little bit different than your traditional Spain and gave me an opportunity to actually be a part of a um program with Cornell. And so I got to meet folks of different backgrounds and different religions and different knowledge points. Um, and it gave me the chance to broaden my uh perspective in life. I actually went for a semester, I stayed for like a year and a half to the point where my dad was like, I need you to come home and graduate. Um but that's how much I loved it.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Gotcha. You know, and so you know, Sarah, I took economics in in college and university, and I did not have sales on my radar at all. As a matter of fact, I'll go so far as to say that for a while there before I really understood what it was to be a sales professional, sales to me was a bit of a dirty word. It almost like you know uh you had to lie to cheat, and you have to kind of force someone to do something that they didn't want to buy and just kind of do that. I don't know why, well, I don't know where that really came from, but I did not have that in my scope at all. And I'm curious about what prompted you to get into sales.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Uh super interesting because I definitely grew up with that. My my mom's in the medical profession, my dad's lawyer. Um, they they kind of always guided me towards having a you know a degree in something, if you will, um, that is uh or license in something. That's probably the word I should use there. Um, I ultimately in Barcelona, I actually ended up working for a local Starbucks. And during it, I realized it was right near the American campus. And so people were coming in and they had more traditional Spanish products where I think folks were looking for like a taste of home. And so I helped them, hey, like let's have a chocolate croissant, let's have this in that we would have had in the States, and their sales skyrocketed. So they actually put me in charge of, hey, how do we market the store? Because I was having I was going for a marketing degree at the time. And so I put a sign outside that was like, Miss Vanilla Lattes, right? Come on in and use that and played off of that, right? Because they're there's students that are there for at least a semester. There's a point where you miss something that looks like home, right? But then we started educating them on a frittata as an example, right? Um, and we could we got back to that more Spanish culture in the store, but you had to start where people were and then bring them over into that world. And so I think naturally I got in, I realized that I was just really good at this. Um it was super funny when I came back. My dad played a video of me where I apparently put a PowerPoint presentation together when I was about like six of why I needed to go to Hawaii. Um, and my parents actually ended up taking me, but I walked through and he was like, I knew that this is what you should do from day one. I just needed to let you figure it out.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

You sold them on Hawaii at six. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Uh I really liked dolphins, so there you go. Uh and now my three-year-old is very similar to me. So I'm I am uh um getting the other end of that sword.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

As long as grandpa doesn't show her the the PowerPoint presentation, she'll be all right, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Hopefully grandpa funds it. So we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

You know, when you think about your your selling career uh post-Starbucks and post-Barcelona and post-Sout Carolina, post you know, college, so to speak. What was your first real sales job? Because you mentioned at the start, you kind of run through the gamut, inside sales, BDR, account manager, and so on. What was your first professional sales job here in the States?

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, I actually worked for an outsourced appointment setting firm. Uh, so I got the opportunity to support about five different reps. And uh, they were at Marketo at the time, they were at corporate executive board. Um, I had folks kind of across the board, I had Salesforce at one point. Um, so I got to see these big tech firms and how they were working by being on the outside, if you will. Um, I'll never forget I had Oracle at one point, and that was just a totally very tenured sales team in comparison to the Marketos at that point. So I started to see the types of salespeople that get hired different places and how they work differently. Um, some of my salespeople like wouldn't show up to meetings, and I was like, that's insane. Like, why wouldn't you want something in your pipeline? Others of mine would be like barking down my doors. Others of my sales um reps would say, Hey Sarah, I'm gonna be in X City. Can you get me other meetings in the city? So I started to really realize, you know, how good salespeople will do things. Um, I loved that job. I ended up actually selling appointment setting uh and because I was so passionate about it, and then I moved into fully carrying a bag um at corporate executive board.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Gotcha. You know, I I gained my introduction to sales uh at Xerox, and I told you at the start here that sales was not on my radar at all. I I had a kind of a negative thought to it. No real no real reason why I just did. And I certainly didn't have me being a salesperson, I was a finance guy, I was like a numbers guy. And so I was out of work, I joined Xerox on a flyer, so to speak, and said, let's give it a shot. I really went in with a very much, I'll give it six months, see how it goes. Turned into almost 10 years when it was all said and done. But that first year, I might have meant I must I must have mentally quit half a dozen times. I just couldn't figure it out. I was in early, I was out late, I was all in to this new career of mine, but I was working really hard, clearly doing it the wrong way, because I just could not figure it out. And so I'm thinking I'm curious about if you think about your various roles over your selling career, yeah, any situation comes to mind that you that you recall where you really had to dig in mentally and figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Um, I mean, I'd say when I started as a BDR, like I said, people were trying to put me into a bucket. I was in DC at the time, which is like not northern, not southern, not, you know, West Coast, not East Coast, really. DC is just a mismatch. And so they wanted everyone on the floor to kind of look and feel the same way. There was a cadence in which you were supposed to reach out. And it wasn't working for me. I was doing exactly what they told me to in the playbook, but it wasn't working because I didn't feel myself. Um, and so I remember having to have the mindset to say to my boss at the time, can't give me a week. Just let me try it my way. Um, and let's see what happens. And I had this thing called the callback approach. I don't know what it was about being a southern woman, but I was mostly calling men. It was CIOs at the time, and they would call me back, right? And then they'd call me back when they clearly had a minute, um, and it would give me at least 30 seconds to get them to open up to having a conversation. So I would always leave a voicemail. My callback rate was like 50%. Um, and so it worked for me. Where callback, you know, leaving a voicemail was like step six in their sequence before. Um, and so what had to shift though is I had to say, let me stand on my two feet. I respect your training, right? But it's where I learned enablement because not everybody can be trained the same way. Not everybody's got the same pipeline, not everybody's got the same human that they're actually doing the reach out on behalf of. And I think it's so important to remember that we want someone to bring their full self to work, and then we want that to work for the role that we're having them play versus trying to put them in a box.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

I would say I think that's probably why I was a very ineffective sales manager because uh I went into the role, good intentions. It was kind of the next progression of my career. Pardon me, but the way that I managed was this is how I did it, so this is how you should do it. And that was like the worst thing I could have done. It was just a recipe for disaster overall, quite frankly.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

And that's what most first-time managers do. Uh, and why, again, I think enablement is so critical because what you should do is say, here's seven examples that have worked, right? You're gonna have to screw up, you're gonna have to have coaching conversations that don't go well. Let's record those, let's talk through them, right? Let's have a feedback loop so that we can involve you. But every member of your team is gonna need a different development plan. And let's start there as the basis of things.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

You know, Sarah, you mentioned at the start that uh you're a mom for the second time just recently. Two kids, three and a newborn. And so I'm a father myself. I have two kids, they're 12 and 10. And when it came to starting a family uh as a guy, uh all I had to think about was you know, how do I afford this? Uh I had no real concerns about the impact on my career as a man because I didn't carry the baby. There was no, there was no mad leave for me other than being working from home at the time. But I'm curious about you being you becoming a mom. Did you have to factor into a conversation with yourself regarding the impact on your career as a woman?

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Absolutely. And I think it's the hardest part about being a working mom is you want to set the right perspective for your kids, especially the fact that I have two girls. Um, but it's hard. It's a lot of push and pull and it's resetting of your mindset of what's important and the expectation from your team members. I mean, I block my calendar every day from five to six. And I always tell my boss, you're welcome to call me in that period. If I have a minute, it might be a little loud. Um, but of course I'll answer, right? However, I I will have I'm happy to sign back in once I've gotten everyone to bed and sit down and really think through your your answer, but I want to be thoughtful in how I do work. And so how thoughtful looks to me is a little bit different than it used to be. I used to when I first started my career. I was on, as you mentioned, from seven to seven. I got everything done, I got all my post-its cleared. But the reality is I'm way more effective now that I'm I set time to be thoughtful. Like I set time after daycare drop-off to think about the things that people asked me the day before so that I can respond in a way that isn't a check it off my post-it note, but is a really um engrossed answer into how we can think about it holistically. And so candidly, I think I'm a much better leader as a mom. And it's funny because team members of mine have actually verbalized it and said it. They were like, Sarah, you're not a like just get it done. You're a, hey, let if we're gonna do this, let's do it right and let's kill it. Um, and I I think a lot of that came of uh, you know, how do I set the mindset of for my girls that I'm gonna do if I'm gonna work, I'm gonna do it really well. Um, I'm not just gonna go in for a paycheck and I'm not just gonna give them 24 hours of my day because number one, they don't need that. Like I can do what I do really well in my thoughtful time, but I have to have my children out of the house and I have to have that time block so that I can really think through things. And I had to be confident in myself to say that, especially to my male bosses, to say, here's here's my new way of working. I promise you're gonna get the same output from me.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Well, I'm certainly not surprised at all to hear that it's actually transferring and echoing into those that are on your team and those that you support, because if it's coming through that way, they're gonna receive it that way, of course. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Sarah, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate your time. Uh congrats on all your success to this point, of course. And I always like to close kind of the episode with if you have a if you think about your career, your careers over the past X amount of years or so, any best practice or a thought or an approach or advice that's been given to you that served you well?

SPEAKER_00 18:55

I I mean, I got a lot of advice before becoming a mom for the first time. Um uh, and that was be more vocal. Tell people what your plan is to accomplish the same things that you did before, and everything will be okay. So, especially in this world of AI, be more vocal. Be vocal with what you used AI to do. Like people want to know. I don't think it's taboo, and uh be if you have a voice, you're human, and if you're human, you are needed.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

And on that note, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Paul. Wonderful. Okay, everybody, thanks so much for joining us on this episode. We're gonna wrap it up right now. Remember that your intention matters. Why? Because that's the result you'll tend to get. We're out of here. We'll see you on the next episode next week.