Huntress Career Growth & Development

Tell us about your sales journey thus far.

Before I joined my current team, I worked as an external contractor performing the same role. When the company I was working for was sold in 2020, Huntress did not hesitate to hire me as a sales development representative. 

My previous employer’s leader came on board, too, now as my direct supervisor. She has been the most impactful mentor I’ve had in my career. Together, we built out our department within the sales organization, and she helped guide and develop me into a management role. She has always encouraged me to keep an eye open for opportunities to grow and develop my skills, from celebrating my wins to pushing me out of my comfort zone. She helped me discover my love of building new things and finding unexplored territory.

As my department grew, I gained new peers and got to experience the victory of mentoring some of my employees on successful career paths both inside and outside of the sales team. I genuinely find this to be the most rewarding part of my job. Recently, I was promoted to senior manager and given new responsibility to help build out other regional sales development representative teams as our company expands globally. I have found this incredibly rewarding.

What is the sales culture like at Huntress?

Our sales culture is communicative, fun and professional. It is also very collaborative, and it’s common to see peers sharing ideas and trying new things together. We run friendly competitions that allow us to have fun and compete in a healthy way while still maintaining focus on our goals. My team has some fun rituals and traditions that help to support this. For example, we celebrate every win with a gif posted in our team’s Slack channel, and these are always accompanied by a series of colorful emoji responses and cheers in the thread from peers. Sometimes, if there’s a particularly unique or hard-fought win, the story is told in the thread, so the team can all learn from each other.

The part of our culture that has had the biggest impact on me, however, is our strong focus on growth and development. There is so much value in having something to strive for and being open to the skills you still need to build to get there. It allows us to constantly evolve our processes and ourselves into the ever-better version. We keep strong talent because they know there is potential for advancement, and their manager is on their side to get there.

What advice do you have for sales professionals who want to join your team?

I would encourage sales professionals who want to join our team to build strong relationships with their peers, learn and follow the existing structured sales processes, remain open to continuous improvement and seek feedback from their peers and mentors. Getting to know your colleagues and building early rapport with them can be crucial to your future success. They are a wealth of knowledge with valuable insights. They also know what the day-to-day of your job is like, and they can bolster your confidence or give you motivation when you need it.

Familiarize yourself with our sales process and methodologies. Consistency is the key to reliable results. Failing to use the customer relationship management tool to its full potential will negatively impact you in the future. Our process is always open to evaluation and iteration, but if you don’t understand it, you can’t understand where it needs work.

Acknowledge that no one is perfect, especially in the realm of sales, which is deeply human. Being open to recognizing and addressing your weaknesses and acquiring new skills is vital for career growth. Feedback is invaluable, so make it a point to seek input from your peers, mentors and managers.

Describe your career journey so far. What skills and experiences have you acquired along the way that have helped you get to where you are now?

I had originally started out as a musician, but had always been good with computers. I had taken some programming classes in junior high and had just puttered around with them for fun. When I moved to NYC I eventually decided to study computer science more formally. Eventually I decided to meld my love of true crime and computers and got a master’s degree in computer forensics. Learning how to program was integral to my success, however, since the field of computer forensics was still very new and you would often have to create new tools to parse artifacts (because there wasn’t a tool available) or troubleshoot existing tools that might not work as expected. Also having knowledge of how to program and operating systems internals made my analysis skills better because I knew how programs should operate and how to debug them. This was extremely helpful when trying to reverse engineer malware or writing new code to do RAM forensics.

What support did you receive from individuals or resources that helped you step into a leadership role?

When I was a grad student I was lucky to have stumbled across some research around memory (RAM) forensics, (which led to the Volatility project) and I was able to find one of the authors (Aaron Walters) on IRC (an online chatroom). I was interested in this project because it was a component that I needed in order to finish a research project of my own. Luckily Aaron and others in the chatroom were very receptive and encouraging. It was a wonderful open source community in which I was accepted and flourished. As I got more involved in the project, I took on more and more responsibilities. I had really found my niche.

Being one of the people responsible for updating and maintaining code for the Volatility project definitely helped put me on the trajectory for a leadership role. When working with others on open sourced projects, you can come across all kinds of personality types. There will be times you don’t agree on things, but you have to come to some sort of common ground in order for the project to survive. I was able to take what I learned during there and apply it to my day job in order to manage not only time and projects, but people.

How do you encourage other women on your team to become leaders themselves? Are there any stories you can share that showcase how you’ve done this?

These days I tend to act as a sounding board and mentor for various women co-workers, friends or acquaintances as requested. I try to listen as much as I can when others come for advice. Women in general are not often listened to in their day-to-day lives, often due to bias, so I try to make sure that they feel heard when they are seeking advice on something. It also doesn’t make sense to try to solve a problem for someone, without even fully understanding the problem to begin with. I try to ask open-ended questions so that I’m not probing them towards an answer that I am thinking of before knowing the full scope of the problem.

Recently I had someone who was trying to advance her career, but didn’t feel like people were taking her seriously. The main problem I saw was that upper leadership just didn’t know much about her at all. I gave her advice on how to make herself more visible, but within her comfort zone. She took the advice and it worked- she was promoted within the next promotion cycle. Sometimes it’s not that you’re doing the wrong things, you may just need to tweak what you do, in order to accomplish your goals. Talking to a third party person might help with that.