Superhuman Career Growth & Development

Which skills do you leverage most often in your day-to-day work?

First and foremost is customer-centricity. By actively listening to customer needs, deeply understanding their business and tailoring your approach to their ideal outcomes, you’ll deliver mutually beneficial value. Top account executives are trusted advisers who are highly responsive to customer needs. 

Next up is organization. Use your customer relationship management software daily, block time on your calendar for specific tasks, maintain a clear to-do list, and own every detail about your business. By the time you log off on Friday, you should have a clear plan for the following week to maximize your time. 

Most sellers’ motivation ebbs and flows, so maintaining high discipline is crucial. The key to elite performance is consistent, high-quality effort. You must embrace the work, trust the process and give it your best effort every day.

Collaboration is vital as you move upmarket. An AE often works with 10 internal and 10 external people on one opportunity, making it challenging to align so many people around a common goal. Respecting people’s time, understanding their motivations and expressing gratitude for their contributions are essential.

How have these skills enabled you to heighten your impact on Grammarly or grow your career?

I appreciate that many top performers in software sales are open to sharing their advice about what’s worked for them. It’s a great tradition, and I’m grateful to have learned from some of the best. I try to learn something from every interaction and implement what I’ve learned to challenge myself. 

After more than a decade of working at big software companies with robust training and veteran sales leaders, I decided to spend five years at early-stage startups. They were two entirely different worlds. It wasn’t until I joined a resource-strapped startup with a minimal sales structure that I realized how much I had learned in my previous roles. That realization kicked off the second stage of my career, which has involved recruiting, training and developing elite sales teams.

Today, I have the privilege of leading a team of high-integrity, high-performance sellers at one of the most exciting tech companies in the world. These sellers all have the core skills necessary to succeed in the role, so my job is to help them challenge themselves to reach their full potential. It’s a great responsibility, and I get so much satisfaction from assisting them in improving and exceeding goals.

What are some resources and/or sources of inspiration you’d recommend for reps eager to refine their sales skills? Are there resources Grammarly has provided to support this growth? 

Sellers must find an organization that prioritizes ongoing training and enablement. Here at Grammarly, Jason Manoharan and the enablement team provide a few streams of training for the team, divided into three categories: Active enablement, which takes the form of multimodal programs that are designed to level up the skills of our sales teams and require the active participation of our sellers; structural enablement, which involves prioritizing process updates, feedback loops and new supporting materials; and point-in-time enablement, an approach to knowledge-sharing that’s curated to solve specific business needs, like new product launches.

In addition to finding a company to support you, sellers must continually study their industry, refine their sales skill, and practice self-development. For self-development, Mindset by Carol Dweck is a must-read. Two sales books that have greatly influenced me are John McMahon’s The Qualified Sales Leader and Todd Caponi’s The Transparency Sale. For your industry, read what your customer executives are reading. Grammarly is a trusted AI assistant for work, so I study workplace productivity, AI literacy and the future of work. I read blogs like “TLDR.ai,” “Lenny’s Newsletter” and newsletters from big large language model providers.