Episode#14: "The truth about women and sales jobs" - Kim Walsh - Global VP at HubSpot for Startups

50inTech Podcast

Hey I'm Kim Walsh Global VP of HubSpot for Startups. (...) We partner with VCs, incubators, basically all startup organizations, and our mission is to help millions of startups grow better.

So we started this, HubSpot for Startups, three years ago. The team is a global team now, we help over 10,000 startup customers. We love to empower all types of companies, and we think that's really important, but we really love to support our female founders as well. (...)

What we see happen so often in sales is that marketing is dominated by women typically in companies, but sales positions are dominated by men. What happens and why I'm the executive sponsor of a woman in sales group, is that we feel it's really important to empower women to have a career in sales.

From a financial perspective having a career in sales gives women opportunities. One of the things that also happens in our women in sales group that I actually hate to see happen, I spent a lot of my time trying to help women is, they’ll get to a certain point in their career they'll graduate college, they’ll come in as an entry level sales person, they’ll do really well, often times they are the top performers on their team, and then what happens from there is they say: “I really love customers, I want to go to work with customers, I want to join the customer success team.” (...)

So what we do is we try and change the landscape of what is sales. Sales isn’t going out drinking every night with your buddies. Sales isn’t closing deals on a golf course. Sales is actually talking to a customer, understanding what the customer's pain points are, understanding how you can help them. (...)

So, if you frame sales, to a woman who’s doing well in sales and let her know that she can actually have a great career, and provide for her family over time. Also, in sales you have a ton of flexibility. I've seen this happen over time, where they’ve dealt themselves because they want to do a career change into something that seems a little bit more safe and they stay in sales and they've actually gone on to do really really well.

So it's really cool and those women are empowering other women. What I think has to happen inside sales and marketing too, that is really important, is that women need examples of people who have done it before. (...)

So what I think about today's world is that so many of us women are sick of our voices being quieter, you know we need to have a platform so many other women are giving us a platform, that we want to be heard, and we can collectively come together and help each other. I think that's happening in today's world as well. (...)

My few key things of advice for anyone out there looking to get into, you know, maybe you're looking to leave marketing, and go into sales, or maybe you're looking to build a career in what we call a “go to market function”.

1/ Be a good listener, be empathetic, love helping people

2/ Put more women in CRO roles, give them a seat at the table, give them a platform

3/ Put more women in leadership positions, put more women in C level positions

In conclusion, I'm really excited and thank you for allowing me to be on this podcast today and talk about something that I'm so passionate about. I accept the 50inTech’s mission, I support it in building a community for women, and building an inclusive platform, this is what the world needs right now, at a really cool time. (...)

Let's continue the conversation and I guess be passionate together, because the more of us that can do this together, the more we can help other people.