I am not a self-proclaimed sales guru. I rarely, if ever, post those multiple, one-lined sentences on LinkedIn espousing what you and your reps should do to become more productive. I have written extensively about sales – such as here, here, and here – and spoken on prominent podcasts from Bowery Capital to Brian Burns, but I don’t do that too often nowadays.

My story starts in 2012, when, after graduating with high honors and magna cum laude from NYU, I decided to take an internship (yes, free labor) at an organization whose mission was to train everyday people how to use the Internet. I was an assistant to the Community & Social Media Manager, where I created and curated, Facebook and Twitters posts.

Three months later, I was the Community and Social Media Manager. I created the “Grovo Champions,” which was a community of over 100 power-users located around the globe who partnered with us for real-time feedback, news amplification, and ideas on how we could grow.

Six months later, I was asked to start the sales team with our CEO. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and was almost fired…repeatedly. However, with a lot of love, training, and a healthy dose of fear, I began to get it. I closed smaller deals – e.g. $500, $1,000 – until I found my niche in Sales Development, which was gaining popularity due to Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue, published a year and a half earlier.

Two years later, our company grew from 20 employees, at the point when I started, to over 200. Our sales team went from just me, to over 90 people, with me eventually being responsible for 30 of them in the capacity of SDR Manager, where I managed four managers (Inbound and Outbound), who each had 5-7 reps. We drove millions in revenue, earning us a $40M Series C and the title of “Best Place to Work in NYC Tech.”

Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last, but they rarely do. No longer willing to put my heart into it, I left the organization in 2016 to focus on writing, travel, and all those other things twenty-somethings with a little money in their pocket do in an effort to find their calling. Fortunately, I did. My purpose in life is to create.

When I returned to the States, I began consulting with Skaled, the top sales consultancy in North America, where I worked as outsourced SDR leadership for companies in Canada, San Francisco, Portland, and, of course, New York. And while I was grateful for that work, which gave me time to write, I realized that I could have a greater impact by empowering people who looked like me and wanted to learn how to do what I do, but may have not known it existed.

And here we are. Me writing this and you reading it. Thank you for making it this far. Now that you’ve gotten to know me, I hope you’ll do me the same courtesy and send me an email telling me about yourself. If you work for an organization looking to partner with us, great. If you think you’d like to learn how to sell, and go through our intense training process, wonderful. And if you just want to chat, we can do that, too, albeit it will likely take me longer to respond.

Mateo
Founder