Work in Business Development - Inside the Helix Sales Team
💎If a career in business development is something you’d like to pursue, this video is for you! Watch till the end to learn how you can join the life sciences and growth team at Helix and be part of the healthcare transformation this company is spearheading.
📼Helix is hiring for business development and account management roles. Meet Daniel Lee, the senior vice president of life sciences and growth at Helix, who’s looking to expand the team with people who will not just make sure customers are happy but who can also grow existing accounts!
📼So, before you apply for a business development role with Helix, you may wonder what the life sciences and growth team does there? Well, Helix understands genomics. They utilize various genomic and electronic health record data to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies discover and bring new drugs to market, specifically tailored for individuals.
They’re also incredibly involved with the COVID-19 response across the United States. Not only do they do testing, but more importantly, they work very closely with the US government and other agencies to develop and implement a nationwide viral surveillance infrastructure. This tracks new COVID variants as they emerge across the US, plus whatever may be coming in the future. As Dan notes, they like to call it “Finding Pathogen X.” Sounds exciting or what?
📼And what's the day-to-day like for a business development role at Helix? One thing Dan guarantees is that no day is similar to the next! You may find yourself responding to a customer inquiry, developing a new product, or figuring out how to scale a product and bring it to market. Dan's team attempts to understand the effects on patients because, at the end of the day, that's where Helix is trying to make an impact.
Business Development at Helix - What About Career Growth?
Startups are fantastic for career growth because you get your hands involved with everything. And at Helix, they have a real passion for growing people. Plus, Helix is going through hyper-growth! That can only be achieved If they simultaneously grow their employees to meet the challenges they face. And so, not only do they implement formal training, but they also supply a significant amount of mentoring. They want to ensure that every employee is put in a position to succeed!
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Helix? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to Know Dan
Dan is a senior executive in the healthcare industry who seeks out challenges to build, grow, and transform businesses. He enjoys unraveling complex problems and issues both domestically and internationally. Driven by intellectual curiosity that has led to a multi-disciplinary background in strategy, business development, finance, commercial, R&D, and operations, he leverages high learning agility, systems thinking, and business savvy to lead through disruptive change. Dan thrives in fast-paced, fluid environments and has a passion for cultivating leaders. He devotes special attention to building cultures where people can thrive and is known for developing talent. If you are interested in a career at Helix, you can connect with Dan on LinkedIn!
More About Helix
Helix is a personal genomics company with a simple but powerful mission: empower every person to improve their life through DNA. Helix is dedicated to making DNA learning accessible and actionable for everyone. They’ve been working hard to achieve their vision: creating a world in which every person benefits from their biological information and is able to help all of humanity lead better lives. They are collaborators—scientists, engineers, designers, marketers, and more—working across two offices to solve complex challenges locked within the human genome. They are biased toward action as they strive to uphold integrity in sequencing, science, and communication. At Helix, transparency, collaboration, and empowerment drive everybody in all that they do.
How To Manage Your Early-Stage Career - Tips From Gainsight
💎 Are you wondering how to manage your early-stage career? Tune in to catch three top tips from Gainsight that will help you plan strategically!
📼 In this video, you'll hear from Kelly DeHart, SVP, Sales & Account Management at Gainsight, and get her view on how to manage your early-stage career.
📼 Tip #1: Go Where There Is Growth. The first tip on how to manage your early-stage career
means understanding the career path and trajectory of your new role when you first join a company. You'll find that some companies do an excellent job of showcasing career paths and requirements for getting from one step to the next. Don't lose sight of the fact that while you might start off making less money, your earning potential will increase as you take those next steps in your career. Maybe there's one standout company that gives you more opportunities to do that. So when you're selecting a role to apply for, definitely evaluate the path and consider going where there is growth.
📼 Tip #2: Improve The Status Quo. The next tip on how to manage your early stage-career is to take the initiative to identify improvements and make recommendations to improve the status quo. When you enter a company and begin onboarding, you learn the team processes and workflows. As a result, you have a unique, fresh-eyed perspective! After 30 or 60 days in your role, it would be fantastic if you could make recommendations on gaps you've discovered that could be fixed or optimized. In Kelly's words, when she has new employees that offer meaningful insights, that really helps them jump out in her eyes and shows the potential of what they will contribute.
One Last Key Tip On How To Manage Your Early-Stage Career
The third tip is to maintain a broad view of your career options versus just setting your sights on one linear path. Some people know that they want to be in sales or customer success for their entire career. Still, many people look for an entry point to try and learn the ways of a business, in case they decide to course-correct and move into different parts of the organization later. So to achieve that, when you first start at a company, try to build bridges and cross-functional alignment with team members that cross your path. For example, if you're in sales, you could align with team members in marketing or customer success and learn what they do. Then, if you consider a switch to another department in the future, you'll have a breadth of experience across the organization that will eventually make you more valuable on a leadership level.
📨 Are you interested in joining Gainsight? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
More About Gainsight
Gainsight is a venture-backed, fast-growing tech company revolutionizing Customer Success for businesses. The Customer Success Company helps businesses expand quickly by reducing churn, increasing upsell, and driving customer advocacy. Gainsight provides a complete, end-to-end Customer Success solution through their services and technology. The industry-leading platform helps companies manage customer relationships effectively, track customer health, and transform the way organizations operate around the customer. Gainsight is the platform of choice for many leading companies like Box, Adobe and Workday.The company has been recognized as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world by Forbes, one of the fastest-growing private companies in America by Inc. Magazine, and as one of 20 Great Workplaces in Tech by Fortune Magazine. And Gainsight's CEO, Nick Mehta, has been recognized as one of the Top SaaS CEOs in America. The company has offices in California, Phoenix, St. Louis, London, Tel Aviv, and India.
Sales vs CS: How to Know Which is Right for You, With Gainsight’s CCO Kellie Capote
Performing in a dance show, cheering on the Steelers, giving a presentation: the activities Kellie Capote has most enjoyed throughout her life all incorporate connecting with other people.
It makes sense, then, that the self-proclaimed extrovert would've ended up with a career in sales.
And it makes even more sense, says Kellie, that she transitioned that sales career into working in the then-nascent field of customer success—and that she's currently the Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight, the company that pretty much invented the field.
She first started following Gainsight while in an account management role at ADP. It wasn't long until she was convinced she needed to work there.
"Watching the shift to the subscription economy, and the digital transformations that were happening, was a light bulb moment for me," says Kellie. "Like, 'Oh my goodness, I need to be at Gainsight.'"
Now, four and a half years into her Gainsight career, Kellie is more passionate than ever about the connective tissue between sales and CS, the potential for CS to transform organizations, and the growing CS team she's building at Gainsight. We sat down with her to hear more about how she got to where she is and what advice she has for people considering roles in either field, and we're thrilled to share her experience.
Finding Her Ambition
After studying marketing at Penn State University, Kellie began her career in sales because she was motivated by the chance to talk to people. "It really energized me," she says.
Several formal sales training programs at Fortune 500 companies later, she was working at ADP when she pivoted into working in account management—and that's when she realized she'd found something she liked even more than selling.
"It wasn't just the acquisition of, 'Let me go land a deal and then move on,'" she says. "It was really that continuous relationship and driving the customer towards their next set of outcomes. That really was where I got my fulfillment."
She leaned into the account management side of things, nurturing customers and going after metrics that are now part of a customer success approach. ("We just didn't call it customer success at the time!" she explains.) That's when she started following Gainsight's growth and decided to apply.
With no connections, she managed to land a job there as an enterprise CSM consultant. Within six months, she had taken on managing people and building out the CSM team. From there, the promotions kept coming until she landed her current role, CCO.
The Difference Between Sales and CS
As someone who came up in sales and now manages a big CS team, Kellie is well-positioned to understand what both fields have in common (as well as how they diverge). We asked her for a primer, and here's what she shared:
- They're more alike than not. "There's a lot of connective tissue between sales and customer success," explains Kellie. "Very often people think that sales and customer success are in opposition to one another. I actually think customer success is long-term selling. We're constantly earning our customer's business from pre-sales to each and every renewal event."
- What's different is the timeline. "In a traditional sales role, you're typically running up against a number. You're in acquisition mode, whereas in customer success, you have a longer lens on what's success."
- Value selling is at the heart of each field. "A lot of the formal training that happens in sales organizations around value propositions plays so nicely in customer success, because it's all about explaining the what, the why, and the how. Having frameworks to do that becomes really, really important."
- The same type of people can often succeed in either role. "Both demand what I call the adaptability quotient. You have to have thick skin in sales because it's a numbers game. You're not gonna win all of them. You can't ride the highs too high or the lows too low. And in customer success, you're gonna have good days, bad days, and everything in between," says Kellie.
- But recruiting for each role is slightly different. While both roles require communication skills and relationship management, Kellie says that sales is more dependent on stronger negotiation skills, and customer success requires a "bulldog mentality" to keep digging deeper and understanding a customers' personas and roadmap to "push them up the maturity curve of success." CS is all about EQ, says Kellie. "You've gotta be able to paint the art of the possible. Building those connections and getting the truth out of people is a craft that not a lot of people can do."
- And CS is usually more deeply embedded in the rest of the business. "Customer success folks do more cross-functional collaboration. You need to be able to engage with product. You're engaging with services, you're engaging with support. You're working with marketing, you're working with PMM," says Kellie. "You have to really be the voice of the customer."
5 Tips for Figuring Out Where You Want to Be—And Transitioning, If Need Be
If you're debating a career in sales versus CS, Kellie has advice on where to start:
- Ask yourself how money motivated you are. "CSM compensation is ticking up year after year and there's good money to be made, but there's still a pay gap. If you want to bust your butt and get the biggest commission check that you can get, and that's the number one motivator for you at this point in time, it may be sales where you want to start," says Kellie. Keep in mind, though, that sales compensation usually is heavily weighted towards commissions, so if you're after security and stability, you might prefer the salary-based CS model.
- Determine whether you prefer set processes or open-ended problem-solving. "CS can be like herding cats, and it requires that you get your hands dirty. If you enjoy digging in and understanding other people's business and not just talking about the strategy, but helping to make the strategy work by connecting the strategy and the tactics, try CS," says Kellie. "If you just want to follow your sales methodology and move on to the next one, that's sales."
- Figure out if you want to explore other roles at the same time. Because CS is so cross-functional, says Kellie, it's a great place to start if you're interested in learning more about product, operations, marketing, or management. "It lends itself to lateral moves within the company. And if you stay within the function, you could get into leadership. I'm a little biased, but I think we're increasingly seeing the CCO role become a very strategic role within organizations."
And if you started in one field but are interested in moving to the other, you can follow Kellie's path and:
- Believe that there really are transferable skills. If you want to go from customer success to sales, you'll want to highlight consistent performance and operational rigor, says Kellie, which can be done by showing the metrics you've owned and what stretch goals you set for yourself. For the opposite transition, she suggests highlighting relationship management and cross-functional skillset, along with tangible examples of how you've made customers successful.
- Recognize that both fields are becoming more strategic and structured. As CS evolves, says Kellie, it's developing more of the metrics-driven approach that sales teams have long had. And sales teams are starting to measure their own success on a longer time horizon, too. "Having that big rallying cry drives overperformance," explains Kellie.
As Gainsight's CCO, Kellie is looking forward to the next evolution of the future of CS. "My ultimate responsibility is being like the learning engine of the business, constantly driving and advocating for customer centricity," she says. "But it's not a one person job. We need an organization to do that."
How Hopin’s CCO Knew a Startup Environment Was Right For Her—and Two Questions to See If It’s Right for You
If there's a thread that connects all the different facets of Rosie Roca's life, it's the power of bringing people together.
From how she was raised, to how she got her first job, to the decision to leave enterprise software to take on her current role as the Chief Customer Officer at fast-growing events technology platform Hopin, a focus on community has helped to guide Rosie's decisions.
We sat down with Rosie to talk about her career, her new role at Hopin, and what advice she has for people who think that their ideal community might be at a startup.
Drawing from experience
Growing up in Havana, Cuba and moving to the United States when she was 12, Rosie's first values were drawn from the community she was raised by. "I was surrounded by really hard-working folks that just forged paths ahead of them no matter what obstacles were in the way," she says. "It's really transformed how I think about challenges and it gave me a framework, from a grit and perseverance perspective, that I carry with me."
Her interest in how other communities worked and were run led her to study government at Harvard. "Growing up in a country like Cuba, you come away with a different understanding or appreciation for government structures and political systems," she says. "I was fascinated by the differences between my native country and the U.S., and what you see around the world."
As an undergraduate, she traveled to the United Kingdom and Spain, and studied abroad in France, working toward an international law degree. "I tested that notion, which I encourage everyone [to do]," she says. "I took a law school class my senior year of college. I absolutely loved the discussion and didn't enjoy everything else about it!"
It was at a conference about sports that Rosie found her first job. (The irony of the importance that well-run events have had on her career is not lost on the Hopin leader!) Rosie listened to the keynote speaker talk about how passionate she was about her work and happened to sit next to her at lunch after her talk.
"We hit it off," explains Rosie. The keynote speaker also happened to be looking for someone to help her with a marketing-research role, including interviewing customers about their experience. Rosie was the perfect fit.
Her role drew on the research skills she'd honed as an undergrad, and Rosie loved the community she found at work. The company, Kraft Sports Group, ran the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, and Rosie spent her days interviewing fans and customers of major events. "We were helping the business better understand the voice of the customer," she says.
Finding success in customer success
Rosie found herself interested in how technology could drive the future of the fan experience and community, and how marketing would be transformed around that technology. She went to Stanford for her MBA to learn more about those areas.
One professor stuck with her. His point? "'At the end of the day, no matter what role you go into, you're going to have to learn how to sell. How to sell your ideas, how to bring along hearts and minds, how to think about selling a product or a service,'" says Rosie. She liked the idea of selling, but didn't have much experience in it, so she took on a role at an early stage startup RelateIQ, which later became part of Salesforce, on their customer success team.
"It was early days in customer success," she says. "The strength I had, coming from my background, was that I had no fear in picking up the phone, understanding insights, and helping the business to react from an operational perspective."
Once again, Rosie found herself in a position where she worked closely with a community, this time one made up of Salesforce customers. She worked to understand their goals and frustrations, to support them, and help create better products for them.
"The foundational aspiration [of customer success] is to really understand how a business connects to its customers to support them in achieving their goals," she says. "What made me successful in that opportunity and every one after that was to stay focused on the user."
Rosie rose through the ranks, from manager to director to SVP, and was enjoying the challenge of setting a vision and getting a team aligned behind it. But she wanted to try doing that from scratch somewhere new. Somewhere like a startup.
Why Hopin
When Rosie first heard about Hopin, it seemed like a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
"It is a totally new and exciting space to build a company, build a team, and build partnerships with customers in a whole new way, at a time when this type of technology is so needed," she says. "Ultimately, what drove my decision to join Hopin was the team of really talented folks, all passionate about the customer experience and the events industry,working together to create an iconic company."
What's most impressive to Rosie now, six months into her role, is the speed at which the business is growing and evolving. "It's unlike anything I've ever seen from an execution perspective," she says. "A week in prior roles is maybe a day at Hopin, which is a testament to our stage and to the type of culture that we have."
How can you know if Hopin—or another fast-growing startup—is the right next place for your career? Rosie has two key pieces of advice:
1. Make sure you're excited about the problem they're solving, and all the challenges that will come after it.
"Be super clear around your purpose and the challenges that motivate you and will push you into that uncomfortable zone, which is where we do a lot of our learning," she says. For her, at Hopin, that means not just building new event experiences for our customers, but also helping to redefine what overall customer success looks like.
2. Know who you'd be working with and learning from, and be comfortable with that.
Rosie comes at this part from two angles: First, who are you working for? Is your manager someone who can motivate people? "At Hopin, our CEO Johnny has the capability to drive execution and build team culture so quickly," she says. "He's been able to motivate hundreds of people in a year to do something that no one else has ever done before. I'm really learning from him and am thrilled to continue."
The second part? "Who are you going into the trenches with?" asks Rosie. Is it a team of people that you feel like you can trust and enjoy spending time with? That's been the case at Hopin, she adds: "They're so positive and optimistic and ambitious, with an incredibly impressive level of talent and execution."
Staying connected with her community
As busy as she gets, Rosie always makes time for one weekly (if not daily) ritual: reviewing the Slack channel dedicated to shouting out Hopin employees who are going above and beyond. "I go to that channel and just scroll and read about the camaraderie and the support that we have across the entire organization," she says. "You can't help but feel like, 'Holy cow, this is an incredible team, and everyone is really supporting each other in every way that they can.'"
If the Hopin team sounds like one you'd like to be a part of, check out their open roles.