Dwight Schrute might be Dunder Mifflin's best-performing paper salesman. But we don't want him in our sales team at Locale.ai (at the risk of missing out on the great entertainment value he brings to the table). And no, this isn't just about his erratic and eccentric behaviour at the workplace. So, why do you ask? Here are our top reasons:
Not Caring is Not an Option
Most of our prospective customers who are feeling the pain today don't even know a solution for their problem exists. Many of them are using temporary hacks to solve their problem currently.
At Locale, we aren't just building a product. We are building a category and we believe that genuinely caring about the customer need is the vital first step towards building something great, something both we and our customers can be proud of. When it comes to our values, user empathy is right at the top. So, we don't need salespeople. We need perceptive and empathetic people who can solve problems.
For us, sales is about both educating the customers and learning from them. It's about making them realize how much money they are silently losing because of this problem and how we can help them. In a nutshell, it's about figuring out how to position the problem and co-create the product with our customers.
No Customer Question is a Ridiculous Question!
Dwight is quite intolerant of questions. But at Locale, we believe no buyer question is ridiculous. After all, a buyer wouldn't want to go with a company that scoffs at their questions. If our product makes a user feel dumb, the problem is with our product and not with the user. Locale's sole job is to make the life of operations teams easier. If we can't do that, why are we even here?
We are looking for problem solvers; folks who would act as consultants to our prospects walking them through the solution to their need and how to implement that solution. Our sales team would spend more time solving problems than doing anything else.
Patience is Key
Most of our prospective customers haven't seen anything like Locale before. So, our team might have to spend months closely working with the prospects to make them realize the gravity of the problem, patiently answer all their questions, walk them through the product and meet all the executive stakeholders at their company.
Patience is waiting, and not waiting doing nothing. But to keep at what you're doing because it might take some time until your work starts yielding results. A Dwight Schrute might not have the required patience to keep up with a sales cycle that is typically longer.
Team Work is in our DNA
Let's face it. Dwight isn't the best team player. But at Locale, team work is a part of our DNA.
As a product, we are working towards making collaboration and actioning easier for operation teams across the world. We imbibe the same spirit in how we function. We don't have silos at Locale.
The Locale.ai Blog
We are a closely-knit family that thrives on collaboration, open dialogues, and growing together both as a team and as individuals. There are so many working parts to our (always evolving) sales model at Locale that our sales folks would have to work very closely with everyone from product team to growth team and design team to executive team. You might even need to bring people from other teams to close a difficult sale and understanding when to seek that assistance would come handy.
The Locale.ai Blog
Taking Ownership, Not Control
Nobody at Locale tells a colleague what to do. This is simply not how we function. Each of us discuss with the rest of the team on how we can contribute to Locale's journey the best, carve out our own niches, seek support from rest of the team in implementing our ideas, take ownership and deliver. Taking ownership also means learning from our mistakes and reiterating until we get it right.
Knowledge is not the sole preserve of a few. It's dispersed among all of us and it's always good to have as many active minds putting their ingenuity to use. As the Nobel-Prize winning economist Freidrich Hayek puts it in his groundbreaking paper that inspired Jimmy Wales to start Wikipedia:
"Every individual has some advantage over all others because they possess unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to them or are made with their active cooperation."
We are very mindful that the team culture at Locale brings the best out of all of us as individuals. That happens when we provide people with an environment where they can voice their ideas freely, discuss and debate them in a reasonable manner, finally take ownership of their part contributing to a whole that's bigger than all of us in the team.
A Call for New Age Sales-people
According to Forrester's research, 60% of today’s business buyers prefer not to interact with a salesperson as their primary source of information. Put yourself in your everyday shoes as a consumer and you will find that all of us have become averse to anything we find too sales-y.
The explosion of social media and peer review platforms has heralded what is being called as the age of the customer. Gone are the days of pushing your product onto the customer with one-way sales communication. We have a solid belief that a brand like Locale is set to succeed in this new age because user voice has been crucial to not just our product roadmap but also its underlying philosophy since day one.
Locale is different from your typical B2B enterprise sales company. We are creating an entirely new category and in a new category, it’s really not about the competition, but rather all about evangelizing the whole category itself. Status quo is our biggest competition.
We want people who can make sense of the whole ecosystem, update their understanding as and when it evolves, and can execute that understanding at speed. They should be very comfortable with data and should be able to get well-versed in how Locale works and the kind of problems it solves so that they can demo and troubleshoot seamlessly during their presentations.
We're looking for problem solvers, product folks, value-sellers and at heart, evangelizers; people who would help clients solve difficult problems, co-build the product with prospective clients and our engineering team, sell based on the value our product delivers and in doing all this evangelize an entirely new category. Locale's is a category creation environment, and a Dwight Schrute won't do well in such an environment.
If you think you aren't a Dwight Schrute and what we talked about resonated with you in any way, come shape the way companies look at their operations and help build the world's first-ever operational analytics platform.
Head over to our job board for reading the detailed role descriptions and applying. If you want to get creative with your applications or have any further queries, feel free to email me at [email protected]
CareersSales Development Representative
CareersEnterprise Sales Associate
