Communicating in Sales and Leadership
Above: Group picture from the "Advanced Sales Summit" in NYC
In the fall of 2015, during my first quarter at UW, I decided to apply to the Executive Board of AIESEC, a Registered Student Organization (RSO) I had just joined, as a Vice President of Business Development. AIESEC is a french acronym for “Association of students in economics and commercial sciences”, but nowadays it got much bigger than that. It is present in 126 countries and promotes experiential learning exchange programs for young people in which they can volunteer for a non-profit or work for a company abroad. This was my first experience in sales, in leadership, and in doing anything remotely professional in the United States (and in English).
This was a great opportunity for growth, one of my core values, and to put myself out of my comfort zone. I had big shoes to fill as the previous person on my role was responsible for the best results the Seattle chapter of AIESEC has seen in recent years and won a national award. My main goal was to bring that same award home and inspire more and more people to take this kind of risk and apply for leadership positions within the RSO despite any potential lack of experience. I was also very much interested in doing well so that I could apply to be president of AIESEC in the next year.
In this role I was responsible for leading a team to find companies interested in bringing international talent to Seattle and selling our talent sourcing services to them. After the sales process was done, the team would then have to recruit the talent to come to Seattle, posting the position at aiesec.org, screening CVs, doing interviews and assuring both the company and the exchange participant have great experiences. Besides this “direct job” I also was part of the Executive Board, meaning I had to assist and have ownership over the overall strategy we were implementing, and keep constant communication with the National Vice President for the product we were selling to companies.
Leadership Competencies Developed:
Looking back on this experience I realized that, even though I like growing and push myself out of my comfort zone to do new things, I had a fixed mindset. I was too focused on titles, awards, and external validation for who I was a person - I gave too much importance to “capital L leadership”. I saw myself as the person who could revamp our local chapter into new heights just because I liked the way that sounds, which led me to thinking I could do everything on my own. Most of the leadership competencies developed in this role were focused around how I communicated and “led” others. I still had a lot to learn about leading myself before I could go around calling myself a leader. Yes, I learned to be resilient in this experience, but that isn’t too meaningful if I am being resilient about the wrong things. Applying to be president of AIESEC even after those learnings was a way I found to compensate for not having won the awards I so wanted, and try again in another “capital-L” leadership position. The chapters to come proved to be even more transformational.
Listening
After some sales training sessions I attended, I learned that if I am doing most of the talking during a sales meeting, I am doing it wrong. I learned the importance of asking open-ended questions so that I could truly understand the company’s problem and try to tailor our services towards best fulfilling their needs - instead of just shoving a sales pitch down their throats. I had approximately 50 sales meetings and closed many deals in the first half of 2016, all of which ended up being the companies I cared about and went out of my way to try help. In the end of the semester, this listening approach helped me earn a $1000 scholarship for being the top salesperson in the country
Empowerment
Given I had no experience as I started the job, my main focus in the winter was to do as much sales as I could so that the 8 people on my team would “respect me” and “do what I told them to” - which I later found was a massive mistake.
I realized the importance of delegating tasks somewhere in early Spring and, with some positive attitude, some good results came out of it. I successfully empowered two of the new members I recruited to being among the best salespeople in the country - one of them even got invited, with all expenses paid, to an Advanced Sales Summit hosted by AIESEC US in their headquarters in NYC.
Facilitation
Being VP also meant that I was now responsible for giving training sessions to my team. AIESEC, back then, had this conference called “Train the Trainers” that people could attend and learn how to facilitate top-notch workshops. This was important for the organization, since it relied on its members to teach themselves and facilitate sessions in national internal conferences. After attending this conference I was put on the “National Trainers Pool” and got invited by AIESEC in San Diego to fly there and train people on sales. This conference was very impactful as, even to this date as a UW Leaders mentor, I use the skills I learned in it to design and deliver leadership development workshops
This is something I perhaps always had on the back of my mind ever since doing theater classes in middle and high school, but this role gave me more context and vocabulary around how vital nonverbal communication is. At a training session with the chair of AIESEC’s Board of Advisors (a great salesperson), I learned that roughly 70% of communication happens through body language, 20% through tone of voice and 10% through words. This blew my mind away. Ever since I aim to be as mindful as I can about how I communicate nonverbally. At first I applied it in sales, but now I strive to express enthusiasm nonverbally as much as I can, in order to spread positive energy around.
Nonverbal Communication
Helping Others
Taking the Nonverbal communication learning, instead of calling 100 people, I tried going to as many networking events as I could and have face-to-face interactions. Then, by utilizing the listening skills I was developing at the same time, and making the sales process more about helping the companies than helping myself achieve my goals, it became easier to sell. Notably, I remember having a meeting with an up and coming startup in Seattle called Siren. At the time the CEO told me that there was not a need for AIESEC’s services, so I just focused on building and maintaining a relationship with her, as that could change in the future. That approach paid dividends as it turned out the CEO of another startup I ended up closing a deal with was her friend. A few days later that deal was closed, Siren’s CEO reached out to me, and we continued talking about how AIESEC could help her. In both deals, I aimed to forget about the fact that I “had to sell” in order to have a good performance and, instead, actually cared about the startups’ success.
Advocating for a point of view
One of the last things I did on this role was to apply to be the next president. I did not achieve as much as I wanted as a Vice President and wanted to do more for AIESEC. I viewed the RSO very much as a business, since we were not actively selling services to people and companies, we were responsible for the Exchange Participant’s lives, since they were going to a new a country where they did not know anyone. We needed more consistency and commitment from our members if we wanted to have excellent customer service and create more exchange opportunities - which is how we measured the impact we created. This was not an easy process to go through since I had to point out things that were wrong with the then current administration, which I not only was part of, but also had some of my closest friends in. Moreover, to say that “officers would have to work more” was on its own a daunting task. It was through this experience that I learned how to confront the brutal facts about reality and stand by what I believed in, no matter if people could get upset at first. Thankfully I ended up getting elected and met like-minded presidents of other AIESEC chapters around the US who gave me confidence and strength to keep advocating my point of view.
