Daria Danilina

Salesroom 

At Salesroom our vision is to become the dominant remote selling platform for mid-market and enterprise B2B account executives. We plan to achieve this goal by combining workflow tools and real-time guidance with a rich video experience, allowing buyers and sellers to bring their whole self to the interaction and build authentic relationships.

Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer

Lightico

Investor and Board Observer

Codility

Oxx VC

Oxx brings scale up capital to B2B software companies with great traction.

See more here: http://oxx.vc

Associate

Hummingbird Ventures

Hummingbird Ventures is a venture capital partner for extraordinary entrepreneurs building fast-growth tech companies. We’ve teamed up with leading companies, including Peak Games, Kraken, Deliveroo, Showpad, Clear2pay, Amplidata, Markavip, Shutl and many others. With a presence in London, Ghent and Rotterdam, we provide swift access to the operational resources and advice needed to grow the tech companies of tomorrow.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery - the mobile surgical training system built for mobile devices. Our goal is to improve accessibility to the best in surgical education for surgeons and patients.

MBA Intern | Strategy & Business Ops

Balderton Capital

Investment Team Summer Associate

Dropbox

- Part of the European landing team in Dublin
- Experience in all areas of digital sales, including lead generation, optimisation of existing sales channels, training and mentoring of junior team members, localisation and expansion into new markets, working with channel partners (Value Added Resellers)
- Co-led the sales training program for six months, onboarding over 30 salespeople with the focus on reducing the time needed to bring them to productivity 
- Internal analytics, supporting management decisions with data, comprehensive experience with Salesforce.com
- Extensive work on outbound lead generation through online chat

Sales and Operations

HSBC

- Junior member of Central Banks sales team, responsible for covering Central and Eastern European reserve managers on the fixed income side
- Product knowledge of European government bond, Agency and Covered Bond markets as well as interest rate and cross currency swaps
- Rotation in the public sector origination team
- Rotation in the CEE Fixed Income Sales team
- Responsible for the weekly cross asset commentary for the Bank’s Global Top 75 clients (“Voice of the customer”)

Analyst - Fixed Income Sales

Cass Business School

- Assisted Professor Charles Baden-Fuller (Leader of the Strategy Group at Cass Business School)
- Contributed to a case study about the competition between Google and Yahoo
- Market analysis for a fine wine storage business

Research Assistant

On a mission to make sales calls fun for buyers and sellers. We take our customers (and our customers' customers!) very seriously! 

👀 Six Transformations Coming to Your Sales Role: Get Ready! 👀 

Most folks today think of AI in sales as just about crafting emails with ChatGPT or summarizing calls. 

But its impact is going to be way more profound, and it's arriving faster than you might think.

- Attitude over Experience: Imagine a charismatic waiter with stellar people skills. Previously, transitioning into sales without relevant experience would have been challenging. Now, with AI’s playbook, almost anyone enthusiastic and adept in human interaction can  acquire the necessary sales knowledge and tactics. The door is now wider and open for new talent.

- Convergence of Roles: For decades, we've hyper-specialized: AEs, CSMs, SDRs, BDRs, RMs, SEs... AI is about to flip that script. With the help of advanced AI tools, one person can handle most of these roles. This leads to simpler team structures and improved customer experiences.

- Instaboarding: Forget about the old six-month ramp-up period. With AI, new hires can become experts "overnight." AI-driven training programs and shoulder-to-shoulder assistance ensure that from day one, reps are informed, capable, and ready to rock.🎸

- One Step Ahead Plays: AI’s knack for analyzing vast amounts of data can forge highly predictive sales strategies, anticipating the next steps, customer needs, and even potential objections before they actually arise. This proactive approach allows for interactions and offers to be tailored to customer expectations even before they articulate them. 

- Hyper-Personalization in Customer Interaction: AI knows your customer better than they know themselves. Leveraging insights from communication styles, preferences, and past interactions, it crafts conversations and solutions that are generated on the fly, making each customer feel uniquely understood and valued. Consider the impact of dynamic collateral crafted with a Christopher Voss-style language mirroring.

- Fewer Internal Meetings: "My AI agent will coordinate with yours." More time for coffee ☕  :)

The landscape is changing. AI isn’t just a tool; it’ll reshape the industry.

We just did our biggest marketing investment in the history of Salesroom 🤯

(apart from buying the domain name salesroom.com but that’s a story for another day)

It’s a large scale survey of sales reps and managers about everything relating to coaching, confidence and what * really * happens in customer interactions.

We did it to establish our credibility / thought leadership in market , but also to check our assumptions and have an unbiased third party interview our ICP customers.

There are a lot of nuggets of wisdom in this report…
😳 Like the 30% gap in “confidence in the CRM data” between people who put the data in (AEs/SDRs) and people who look at that data (leadership + revops)
😳 Like the the fact that reps think AI is more effective at giving them feedback on their than listening to a call recording with their manager
😳 Or honest admissions of how often reps actually adhere to their company’s methodology

But the most interesting finding of all - how often sales managers join customer meetings

In fact, when asked about the type of coaching they received, reps rated “having a manager present in the call” as the most popular type. But far from the most effective.

Managers are joining calls more often than role playing or going through meeting recordings with their reps. And I have a few thoughts about it.

Every sales leader is under a tremendous amount of pressure right now. 

And (almost) every sales leader got to their position because they were an exception sales rep once.

So when put under pressure their first instinct is to jump in and do what they’re best at - close the deal.

It takes a real amount of patience, trust and support NOT to jump in and “SUPER-REP” the hell out of every deal that stands between a red quarter and a green one. 

It may safe the particular deal in question and it may even save this quarter.

But it’s not going to help the team develop and improve their skillset - it’s just pushing the problem further out into the future.

To add to the problem, very few sales managers actually receive manager training and nurture someone’s learning journey. So even in the best of times, they’re not as effective at coaching as they could be. Which would also explain why we’re all here on Linkedin learning from each other, subscribing to newsletter and buying online courses. 

I’ll share more thoughts about our most interesting findings over the coming days. To get the data without my commentary, head over to our blog to download the report 🙌

I always believed that call recording is an means to end, not a goal in itself.

No amount of driving, cooking and dog walking is enough to listen to a meaningful number of meetings to draw conclusions that are statistically significant.

Sales leaders usually ask reps to submit “one good call and one bad call” for review. They use these very limited data points to draw conclusions. 

There are a few well-resourced companies with the right culture that manage to take full advantage of their call recordings. They tend to have large enablement teams regularly listening to meeting recordings, lower number of direct reports per sales manager and ample resources for training and coaching. 

But for the rest of the industry… call recording is mostly shelfware 

Our goal at Salesroom has always been to make call recordings superfluous 

✅ Firstly, by giving sales teams guidance to prevent mistakes before they happen

✅ Secondly, by using machine learning to give actionable insights that eliminate the need to listen to recordings

Owning the video infrastructure gives us a significant advantage in both areas.

Here’s something we’ve been working on that just went live - automatically assessing every opportunity through the lens of the customer’s methodology.

We started with MEDDIC because it was the most popular framework among our customers.

Every opportunity is automatically assessed by AI and key moments for why the 🤖 AI 🤖 made a certain decision are picked up for review by the sales team.

Here’s how it‘s used by our customers (based on feedback after the first week live):
✅ AEs prepare for upcoming meetings better by knowing where they lack info and what they need to ask to move the opportunity forward
✅ CSMs identify commercial upsell opportunities more effectively and learn to capitalise on them during meetings
✅ Sales leadership quickly identify deals that merit review, i.e. “commit” in the forecast but metrics for success weren’t discussed with the prospect

Have thoughts to share about MEDDIC or embedding other methodologies in your process? Hit me up, would love to learn from you over a virtual coffee ☕️ 

I am often asked about the “hardest thing” in running a start-up

Hiring great people is hard, fundraising and managing a cap table is hard, competing with very well funded incumbents is hard, finding product-market is hard (probably the hardest one on that list if you ask me..) - a lot of founders talk about these.

But for me, especially on the GTM side of things, the hardest thing is the insane power imbalance between a start-up and pretty much everyone it’s selling to.

No one talks about it but it exists and it gave me more sleepless nights over the last 3 years then any other problem.

Let me explain. As a devoted Sandler fan, I live and breathe by “equal business stature”. Your time is valuable and so is mine. Before investing into anything, get clear commitment from the other side. Walk away from the relationship if effort is not reciprocated.

This approach served me incredibly well in my 9 years in investment banking, sales and investing but it sadly doesn’t quite translate to early stage start-ups.

The last 2 years have shown us all that you can’t build a business out of selling to other startups. If you want to survive, you have to go after larger companies, partner with established service providers and generally swim with much bigger fish. 

They have thousands of employees, you have 15. 

They have a brand name, you are a new kid on the block.

Most importantly, they have time, they can afford to wait a few quarters… you need this deal signed yesterday.

Everyone knows it. They can afford to f*** around, you have to play by their rules if you want a shot at working together. 

I WISH walking away from a deal after someone reschedules a meeting for the 3rd time or wants a trial extension was a possibility - but in reality it’s not. One large customer and one successful partnership can change the game in the early days of a startup. 

So you end up over-investing and giving more than your fair share, violating the “equal business stature” rule many times over, but I have yet to find another way to open doors and actually get a shot at the goal.

Do I still believe in “equal business stature”? Absolutely. But there is this weird corner of commercial operations, called the zero to 1 game, where rules that apply to 90% of situations cease to exist. 

Picked up the “The Innovative Seller” over the weekend. Turns out Heath Barnett beat me to it by a week - what can I say “Great minds think… A LOT” 

When you run a sales team that sells to other sales leaders, your own process is always under the microscope and must be spot on. It doesn’t matter what kind of software or service you offer, if your customers aren’t impressed with the buying experience they get, they won’t be buying. 

It’s true for every business, but especially true for sales tech / services.

At Salesroom , we know quite a bit about real time intelligence and virtual meetings. But we’re also constantly pushing ourselves to innovate in other parts of the value chain: lead generation, email communication, forecasting, social selling etc. 

With so much info freely available online, if a buyer decides to book a 30 min call, they should walk a way from it with new learnings and food for thought, regardless of the outcome of the meeting.

As Jake Dunlap says “Commitment to Technology and AI proficiency” will give many sales teams the edge in the coming years, while others struggle to keep up with the changes in the landscape. 

It puzzles me how many companies selling innovative products are still stuck in the stone ages when it comes to their own process - taking notes with pen and paper, forecasting out of a spreadsheet and training their reps once every 6 months in a classroom setting.

Think about “authenticity” of the sales pitch when someone from that camp is trying to convince you to commit to a “digital transformation” 🤷‍♀️

Co-founder & GTM leader | Live coaching in every sales meeting ☎️

Who's the best at NURTURE? Thought Leaders? SaaS Tools? 

I'm shocked at how few companies nurture Closed Lost and other MQLs that haven't entered the sales pipelines...

Knowing so many buyers don't buy the first time around Nurturing these leads WELL and THOUGHTFULLY so they build trust, seems like a revenue treasure chest.

I'm eager to follow learn and/or implement the best in this space.

Taplio

Daria Danilina's Linkedin Analytics

Daria Danilina

What is Daria talking about?

Daria Danilina's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Daria Danilina's Linkedin Analytics

Daria Danilina

What is Daria talking about?

Daria Danilina's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Daria Danilina's Linkedin Analytics

Daria Danilina's Best Posts (last 30 days)