SalesTechStar Interview with Erik Darby, VP of Business Development, BetterUp

Erik Darby, VP of Business Development, BetterUp catches up with SalesTechStar to discuss BetterUp’s new Sales Performance feature:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Erik, tell us about yourself and your B2B sales journey through the years. We’d love to hear more about your role at BetterUp…

I am the Vice President of Business Development at BetterUp where I am responsible for overseeing the growth and development of BetterUp’s alliances, partnerships and ecosystem. I joined BetterUp after the company’s acquisition of Motive Software, a machine learning and natural language processing company focused on identifying emotional and behavioral insights in multi-channel data, which I co-founded.

Before co-founding Motive, I worked at UKG where I last served as Senior Director of Global Sales and Business Development. In that role, I was focused on scaling UKG’s employee engagement and talent solutions across 7,000 global customers.

My journey to UKG is similar to my journey to BetterUp – I joined UKG upon the acquisition of Kanjoya where I served as EVP and co-founder. Interestingly enough, I first began my career in finance where I led oil service & energy equity and debt investments for multi-billion dollar investment funds. A much different industry from enterprise coaching, but exposed me to identifying value and working and executing against various theses.

Take us through the BetterUp Sales Performance feature on Salesforce AppExchange and how it enables end users?

BetterUp Sales Performance on Salesforce AppExchange empowers customers to reach peak performance through dedicated professional sales coaching and measurement. The 11 million+ AppExchange customers have access to key features of our Sales Performance solution including:

• Dedicated sales performance coaching: Employees meet one-on-one with their sales performance coach focusing on mindsets and behaviors essential for success in their sales organization such as resilience, focus, and agility – leading to robust and lasting transformation
• Specialist coaching: Expert coaches support targeted employee needs like nutrition, sleep, high-stakes conversations, diversity and inclusion, and more
• AI-driven educational resources: Over 3,000 topically relevant resources in a content library available at employees’ fingertips, with curated recommendations that are essential to sales managers and representatives
• Self-assessments: Maximize growth and impact with the ability to track progress and leverage pulse, 180, and 360 assessments to identify gaps between one’s self-perception and what others experience
• People Analytics Dashboard (PAD): Access deeper sales team behaviors and insights with the Sales Excellence index

Further, the solution measures the impact coaching is having on business outcomes including quota attainment, deal velocity, time to productivity, and more.

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How does dedicated sales coaching enable new sales hires to pick up the pace and drive ROI faster?

Dedicated sales coaching enables sales teams and individuals to increase their performance, ultimately helping sales hires achieve and exceed sales goals. This solution supports customers in strategizing on deals, prepping for prospective calls, and developing the right mindset around resilience, focus and agility, which in turn drives positive ROI for the business.

How are you seeing sales leaders modify the typical B2B sales process today to help drive more business impact despite current marketplace challenges?

Sales leaders know better than anyone that a business cannot perform unless the people can. Historically businesses have been investing in processes and tools (e.g. technology services and digital transformation), but they really need to invest in the people themselves. Providing sales leaders and sales teams with the resources to impact their skill-sets, mindsets, and behaviors has proven to be the most effective way to impact time to productivity, quota attainment, and so much more.

What can B2B sales teams do more of today to boost sales goals within shorter time frames?

Leverage BetterUp Sales Performance – the results speak for themselves. Data from BetterUp shows that, on average on a year-over-year basis, BetterUp Sales Performance customers have seen a 60% increase in individuals attaining their quota and a 20% increase in deal size. Investing in solutions that help sales teams hone in their skills – like coaching – is the most effective way to achieve goals quickly, and eventually exceed them.

Can you highlight more about the future of the B2B tech market and in what ways you expect to see it grow?

There will be ongoing disruption by AI in automating business processes, improving decision making, increasing productivity, and so much more. However, it’s the combination of AI with human expertise that gets me most excited for the future. The universal goal for each organization is to drive peak performance, and tapping into the best of technology, like AI efficiency, and the best of what makes us human, like empathy, motivation, resilience, and grit, leads to the best outcomes. I believe the future of B2B tech will be driven by the solutions and organizations that embrace the combination and balance of these capabilities.

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