Hi Isabel! What’s your job?
I joined Tactic in April as part of our go-to-market team, and what I handle is sales, which sounds really broad… and at the moment it is! Together with our CEO Rudy, our Customer Success manager Adam and our Commercial Lead Martin, I’ve been developing Tactic’s go-to-market strategy from working out our ideal customers to developing our pitch messaging to refining pricing strategies. We prospect and qualify customers whose growth goals we can achieve through Tactic. Rudy and I pitch to those customers, and then Adam makes sure they’re getting great value and hitting their internal objectives. It’s a slick system! And we’re a small team so we support each other a lot - our functions aren’t completely siloed. We’re collaborating every day on customers and strategy.
For you, where did your journey to Tactic begin?
I have a bit of a mixed background, but I've been doing enterprise global sales for a long while. In my previous life in a very big company, I was progressing well and handling big enterprise deals. At that stage I knew I could either become more senior where I was, or I could challenge myself in a new context. There are pros and cons for working at big and small companies, of course - but it felt like the right time for me to move somewhere focused on agility and breaking into markets.
I’ve also always had the goal of growing my own sales team from scratch. If I had progressed somewhere big, I would inherit a team structure without having the opportunity to design it or create a strategy from nothing. This goal in recent years has become something I think about more and more as I’ve picked up management experience so I knew I was ready to shift my career into the startup space.
I also realised at some point that I wanted to sell not just to big enterprise clients but to a wide base, and deploy different sales strategies based on which clients I’m handling at any given moment. I love the idea of spending the morning talking to startups, then doing some demos to scale-ups and answering their questions, then getting on the phone to someone in a global company. If that’s your job, it’s because your product is really dynamic. So I wanted that fun element too, and to constantly keep learning about different types of clients.
And what did you find attractive about Tactic in particular, compared to other potential start-ups where you could lead sales?
Definitely the people. The deciding factor for how long I spend in any given job is how good my colleagues and managers and team are to work with! Obviously, in startups, co-founders and early hires are extremely variable in terms of personality and goals and culture. I was looking for somewhere ambitious but open-minded, fresh and diverse - it’s important to me to work with other women in tech, which I’ll come back to. Tactic ticked all of these boxes.
What are you excited to achieve at Tactic?
Ultimately, in sales it’s very simple: growing revenue. I’m excited to see more and more users onboarded, more and more deals closing, and for our product to continue developing with a great customer feedback loop. I’ve got to say that our demos are going really well - at a startup, you often rely on the vision and sales pitch of the founders and hope that the product stands up to those promises. In our case, we’re blown away by how positive our prospects and customers are about Tactic as a solution for their GTM needs.
Being Sales Lead at Tactic means I’m highly visible as a woman in tech. Granted, I’m not an Engineer, but I’m in a strategic role in a tech startup that’s backed by major investors. I want to use this position to build upon our pro-diversity culture here at Tactic (it’s already very exciting to me to work alongside a female Engineer and a female Chief of Staff) and work towards a state where being a ‘woman in tech’ isn’t a remarkable thing.
Any work from home rituals?
I try to get out for a walk and use it as thinking time. So much of my job is intensely communications based, whether it’s strategising and syncing with the team, or pitching to customers and answering their questions, demonstrating how we solve their pain, and I need quiet time to process my thoughts or prioritise. It’s a great flexibility that you don’t really get in the office because you’re ‘on’ all the time.
What’s the best part of remote-first working, for you and for your workplace?
I really like remote-first as opposed to hybrid, because you can truly have multicultural teams rather than a mainstream group who live/work near the HQ and contributors who feel siloed if they’re fully remote and the rest of the team aren’t. It’s very healthy to work with people living in different countries, people with different first languages, cultures, mindsets, approaches. It makes you think more about why you plan your work a certain way and can make you a more mindful decision maker. I think geography is a form of diversity we don’t talk about much, especially because enterprise and corporate and startup workforces are still so capital city-centric, but it’s changing and that’s for the best.
If you could work remotely from anywhere in the world for a week, where would it be?
Definitely somewhere warm with a beach. I lived in Australia for a long time and loved being able to spend my breaks and evenings/weekends on the beach. I love hot weather. I’d miss London though. Ideally, London could be transplanted into Australia as a beachside city!
Top things to pack for a day working in an office space?
I’m tall and I’ve started to take a laptop stand to coworking spaces if I work out of one for the day. I also always have a notebook and a pen - when I scribble thoughts by hand and then have to work out what they say, that information sticks in my mind better than typing in my notes app does. I also have the two different types of corded Apple headphones, one for my laptop and one for my phone. In a dream world I would always have packed snacks too.
Dogs or cats?
Dogs, although in my house it’s a losing battle!
Burgers or hot dogs?
Well… both, but I’d always rather have pasta.
Mac or Windows?
I’ve just moved to Mac and it’s a learning curve! It definitely looks nicer and has great features, but I’m still learning so probably Windows
Slack or Zoom?
Slack
Film or TV?
Definitely TV, and within that, trash TV. We all need a brain cleanser.
City or countryside?
City… but with a beach?! City.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter?
I love the fact that we have all four in the UK. In any other country I would say summer but I definitely always look forward to the next season.
Interested in joining the Tactic team? Check out our open positions here.
