Career Path Of A Head Of Global Sales Development At A Top Startup
Iain's career path began unexpectedly with a painting internship after a soccer injury, transforming into a sales journey driven by a desire to gain experience and self-discovery; this led to progressively responsible roles across multiple companies and countries, culminating in their current position as Head of Global Sales Development at a rapidly growing startup, where "early college lessons" continue to inform their leadership style.
Career Exploration, Sales Development, Professional Networking, Overcoming Challenges, International Experience
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Iain Rodoni
Head of Global SDR
Linkedin Top StartUp
UCSB
N/A
Biology & Related Sciences
Technology
Sales and Client Management
Worked 20+ Hours in School
Video Highlights
1. Iain's career began with an internship focused on sales, despite initially planning to focus on athletics. This demonstrates the value of adaptability and finding alternative paths to career success.
2. He emphasizes the importance of gaining experience, even if it's in roles you're unsure about. This highlights the value of exploring different career options and learning what you don't want to do as part of finding what you do.
3. Iain's career progression shows the impact of consistent hard work and leveraging previous experiences to secure increasingly responsible roles. He stresses building connections and learning about the necessary skills to excel in each position.
Transcript
Could you walk me through your career path? Please start with your experiences in college, and any internships or jobs you had before your current role.
Most definitely. I showed up as a freshman at UC Santa Barbara, actually intending to play soccer, but I tore my knee. I needed to find something to do, and found an internship with College Works Painting on campus.
I ended up spending the entire three quarters and then summer basically knocking on doors, trying to sell paint jobs and then completing those jobs. It was tons of fun, brutally hard, and taught me a whole heck of a lot.
After that, I actually got an internship at a company called AppFolio. First in marketing, I did too much work in a small period of time and was begging for more stuff to do. So they let me be a guinea pig with their sales director. I think it was basically revenue operations; I didn't know it at the time.
We figured out something that worked, and so I started working there part-time, 20 hours a week. After that summer, I got to hire a bunch of my friends and build out some team. Then I failed an "no can do" test and thought, "Maybe I can't actually manage all these students working."
That next summer, after that year, I actually got my first sales internship as a Sales Development Representative at a different software company, called Procore. They didn't really do sales internships, so they said, "You can be an SDR here, but you don't get any manager experience, so you gotta do your best over this three-month period."
I just threw effort at the wall and managed to find a little bit of success. Along this whole journey, I was basically thinking to myself, "You need experience to get a job after college." I had no idea what job I wanted, but I figured I should probably just get experience.
I think learning what you don't want to do is super important on the journey of learning what you do want to do. I was just trying to learn as much as I could, build some connections, and answer the questions: What gives me energy? What am I naturally good at? And how can I turn that into making money?
At the end of that junior year summer, it went well enough. I went into my senior year of college, studied abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland. Then I was fortunate enough to have a visa, thanks to my beautiful mother, and didn't go back to college to finish my degree at UCSB. Instead, I moved to Dublin, Ireland, to do an internship with a company called Salesforce.
I basically did sales enablement and did an SDR gig again. Then I moved to London to be a founding SDR for the European side of an American software business, Procore. So, that first internship got me the next one, which got me the next one, which got me the next one.
All I did was work as hard as humanly possible to learn not only about myself but about the skills required to do the job really well. That catapulted my career into where I am today. After getting my degree, I moved to Austin and worked my way up a standard software sales ladder from SMB SDR to enterprise and then strategic.
Then I became kind of executive for a couple of years. At the end of that journey, the CRO of the business moved to a different company and called me up, saying, "Hey, I'm joining a startup company, you should come join." I did and had a wild ride over the last two and a half years there.
All those things I learned along the way were really helpful in figuring out how to deploy a CRM. On my fourth day, I had an interview on my second day. I went from being one of the first five go-to-market employees at the small, 70-person startup to now one of 350.
I am the Head of Global Sales Development. I manage one manager and 19 direct reports. I've been lucky enough to have a ton of responsibility that I'm trying to figure out every day. Those early college lessons actually taught a ton about how to find the confidence and awareness to ask for help in all these situations.