An Adaptive Sales Journey In The New Work World

Sunil Roger, Director of Sales at TurboHire, recently completed 1-year in the organization. We thought it was the perfect opportunity to have a candid Q&A session with him to understand his journey of growing and leading a team through the pandemic from the very first day, what inspires him to keep doing better in a leadership role every day, his work-life balance and his learning experience at TurboHire.

1. Tell us about your role as Director of Sales at TurboHire and what all that encompasses?

In essence, I’m an enterprise salesperson. I speak to prospective customers, try to understand their pain points and how can the platform help them. In addition to this, I also am responsible for building my sales team, managing the sales numbers, and exploring possible new avenues of revenue generation.

2. You’re also one of the core team members at TurboHire. Can you tell us how you got started, what made you believe in the idea of TurboHire?

It’s quite an interesting story that began sometime in early 2020. I was looking for jobs while still continuing in my previous role. That was when I stumbled upon TurboHire. I wanted to connect with the co-founders and Aman Gour was the first person I got connected with.

We talked and discussed the idea of TurboHire, and how the team is building a first-in-class talent intelligence system. I connected well with the idea and wanted to explore possible opportunities. I had a conversation with Deepak Agrawal, CEO TurboHire, and that’s how it all started. I joined TurboHire on March 20th, 2020 and the nation went into work-from-home.

It’s been exactly a year since, and I’ve felt fortunate throughout my journey so far to be a part of this growth story and contribute.

Bonus read! My Journey With TurboHire Thus Far.

3. What problem is TurboHire specifically trying to solve?

TurboHire is certainly a well-conceptualized, thoughtfully-built, and smart product that is out there in the talent intelligence space. And I don’t just say this because I’m a part of TurboHire. It keeps the recruiter as the nucleus around which the entire platform is built.

The platform that we have built is trying to solve the core problem of recruiters in centralizing, streamlining, and efficiently optimizing the recruitment process with an added layer of “augmented intelligence”.

4. Can you talk about some of the challenges you faced working remotely in the initial days of your joining?

As someone who was not used to working remotely even a single day of their professional life thus far, the lockdown was a completely different phenomenon I had no idea about. Add joining a new company on top of it, and things were quite chaotic in the initial few weeks of my joining.

I had no workstation setup, my cook was no longer allowed inside the apartment, my parents were worried, and I had no clue how to survive the then 21 days of lockdown. Little did we all know that that is pretty much how we have ended up living 365 hence. But the team took to #workfromhome as easy as a south-Indian to idli. We had our daily scrums to begin the day with, so the sense of continuity was maintained. And we also had our bi-weekly “Chai pe Charcha” to come together as a team during the challenging times.

It certainly has been a great learning experience, now that I’m recollecting those times while penning it down.

5. As a Sales Director, in a growing business, in a growing startup, you’re wearing a lot of different hats, managing a lot of different roles and disciplines, and trying a lot of different things. From a perspective of either a typical day or typical week, how are you dividing your time to focus on the different things you need to do?

I generally like to divide my work schedule into weeks. And in my typical week, I dedicate 50–60% of my time to customer conversations. It could be reaching out to new prospects, nurturing the existing prospects, or routine health check-ups with our existing customers.

Around 25–30% of my time I dedicate towards internal collaboration with the team on various initiatives.

The remaining of my time goes into brainstorming new initiatives, collaborating with the marketing and product teams on sharing insights, refining the sales process, etc with my team. Something for which I would like to dedicate more time going forward is networking with like-minded people and brainstorming ideas.

6. Is there a kind of pressure you faced as a core member as well as the Sales Director that other people would not really expect or understand?

I think I can take the liberty to talk on behalf of everyone in TurboHire when I say that every member is a core member. Each of our roles here has its own set of challenges and responsibilities.

The sales team has the pressure of going above and beyond our targets, the marketing team has the pressure of leads, the product team has the pressure of new features and the engineering team has the pressure of developing and stabilizing the platform. And we all understand our responsibilities of building TurboHire together. So I’ve never really faced the challenge of people not understanding what I do.

7. What’s the most important thing you’re working on right now? How are you making it happen?

The most important thing that I have been working on ever since I joined is to get more customers to adopt TurboHire. And given that we always aim for the stars, we are constantly evolving our sales approach, perfecting the right strategy to nurture our prospects, and ensuring customer success remains our top priority. Both now and in the future.

8. On a personal level, what are the 3 productive tools you use to organize work and keep on top of all things you have to do on a daily basis?

Firstly, I always have a Personal Notebook where I like to maintain my key action items for the day. I like the old-school charm, in that way. It helps me in structuring my time accordingly. And nothing quite matches the feeling of tick-marking those items that you have completed at the end of the day.

Secondly, I cannot imagine a day without Hubspot, which is the CRM tool that we live by. Given the sheer volume of deals that each one of us in the sales team is handling, Hubspot is a god-send in managing everything right from data management, task assignment, sales pipeline management, business reporting, and nurturing automation.

Thirdly, my Google Calendar. It might seem quite rudimentary (‘Everyone uses a calendar, Sunil’, I heard that). But don’t we all struggle to ensure our time doesn’t get spent just in meetings when nothing significant has actually gotten done during the day? A very simple hack is to block 30 or 60 or 120 mins of one’s own working hours and get that proverbial elephant out of the way. It might not seem like much, but at the end of the day, I would’ve not only managed to attend all the meetings but also tick-mark one more action item off my diary.

Lastly, I try to ensure as a practice to stay on top of my mailbox every day, ensuring no emails go unread or unattended. It helps the reputation you carry in front of your customers and team members. And also, declutter!

9. Speaking of your own work-life balance, what are some things you do to reboot or step away from your work to re-energize?

I was (and hopefully, still am) someone who likes to step out during my time off. For a walk, movies, or just visiting friends and family. But the lockdown made things quite difficult for all of us. So I turned towards cooking as therapy. And being an old-school guy, the simple pleasure of cooking plain home-style food was soothing at the end of a long day.

At the end of a year at TurboHire, I still have quite a long way to go in understanding sales, but I can confidently say that I have become a good cook.

10. What are some of the ways you deal with challenges like burnout, how do you get back to a good headspace in those moments?

To be honest, I did quite face the challenge of burning out anytime. Sometimes things go according to plan, but there are equal times when it just gets a little too overwhelming. What helps during those times is to declutter the mind. The best thing that one can do for our own selves is to give the mind some rest from the constant churning every day. I try to consciously switch off, recharge, and be fresh from the next day.

11. Lastly, has there been an influence or advice you’ve been given that stood out as a difference in your career?

I consider Deepak Agrawal, CEO TurboHire, as my mentor, both personally and professionally. He religiously gives those tidbits of wisdom every day where I draw my inspiration from.

A couple of inspirational advice that I try to incorporate into my career:

1. Don’t sell your product, but have a conversation with the customer. When you’re selling, you’re talking. When you’re conversing, you’re listening
2. Prioritize things not based on urgency but by importance. This will ensure you are not being reactive but proactive
3. Play individually, but think like a team.

To learn more about Sunil and others in the team and the impact TurboHire is creating in the TA industry, click here.