Blueground’s Joshua Hezghia On Leading A High Performing Sales Team

“When joining a startup, it is more about the journey rather than the destination.”

Joshua Hezghia is Blueground’s Director of Sales whose work, at its core, is to ensure that the company’s 2200+ tech-powered, move-in ready and beautifully designed apartments are being matched to tenants looking for a stay of a month, year, or longer. According to Josh, “the fun of scaling a startup is having different teams working towards a common goal. Blueground is growing 3x YoY and leveraging technology to scale effectively. We will reach $1B in revenue by 2022 with long term potential being 30x that amount.”

Promoting growth, curiosity, collaboration, authenticity, and hard work are all part of the orbit that forms Josh’s leadership style.“I want to share the lessons learned along the way to groom and inspire the future generation of successful sales professionals.”

The power of people

Simply put, the Sales team at Blueground is the sum and synergy of its individual members. With this belief, Josh puts a particular emphasis on setting the right environment where people are proud to work.

To start, he builds and continues to foster an environment where transparency is key. He shares, “trusting your colleagues to try new things enables new ideas to be brought to the table.” When transparency is present, it enforces a culture of lifelong learners who take risks in their daily work. It is also the idea that it’s okay to fail as long as you are learning from it and improving.

As one of Blueground’s values, transparency is ingrained into the company’s culture. It’s a reflection of the company’s beliefs along with being conscientious of time, being driven by excellence, and caring deeply for clients and colleagues.

“In a startup world, it’s easy to be siloed when working in a fast-paced environment. You can forget to interact with others. For me, inclusion is heavily encouraged at Blueground because you can learn so much from your peers.”

With a team spread out across Blueground’s offices around the world, it takes a conscious effort to maintain a team spirit at all hours of the day. Blueground’s employees regularly check in with other offices in person, in addition to the employee perk of 14 nights of complimentary personal accommodation in apartments from Dubai, to Greece, to L.A.

Blueground’s mission is to make people feel at home wherever they choose to live. In leasing carefully selected, ideally located apartments, the real estate tech startup upgrades them to fully-furnished homes. What that means for clients is a move-in ready apartment where they can simply show up and start living from day one, with WiFi running, Marshall speakers hooked up, tableware stocked and beds made.

In his team, he seeks out “incredible talent where people are intellectually curious, hard-working, and team players.” The fact remains that Sales can be stressful at times. Being able to stay calm when the pressure is on and to then over-perform takes a special kind of talent. Therefore, the ability to manage the highs and lows is paramount. Retaining satisfied clients like Coca-Cola, Samsung and Oracle, whose employees rent with Blueground, is balanced with expanding a client portfolio of individual and enterprise clients. “We’re constantly raising the bar!”

Knowing your inputs to arrive and exceed your target outputs

As Director of Sales, Josh has set out a few key initiatives. The first of which is mathematical. Knowing your equation, as he puts it, means creating a sales model to better understand how to maximize revenue. From the company level all the way down to the individual level. He adds, “The inputs are your efficiency metrics such as time to first response rate, gross touches per lead, missed call %, and connect to close. In addition, understanding the volume of inbound leads and the proper coverage needed per market is critical.” Though many companies have access to a trove of valuable data, it always comes down to putting it to its optimal use! “ It’s important for Sales leaders to be innovative and proactive when identifying new opportunities for revenue to help accelerate future growth.”

Going back to his emphasis on the team, Josh shares the importance of a proper career plan to retain top employees. Blueground is already becoming a destination for talent. People come from different backgrounds and bring incredible stories with them. “Recognizing and appreciating top talent is crucial but what’s more important is making sure they themselves have a sense of purpose,” he discloses.

Performing through authenticity

From being a firm believer in meritocracy, Josh has put together team targets that incentivizes the right behaviors for the business while being considerate to employee happiness. Without a leader’s active checks, such a plan could have a propensity to cause indirect impairment. Blueground’s Sales team works within a framework of individual goals as well as team-focused targets.

Part of a holistic career plan includes continuous development and learning. He envisions hands-on coaching and workshops specific to real-time challenges faced by the Sales team. That means running sessions himself or passing the mic to someone within the team who is an expert on the topic. Josh recalls numerous people who have grown into well-rounded sellers. To be invested in the success of an individual, Josh states, is to know what uniquely motivates that person.

When heading a team driven to perform, Josh is mindful of the spirit of competition. On the one hand, competition in a sales environment is healthy if executed properly. He sees it, however, as a temporary solution. In its supercharged form, it can lead to an implosion. He overcomes this pitfall by “having a plan in place that sets a personal goal for individuals without constantly competing against one another but rather yourself.” He adds, one of the key goals of leading a high performing sales function is “defining how to master daily engagement across all teams. Accountability is important here.”

Josh closes our time together sharing, “With Blueground’s vision to be in 50 cities, it’s going to take a robust team in Sales to power that expansion plan beyond the existing nine cities across three continents. He continues, “if you are the type of person who is eager to succeed while genuinely happy seeing others win, and enjoy a constant challenge, then we’d like to hear from you!”

Blueground currently offers sales positions in six of its markets from Account Executives to Senior Sales Managers, see the Job Page for the most up-to-date career opportunities.