With Denis Ambrus: A Champion in Every Way
Denis has found three areas of interest that he has been very passionate about: emerging technologies, economics, and international politics. With the diverse experience of living and studying in 4 countries, he is able to connect with people from different backgrounds. Denis is both meticulous and fearless, having honed his skills at leading companies in the financial services industry. He mastered everything from cold calls to conducting Anti-Money Laundering (KYC/AML) enhanced due diligence.
By Yemi Olorunwunmi
How has Flockjay helped advance your career?
Flockjay has helped me bridge the gap between what I enjoy doing and what I want to do professionally. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset and felt the need to challenge the status quo if I could think of better ways to solve persisting problems.
After having worked for larger financial companies during the past couple of years, I realized that I needed to be in a different environment if I wanted to achieve the career goals I had in mind for myself. I knew that I would fit in really well in a fast-paced environment, where things change quickly. Being part of a team that is obsessed with learning, continuous improvement and challenges the way in which things have always been done felt like a place where I belonged. I knew then that the best place to find such an environment would be at a startup.
Before graduating from Flockjay, I had trouble leveraging my limited professional work experience in interviews, which made it harder for me to enter a high growth startup that was building a product I believed in.
However, during Flockjay, I was able to hone in on my ability to connect with people and to help them see the value in emerging technologies. Developing those skills ultimately jumpstarted my career and got me to where I am at today.
How have your past experiences prepared you for this career/role?
Having worked in the financial industry in the past has helped me in my current role, as I am now able to better empathize with the people I talk to every day and has also enabled me to deliver the value of the product I am selling in a language that is familiar to them.
I believe that my past experiences have helped me develop some traits that I think are crucial for someone to be successful in sales.
I learned to be resilient and to adapt quickly to rapidly changing situations. Having moved to the U.S. from Romania when I was in high school, and having lived in 2 other countries during college has helped me learn how to quickly adapt to a new culture and unexpected situations. This helped me develop a resilient mindset, which will allow me to overcome any challenges that I may encounter in my career.
Are there any similarities between Judo and sales?
Looking back, I’ve been able to draw some parallels between the time I spent doing judo in the past and doing sales now.
The most important thing I learned in judo was to be unafraid of failure. This helped me develop the ability to bounce back quickly whenever I failed.
When I wanted to implement a new technique into my fighting style, I would start out by doing thousands of reps, aiming to perfect every step before I’d set out to use it in competition. I would then start using some of the new routines in real-time by fighting in tournaments.
Whenever I’d make a wrong move and lose a match, instead of giving up, I would go back into the dojo and focus on improving what I did wrong. I would then be eager to go back to fighting to see if this time I got it right.
Before each competition, our coach would set out a team goal to come back with as many medals as possible. We would go into each fight with this team goal in mind but focus on fighting for each other.
The way this translates to sales is as follows: the technique is the pitch, the tournaments are the daily call marathons salespeople engage in and the dojo is the CRM where reps go in after a bad call to leave some notes and tweak their sequences to not repeat the same mistakes again.
The team medal goals are the revenue and closed deal targets, while each rep goes into battle individually, call after call.
How do you stay motivated/thrive under pressure?
I stay motivated under pressure by taking a step back to focus on the bigger picture.
When faced with pressure or repetitive tasks, I ask myself: how does the research I am doing now fall within the process as a whole? How does it contribute to my ability to perfect the technique I’m currently working on? How will it feel once I’ve crushed this month’s quota?
What helps to keep me focused is recognizing how grateful I am to be working alongside an awesome team, while getting the chance to learn an incredible amount. By focusing on the end goal, and remaining grateful, I am able to stay motivated and push myself through the difficult tasks that I encounter.
What challenges do you see in your chosen profession? What opportunities?
A big challenge I see in sales is that the profession is rapidly evolving towards an age of partnerships and relationship based selling where leveraging new technologies to accelerate the sales process becomes crucial.
This at the same time is a huge opportunity for forward-thinking sales professionals, as the quicker they can adapt to the rapidly changing sales ecosystem, the better results they’ll get from their efforts in the long-run.
Is there a book or resource that’s propelled you forward/ changed your thinking?
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield has helped me overcome some of the internal obstacles to success and provided me with some tools to identify, defeat and unlock the inner barriers to creativity.
This has helped me sharpen and maximize the use of my creative abilities and expressing them through photography and by finding new ways to solve familiar problems.
Anything you would’ve done differently? Or, Anything you wish you knew earlier or asked sooner?
Even though I’m sure I could have fast-tracked the point where I’m at in my career right now by doing things differently in the past, if I had the chance to go back and change some things, I don’t think I would.
I believe that everything does happen for a reason and that all my experiences have led me to where I am today: being a Flockjay graduate, having made new friendships, building out my network with people who are passionate about similar things, and pushing myself to learn and grow every day. As Steve Jobs once said, “you can only connect the dots looking back.”
One piece of advice I have for others who might feel lost in their careers right now is to always stay curious and to not be afraid of exploring new opportunities that come your way, because you never know where those might lead.
I believe that it’s important to look at your career progression as being similar to an elastic band, rather than a linear path. Sometimes, when you feel like you are being drawn backward, if you keep an open mind, that backward pull might just propel you further than you could have ever gotten by taking a conventional route.
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At Flockjay, we are proud of how far our students have come, and we know this is just the beginning. If you want to launch your own career in tech, submit an application. (app.flockjay.com)
