Meet Dan Imbriaco, an Account Executive on HubSpot Dublin's Enterprise Direct Sales team. Dan has been at HubSpot for four years; three of which were in HubSpot’s US headquarters working for the Small Business and Mid Market Direct Sales teams. 

We asked Dan a few questions about what it's like working in Sales at HubSpot and his journey from the small state of New Hampshire to a career and life in Dublin, Ireland. Here's what he had to say!

Can you tell us a little about your role at HubSpot?

I’m a Corporate Account Executive on HubSpot’s Direct sales team in Dublin selling to organisations in the UK & Ireland with greater than 200 employees. My journey at HubSpot has been quite interesting as I started off in our Small Business segment, and then moved to Mid Market, and now sit in the Corporate team. I’ve had an awesome opportunity to develop my skill set to sell to companies across multiple geographies, business sizes, and industries.

Tell me a little bit about your background/journey to HubSpot.

I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2013 with a Bachelor's Degree in Marketing & Management. My first job out of college was a Business Development position with a tech company outside of Boston named Dynatrace selling Application Performance Monitoring tools to IT/Engineering folk to help with root cause analysis for app failures. I worked there as a BDR and then Sales Rep for a little over 2 years until a former HubSpot manager reached out to me via LinkedIn to gauge my interest on potentially interviewing at HubSpot. We met for coffee and then agreed that this was something that I wanted to pursue. My interview process was a bit lengthier than most as I probably interviewed with 10-12 managers across Direct, AP, and Industries (old Media & eComm teams). Although tiresome, it gave me a ton of exposure to different management styles, personalities, and positive traits that solidified my decision that HubSpot was the right company for me to join.

Can you walk us through what a typical day looks like for you?

My day is pretty similar to most sales people I’d say. It’s a solid mix of prospecting for new potential opportunities through calls, emails and LinkedIn, as well as working on and progressing existing opportunities. There is some admin work mixed in, but nothing too overwhelming. My role up until this point had been a volume game, where I needed to generally close 8-10 deals a month in order to hit my quota. Now that I’m in corporate sales the deals are bigger and more complex, so they require more strategic direction and nurturing. Now I have less meetings which allows me to be more thoughtful in how I progress deals forward.

What are some skills you both think are important to have to be successful in your role in Corporate sales?

Number one I’d say, especially in Corporate, is trusting the process. HubSpot has traditionally been sold primarily to small and medium-sized businesses, of which tend to make decisions relatively quickly. This plays well with HubSpot’s monthly quota goals. Corporate deals on the other hand tend to take longer than the average sales cycle for a few reasons. First, they’re generally larger and more complex. You also typically need to sell through multiple layers/stakeholders and deal with legal, IT, security and procurement reviews. It can be frustrating if things move slowly and you’re missing one to two months of target; however, you just have to trust yourself and trust your process to lead the opportunity to close.

What skills are critical for your success?

Always being on the hunt for new opportunities and never being comfortable with your pipeline. Things can happen everyday that can derail your deal so you need to make sure you have an adequate pipeline to fill those gaps. I’d also say being inquisitive and asking the right questions is an important skill to have as well. Understanding the “why” of people’s questions is key to being able to ask a follow up question or provide a helpful solution to progress things forward.

What advice would you give to somebody looking to break into Corporate sales?

Try to learn as much as you can about enterprise business processes as quickly as possible. I never really had to deal with legal teams or security conversations in other HubSpot sales roles; so being able to sound confident on the phone when dealing with these conversations is very helpful to quickly overcome any sort of objections or roadblocks when looking to progress things to the next step.

What makes Corporate sales great?

Working in Corporate sales gives you exposure to a lot of interesting businesses, challenges, and use-cases. Often these businesses are trying to go through their own business transformation. It’s more problem solving rather than running people through our traditional sales process/funnel, which I enjoy. Also, because Corporate hasn’t always been the primary focus for HubSpot’s traditional buyer personas, it often times feels like a startup within a larger organisation because we’re figuring out new challenges as we go.

What do you find most rewarding about your job?

Getting the “Your Opportunity Has Purchased” email from Finance when a deal you’ve been working for months finally closes! And then being able to congratulate your champion who you’ve worked so hard with that they finally will be able to use HubSpot. It’s truly a win win for both sides. My prior job was selling software that alerted you when your applications went down; much less rewarding, like selling flood insurance!

What do you find most challenging about your job?

Over the past few years HubSpot has evolved from a marketing product to a marketing product that sells sales tools to a full end-to-end growth platform. With this shift comes a completely new sales approach and a ton of new functionality to learn and master. Very exciting, but also a daily task of keeping up with it all considering how fast HubSpot moves as a business. Salespeople generally are pretty change-averse, so the most successful reps are ones who can take it in their stride, focus on the controllables, and continuously execute the task at hand.

What’s your favorite thing about working at HubSpot?

The people. HubSpot does an excellent job of hiring great people who both want to succeed and also truly care about the success of the people around them. Generally the average tenure of a software salesperson in the market is two years. Most salespeople have been at HubSpot for three to four years plus, with some even ten plus years! This speaks volumes to the culture HubSpot has created and the amount of buy-in employees here have.

If you weren’t in sales, what would you be doing?

I’ve always thought it’d be cool to run HubSpot for a startup and be their Marketing Director so to speak. I think it’d be interesting to take what I’ve learned in selling “the dream” to hundreds of similar businesses and actually implement those same strategies in practice and see the benefits first hand.