As businesses continue navigating a shifting sales landscape, success hinges on embracing innovation and prioritizing customer-centric strategies.
According to Gartner’s Future of Sales report, the future demands a permanent transformation centered on moving from seller-centric to buyer-centric approaches, supported by hyperautomation, digital scalability and AI-driven decision-making. This transformation empowers sales professionals to engage customers with precision and agility, enhancing their ability to exceed ambitious goals.
Built In heard from three sales leaders whose work exemplifies this shift: Dason Allen of RTB House, Samantha Lang of Forward Financing and Jess Lambe of SOPHiA GENETICS.
These sales pros share how they’ve refined their techniques, leveraged technology and built strong relationships to elevate their performance. Looking ahead to 2025, they reveal the strategies, goals and support systems that will enable them to thrive in a competitive, digital-first world.
RTB House is a global technology company that specializes in personalized advertising using deep learning algorithms, offering a full-funnel marketing platform to drive results for its customers’ brands.
Reflecting on the past year, what specific strategies or techniques did you implement that had the most significant impact on improving your performance?
Over the past year, I was promoted to lead a sales team, a recognition of the success we’ve achieved in building relationships and effectively showcasing the value RTB House’s deep learning technology brings to our clients. By leveraging industry conferences, client dinners and targeted outreach, I strengthened existing partnerships and forged new ones, gaining a deeper understanding of client needs. This approach enabled me to demonstrate how our use of first-party data to deliver meaningful ads consistently drives incremental conversions across various verticals.
Balancing my responsibilities as both a seller and a leader, I prioritized high-value interactions and emphasized RTB House’s unique ability to deliver measurable results. This dual focus played a pivotal role in securing new opportunities and ensuring client satisfaction.
As you look ahead to 2025, what new goals have you set for yourself, and how do you plan to achieve them?
As I look ahead to 2025, my primary goals are to drive revenue growth, strengthen team performance and expand our client base through strategic partnerships. Our ambitious growth plans will serve as a foundation for these efforts.
“As I look ahead to 2025, my primary goals are to drive revenue growth, strengthen team performance and expand our client base through strategic partnerships.”
I aim to enhance our value proposition and secure high-value deals while fostering team development. By sharing successful strategies, promoting collaboration and offering mentorship, I’m dedicated to elevating overall performance. Additionally, I will focus on refining our sales processes and identifying opportunities where RTB House’s solutions can deliver measurable impact.
How is your manager, team or employer supporting you in hitting your new target?
VP of Enterprise Sales Jason Blom and the leadership team have been incredibly supportive of our growth plans. Our team thrives on collaboration, working together on every deal to ensure success. This truly is a team sport, and we’re all in it together!
Forward Financing is a source of fast, flexible financing for U.S. small businesses that have often been underserved by traditional financing options.
Reflecting on the past year, what specific strategies or techniques did you implement that had the most significant impact on improving your performance?
This year we standardized quarterly business reviews with our independent sales organizations, which helped us, as account managers, develop stronger relationships with our entire portfolio. These discussions helped identify what was most important to our ISOs while simultaneously creating an environment for us both to talk about growth. There was an almost immediate increase in sales with the ISOs that completed these calls, which was cause to celebrate.
At Forward, we take pride in being a company that “says yes when others say no.” Our industry is extremely fast paced, so it is imperative to organize my working environment to ensure quick and efficient communication. Additionally, being a trusted and reliable resource for our ISOs is immensely important, so they want to continue to sell Forward’s product to customers. Building trust with my ISOs has been achieved by being a dependable resource, understanding their needs and being responsive to their inquiries and concerns.
Lastly, I collaborate with my ISOs to set and track goals every month to keep us aligned and motivated. We built analytics dashboards to track monthly progress and stay accountable for targets.
As you look ahead to 2025, what new goals have you set for yourself, and how do you plan to achieve them?
Looking ahead into 2025 is super exciting! We are finishing this year out by breaking numerous sales records and are looking to continue this momentum in the new year. Taking a proactive approach is something I plan to do with all of my partners in 2025. Identifying certain KPIs that align with our overall business objectives will also help set up for a successful new year.
A main focus for myself in 2025 is to exceed my monthly sales goals and be at the top of the leaderboard. I’m hoping to help my top partners identify areas of growth for their own teams. Simultaneously, I am taking on more responsibility in our working relationship and want to get more face-time with them and their teams.
“Taking a proactive approach is something I plan to do with all of my partners in 2025. … I’m hoping to help them identify areas of growth for their own teams.”
How is your manager, team or employer supporting you in hitting your new target?
At Forward Financing, there is an immense amount of support given to employees by both your immediate team and manager. Team support is crucial in this role, whether it is bouncing ideas off one another or collaborating on how to address ISO needs more effectively and efficiently. Open lines of communication enhances our overall team performance and builds a strong, cohesive team dynamic.
Manager support is also essential. Whether it be our weekly one-on-one meetings or coaching sessions on how to better improve our selling skills, Forward managers are very involved every step of the way. Each manager has a hands-on approach to ensure you are always as close as possible to your monthly sales targets if not exceeding them.
Forward encourages all employees to take advantage of professional development opportunities. Recently, I completed a six-month professional development program with NimblyWise that was recommended to me by my manager. I developed numerous skills — such as pattern recognition, experimentation and iteration, and curiosity in the face of ambiguity — that all help me better understand and manage my partner relationships.
SOPHiA GENETICS is a healthcare technology company dedicated to establishing the practice of data-driven medicine. Its cloud-based SaaS SOPHiA DDM Platform is currently used by more than 780 hospital, laboratory and biopharma institutions globally.
Reflecting on the past year, what specific strategies or techniques did you implement that had the most significant impact on improving your performance?
As with other industries, biotech is undergoing a time of recalibration of what matters most and where resources are used. Leading and working within smaller business development teams has required two strategies in this environment.
The first is efficiency in managing business opportunities. Tools are a tremendous help, especially those that can effectively feed our customer relationship management software with high-level and customer interaction data. Capturing quality data in our CRM is crucial and it must be efficient. Another example of efficiency is being clear and defined on how the sales funnel progresses or kills opportunities. A stagnant list of potential deals is not a mark of a high-performing and efficient team.
The second element is being realistic about how, when and where our solution offerings compete and can ultimately win. This is all about increasing the success rate of our sales efforts. SOPHiA GENETICS has a number of great products, but not all solutions need to be positioned in every sales opportunity. The strategy taken by our BioPharma business development team was to really tighten efforts on the products that are differentiated and set apart from a crowded market.
As you look ahead to 2025, what new goals have you set for yourself, and how do you plan to achieve them?
Positive outcomes result from an engaged and well-cared-for customer. Whether in preliminary stages or post-agreement, sales professionals must stay attuned to the customer’s situation. In 2025, our business development team has the goal to differentiate ourselves by the way in which we interact with our partners and customers. We’ll prioritize their requests over anything else. We’ll obsess over timelines and turnaround time perceptions. We’ll create robust and full-picture responses to proposals and bids. We’ll ensure there is no tunnel vision in our assumptions. Finally, we’ll ask ourselves “what else?” before making that next interaction with our customer. The SOPHiA GENETICS BioPharma customers will know and feel that they have been prioritized above anything else.
“In 2025, our business development team has the goal to differentiate ourselves by the way in which we interact with our partners and customers.”
How is your manager, team or employer supporting you in hitting your new target?
In order to scale the BioPharma business to another level, the target is being set at and measured at a team or group level. This approach doesn’t downplay an individual’s importance or responsibility, but the goal is to create a renewed sense of team, collaboration and unity. We believe this will create a durable foundation for the coming years of even further scaled business.
We are highly aware of the work we need to do to achieve our goals. Thankfully, I have the support and empowerment of our leadership to achieve them. As a new leader, I’ve had my suggestions listened to and implemented and I’m reassured that my team has the resources they need to be successful. When we identify barriers or roadblocks, we are swift to find ways to remove or work through them, and when there are unexpected opportunities for success we deftly grab at them!
It’s with this collective focus between team, leadership and organization we know we can achieve success.
