Welcome to the OdaTeam Spotlight Series! As the #1 Enterprise Data Platform for Salesforce, some of the best and brightest in the ecosystem work here at Odaseva at our offices in San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, London, and remotely around the world. In this Q&A series, we’ll be sharing their journeys with you. Oh, and it’s an exciting time to join the team transforming SaaS data management! You can see our open positions in engineering, marketing, sales, support, human resources, and more here.
Today’s OdaTeam Spotlight is on Paul Young, Enterprise Account Executive at Odaseva. He’s worked at Odaseva since April 2019 and is based in Missouri.
Life pro tip: if you’re not following Paul on LinkedIn, you’re missing a daily dose of entertainment.
Let’s dive in!
A: I am a salesperson so my goal is to make sure we’re a good fit for potential customers. It’s as much about qualifying people out as it is convincing them to buy. Odaseva is not for everyone, we’re specialized for the enterprise, so I see myself as the gatekeeper between prospective customers and our product.
On a typical work day, I get up at 4:30 in the morning to check messages from customers in the EU and other regions. Then it’s on to prospecting, company meetings, cracking jokes during company meetings, meeting with prospects, and working with other departments within Odaseva such as legal. In between, I publish trolling posts on LinkedIn. The chicken sushi post is a recent favorite.
A: The team is experienced, more so than most companies I’ve ever worked at. Sales can chew you up and spit you out, there’s usually a pretty fast, high turnover. Here, the people are pretty deeply experienced. I love working with people who know their craft and are generally good at it.
A: Three years ago, a buddy who is a recruiter kept telling me about Odaseva. Finally I agreed to take a call to get him to shut up. The job sounded interesting, and the rest is history. I liked the team, they were doing something new and raw. When I joined, I was the first person who was an outside hire, and one of the first people who didn’t speak French – all the meetings were in French.
A: I love the freedom of this place. In general they don’t micromanage, and they’re fine with me being remote. There’s a huge amount of latitude, which is good if you have an experienced team. I love the ability to work on my own.
A: I was working as a paramedic in St. Louis and got injured, so I started working in IT. That led to me getting a job as the Director of IT in a recruiting firm in New Jersey, things were booming and it was a great job. Then 9/11 happened and many of our clients were in the South Tower. Nothing was ever the same, the company didn’t survive.
So I was out of work, and had a friend who worked at a technology company and offered to help. I told her I could do anything except sales. So she got me a job in sales.
I did really well. And one day there was a meeting going on and I wanted to steal a ham sandwich out of the conference room. I got trapped in the back of the room while taking the sandwich and everyone filed in, so I sat down and everyone assumed I was supposed to be there. I got handed something to do with a CRM system, and I was too embarrassed to say I was just there to steal a sandwich. And that was how I got into Salesforce.
A: I won two Demo Jams along with Oscar Parra, Solutions Engineer here at Odaseva. For one of them, I dressed up in silly costumes and made crazy voices, pretending to be a crazy person in the office and dancing around. It did help us win, I think. The point of the costumes was to show how different characters react during data loss scenarios, like a manager screaming about getting his data back. It did get a serious point across: your choice is to have a backup and restore solution in place or you’re going to have to tell your wife and family that you’re unemployed again.
I’m also proud of bringing in some very large logos.
There’s a big difference between selling in Europe and selling in the United States, I’m glad I was able to help some of our US customers be comfortable with us.
“I think Paul Young, who was our key account executive on this project, was phenomenal. He did a fantastic job as a salesperson, which is not typical that we see especially in the software space where everyone is just pushing to sell. And the experience with Paul was one of the big factors that led into our decision to pick Odaseva. Because he absolutely made sure that we were just buying what we needed and he didn’t oversell it by offering us things that we were not looking for. He did present the options, so those were great to have. I have been involved with hundreds of vendors and sales cycles and I tell you honestly that my interaction with Paul was in the top five of all those experiences. He was very genuine, very honest and very patient.”
– Quote from an Odaseva customer, Q1 2022
A: I love doing standup comedy, if I wasn’t a salesperson I’d probably be a good standup comedian. Many of my customers laugh at me anyway, so I’m halfway there. And when you make bosses laugh, they’re less likely to be angry.
Also that sales is my second favorite career after being a paramedic – but no one ever throws up on me here.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Paul!
P.S. Paul shared more about his Salesforce career experience in a January 2022 video on the Brainiate YouTube channel, you can watch it here.
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