Lesley Ronaldson
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Lesley Ronaldson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And they were growing out of a huge team. And I knew I was going to try and go as far as I could there. And I had made a commitment. I did a couple of foreign assignments there. I helped set up the first call centre in India. 2004, I lived in Slovakia for a while in Bratislava where we outsourced our German sales. After about 15, 16 years in Dell, I had a mentor say to me, hey,
You've had a great run. You know, I was managing partners at that stage, a senior manager. He said, hey, you've had a great run. But could one say you're a one trick pony? Now, that phrase lives in my head rent free. He said, you know, you've been behind a pretty big logo, pretty deep pockets selling hardware.
I think you may need to start looking at SaaS, looking at software and potentially kind of the startup world. So I was like, oh, yeah. Okay, let me have a look. Now, in Dublin, there is, we were really, really lucky at that time, around 2010, I suppose, there was Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we called it Silicon, like there's like a Silicon Valley element to Dublin.
And I had a friend who worked in LinkedIn and we had a chat and he said, look, they're starting a new business line on LinkedIn. It's called LinkedIn Sales Solutions and the product is Sales Navigator. And this was 2014. I was like, okay, yeah, you know, I know a bit about LinkedIn. I used to call it the Facebook for work. How wrong was I?
So I went to the interview and I was one of the first managers hired in and they called it a startup within a startup. So we launched Sales Navigator. LinkedIn absolutely brought me on a journey. I would say the leader I was in Dell would have been, you know, I grew up in a boys club. I grew up surrounded by a lot of men and I definitely had kind of
sharp elbows but LinkedIn taught me a lot of things to be an empathetic leader to seek to understand always to you know always lead with my heart and my head but data right data is really important but your people are really important and customer LinkedIn was the first place where I ever heard about value engagement
and I had an amazing manager in LinkedIn called Paul Terry and he said Lesley let me finish you like this if you're at a dinner party and the person on your right only talks about themselves and the person on the left asks you lots of questions about you who do you want to sit beside and I said well I want to sit beside the person you know I want to talk to the person on my left and he says why I said well because he's interested in me and it's conversational he goes and that is how we treat our customers no feature blasting no talking at them no talking about the product
You want to know about them. And for me, that kind of turned on a light. When I think about the Dell days, we were selling like laptops and desktops and there was an incentive. If you sold a printer, you got like a multiplier. So it's more commission. And I remember sitting beside a guy called Fred, he hung up the phone and he goes, yes, I just sold two printers.
And I said, oh, we work in consumer sales. So how did you do that? And he goes, oh, you know, this old couple have just bought a desktop, but I sold them two printers. And I said, mate, you've literally just turned our dining room into a WeWork. You know, that's not selling with integrity. Nobody needs two printers. They probably didn't even need a printer. God love them.
But I just remember thinking, that's not cool. And then I think when I got to LinkedIn, I was definitely brought on an education about it is all about your customer. And SaaS, because the way the SaaS model works, you know, retention and churn, it was an absolute like an overnight haul of how I sold. and how I saw integrity and more integrity and always with customer in mind, never overselling.
It's not about me. It's not about the sale. It's not about the commission. It's about solving a need or solving a problem. So that was the LinkedIn journey. Then I was approached by a smaller startup, a language translation company. Then Asana, which was project management. I am really organized person. Sometimes it can be crippling.
Sometimes your greatest strength over index can become your greatest weakness. And I am super organized. And Asana was like, I'd come home. It was the mothership
I use it today actually all of Gong and Mia is run off Asana so shout out to my Asana crew and then I had always known of Gong it had been on my radar since 2017 because they were the new kids on the block they were incredible on social media as I worked in LinkedIn and their profiles were brilliant their marketing was funny spicy direct hit you between the eyes some amazing videos so when they approached me I was so happy in Asana it was a bit of a
Will I, won't I? And I said, yeah, this is absolutely the world for me. And I will tell you now, I'm never leaving.
I think as my husband usually says to me, explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old. I think it is what your customers' needs are and their demands are at the focal point of all your decisions. Whether it's delivering a product, a service or an experience, your whole team has to be thinking customer first and customer first mentality. It's bandied around a lot.
It's a lot of, you know, principles in companies. Our principle is here, create raving fans. So I want our customers to buy, but we want our customers to be obsessed with the product. And often at events, we're very careful where we sit people. We do prospect, customer, prospect, customer, prospect, customer, like a seating plan. And we will match up vertical. and we'll match our persona.
Often sit back and watch a VP of RevOps, who's a customer, tell the VP of RevOps, who's a potential client, why he bought Gong. Because it's not me selling, it's someone else selling for you. So for us, our customer, they're king. Our customers are absolutely king.
there's probably a couple of things we do here, probably, you know, four or five, but the first one is a clear vision, right? Clear vision from the top down. As I said, one of our Gong principles is to create raving fans and we have clear measurables for all employees. So retention metrics, et cetera. And our CRO actually has customers as one of our pillars, which many, many companies do.
We touch on this every month globally in a team review. And we ensure that every single person knows why we do what we do. I think as well, if you want to remain customer centric, it has to go across all departments, right? You are all responsible for your customer. It does not end with the order form getting signed.
I think back in my old, old sale days, I would have just closed a deal and moved on to the next. That doesn't happen now. I think when I hand a customer over to the customer success team, I still want to stay close to that. And it's really important. Luckily with Gong, and this isn't a plug,
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