Being Your Own CEO During Your First Year

Whether you come from one end of the spectrum as a seasoned enterprise rep who knows the physical security space inside and out or are new to sales altogether, building your career at Verkada will be unique because of both the pace that you will grow with us and the nature of our company mission: integrating an organization’s commercial building and other physical spaces in order to provide a safer and more efficient environment. Understandably, it may not be immediately obvious why you should be making the jump from your current job situation but we encourage you to reach out to actual people on our sales team (profiled on our career web page or LinkedIn), to hear first hand about their journey at Verkada so far. Additionally, we hope these guides give you a sense of the different phases of the first year at Verkada and will help you visualize how you can come in and embark on a wonderful career here. In this post, we describe what your first year at Verkada looks like in sales, at which point you should be fully ramped and are an important revenue generator on our team.

Beyond the Standard Verkada Sales Playbook

By now, you should have a few quarters of selling behind you and built up some base (a growing base!) of customers and revenue streams. This likely will be a result of having followed our proven successful sales playbook. At this point, our best reps often transition from following the trodden path to blazing the path. In startup space, there is an oft-quoted metaphor of “building the plane as one is flying it,” and when it comes to selling a radically new product and feature-set into an outdated industry, this same idea holds. The playbook is a living and breathing collection of our company knowledge, and you can contribute by bringing your own creative, scrappy, and unique ideas to the table as you think about how to continue growing your revenue stream and bringing in business in unusual ways. One example of this is how one successful rep found a unique customer base in Australia that no one was looking at, and as a result of the pipeline built out, ended up spearheading and launching our APAC business. Another example is how another rep figured out a clever way to leverage fax machines to successfully reach out to customers in a target industry and generate revenue through this approach. If you have a knack for creativity and innovation, or want to develop this skillset, you will likely find the Verkada sales team highly rewarding in this regard.

Developing Relationships with Peers and Other Parts of the Company

Presumably at the one year mark on the Sales team at Verkada, you will have developed a great relationship with your manager, found mentors within the sales org, and established a fun camaraderie with your teammates. Verkada is so much more than the sales organization, however. We have some of the best AI engineering talent, amazing support and operations employees, and a quickly burgeoning global presence, with employees in our UK and Australia offices. As a fully ramped part of the sales team, your experience understanding your customers and the industry space by this point will be incredibly valuable to other parts of the organization, and likewise the experience and knowledge that employees at other parts of the company will be helpful for you to learn about as we continue to grow as a company. Cross-pollination of ideas, relationships, and experiences is highly encouraged at Verkada, and we host all kinds of events to help facilitate this. You’ll find this human and cultural aspect of Verkada one of the most rewarding parts of the experience at this startup. We all think of Verkada in family terms here.

Rocketing your Career Development While on the Rocket Ship

In the next and final part of the 'Sales at Verkada' blog series, we cover what it takes to be successful at the one-year mark of being a sales rep, after you’ve finished ramping up as a rep both in terms of your quota and your skillsets. In it, we go discuss going above and beyond the Verkada Sales Playbook and the importance of relationships with your peers and other departments.