Learn What It Means to be a Salesblazer
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe what a Salesblazer does.
- Identify the skills of a successful Salesblazer.
- Explain the key roles on a sales team.
What Is a Salesblazer?
Fundamentally, a Salesblazer is a sales professional who strives to solve people’s problems with the best possible products and services. Matching organizational challenges with the perfect product or service solution is often complex, so people who enjoy solving problems, nurturing relationships, and continuing to learn new strategies and technologies will probably find a career in sales to be fulfilling.
Many people across a sales organization must work together to successfully complete a sale. Core sales team members, like business development representatives and account executives, are responsible for the sales process itself. They’re tasked with activities like prospecting, leading sales calls, closing deals, and upselling or cross-selling after the prospect becomes a customer. Managers and sales leaders are more focused on crafting strategies that grow company-wide revenue and ensure both employee and customer success. Sales operations ensures sellers have the right processes and technology to be efficient and successful in closing deals.
Every sales role has a specific skill set needed to help make the sales process successful.
Required Skills
Success as a Salesblazer depends on a combination of technical skills, like understanding sales tools and data, and soft skills, like effective communication. Together, the skills enable you to build relationships with teammates and customers while driving company revenue.
Key technical skills for a Salesblazer include:
- Customer and prospect research
- Pipeline management
- Sales data analysis
- Strategy development
- Recruiting/hiring
Critical tactical and soft skills include:
- Prospect/customer communication
- Team collaboration
- Relationship building
- Problem-solving
- People management (sales leader)
- Culture-building (sales leader)
Common Salesblazer Roles and Responsibilities
It takes teamwork to close any sale. That includes everyone from the sales rep who makes the first call all the way up to the chief revenue officer (CRO) who owns revenue growth for the organization. Let’s meet the team.
Business development representative (BDR): Think of this entry-level role like the ignition for sales. BDRs are primarily responsible for prospecting, or finding businesses/individuals who would be most likely to buy a company’s product. BDRs often use creative, outside-the-box thinking to find the right prospects via online research, then rank them based on the likelihood of closing a sale. When it’s time to engage them, BDRs make cold calls—or calls without an introduction to the prospect—and use a careful balance of product hooks and guiding questions to gauge prospect need and interest. When likely buyers are found (often called “warm prospects”), the BDR forwards their information to an account executive (AE) who works to close the deal.
Account executive (AE): Otherwise known as a sales representative, AEs take qualified leads from BDRs, lead sales calls and product demos, and close deals. Their role is to successfully align customer needs with the product they’re selling. Most commonly, AEs are guided by quarterly quotas, or a target sales amount. If they hit their quota, they receive a predetermined commission.
Sales leader: High-performing AEs are frequently promoted to lead sales teams. As leaders, they’re responsible for the performance of the entire team but typically don’t have their own personal sales quotas they need to hit. Instead, their role revolves around sales rep support and training, ensuring warm prospects are quickly moved to close, and AEs use best practices to build lasting customer relationships. Sales leaders are hyper-focused on data, living in dashboards, watching deal metrics, building sales forecasts, and guiding strategy based on team performance.
Sales operations: Sales operations makes the sales process work, from enabling new sellers to optimizing the sales cycle to finding just the right technologies. They look strategically at the whole sales organization to see how they can optimize processes and systems to deepen the business impact. Efficiency is the name of the game for this role, so they’re always looking to CRM data to identify best practices, tighten up the sales cycle, and deeply understand current and future performance. Increasingly, sales ops has a seat at the executive table.
Chief revenue officer (CRO): This emerging role combines oversight of sales, marketing, finance, and service teams to ensure a seamless experience for customers. Also data-driven, a CRO focuses not only on sales, but what happens before and after a sale is closed—from marketing (lead generation) to product implementation and service (customer satisfaction and loyalty). This holistic view requires cross-team collaboration, careful strategy development, and nimble decision-making. As company executives, CROs are also tasked with managing diverse teams, developing training programs, and keeping reps engaged.
Find the Right Sales Role for You
Ready to make the most of your sales career? Check out the Salesblazer Career Path on Trailhead where you can hone critical sales skills, learn about important sales tools, and collaborate with other sales professionals.