You probably read the title of this post and thought I was messing with you right? I’m not! I came across Sales Hacker back in April 2014 while still working for my previous employer and we decided it would be a great event to sponsor. During the event we hear from lots of awesome speakers, met great people, and made tons of connections. Shortly thereafter I connected with the Sales Hacker team and expressed my interest in running a Sales Hacker Series in Toronto.
Toronto is an awesome city and has great –although undersold- tech talent, not to mention all the great restaurants (and Canadian beer). What Toronto lacks is a well-established tech sales community. There is lots of talent but no major events pulling that talent together. I have mentioned this to a lot of people over the last year and it seems as though many people agree.
Anyway, enough about Toronto and on to the big question: How did running a Series get me a new job (and a trip to Hawaii)??
I Made Lots of Great Connections
Including my new boss Emmanuelle Skala. Emmanuelle is the VP of Sales at Influitive, and comes from an amazing background of building and scaling world-class sales teams. Influitive was founded by CEO Mark Organ, the same guy that founded Eloqua (which sold to Oracle for almost $1B). In short, the place is an absolute rocket ship. Emmanuelle and I met when someone suggested that I ask her to present at the event in Toronto. We had a few opportunities to speak before and at the event, and afterwards Emmanuelle went into recruitment mode. About 2 months after the event she made me an offer and I left my previous role to work at Influitive. Best choice I ever made!
I also got the chance to meet with frontline salespeople and executives from some of the top companies in Toronto like Salesforce, TopHat, and many more. The connections I have made are priceless.
I Came Out On Top
But of course, being the first one to run a Series in another city there was a bit of risk involved in taking on the cost associated with running the event. Needless to say I hustled as hard as I could and was able to sell out the tickets and secure 3 great sponsors. The combination of ticket sales and sponsorship money covered the cost of running the event and I actually ended up with about $1000 of profit. So what did I do with it? I paid for a plane ticket to Hawaii!
So there it is. If you are thinking about running a Series in your city I would highly recommend it. It is a great way for you to grow your network, be seen as a leader in your community, and who knows, maybe even pay for a ticket to Hawaii 😉
