-: My name is Walter Rivera,
and I'm the head of sales and partnerships at Funderful.
Basically our mission is to help universities,
colleges and universities across the country,
be able to update their,
the way how they communicate with their alumni.
Instead of providing a much better alumni engagement,
I, instead of just doing the phone calls and emails
and print the same way how schools have been doing it
for the past couple of decades,
being able to help schools communicate with their alumni
through Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, texting,
through messaging platforms, basically.
So being a startup, I've had to wear so many different hats,
from product to operations to customer success,
so it's been a little bit of everything,
and now we're finally starting to move into
more of a structured sales
department organization there.
So, yeah, basically for me,
it entails a lot of building relationships
with a lot of potential clients,
and just building relationships.
It's a relatively small industry,
so we need to be able to really be able to connect
with potential clients,
and just build a lot of relationships with them,
so it involves a lot of going to trade shows
and conferences and kinda really traveling a lot
and meeting a lot of the different schools,
understanding the clients, their needs and all that,
and then after that, it also means
a lot of cold emails, cold calls,
follow-ups, and then negotiation with the contracts,
and then finally
having them sign the contract then.
And then, coming from the first salesperson
in that kind of startup,
our role is basically not just go out there and sell,
but then also be able to have to figure out
what do people want,
do a lot of that kind of customer discovery as you're going,
and having to just set up essentially the whole
kinda like sales model,
understand what will be your traditional
typical sales cycle and how to narrow it down,
so we're in the higher education space.
Sales cycles can go anywhere from three months to 18 months.
So being able to kinda try to keep between that,
how do we keep it like under six months sales cycle.
So it's a lot of kind of that type of work
that now that we figured all that out,
then now it's where now we're expanding
the hiring a full sales team.