Closing the Gender Gap In a Hybrid Environment - The Relaunch of Gal & SALs as "WINS" (Women in Sales-Execution)

Herstory:

On June 21, 2022 in our Seattle HQ office we hosted a Summer Party and relaunch event celebrating the re-branding of WINS (Women In Sales-Execution).?

For some context, ERGs are not a new concept at Outreach and one of our first ever ERGs was a group called “Gals & SALs.” It was created in 2018 with the purpose of hiring, retaining and promoting more women on a male-dominated team of Sales Development Representatives.?

The development of the GALS & SALS program from where it started is instrumental to understanding the power WINS can have in our industry.?

At the time (Summer of ‘18) there were roughly 35 SDRs, and only 3 women on the team. The XDR leadership and recruiting partners saw an intense need to make an intentional shift in the way we interviewed, hired and curated talent in order to ensure that our team of SDRs was more indicative of the general population and that eventually, we’d have a more even distribution of genders on the team.?

With this in mind, the recruiting team led by Mandie Manning got to work reviewing our job descriptions for gender bias, We worked to ensure that there was always at least one woman on every interview loop and that there was an opportunity for candidates to ask questions specifically related to DEI by ensuring that it was listed on our webpage under our Core Values.?

From there, we started outbound recruiting. Mandie Manning and Brooke Bachesta lead the charge with support from VP of Sales Development Steve Ross and CRO Anna Baird. We ran linkedin campaigns, neighborhood happy hours and encouraged reps to refer women specifically from within their networks. We sent our leaders including Brooke Bachesta to external panels and webinars, speaking about the importance of a diverse team and the need for more women in sales. We had reps including Cari Olson take charge of planning events, being ambassadors across the company and posting on social media about the change we were making.

Eventually, we grew our team and brought in more women. We hired in classes of 3 and 6 reps at a time and amidst all the excitement, ensured that we would be able to retain these folks.?

We started with monthly happy hours under the name “Gals & SALs” (SAL = Sales Accepted Lead and is the term for the criteria upon which SDRs are paid commission). Those happy hours then expanded to professional development series with panels featuring women in C Suite and VP level positions.?

Eventually, those monthly happy hours became quarterly events to adjust for scale and we broadened our horizons to our fellow offices by way of Meghan Donovan and Julianne Thompson in our Tampa Office, and Molly Grossman and Kelley Teed in our UK office.

We had momentum and when our 1 year anniversary arrived, we threw a huge party to celebrate a nearly 50% representation of women on the XDR team and were honored when guest speakers Lauren Bailey and Lori Richardson came to speak at our event in the late summer/fall of 2019.?

We were deep in planning for the following year when COVID hit, and unfortunately, Gals & SALs disappeared for a while. We found so much success in our in person events and really struggled to maintain momentum virtually.?

Enter Carsen Boyle and Peony Situ – these two women found a way to resurrect Gals & SALs in a remote environment fraught with uncertainty about the future.?

They rallied around Slack and Zoom, and got folks to participate in remote panels. They found ways to drive impact through our current operating rhythm of standing meetings and all hands and leaned on internal leaders like Shay Keeler, Cassie Pless, Christine Allanson and Liz Clyman to participate in panel discussions. And we were back, baby!

The buzz grew and soon, we realized that Gals & SALs hadn’t disappeared – the core tenets of recruiting, hiring and promoting women had been alive on the sales floor, and we just needed a new medium to reach our hybrid audience.?

With that, we put together a planning committee where we set out to create a charter, a maturity model, clear roles and responsibilities, a mission statement, and a new name that would better represent our entire GTM team’s efforts to drive gender diversity and support women in sales. After 8 weeks of planning after hours and during breaks, we unveiled “WINS” (Women In Sales-Execution).

“WINS” (Women In Sales-Execution):

We realized that following some revamped events, there was a lot of appetite to grow this group internally to support not just Sales and Market Development reps, but everyone on the GTM teams to include sales, post sales, pre sales – the whole gamut!

Our charter is as follows:

WINS seeks to:

• Help hire, retain, and promote women at Outreach
• Host events, panels, and educational speakers to help women level up their skills in work and life
• Creating community for women on our GTM team, creating a safe space in dominantly male driven departments and encouraging change

In preparation for the relaunch the cochairs:

• Created a new slack channel
• Put together a plan for an unveiling event
• Got to work promoting internally via email, slack and word of mouth.
• Worked with our Office teams to ensure that we had a space to host and set up a zoom for our remote teammates and come June, we were ready to launch WINS and unveil all that we had been working on to our GTM partners!

Relaunch:

In addition to revamping social channels and aligning on goals, the WINS cochairs relaunched with an event. The relaunch event took place in our Seattle HQ with a Zoom for remote employees or those in a different time zone. We were joined by Steve Ross, Whitney Sieck, Tali Dunn and Carsen Boyle on a panel centered around intentional inclusivity. Panelist were asked questions related to their professional journeys. Some key themes that emerged around intentionally making space for DEI, seeking help from others and creating a community based on support and mutual respect:

"When things are tough, run towards the fire” - Steve Ross, VP of Sales Development

“There are always problems happening at any given time and if you are willing to kind of help with that solution, it's going to get noticed…And if you step up I will never forget it.” When things are going sideways, be the person that steps up and says “I may not have all the answers but I’ll sure give it a shot.” Gives you exposure to your senior leaders, cross functional teammates and direct impact to the business.?

Make use of what you have to build community “we turned to Slack and Zoom during the pandemic because that’s what we had available” - Carsen Boyle, Growth AE North America

In a hybrid or fully remote environment, you have to get creative to find ways to bond with teammates. Zoom happy hours lost their luster early on so Carsen and Peony found ways to bring WINS events to people and meet them where they were at – they put a panel together during a standing weekly meeting so that the global team could join, they hosted professional development training sessions covering topics like Financial Fluency, and sent newsletters during the holidays.?

You don’t have to be a people leader to impact change. “Lateral leadership means making space for [people to bring themselves to the table].” - Tali Dunn, Program Manager Professional Services?

You can find ways to impact change and intentionally drive DEI efforts on your own team, without having to be formally in charge of the department or team.?

You can start by asking your teammates “what are your career priorities, how will that make you feel? What do you need to get there?”

Seeking out a mentor is important and it “requires acute self awareness.” - Whitney Sieck, VP of Revenue Enablement

“Early in my career [mentors] were provided and I know that that was a privilege and that that was something that I was really lucky to have…very early on. And other times I've sought them out. There's a few ways to do that and one is through astute self-awareness. [Your mentor] may not be just the person that's in the next role ahead of you. It may be someone who thinks about things differently than you…If you're aware of where your gaps are, [then you can ask around for people who have those skills]. And it doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all scenario, they don’t have to be your mentor for every aspect of your life…[An example is thinking of mentors like] a board of Directors.”

There were SO many learnings that came out of this session and great questions from the crowd. The entire recording can be found here in Kaia, part of Outreach Guide.

Looking to Get Involved?

If you’re looking to build community and help WINS impact not only Outreach, but the larger GTM community, there’s a number of ways to get involved.??

For internal Outreachers, join our slack channels, become a volunteer ambassador or attend the upcoming events!

For external folks, I’d encourage you to think about how you might launch your own version of WINS in your organization. It can be as easy as starting a recurring happy hour with discussion topics, or getting folks together once a quarter over zoom to build community.?Reach out to any of the co-chairs mentioned below and we'd be happy to chat and brainstorm with you!

In addition, did I mention that we're hiring? ?? https://www.outreach.io/company/working-at-outreach

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

?? This article was written by Brooke Bachesta, with help from Amy Hale and Ali Olson.

The re-launch event was planned by Grace Presnick in partnership with our Office Team (Brigette Gilbert, Justin Burgess and Emily Heath, with help from our partners at OWN (Outreach Women’s Network), an internal ERG Lead by Karlee Gibson.?

The panelists who gave such incredible insights were Steve Ross (VP of Sales Development), Tali Dunn (Progam Manager, Professional Services), Carsen Boyle (Growth Account Executive, North America) and Whitney Sieck (VP of GTM Enablement).?

Our fellow co-chairs Molly Betz, Kelley Teed, Elen Murphy, Amanda Lockwood and Christine Allanson helped us promote this event and play a key role in ongoing planning and execution.?

Our strategic planning document which includes our charter, maturity model and roles/responsibilities can be found here.?

If you or anyone you know is interested in working at Outreach, our hiring page can be found here.