Harry Hembrow

I'm Harry, I'm based in London and I'm a Chief Revenue Officer at a startup, which happens to be my own startup.

So most of my time at work is focused on growing revenue for our business, but that covers a lot of different things.

So this might be designing and building, you know, our ideal customer profile. And that includes building and refining target lists. It includes myself, you know, and team members reaching out to those people at those ideal companies.

These are companies that you all have heard of, you know, like Coca-Cola and Nestle that make some of our favorite products.

What we'll do is then we will use the phone, we'll use email, we'll use social media to create crafty messaging and essentially book some time with these people.

What we'll then do is prepare, you know, presentations and have an open and honest discussion about how their business is running today.

And if we can genuinely add value and help them solve some of their problems. And then from there, it will be co-creating solutions for these customers alongside them in partnership and working through understanding, you know, what the impact of a partnership will mean to them. And also who else it might benefit across the business.

So no two days are exactly the same but typically it would involve finding the right people and starting conversations, understanding how they currently work and whether we can genuinely help, and then collaborating with them to design solutions to their challenges, essentially.

But I spend a lot of time on calls and in meetings, both online and in person.

I lead a team of sales professionals and work very closely with our own product team who build and maintain our software. We're constantly sharing feedback from customers and helping design solutions that people actually need, but essentially working with my team of salespeople and primarily our product team as well to improve our features.

And I also work and look after marketing, which involves creating material that's going to resonate with our customers.

The best thing about my job... so winning clients is incredibly fun.

I love picking a few dream brands to work with, so think Coca-Cola or Kit Kat, and working towards earning their trust. When they finally become customers, it's a really rewarding moment.

I would say that process is the best thing about my job, but the process itself end to end can be quite challenging, which is also rewarding.

So the hardest part about my job is not everybody needs your help and that's okay. It can still be tough when you don't win a customer. So you have to really work at building your resilience and have thick skin and don't take rejection personally.

So my bosses kept asking me to help with sales when sales wasn't my job. I used to be an account manager to work with clients and help them run their campaigns.

But over time it became clear that sales very much suited me. I think some of the key skills like understanding people and what motivates them are things you're often born with and need that you refine over time.

So my education massively helped me. So I studied a variety of different subjects, but later on I studied business and also marketing. That gave me a very strong foundation and helps me have more meaningful, informed conversations with customers.

For me, there's been many memorable moments but starting my own business, I think that took a lot of courage. And I made plenty of mistakes along the way and mistakes should be often viewed as positive if you learn how to overcome them. But I learned more during that period than almost any other time in my career.

That's a great question. So I think... don't overthink things or worry too much about the future. I think life has a way of pointing you in the right direction. You just have to be willing to follow the signs. So don't think you're gonna have it all figured out at the very beginning and enjoy the process. process.