Carter Middleton is an indispensable Mid-Market Account Executive! Carter's commitment to continuous learning and genuine interest in understanding the prospect’s business problem makes him an asset to our team and prospects alike. In his free time, Carter likes to play disc golf, volleyball, and is in a competitive ultimate frisbee league. He also enjoys reading, traveling, and supporting the Buffalo Bills during NFL season!
Read on to learn why Carter enjoys working at startups!
Q&A #
Continuous learning is almost ingrained into the role of an AE if you want to be successful. There are lots of different programs, strategies, and tactics for effective selling and by continually going through training, learning from my coworkers who’ve had success in sales, and talented sales leadership, I can take what I like and build my own selling voice and rapport with customers. I ultimately want these conversations to feel natural and the more practice you get, the more comfortable you will feel around probing and finding the business case.
When you’re able to ask the right questions, your customers trust you and are more willing to share their feedback which can help influence the product. I think that’s very cool and why I enjoy startups. You can have a real impact on the business when you're able to help find new customers and solve their pain points/business issues with a product they really enjoy! It’s cool to see the potential growth of both companies.
I’m lucky! In our segment, there's a lot of interest from companies in the market for runZero which is uncommon as a startup. We're constantly seeing people spinning up trials and reaching out with interest. So a lot of my day to day role is handling inbound lead generation, managing active opportunities, running demos with companies, running proof of concepts and generally just trying to get deals across the finish line.
As far as the team aspect, despite our individual responsibilities, we collaborate closely to secure deals. I’m on the bulk of my calls with my sales engineer because he can provide those technical insights. We problem solve as a team with our customers and prospects; so, I would say sales is very collaborative at runZero. There's a lot of feedback given as to what's working and not working and it makes for more interactions with your teammates, prospects, and current customers. We’re always listening to our current customers/future prospects and making changes along the way. A good example of this was our big 4.0 release!
I truly believe that every single person has a unique background, a unique story, and something to share. It’s being genuinely interested in knowing the person. That is automatically going to build genuine relationships. It’s worked for me through different cultures and different countries. It’s asking questions, appropriate questions. I’ve learned that if I get to know people on a personal level, the work part takes care of itself. It actually becomes much easier to work with that person.
I think open communication and everyone working on their individual goals to close business and support the mission is most important. Also it's all about the team's collective triumph, we celebrate team wins and being collaborative throughout the process is helpful. I think a healthy team can also vent about lost deals or just different interactions you have with prospects. You will lose deals in your career so you have to celebrate the wins and not sweat the losses too hard. It doesn't feel like the negative side of sales, like when people feel competitive to the point that you're not supporting other sellers. We have a supportive and cooperative sales atmosphere.
My teammates have great market knowledge and everyone is open to sharing those learnings and best practices to help one another. One way we knowledge share is through win wires where we say why we won the deal, why the customer loves runZero, things like that. My coworker Justin Arnosky is great at these and it’s super helpful.
The Buffalo Bills for football, and I went to school at University of Wisconsin, so University of Wisconsin football and basketball too.
