All Podcasts
go to market

Listen

Podcast: Go to Market Grit
Date: January 11, 2021
Title: How Kelly Wright Went from Selling Door to Door to Board Director at Fastly
Length: 49 Minutes
Episode: 17
description:

Kelly Wright has had a remarkable career in sales, from her early days selling books door-to-door to joining Tableau as a developing startup and helping them grow into a multi-billion dollar company as a key member of their executive team. Today, she is board director at Fastly, a leading cloud services provider.

In this episode of Go to Market Grit, Joubin and Kelly discuss Kelly’s incredible career path, including her decision to attend business school, how she landed at Tableau, and how she secured a position as board director.

In this episode of Go to Market Grit, we cover:

  • Kelly’s thoughts on Tableau’s high profile acquisition by Salesforce.
  • Kelly’s career journey and how she ended up at Tableau as EVP of Sales. Kelly also talks about her early experiences selling books door to door and how she built up grit and resilience.
  • Why Kelly went to business school, even though her calling was in sales.
  • What Kelly saw in Tableau and why she decided to take a leap of faith and join the company.
  • How Kelly measured herself as the first account executive at a developing startup without a formal tracking system in place.
  • How Kelly dealt with change management during her early days at Tableau.
  • The concept of hiring for culture fit and why Kelly prioritizes this when searching for new team members. Kelly also talks about interviewing quickly at scale and how she determines whether interviewees have the potential to be successful.
  • Kelly’s advice on how to get on a company board.
  • Kelly’s definition of grit.

Recent Podcast

Purposeful Culture Driven Sales

May 2024

Length: 59 Minutes

On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda McCabe speaks with Kelly Breslin Wright, Founder & CEO of Culture Driven Sales. They discuss resilience and purpose related to the Culture Driven Sales methodology where Kelly Breslin Wright operates as a C-level executive, board director, advisor, and adjunct university professor.

Kelly Breslin Wright is an experienced executive and corporate board director for both public and private companies, with over 30 years of experience in leadership, sales, operations, and strategy roles. She has served as an Independent Director and Advisor for multiple Boards and has helped companies navigate multiple stages of growth. These include IPOs, enterprise expansion, CEO and leadership transitions, globalization, M&A, financings, business model changes, and global crises. She has a unique mastery of sales, go-to-market, leadership, transformation, strategy, growth and scaling, data and analytics, and culture.

As an operator, Kelly Breslin Wright served as President and COO of Gong, an artificial intelligence platform that serves revenue organizations to deliver insights at scale. There, she managed all go-to-market functions, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing. For nearly 12 years prior to Gong, Kelly Breslin Wright was Executive Vice President of Sales (Chief Revenue Officer) at Tableau Software (formerly NYSE: DATA). She joined as the company's first salesperson, where she grew Tableau’s worldwide sales and field operations from zero to $850M in revenue and managed over half of the company’s 3,400 global employees. Tableau was purchased by Salesforce in 2019 for $15.7B. Before Tableau, Kelly Breslin Wright spent time at Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company, Bank of America, Dale Carnegie Training, AtHoc, and Southwestern Advantage.

You can find out more about Kelly Breslin Wright at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellybreslinwright/  

Culture Driven Sales Website: https://culturedrivensales.com/  

University of Washington Foster School of Business Website: https://foster.uw.edu/faculty-research/directory/kelly-wright/  

 

Click to Listen
Show All