Katherine Long- What you Hate and Love About Selling?

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Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Katherine Long.

About the interviewee

Katherine Long, Founder and CEO. Katherine is the founder of IllustriaDesigns.com. She drives the company’s vision and growth as it flattens the marketing playing field and makes quality design accessible. She holds dual degrees in economics from the Wharton School and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, both summa cum laude.

 
Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.).
 
IllustriaDesigns.com brings businesses the convenience of in-house design without the cost through a flexible cloud-based subscription model. Illustria is based in Bethesda, MD.

What type and size of companies do you have as clients?

Our customers range from the Fortune 500 and publicly traded corporations to high-growth tech startups. World Wrestling Entertainment (NYSE:WWE), Innerworkings (NASDAQ:INWK), Hubspot, One Medical Group, and more.

What comes to mind when you see this topic?

Hi Kevin, I’m the founder of a company that does B2B sales in the mid/enterprise markets. What I love about sales is that it’s all about hustle and persistence. Anyone can do well if they put their mind to it—I’m certainly not the stereotypical slick salesman, I’m more of a listener type. Sometimes, it takes months and dozens of touches to get a deal to close, but when it does, you feel fantastic. And it’s always great to be able to see your progress in measurable metrics.

There’s nothing I hate about sales, except maybe that the clock resets to 0 at the start of every month for my team. But it gives us a rush to start climbing back up that mountain.

What are the best practices when it comes to this issue?

Both who and what you know matter. Who you know can
get you in the door, but what and how you present will close the deal.Additionally, as the company’s sales model scales (to get to $10MM, $100MM,$1B in ARR and beyond), who you know matters less, because you have to build the funnel for both outbound and inbound and scale that to a larger sales team beyond yourself.

Contact information:

 www.illustriadesigns.com