BC Startup Sales Podcast — Breaking Into Startup Sales with Matt Hidalgo (Cockroach Labs)

This week we were joined by Matt Hidalgo, a recent 2019 Bowery Capital fellow and current Sales Development Representative at Cockroach Labs, to discuss his journey landing the fellowship and breaking into startup sales. We spoke about his role at Cockroach Labs, how he found the Bowery Capital Fellowship and advice for recent graduates looking to break into startup sales.

Matt Hidalgo is a Senior Sales Development Representative at Cockroach Labs based in New York. Prior to Cockroach Labs, Matt was a Bowery Capital Fellow, a Public Policy Fellow at Twitter’s D.C. office and a campaign manager for a city council race in Orlando. He previously co-founded Apollo, an on-demand mobile tutoring startup. He is in the process of launching Collie—a digital neighborhood with private homes for friends and family to share lists, photos, and schedules. He graduated from NYU in 2019 with a B.A. in Public Policy.

In this episode, Matt shares more about his personal and educational background which led him to his interest in tech. We then delved into his role at Cockroach Labs, a software company that develops distributed SQL databases. We cover how Matt found the Bowery Capital Sales Fellowship program and what he liked about it. The fellowship matches successful applicants, who are college students or recent graduates, with a sales role at a high-growth software startup for 10 weeks. Recent graduates often receive full-time offers from their host companies, which was the case with Matt. He shares that he really liked the fellowship’s flexibility and mentorship program, especially since breaking into startup sales can be challenging. Matt goes on to share his advice for both young talent looking to break into the startup world and recruiters looking to hire up and coming talent. Matt concludes with a few tips on ramping up quickly as a Sales Development Representative. He suggests becoming very well acquainted with the product and leveraging your engineering team to learn more about the technicalities as a well-educated salesforce can be very effective with clients and saves engineers the extra time spent on client calls. We won’t give it all away here but it was a great episode full of tips and tricks for listeners who are interested in successfully breaking into startup sales.

Interested in learning more about the program as a potential host company or Fellow? Check out our Bowery Capital Fellowship page.

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