BC Startup Sales Podcast – Sales Personalization vs. Automation with Jimmy Forbes (SendGrid)

The Bowery Capital team invited Jimmy Forbes, SendGrid’s Manager of Sales Development, to come in this week to talk about “Sales Personalization vs. Automation.” SendGrid provides a single reliable platform for transactional and email marketing, enabling customers such as Uber and Spotify to reach inboxes and build elegant email marketing campaigns. In this episode, Jimmy lays out SendGrid’s strategy that determines where they sit on the pendulum between sales automation and sales personalization.

Jimmy, an outdoors climbing enthusiast, has built SendGrid’s sales development team from the ground up, scaling and optimizing outbound global sales for the company. As technology continues to influence the next generation of sales professionals, the relationship between automation and personalization continues to be a topic that gets brought up a lot. However eager typical executives come in and try to dial up automation, Jimmy’s experience with resisting that automatic urge has led to unexpected insights validated by data in higher conversion rates and quality of interactions with leads.

SendGrid is a proven cloud-based customer communication platform that successfully delivers over 25 billion emails each month for Internet and mobile-based customers like Airbnb, Pandora, HubSpot, Spotify, Uber, and FourSquare, as well as more traditional enterprises like Taco Bell, Intuit and Costco. Since graduating from the Boulder Techstars accelerator in 2009, SendGrid has reeled in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, 500 Startups, and several other notable investors.

Sales Development and the role of the Sales Development Representative have been a common topic on the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast in the past, in which our guests have touched on everything from training, coaching, hiring, sales technology stacks, and more.

If you liked “Sales Personalization vs. Automation” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!