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Life at Sortable: Meet Lindsey

Another month, another member of the Sortable team for you to meet!

You’ve already met several members of the team like Jamie Murphy from Product, Daniel Rodriguez from Engineering, and Julie Holmes from Onboarding. 

In this edition of Life at Sortable, we are so excited for you to meet Lindsey Ernst, a key member of our Sales team. Lindsey is a Business Development Manager who joined the Sortable team just as the pandemic began and it has been a wild ride since then. 

Ready to meet Lindsey? Let’s go!

Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What do you do at Sortable?

I am a Business Development Manager at Sortable. What this means is that I am responsible for the full sales funnel — overseeing all new opportunities as they come through the lead initiatives, to the point where these opportunities sign a contract and pass them onto our Onboarding team. What this involves is talking to new inbound leads as they come in, ensuring that they meet our required metrics, and that we will have a successful partnership together. From a technical standpoint, it’s ensuring that our technology works with our publishers’ sites and that we have partners who are willing to work with them.

Favourite part of the Sales process?

One of my favourite parts of the Sales funnel is evaluating the technical side of our potential partnership. This gives me the opportunity to get a more in-depth look at, and understanding of, what the publisher needs, and ensuring that we can be successful in our partnership. A publisher, for example, may want their focus on improving fill rate and viewability, or increasing revenue, or it could be all of those. I like being able to see how we can accomplish all these metrics by implementing different optimization strategies or connecting them with specific demand partners, etc.

Why Sales over other departments?

I’ve always worked in Sales and I continue to do so because I love interacting with people — talking, building rapport, etc. I get the opportunity to talk to so many people every day and everyone is so different. Bonus — they keep me on my toes and I have to be able to easily talk to them.

What’s the biggest thing you enjoy about working with publishers?

The biggest thing I enjoy about working with publishers is the opportunity to understand and see what people are doing for so many types of sites and different verticals. On an average day, I talk to over 30 people and it’s so cool to be able to learn about their sites from across the world with different goals. The other day I spoke to a publisher from the Netherlands then two from Ireland and another Toronto. They’re all doing something different, but similar and using the Internet to accomplish their goals whether it’s educating or selling, etc, and monetizing their websites along the way.

What does your typical day look like?

In Sales, we do tend to start a bit earlier than other teams since we cover timezones across the world. The first thing I do is address any urgent emails and then I move onto lead review. Lead review is taking a look at new and existing leads in the funnel and running an opportunity report on them. If a publisher has moved forward in the funnel, this will be shown on the opportunity report and help us figure out what we need to do, what’s next for this publisher and how we can help them move forward in the sales process. After I’ve reviewed leads, I like to take a look at outstanding contracts to determine if they’ve been signed and if there are any roadblocks. The rest of my day is filled with emails and meetings.

What’s your favourite part about working at Sortable?

My favourite part about working at Sortable is the culture around rapid and continuous improvement. I find that Sortable is extremely receptive to new ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. A lot of autonomy is given to us to make things happen, however small or big it might be. Sortable is willing to invest in their employee’s ideas, listen to their suggestions, and implement them. I enjoy being able to see that process of a suggestion being made, watching it come to life, and people being okay with it too. Sortable doesn’t sit around waiting — we’re quick to make improvements and pivot as necessary.

What do you think sets the ideal Sortable publisher apart from the rest? 

The ideal publisher at Sortable is a publisher who has new and updated content that is unique and valuable to a user, has content that draws back users to their individual sites, and a person who is open to suggestions and recommendations to help improve their site layout and optimize it to increase success. A bonus would be a publisher who likes to talk as much as we do — what we find is that the more communication there is, the higher chances of success.

What trend or industry change are you looking forward to the most? 

I’m definitely interested in what a cookieless future looks like — this change should be pretty interesting to see it unfold. I think it’s going to change how Ad Tech works and how we work — we’re going to have to quickly adapt. From a consumer perspective who works in the Ad Tech industry, I think it’s interesting to see how it’s going to impact me as an everyday consumer, publishers that I work with on a daily basis, and the industry as a whole.

What do you like most about Ad Tech? What do you like least?

This question is hilarious! What I like about Ad Tech is that it’s always changing. The least is that it’s always changing! I like how adaptable the industry is and how adaptable our publishers are. It’s great to see that publishers understand this and are willing to work with the changes and be flexible — it does make our lives easier!

If you had to choose to work in any other department at Sortable, what would it be and why?

If I had to choose, I think it would have to be the Onboarding team. They get to be the big pivot point for our publishers because they get to execute everything we’ve been working towards. In Sales, it’s one thing to understand what their goals and success criteria are, but the Onboarding team gets to be at the forefront and execute the optimizations.

What advice would you give someone going into Ad Tech or starting at Sortable?

What I would recommend is that it’s always going to be a learning experience and it’s going to be continuous. New changes happen every day and we’re adding new products. You must be willing to adapt and ask questions. Don’t worry about asking too many questions either — our team is all willing to jump in to answer because we want you to be successful.

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Want to learn more about Sortable’s offering? Get in contact with Lindsey today at sales@sortable.com

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