Employee Spotlight: Richard Scioli on what makes Alloy’s sales team stand out
For this month’s Employee Spotlight, we sat down with our VP of Business Development, Richard Scioli. Richard was the first member of Alloy’s sales team when he joined in 2019. Since then, he’s built the sales team out to 29 people with 7 direct reports — and the team is still growing!
You’ve been with Alloy for almost three years. What was your first role here? How have you grown with the company?
I joined Alloy as the first member of the Business Development team and was responsible for selling many of Alloy’s early clients and building out our sales, partnerships, and sales operations teams. Every year I’ve been here, I’ve paused and assessed what I am doing for Alloy and how I can be most impactful, and it has changed each year as our company grows. Early on it was closing business, hiring (it still is), and working with the product organization to help match our go-to-market strategy with our product strategy; after that, it was ramping a small team and helping Alloy go upmarket. Today, I spend more time in support of the team and working to ensure we have the right strategies, enablement structures, and processes. This year, I’m making a big push to write out my lessons learned and share my past mistakes at Alloy to help get our young team ramped and confident in selling Alloy. My motivations and excitement for being a part of Alloy have always been the same since day one. About three years ago, I fell hard for our product and spent a lot of time with the team. That combination of great people and an amazing product keep me energized day in and day out here at Alloy.
What does a typical day look like for you?
I’m a new father so my goal every morning is to wake up before my family to have some time to exercise and set my intentions for the day. After I get some time with my Son, I hit the workday with an emphasis on planning, research, and strategy work until about 10 am. Once 10 hits, I run out the rest of the day coaching the team in 1–1s, working on deal strategy, and working with my peers in operations, Client Success, Partnerships, and Marketing. Typically I’m brought into the sales process later in the cycle to form a senior relationship or unblock something contentious in a negotiation. I’ll mix my days and work from the office and at home to different degrees each week.
I love Alloy’s emphasis on collective learning and discussion. We have so many events like our Revenue Kick-off called Amplify Alloy, where we revisit how we sell our product, come up with great experiments, and have some fun reviewing lessons from our wins and losses as a team.
Clients are always the priority, of course. I’m looking forward to hitting the conference schedule and getting back to some in-person meetings.
The Sales department has grown so much over the last 18-months. What do the teams look like now? How do they support each other?
At the beginning of the year, we reorganized the sales team so that we’d develop deeper expertise in selling to specific segments of our customer base. This reorg meant structuring the sales team into groups selling to banks, fintech, enterprise customers, and maintaining a strong selling motion with our reseller and referral partners. Over time, we’ll continue to get more specialized with our segments and geographies and add in new markets such as cryptocurrency. We’re also going to work closely with our partners in Solution Engineering to build out a monster team of new product sellers for Credit Underwriting and Transaction Monitoring. Our team often gets described as a family, which I love. We have a strong balance of driven and competitive individuals who support each other and put the company first. I’m a lucky guy to work with such a team.
How does Alloy help develop associates on your team?
Development is much more than getting people to hit their targets. I often look at that measure as an indicator of success, whereas at Alloy, we focus on bringing out the behaviors and habits we know to be successful. Some of these competencies include self-awareness, resilience, and collaboration. If our team is constantly open to feedback and setting goals beyond just the “number,” we’ll have the greatest chance of scalable and sustainable success. My job is to explain how these traits can make people successful and coach and celebrate them in the team. For the fundamentals of process and product, we just introduced a Sales Enablement function led by the great and powerful Arielle Barrow, who recently transitioned from a Manager of our Mid-market.
Sales professionals love commissions! How do Sales leaders define metrics, and how does that tie into commissions?
You can and will do great at Alloy! Last year each team absolutely blew through their quotas. We certainly look at closed bookings as an indicator, but we also need to look at early indicators to be effective. Sales are generally about keeping momentum and discipline. We look at prospecting and pipeline generation measures as health indicators and emphasize responsiveness in our sales process.
How do your teams deal with mistakes and/or setbacks?
As I mentioned earlier, when coupled with drive, self-awareness is one of the greatest qualities a salesperson can have at Alloy. As a group, we try to detach from situations and analyze them for lessons. As an example, we perform deal reviews on losses every other week. It can be tough to admit your mistakes in a public forum, but at Alloy, it’s not about judging failures; it’s about learning from them. We’ve grown incredibly as a team by not taking things personally and analyzing the good and the bad so that we can find patterns in the buying journey for our customers and avoid repeat mistakes.
Do candidates need sales experience to join Alloy? What are the professional backgrounds your team members have come from?
As our company evolves, the profile of a seller evolves too. Early on, we looked for scrappy individuals who may or may not have had traditional sales backgrounds. Our early emphasis was on hiring driven, kind, and intelligent people over long tenures in sales. Now that we are bigger and have moved upmarket, we need to supplement this core of sellers with individuals who have a significant level of drive, have built extensive fintech and banking networks, and have run complex sales cycles many times over.
What advice did you wish you had when you were breaking into fintech B2B sales?
Stay close to the product and make sure you love it. If you sell a product you don’t understand or don’t love, it’ll be clear to your prospect. Sales isn’t just about closing deals; it’s more about understanding a client’s needs and working to find a way our product can meet them. You don’t need to be an engineer, but I suggest sellers look at our API docs and review our product thoroughly.
Another lesson I’ve learned over time is never to make assumptions during the sales process. It’s critical to ask prospects explicit questions and push on discovery. I’ve seen surprises emerge late in so many deals, and it’s never a bad idea to simply clarify and confirm at every step.
Alloy’s sales team is hiring.
