This week, we sat down with Nina Stingo, who is a part of our Sales team in the West Region and joined MuleSoft nearly three years ago as an Account Development Representative. In her time at MuleSoft, she has worked as a team lead, a Commercial Account Executive, and is now an Enterprise Account Executive.
What is your favorite thing about working on the Account Executive team at MuleSoft?
I love working with the people in our Field organization. Everyone is whip smart, generous with their time, and no one takes themselves too seriously. It makes coming to work engaging and fun; there’s rarely a dull moment.
What is the most interesting problem you’re working on solving right now?
My sales territory this year is focused on a few dozen existing customer accounts. Working with an existing customer base requires running a completely new set of post-sales activities, on top of my typical pre-sales activities.
In addition to identifying and pursuing new sales opportunities, I’m also working closely with my existing customers to help them leverage the software they have licensed. Driving adoption can mean spending time on-site reviewing customers’ existing implementations, meeting and enabling new Mule developers, or organizing user groups and think tanks to help promote the software further. Making sure our customers are wildly successful on the platform is key to driving meaningful growth in our install account base.
For me, a particularly interesting challenge in the role has been working with customers to quantify and document the impact our platform has had on their business. The ability to translate technical deliverables into outcomes the business cares about (or vice versa) and then back those outcomes up with quantified success metrics is a new muscle I’m learning to flex.
When this is done well, it’s a win-win. It helps our champions promote their successes internally to their bosses and peers, and it justifies their decision to double down on their investment in MuleSoft.
What is your proudest accomplishment in your role here so far?
I’m proud that I was able to start in the most entry-level position in our field organization and work my way up to owning the relationships with some of our most strategic enterprise customers. Not only has this been important from a career trajectory standpoint, but also, from a professional development perspective. It has allowed me to have exposure to more unique flavors of our go-to-market strategy than most.
Specifically, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of our largest strategic accounts as well as our smallest SMB accounts. I’ve been involved in use cases on the IT and product sides of the business. And I’ve worked on building business cases attached to increasing operational efficiencies, achieving cost savings, and opening new revenue channels––to name a few.
How did you become an Account Executive?
As mentioned, I started at MuleSoft in an entry-level Account Development Representative position. This was a great way to get broad exposure to the industry, including how customers from various industries solve their challenges using some of the technical components of Anypoint Platform. I was later promoted to Account Development Team Lead.
This was a player-coach role, where I had the opportunity to work with very closely with two of our top strategic account executives, while also ramping up new hires the Account Development team. Through that experience, I realized I was really interested in getting direct exposure to our customers. I wanted to be an individual contributor with my own book of business.
That’s why I was drawn to the Commercial Account Executive role; it was an exciting opportunity to take on a massive territory in the West Coast and work closely with companies at a similar size and stage as MuleSoft.
This January, I moved into an Enterprise Account Executive role where I work with larger customer accounts. In both sales roles, I have especially loved the opportunity to work with some of the most innovative companies in the Bay Area as they go through hypergrowth.
Why did you choose to come work for MuleSoft?
It was important to me to work for a company that is solving real, meaty problems in the enterprise. Arguably, every company, regardless of size or industry, needs better, faster, and more flexible access to their core business data; and the pressure to do this well is only going to continue to increase.
When you layer in what is required to do this at scale and in highly complex technical and organizational environments, it becomes a really interesting challenge to solve. I like that MuleSoft not only has a very strong technical product, but also has a unique point of view on how companies can evolve architecturally and operationally to increase their IT delivery capacity.
Helping our customers evangelize this degree of organizational change can be challenging, but it’s also extremely rewarding when they are able to see the fruits of their efforts pay off. I feel confident that I could work at MuleSoft for years and still learn something new every day.
Take us through a typical day in the life.
In sales, there’s really no such thing as a typical day. I try to spend as much time as possible with my customers in the Bay Area and Seattle. When I am in the office, some of the recurring meetings I have include strategy sessions with my direct manager to review key account strategies, weekly team enablement sessions, and weekly one-on-one meetings with my counterparts on our customer success and account development teams. And, of course, I spend a lot of my time on the phone with customers.
What 3 things are always on your desk and why?
My cellphone, earbuds, and laptop are the only three items I need to do my job! Whether I’m on the road or at our SF office, I always have these three items with me.
What teams do you work with most, and how do you collaborate?
I work very closely with our Solutions Consulting and Customer Success teams on our shared accounts. We spend the majority of our time together during work hours. Outside of these two core groups, I also work very closely with Professional Services, Field Marketing, Account Development, Channels, Sales Operations, Legal, Customer Support, and, occasionally, our Product and Engineering team.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about sales is that doing the job well requires a tight interlock with nearly every other function in the business. I really appreciate being an Account Executive at a company where I get to work with all of these cross-functional teams that are made up of extremely talented individuals across the board. Effective selling is a team sport that extends outside of just the direct sales team, and all of these groups help tremendously in our sales effort.
What is your favorite activity outside of the office?
I love cooking! I recently got a new pressure cooker, which has totally changed the game for weeknight meal options. If you’re into cooking, you definitely need to check out the cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine at Home.” It’s an investment, but it’s worth it if you enjoy cooking!
What is the latest technology you’ve learned to use?
If I could instead pick a technology that I look forward to learning soon, it’s our new Anypoint Design Center – Flow designer. This new part of the platform is geared to less technical audiences. As a non-technical person by background, I’m excited to stretch myself and see how proficient I can become at building simple integrations – even if it’s just for demo purposes!
Loved what you read? Our Sales team is growing! Learn more about the team and where you can make an impact.
