Sales and Business Development Professional verification

• Business Development

  Demonstrated

  Natali clearly explained the difference between lead generation and business development: business development means keeping the relationship warm from first contact through closing and beyond, as new products and opportunities appear. She builds a precise ideal customer profile, even checking the size of a prospect's DevOps team before reaching out. She also described researching competitors' customer reviews to find opportunities, which shows initiative and strategic thinking.

• Professional English (C1)

  Demonstrated

  Natali held the full session in English and communicated fluently and confidently, using professional sales vocabulary naturally.

• B2B Sales Execution & Pipeline Management

  Partial

  Natali showed an excellent grasp of pipeline management. She keeps every prospect in HubSpot with notes and status, including those who have not replied, and sets automated follow-up timelines of up to five touches. Her experience so far has focused on bringing qualified prospects to the first call rather than running the calls and closing the deals herself, so adding hands-on closing experience will take this skill to a full pass.

Ideal customer profile: she targeted SaaS companies and startups with 11 to 50 employees, reached out to CEOs, CTOs and CPOs, and checked each company's technical team before outreach to see whether it would need the DevOps services. Messaging: when a CEO replied that he receives hundreds of similar messages every day, she rewrote her approach and offered something different. He remembered her and came back later, which showed adaptability and persistence. Follow-up discipline: in one case she followed up five or six times with a CEO, received a reply, explained the service and booked a call. Low reply rate (2 replies from 50 companies): she said she would test three to five message variants, study what caught the attention of the people who did reply, refine the best version, and contact other team members (CPO, CTO, marketing or sales) when the CEO does not respond. This was one of her strongest answers. Prioritising 40 prospects: she would research company size, revenue and likely pain points first, and then reach out to the most promising companies. To make revenue estimates more accurate, she could combine Apollo with additional sources. Closing experience: at Royalty Truck Insurance she made cold calls to US truck drivers and secured two to three agreements herself. At Das Meta her role ended at booking the call, and she was open about this. Objection handling: when told "we already have a supplier", she said she would ask about gaps without being pushy and offer a free trial. This is a reasonable approach, and adding questions about the cost or limits of the current supplier would make it stronger. Self-awareness: she named research as her strongest skill and running sales meetings as her main area to develop, saying "I was bringing them to the call, but I wasn't doing the calls."

Take ownership of the full sales cycle in your next role or project, including running discovery calls, presenting the offer and negotiating terms. Practise discovery and closing conversations through role-play, using a structured set of questions about needs, budget, decision-making process and timeline. Prepare clear answers for the most common objections ("we already have a supplier", "send me more information", "it's too expensive"), focusing on the client's business value.