Dare To Scale Workshop: Atanas Raykov on Building a Sales Team

Atanas Raykov, Director Business Development CIS & CEE at Viber, was the leader of the 4th workshop, part of the Dare to Scale growth program. Atanas, who leads cross-border business development and local marketing teams in Russia, France and Bulgaria, shared his key takeaways for forming functional and well-performing sales teams. The senior executive who has been responsible for expanding Viber’s global network of telecom partners, spoke about his experience when attracting the best performing talents and advised the entrepreneurs to provide their employees with the necessary levels of freedom and flexibility, so that they can perform at the highest level. Atanas stressed on the importance of establishing common values among the team members and passing these values to the new hires so that they can quickly blend with the rest of the team and have a sense of belonging – “The feeling of inclusion is key – try building a family environment as this would have positive spillover effects on your entire organisation”. The speaker recommended the “What color is your parachute?” book by Richard N. Bolles – one of the most popular reads, aimed at the career-changers and dedicated on the overall job-search process.

The founders shared their challenges related to forming teams and establishing a common culture, assessing perspective sales candidates, and remunerating their sales staff. As an answer to these questions, Atanas recommended identifying the strong sides of every sales employee and verticalizing the relevant sales targets in accordance with the expertise of the team members. The significance of teamwork for executing successful sales campaigns was also discussed, together with the different strategies for evaluating potential candidates for sales-related roles.

The team of Endeavor Bulgaria together with the participants would like to thank Leanplum for hosting the workshop and congratulate Atanas for leading the session. The growth program will continue with the 1:1 mentor meetings while the next workshop will take place on Nov 5th on the topic of Budgeting and Business Planning which is going to be led by Bojidar Neytchev, SEE Managing Partner at PwC and Endeavor mentor.