Emma Maslen, founder of sales strategy firm inspir’em on leaving corporate life and sales success

Emma Maslen went from high-pressure corporate roles to starting a sales strategy consultancy, which has helped thousands improve their sales acumen. She shares her story of switching from a corporate to an entrepreneurial life and what makes for good selling.

Emma Maslen, tech and sales leader with a thirty-year career and CV that includes MD and VP roles at software giants SAP Concur and Ping Identity, business founder, angel investor, Henley Business School alumna and published author, didn’t “choose” to be in tech and sales. 

“Nobody does,” she claims. “Nobody wakes up when they’re sixteen and decides that’s what they want to do.” 

Maslen’s unintended sales career has taken her through many different organisations, from her first data entry job as a teenager at bra company Gossard, to Vodafone’s head office. 

“Whatever you’re selling, you’re selling to all of those different clients,” she says of sales careers. “So you get to learn about all of their businesses. So you learn about commerce, really, and that’s one of the really big things about being in sales.”

A journey through sales – lessons learned

Those business lessons helped Maslen when she started her own venture inspir’em, a sales strategy consultancy she launched with her husband in 2019, but more on that later. 

“I think in Britain we are very apologetic about being a salesperson. In America, it’s a profession. You’ll shout from the rooftops if you’re in sales.”

She shares what sales has given her. “Sales has taught me how to make money,” she states. “What people buy, the value and commerciality. I think a lot of young people, if they are ambitious, are thinking about how they can set up on their own, and I think sales is a good skill set to get, so if you decide to set up your own business, you understand how the world works.”

With sales comes networking. “That’s what sales is all about,” she says. “It’s about meeting people, understanding what they’re interested in, how you can help them, and being valuable to them. The better you network, the more people you meet and the more opportunities you get. People say salespeople are lucky, but I think the harder they work and the more they network, the luckier they get.”

What does the average Briton think about when they picture an interaction with a salesperson? Likely, discomfort and the fear of a ‘hard sell’ lurking around the corner. On the salesperson side, Maslen has noticed a lack of pride. “I think in Britain we are very apologetic about being a salesperson. In America, it’s a profession. You’ll shout from the rooftops if you’re in sales.”

You could say that Maslen is doing her bit to reignite pride in the sales sector with inspir’em, her sales strategy consultancy.

From corporate to startup life – inspir’em

A coaching experience while Maslen was at SAP changed everything. “I really enjoyed the process,” she admits. “Initially, I didn’t enjoy coaching because I thought it was an indulgence and I didn’t have time for it. But actually, as a leader, it became important because you need the time to reflect. I really enjoyed that, and I decided that I wanted to go and study coaching.”

“For the first three years, we didn’t make any money. We hired people, and we paid those people, but actually, as owners of the business and working in the business, we didn’t make any money, but we knew we were on the right trajectory.”

The seasoned professional was finally ready to quit the corporate world. At forty, she’d bagged top leadership roles at global firms, dealt with a constant environment of high pressure, and had children she wanted to spend more time with. “I’ve had a couple of really, I’d say quite stressful environments,” she admits. “I just thought, I want to go and do something else.”

Bubbling in the background was her involvement in angel investing and working with early-stage businesses, where Maslen enjoyed seeing “the oil tanker” of change “turning much quicker” than in the corporate organisations she was used to. The idea for coaching followed, and next, she was off to Henley Business School to take a coaching course.

Maslen calls leaving the corporate world to start inspir’em “a huge leap of faith.” She also admits something many founders would rather keep under wraps: that it took them a while to get profitable. “I’ll tell all the things that other people never say,” she quips. “For the first three years, we didn’t make any money. We hired people, and we paid those people, but actually, as owners of the business and working in the business, we didn’t make any money, but we knew we were on the right trajectory.” It turned out that Maslen was right. To date, inspir’em has helped some 3,500 individuals improve their sales process. The company also hosts women-in-sales events around the world.

When a business is starting, a founder, usually without a big team around them, can find themselves taking on a sales role. Maslen’s opinion on this is as follows: while a founder can be a great salesperson for an organisation, only good sales professionals can fill in the gaps.

Founders and sales – where to lean in and where to delegate

“They’re hugely passionate, and they know everything that there is about the product, target market, pricing and all the commercial side of things and risk,” says Maslen of founders. “But they don’t replace a sales organisation.” 

“In early-stage businesses and scale-ups, average tenure is probably more like six to nine months. The hiring is really bad, so we’ve hired the wrong people, we’ve not set them up for success, we’ve not onboarded them in the right way, and we don’t know what success looks like. So what ends up happening is they get frustrated, or they leave, or we get frustrated, and we make them leave.”

While founders are undoubtedly great sellers of the thing they’ve built, it is the sales arm, she argues, which will be “excellent at running the revenue machine.”

For founders, Maslen says this. Know your value and think about what parts of the sales pipeline need your input, and what you can leave to the sales team, which should include, by the way, a professional seller and sales manager. “Don’t do all the little things,” she says to founders, “have the really impactful meetings.” 

Getting a sales team to believe in what they are selling is the dream, but what happens when that dream doesn’t become a reality? “Get a new sales team,” she states boldly. However, she reminds founders of their duties. “If they haven’t quite understood the value yet, then it’s your responsibility as an organisation to onboard those people properly.” Better hiring and onboarding choices, she adds, could put a dent in poor sales staff retention: “In early-stage businesses and scale-ups, average tenure is probably more like six to nine months. The hiring is really bad, so we’ve hired the wrong people, we’ve not set them up for success, we’ve not onboarded them in the right way, and we don’t know what success looks like. So what ends up happening is they get frustrated, or they leave, or we get frustrated, and we make them leave.”

Outside of inspir’em, Maslen works with Angel Academe, an organisation that aims to get more women into angel investing and fund more female-led businesses. She paints a picture of the investment scene for female founders, and as you might imagine, it’s not pretty.

Female founders – an uneven landscape

Citing research from information service firm Beauhurst, Maslen explains that female founders of early stage business only get around 1.6% of funding, and even when founder teams are mixed gender, they don’t get much more. 

During investment interviews, male and female founders tend to receive very different questions: “Males get asked things like, what’s your vision for the business? Very blue sky thinking questions. While females get asked things like, what’s the return on investment?”

Clearly, gender bias among decision makers, who in the investment world still tend to be male-heavy, continues. But Maslen makes an interesting point: all the coaching in the world won’t help female founders break through the funding gap ceiling; it is anti-bias training on the other side, among the decision-makers, that will really make the difference. This matters, as funding female-led businesses makes sense commercially as well as socially. “They generally provide a bigger return and are more likely to succeed,” says Maslen, reflecting widely shared research about the performance capabilities of women-led ventures.

Maslen can also call herself a published author. Her book, The Personal Board of You Inc, reflects her professional experiences and business lessons for others. As networking is a big part of the sales process, Maslen shares her insights on strategic networking. Here’s the summary: Normal networking is hoping for the best in a room full of strangers; strategic networking, on the other hand, is “thinking about what you’re missing.”

Being “strategic” with networking

“Most people think networking is turning up to a room of fifty strangers, a warm glass of wine, and making small talk,” she says. Instead, Maslen suggests to think about intended outcomes. 

“An example that I give in my book was when I moved to Cornwall and didn’t know anyone. So I Googled Cornwall angel investing speaker and found a guy who turned out to be quite senior in working with the British Business Bank. I said, hey, could you help me? And he said, hey, look, I’m happy to have fifteen minutes with you on the phone. So we had a call, and through his network, he helped me out, and the rest was history.”

As we come to the end of our discussion on all things sales, the rhetorical question of what is the secret to being good at it comes up. “A lot of people think sales is an art but actually, it’s a science. If you look at the data around what you do to be successful, you’ll always do the same things. You’ll meet with the same types of customers the same number of times, roughly, and you’ll do the same sorts of things.”

There’s the formula, perfect and repeat the process, and don’t forget to network strategically and onboard your salespeople properly, now, go sell.

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