To help ensure that women and racial minorities working in tech have the skills they need to compete in a predominately white and male industry, three Chicago tech organizations are coming together to offer a new program specifically designed at mentoring those that work in sales.
Sales accelerator Sales Assembly, sales education company Victory Lap and tech incubator 1871 announced the launched of their Diversity Leadership Training Initiative on Wednesday. The free, two-month program will accept women and minority sales professionals working at Chicago tech and startup companies that have been nominated by their businesses, according to Matt Green, the chief revenue officer of Sales Assembly.
“What Sales Assembly did was just bring the entire community together to combine our efforts,” Green said. “While it won’t solve the problem at large, we’re confident that our combined efforts will go a long way to ensuring that Chicago’s next generation of technology sales professionals are going to be much more diverse than the last."
Sales Assembly is a Chicago-based organization that helps well-funded startups refine their sales and revenue strategies. Earlier this year, it launched VentureScale, an accelerator program designed with the same mission, but instead for smaller, early-stage startups.
Sales Assembly will begin taking applicants for the diversity sales cohort on Aug. 21 from among its existing members and accept 15 individuals, Green said. The first class of the cohort is expected to start Sept. 20.
Classes will be taught by a rotating list of vice presidents of sales and chief revenue officers at Chicago-based B2B tech companies, like Sprout Social, ActiveCampaign, SpotHero and Showpad. Topics taught in the cohort will focus on skills sales professionals will need once they’re in managerial roles, which include managing sales pipelines, and hiring and training entry-level employees.
“We put together a two-month curriculum that is designed to teach existing salespeople within the Chicago tech ecosystem a list of hard skills that they need in order to be effective sales managers,” Green said.
The diversity program is overseen by an advisory council comprised of prominent Chicago figures that work in tech, including Shelton Banks, the CEO of re:work, Lindsay Knight, the director of platform at Chicago Ventures, and Amy Dordek Dolinsky, the co-founder and managing director of business development at GrowthPlay.
“They were instrumental in helping us devise the program in general," Green said. "And they are going to be helping us select which candidates we want to accept into our first cohort.”
