Amid lockdowns during the pandemic, Ali joined the UK Reward Gateway team as an Employee Engagement Consultant. It's his job to support businesses with their employee engagement objectives & challenges. With his expert understanding and passion for innovation, creativity and people, he loves working with diverse businesses across the country to help them achieve their company goals. His favourite projects have included showcasing company culture and values, uniting employees during times of high change or connecting employees to mission and purpose.
With over two years of life at Reward Gateway, we asked Ali to share his journey and what it's like to be part of the mission to make the world a better place to work.
Tell us a little bit about yourself...
I live in London, in South London, but I was brought up in Henley-on-Thames. Some of the past times I enjoy would be going out, spending time with friends, spending time in nature, and doing sports, such as rugby or cricket or tennis. Since university, I've been in sales now for probably seven years or so.
What's different about Sales at RG?
There's a very inclusive culture. For many reasons, it's different. People don't stab each other in the back. People support each other, and we grow as a team. And that's not just here in the UK. That's a team across the UK, Australia, and the US. There's a lot of crossover between us all. There's a lot of learnings to be had as well, which I think is a really powerful for all of us.
What's it been like for your career development?
So, as part of our onboarding process, we learned a lot about ourselves through insights. I got to learn what colours I am and how I work, then from the learning and development, we've got a lot of great people in our team here that have been here for a very long time. They've seen it all. They've done it all. They've signed some really big clients so being able to learn from them and being able to put the time in their calendar is really, really important.
Also, we're really lucky to spend some time out on a negotiation day, at an offsite day, which was fun. We had a brilliant negotiation teacher called Robert Coles, who used to be a UN negotiator. We all took a lot from that day, and it's been great.
Recently, we've started a new course called Sales Impact Academy, where we're managing the complete sales cycle. I personally have learned so much stuff from it, and it means we get to engage with a lot of people in the sales world as well.
Sounds great, what's a normal day like in the life of RG Sales?
A normal day for me is quite varied. Especially if I'm working from home I make a big effort to get outdoors for a walk or a run or do something to kind of break up the getting out of bed and then going into my lounge and doing work. If I'm at the office, I'll try and get some walking in on the way here. So maybe get off the tube at Oxford Circus and head down amongst all the other commuters.
In my work day, it varies a lot. You know, we can have a lot of discovery calls where we get to speak with new clients. So to do that, we get to speak with the Research team a lot. We learn about the business. We learn about the contact, who they are, and their challenges and look at the similar stories and companies we have already to help build value.
After a discovery call, we debrief with the Sales development representative that we work with or are partnered with, and we can talk about the challenges and how we're gonna go through the next steps. So that's one part of my day.
We also do demonstrations or web tours. So that'll be talking people through our solution, seeing if or where we'd be able to add value to them and showing what we've done with similar clients with similar challenges. Either side of that, there's lots of follow-ups. That can be an email, that can be a proposal, that can be a business case, or a presentation. Alongside that, we manage all our existing pipelines. Seeing how everybody's getting on, schedule catch-up calls, and maybe organise further calls with senior leaders or board-level executives.
And we have a lot of time as a Sales team together. So that can just be as an SMB Consultancy team sharing and learnings, or we have learnings with the wider Consultancy team. We often have meetings with Marketing because we have a very close relationship with them. They will update us regularly about, you know, what's going on in the market, what they're doing, what they've noticed, any new content coming. We have the same with our product team as well. There's a real mix. It can get really busy, but everyone here is very supportive.
What does our 'We Love Our Job' value mean to you?
I love selling our products because we are the best in the market, and I know I'm slightly biased. It's great to have so much credibility behind us. We've got a lot of pedigree now that we've been around 15 or 16 years. We've grown a huge amount. Others within the industry have followed us, which is very flattering as well.
We have some amazing client stories and clients to lean back on. We have an incredible product that our team spends a lot of time putting together and making sure it's absolutely optimal. Then we also have a fantastic service level. We have a really big Client Success and Support team. I know that if I'm selling a product and bringing a client on board, they're gonna be looked after as well.
If you're keen to learn more about our Sales team and the opportunities to work with our talented team, visit rg.co/careers.