Gaelyn Bufton

I attribute my success to myself, which sounds selfish, but I'm very lucky to have a lot of really influential women in my life, and men. As women, I think it's really important that we surround ourselves with other really strong women. Honestly, I contribute a lot of the success that I've seen to some of the hardships I went through as a child. I didn't grow up in a super wealthy family, I grew up in a very wealthy community, but not in a super wealthy family. We have some history of mental health things on both sides, and growing up wasn't always the easiest thing. I obviously don't want to have to relive those experiences, but they're what made me who I am today. I had a parental figure in my life who was not ideal - he was a clinical narcissist, he was my former stepfather. I will never attribute my success to him, but the actions that he took and how he impacted my life and my family certainly made me fight back. He's not the reason I'm successful, but his actions are the reason that I took it upon myself to define my own success.

Negotiate your salaries. There's this really upsetting statistic - something along the lines of 60% of women have never negotiated their salary, while 60% of all men do negotiate their salary. Any additional bump you can get to your salary now is going to make a massive impact in your career. Any woman who's scared that they're gonna have a job offer taken away - I've never had a job offer taken away, and I've always been able to get something when I negotiated. It only didn't happen once when the company just didn't do it, but every other time I've negotiated my salary, I've always gotten something in return. Last time I did it, I was taking a pay cut for a promotion because I was no longer going to be in an outside sales role. I came back and said, look, I love this role, I want to take this role, but I'm looking for a little bit more in terms of compensation, so I offered 3 different options. I said, you can either meet me somewhere close to this number, or here are 2 other options that weren't salary-based. One of them was equity, one of them was a roadmap of how can I get to a promotion by this time next year. They came back and met me in the middle and gave me the equity. The worst they're gonna say is no, and you have to make the decision if that's something you can move forward with or not.

Being in sales, nobody's gonna tell you that it's an option in business school. Sales still gets a really, really bad rep in our community, which is hilarious, because no company would be successful if there wasn't a sales team. People still think of Danny DeVito's character in Matilda as a gross used car salesman. I would say just explore, ask questions, seek out mentorship, never be afraid to reach out to somebody and ask them a question. We always hear there's no such thing as a dumb question. When you're early in your career, just explore things and try things. Don't be afraid to fail. If you fail, you're gonna learn something from it. Reach out to other people that you admire in your community, and just ask them what they do and why they like it, because there is no correct path to get to where you want to be. It's all about embracing the opportunities that are presented to you. If you don't end up liking it, it's okay. We have this really strong feeling of if I don't do it right, I'm gonna fail, and I'm never gonna be able to bounce back. I have failed. I've bounced back. We assign these big grandiose feelings and impacts to some things that really, when you kind of zoom out, are not as life-altering as they feel like they are in that moment. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to ask the right questions, or ask the wrong questions. Just don't be afraid to be curious. That's the only way forward.

The biggest challenge in sales right now is that there's a lot of layoffs happening, and there's a lot of people just getting blindsided by their companies. When I interview these candidates, I'm hearing all these stories about what's happened to them. It's just a hard field to be in. It's a really performance-heavy field, and I think, especially if you're thinking about women in this field, it goes back to not being afraid to ask questions, ask for assistance, and if you fail, what did you learn from it? There's also a huge shift with technology happening. We do AI - we're an AI-based platform, and that's fantastic, but we have people behind the platform that are powering it. I think it's just really important to be unapologetically yourself. I meet these people every day who give me this buttoned-up version of somebody, and I'm able to draw out their personality, but I only get 2 minutes of their personality in a 45-minute interview. If their 45 minutes had been all them, they may have gotten hired, but because they just kind of talked around certain answers, or they weren't honest, they miss out. I can have somebody tell me a story that's something really not great that happened, but if they're honest about it, and honest about how they overcame it, and they get specific, I'm gonna be way more inclined to push harder for that candidate. It's really important to put your best foot forward, but also put your own foot forward. You don't want to pretend to be something else, because that's never going to get you where you want to be. Sales is a pretty male-dominated industry, so just don't be afraid to be yourself.

Honesty, loyalty, and persistence are really important to me, but also just human empathy. Not looking at somebody like they're just an employee, but they're another person, and they have their own life going on. Authenticity is probably the number one, especially in the role that I have where I'm interviewing individuals all day long. We show up to interview professional and buttoned up, right? But I want to know how you're going to show up to work every day. I want to know how, on your best day, you're going to show up to work being authentically you, because you're not going to show up as a buttoned-up professional every day. You're not going to show up as a walking resume. You're going to show up as yourself with your personality. Humor's really important to me, just being able to shoot the shit for a minute.