Welcome to Decoding Sales, a podcast where a sales person and an engineer talk about sales.

We're going to decode what really goes on in the sales process

and find not just how sales works but actually how a lot of the concepts in

sales apply much more generally. In this episode we're going to talk about the

importance of transparency and authenticity in the sales process.

My name's Alex Elaine.

I'm the engineer.

My name is Peter on and I'll be the salesperson.

All right, well, let's get kicked off,

maybe do a quick background.

Peter and I work together at Dropbox,

Peter closed Dropbox's first enterprise deal

back in 2013, and I helped with some of the engineering side of that.

And Alex, you're so helpful. I think the thing that I remember of that. Alex, you're so helpful.

I think the thing that I remember from that time is how collaborative you were, how you took the

time to explain things to me in a way that a salesperson could articulate, understand,

and convey to customers.

So years later, when you approached me for help on your current venture,

volunteering for U.S. digital response, I jumped at the opportunity and as you know, found that there's a lot of similarities and I just got so excited talking about how your experience today in a volunteer organization is actually highly relevant to some of the things that I saw in enterprise sales cycles.

I think that's a great way to kick this off. One of the things I was thinking about as I was preparing for this conversation

was a lot of people think of sales as like a very

icky kind of everyone's coin operated as you were describing it like follow the

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