Meet Dariia Gerasymova, the creative force behind Supercadence’s sales growth strategy. She believes in getting to know people personally, not just through stats but by being her true self in discussions.
Dariia’s LinkedIn has growth tips, sales lessons, and a unique style. Known for her humor, she’s the queen of weaving cartoons, memes, and pop culture into her posts, making sales advice fun, relatable, and unforgettable.
She’s a top performer, recently named one of Demandbase and Women in Sales’ Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Sales. And regarding results, Dariia is a powerhouse: she’s cracked the code on setting sales ads that boost booked meetings by a solid 1.54x. She even recently closed a $50,000 MRR deal and is not shy about breaking down her winning approach.
Get ready for a refreshingly cool take on B2B sales with Dariia!
Let’s start with a simple one: What does growth mean to you?
Well, it means you’re getting more revenue and more genuine conversations/ relationships that you can transform into other opportunities for your business.
Can you tell us a bit about your journey into growth sales?
Ten years ago, I entered the tech industry with a marketing focus. In 2021, I had a personal crisis and switched to B2B sales with no sales background. I joined WeLoveNoCode as a BDR (one of the fast-growing no-code startups currently acquired by TopTal), where I quickly led the sales team and turned a humble $3K MRR into a head-turning $50K MRR in just eight months. I tried managing the team but had no success, so I decided to start over with other startups. Now I joined Supercadence, a baby startup of the Influ2 company, and do my best to grow the brand by sales motion.
From your content on LinkedIn, it’s clear that building real connections is important to you. So, how do you measure the success of your outreach efforts beyond just numbers?
Honestly, it’s a hard question to answer. The numbers can’t lie, right? So it’s the main metric for me and the majority of sales reps. But also, I think, you should track some other metrics, like: who is tagging you on their posts, if people are ok with referring you to someone else, if someone can spend their valuable time time on talking with you…All of the factors matter.
If you had to highlight three key strategies that contributed to the growth of your client base, what would they be?
- Aligning your sales and marketing.
- Multichannel and multithreaded outreach.
- Combining the process and intuition when reaching out to people.
What does the statistic of booking 1.54x more meetings with sales ads mean for how you approach lead generation?
I won’t lie, it’s a know-how in outbound sales that converts leads into more conversations and closed deals. You are adding an additional outbound channel in the form of an advertisement targeting specific people via social media and tracking their engagement. By applying it, you know exactly who is interested in your proposal and reach out to them at the proper time. The result? 1.54x more booked meetings or 4x higher conversion in general.
Could you share your most significant achievement in boosting sales growth, along with a mistake you made that taught you a valuable lesson? What insights did you gain from both experiences?
I think that the most significant achievement yet is my personal LinkedIn brand, raised organically from 0 to 13K followers within 15 months. And it’s only the beginning 🙂
By having such a strong personal brand, I increase my chances of outreach being replied to as well as people coming to Supercadence as inbound leads. I think now it’s a powerful machine that couldn’t be stopped, haha.There was one mistake I wanted to spread awareness of so other sales reps wouldn’t repeat such a stupid mistake. So I reached out to an SDR leader and she replied that she thanked me for my outreach but she is not interested. Then, I thought I would reach out to her colleague by mentioning her and that we talked with her so maybe he would be a better person to talk to. He understood it like she was thinking of him as a better person to talk to but it was just miscommunication. And it turned out that they synced internally, finding me in a lie that I didn’t want to create.
The main outcome is to start building your own personal brand, don’t wait for too long 🙂 And…think twice about how you should mention exact people in communication with others.
In one of your recent LinkedIn posts, you talked about securing a $50,000 MRR deal. Can you share more success stories like that and walk us through the specific steps and strategies you employed to achieve those results?
There was a story about me not being scared to be proactive and never thinking only of the existing processes. They can always change, but when you hear your inner voice telling you that you need to react NOW, don’t wait—just do it and be an extraordinary person.
- Learn more on how to do deep research.
- Ask for advice and propose your vision of resolving the situation when talking to your manager.
- Reflect on what’s being done well and what requires some more improvement.
- Look for mentorship or take new courses each quarter.
- Try to wear the buyer’s shoes so it helps to understand their pains and feelings.
- Follow-up meaningfully.
- Build relationships over just selling.
Always be hungry to learn, test, and keep going.
What key metrics do you track to measure your sales performance?
Reply rates, the number of booked meetings, conversations, no-show-ups, outreach time, and channel conversion to understand what works best for my outreach.
Favorite tools or software for managing your sales processes—what makes them effective for you?
- Supercadence, of course. It helps me book more meetings by showing my messages and face on social media before my cold outreach.
- Prospeo and Apollo for contact data.
- Influ2 for contact-level intent.
- Outreach for sequences.
- Folderly Spam Checker to check my email copy (free, btw).
- My mind to research info for relevant personalization 🙂
Can you share your thoughts on how AI can enhance data analysis for SDRs? How does it affect their ability to target leads and improve outreach?
I think it’s streamlining the process of research regarding the relevance of outreach. By using triggers, you can reach out to a person at the right time. For sure, using AI tools is way faster than manual.
Or you can use AI to provide you with some insights & check your spelling and email scoring.
But I’m against using AI tools for massive outreach, it’s disrespectful.
As sales methods and technologies change, what new skills do you believe will be essential for sales professionals, let’s say… in the next 5 years? How should companies get their teams ready for these shifts?
Learn how to be creative, as robots can’t be as creative as humans. It’s just impossible for them to be the next Leonardo Da Vinci, right? So the same is true with your creative outreach.
Understanding how to write prompts is a new black, too.
Overall, my suggestion is to leverage AI tools for your daily routine but not to delegate it 100%, as one day you can wake up without a job…
Be yourself when doing sales and never stop learning!
