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Women in sales make up only 26% of the profession, and it’s even worse in leadership roles at 16%. This episode explores initiatives to ensure a more diverse sales environment, why such environments benefit businesses, and how female sales reps can outperform men on specific KPIs.
From ballet dancer to SDR. From SDR to community builder.
Marie-Claire Silfer's path into sales is anything but conventional, and the communities she has helped create are already changing what the industry looks like in Copenhagen and beyond.
In this episode of Oplev Salg, Joakim Steenfos sits down with Marie-Claire Silfer, co-founder of Saleswomen Unite and Copenhagen chapter lead of Women of SaaS, to explore what it takes to build a more gender-diverse sales environment, why awareness is the critical first step, and what business leaders can do right now to make a difference.
Saleswomen Unite brings saleswomen in Copenhagen together in person to network, share experiences and hear from inspiring speakers. Women of SaaS is a global organization open to all women working in software, whether in sales, product, marketing or finance.
Both communities welcome male allies. As Marie-Claire puts it, the goal is not for women to preach to other women. The conversation needs to reach the men in the room too.
Only 26% of all salespeople are women. In sales leadership, that figure drops to around 16%.
Yet a Gong.io study of 30,000 sales calls found that women are 11% more likely to win a deal than their male counterparts. Research from Harvard Business Review points in the same direction: female salespeople are more likely to close their quota.
Getting those numbers in front of both aspiring saleswomen and business leaders is part of the work.
Joakim shares how Radiant moved from 14-15% female representation to 25% by taking a few deliberate steps. A internal working group of female colleagues reviewed recruitment processes and rewrote job descriptions to appeal to a broader audience. It cost nothing and it worked.
Simply asking the women in your organization what needs to change is, in itself, a meaningful first move.
Marie-Claire highlights a shift worth making inside organizations: moving from mentorship toward active sponsorship. Rather than a leader occasionally guiding someone, sponsorship means colleagues actively advocating for each other's careers and progression.
That dynamic benefits everyone, and it works across gender lines.
Marie-Claire started her sales career in finance in 2012. Looking back over ten to twelve years, she sees meaningful cultural progress. Gender diversity is no longer a taboo subject in most sales organizations. Clients are asking about team composition. The conversation is happening openly.
But the scale is still not balanced. The next step is making sure that visibility, sponsorship and community continue to push things in the right direction, so that more women feel welcome in sales and more leaders understand why that balance matters for their results.
These communities exist to bring women together to build their network, to empower them, to share experiences and to meet in person. I actually started Saleswomen Unite primarily to meet people. After Covid, I feel like everything stayed online and the need to bring in-person events and people together is important now more than ever.
I suppose I created Saleswomen Unite with little selfish reasons. What happened in my career was I was actually in a completely different industry before I got into sales. I was a ballet dancer previously. Seems a bit of a weird career transition, and it was. But why I did that career move was I had my second child and Covid happened. All the theatres were shut down and I was at home trying to stay in shape with a four-month-old baby running around my legs, and it was near on impossible. At that point I also thought, are theatres even going to open again? We didn't know. So I had a big career change, and it took a lot of processing for me. I landed a job in sales, became an SDR, and I suppose the rest is history from there.
At that point I felt I lacked a network. I went from one industry to another. I didn't know anyone. I only knew my small startup that I was part of. And luckily at that point I actually had a female CRO, and she was a huge inspiration to me. I knew just from facts on the internet that out of all salespeople, I think 26% are female. And those stats get even worse when you think about leadership. It's something like only 16% of sales leadership positions are held by women. That's nothing. So I was lucky to have one of those 16% as my leader. She encouraged me. I actually went to her with this proposal: should I build a community? Because I don't see one here in Copenhagen. I was looking, I was searching online, is there a community for saleswomen here? And there wasn't one. So I created it myself. And it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have my CRO at that point, and later on also at Dreamdata, having my colleagues encouraging me to do it and to start rolling with it.
For Saleswomen Unite, anyone that is a saleswoman in Copenhagen. We are meeting primarily in person. We do plan in the future maybe to do some things online, but the backbone of the community is that we meet in person. We have amazing speakers coming in. Our last event had the CEO of Altinget, Anne Marie Kindberg, who came in and gave a really inspiring talk. This is community driven as well, so a lot of our community members find inspiring speakers and bring them in, and their companies also sponsor the events. We are a nonprofit organization. If you're a saleswoman in any industry, B2B or B2C, we would love to chat to you. It's also a way of learning how different industries do sales.
For Women of SaaS, that's slightly different. It's a global organization, and myself and my co-lead for the Copenhagen chapter, Jasmine Hansen de Gulzman, opened this a few months ago. This is open to all women that work in the software industry. It could be that you're working in product, finance, marketing, whatever. If you work for a software company and you're a woman, you are more than welcome. We also love male allies. We don't want women just speaking and shouting to other women about this. It needs to be that guys recognize there is a problem that needs to be solved and ask how we can do it together.
Yes, and right before we went live I asked whether my colleagues could even join, and you said absolutely. For example, here at Radiant we have female role models on our board and in management, but not yet in top leadership. So I can encourage my female colleagues to join the community and get inspired by excellent top leaders like Anne Marie Kindberg. That's impressive.
I feel it's an important topic because especially in sales it's very male dominated. I think most companies, entrepreneurs and business leaders actually want a representative pool of candidates in terms of gender, and the facts remain that it's not balanced at the moment. A lot of people, including myself, aspire to have a more balanced pool of candidates, employees and colleagues. I think it's very important that we take different actions on the subject. The reason I reached out to you is because you were in my LinkedIn feed and I was inspired. I didn't even know that there were communities like this. As a male entrepreneur I cannot completely understand how it is to be a woman in sales. But I think that you and the communities are a way to create the awareness we need in order to be educated on the subject, so that we know it's not balanced as it should be and that we can do something about it. Even if it's small, we can do something.
And I think there are small things that organizations can also do to encourage gender diversity. It could be anything from branding to making sure that your job description is attractive for women. But I also wonder what you have done personally from your position to help that in your organization.
Going back a couple of years ago, I think around 14 to 15% of our organization were women. My board member Christina asked me, Joakim, we need to do something about it, it's not a representative pool. I completely agreed. We were aware of the bias, including around branding and communication. She proposed that we set up a work group. I asked my female colleagues if they wanted to contribute and make a difference. It was that simple. I asked them: do you want to join with our board, sit down in a work group a couple of times, evaluate, and then create some suggestions we can implement at Radiant to make a positive change? They came up with eight excellent actions. One of them was to improve our recruitment process in terms of job positioning and language so that it appeals to a broader and more gender-diverse audience, including women. It helped. It was a small thing. It didn't cost anything, and it made a real change. We are now up at 25% female representation in our organization, and we strive to do better.
Just asking your female representatives in your organization how we can change this is a huge step. It's the awareness. As a leader and CEO, understanding what's happening in your own organization and rooting for change to happen is important. We actually had a discussion about this recently around mentorship, but actually sponsorship. Changing it from mentorship, where typically a leader mentors an individual contributor, to sponsorship, where someone is actively sponsoring you internally. Your female employees helping each other, saying she's really ace at her job, how can we make her better, how can we progress her career? That's a really nice thing to have. And that can happen with your male colleagues as well. We all need male allies, especially within these organizations and communities. It's not that we females want to be preaching to other women. We need to preach to you guys and say, this is what's happening, how can we make a difference together?
I started my sales career in finance in 2012, then moved into Deloitte and professional services. Looking back ten to twelve years, I think it's progressed for the better, especially in terms of culture. The sales organizations I've worked in, especially within these industries, have been very male dominated. But I feel the culture is less male dominated now. Still male dominated, but less so. And from personal experience, I find it okay now to address and talk about the subject openly with my colleagues and my network. It's not a taboo. I experienced it to be a subject I felt I couldn't actually address ten years ago.
I didn't feel it was okay for me because I wasn't an expert in the subject. I experienced multiple times being told to hire a certain amount of a certain gender, and I had to execute it. I felt I wasn't in a position to question that or understand why those things were in place, because it felt like it wasn't something you could talk about. Now I see that sales organizations and our clients openly address the subject. Especially in the last two or three years, they ask questions like, Joakim, the team of consultants we're going to get from Radiant, what percentage of those teams are female? I've even experienced someone having it as a requirement. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's progressed, and in my opinion it's progressed for the better. This makes it easier for us to create awareness about the subject.
Yes, when it's okay to talk about it openly. We have it as a goal in terms of percentage of women. We showcase it in our strategy and our current organization. It's easier now to make a change for the better when addressing it so people can be educated. And speaking about being educated, I want to set the best team and provide the best results for my clients. When I read a study from Gong.io, for example, they evaluated 30,000 sales calls and concluded that women are 11% more likely to win a deal than their counterparts. That's very interesting. I also read a study from Harvard Business Review which mentioned that females are more likely to close their quota than their male counterparts. Those are facts that we need to get out there so that female employees who want to move into sales can be motivated by such numbers, and business leaders can see from facts that it's a good thing to balance the scale.
Definitely seeing both sides of it. It's attractive for women to see other women closing and hitting their goals and being in a really nice financial position. And for business leaders to see that as well, thinking: I need to encourage more women to apply for these roles. I need to promote and make sure that women feel comfortable in sales and think about how to make it more attractive for women to be in sales. I think that's super interesting, and I think awareness is the starting point of that. The more we talk about it and share those numbers, whether that's through social media, through your brand, or through your job description, I would recommend that even if you do have females who have been closing, just share it on social media. I think it's a fantastic thing to do.
I think it's inherently important. We're in 2024, and we need to make sure that women have an even seat at the table, not only for women, but for your organization. Women bring different skill sets and different energy than their male counterparts. If you have a diverse team, it only benefits your organization. You'll have better results, a more motivated team, and you'll be attracting talent as well.
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it's very important to have communities like Saleswomen Unite, because it will help the individuals, it will create an impact of change, and it also brings opportunities for business leaders to encourage their colleagues and employees to join such communities. We absolutely do have a responsibility to balance the scale. I still think there is a lot of way to go, especially within sales. But let's progress in the right direction and let's create awareness and education about it. That's step one, so more people can make a change for the positive.
Definitely. And I think sponsoring and being part of these communities can help not only your organization, but your female employees as well, to grow their network. I really believe your network is your net worth, and it will help them to progress in their careers and to grow their professional network. I think that's inherently important, especially for those who are new into sales.
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