Meet Sean Murphy, distinguished in sales, thriving in digital transformation

My reputation was built by how I could upsell guest suites, and I wanted to validate the assumption that I was good at selling. With that in mind, I left hotels and worked with a few different Chicago startups before settling into consulting about seven years ago. From there, I helped a Chicago consultancy build their outbound sales team. Since beginning in consulting, I worked with clients across a wide range of industries that includes manufacturing, agriculture and financial services. There have been some truly remarkable highlights in my sales career, including:

• Becoming the number one sales performer in a company’s 30-year history
• Closing $40M+ deals with Fortune 100 firms
• Creating a playbook and a sales process that was adopted globally across a 10,000+ person organization
• Seeing the stock ticker jump for clients on news of partnerships that I fostered

The worlds of start-ups and consulting enabled me to become an expert in what I do best — being a trusted partner with my clients. This expertise is what brought me here, to Kin + Carta, as the firm’s Vice President of Strategic Sales. I am accountable to working with our clients to help them identify and execute strategic initiatives tied to their digital transformations. I look at every interaction with prospects and clients at Kin + Carta as not just an opportunity to sell them our incredible services but to make their day and solve their problems.

Sales organizations take many different shapes and sizes. But when you look at expert sales organizations, it's typically groups of very hungry individuals who want to be the best and do their best, and that's who I like to surround myself with. It's one of the reasons why I came to Kin + Carta.

When I was interviewing for the role, it was clear that this is an amazing organization. Often when interviewing for a job, you'll interact with people and think, "I could see myself working with that person." But when talking to the team here, I had a mindset shift that made me realize I wanted to work with them. Coming to Kin + Carta was a breath of fresh air. I came from a 12,000-person organization to being here, where it feels much more like a family.

Selling projects that consultants are eager to work on is a passion of mine. The question then becomes, how do we sell exciting and impactful projects? Those are projects that transform organizations and go beyond lift and shifts or building digital products. Fortunately, at Kin + Carta, we have a team with deep expertise in industry verticals. The people who lead these verticals know all the ins and outs, and that's incredibly powerful. Not only do we have a solid lens and point of view on the future of that industry, but we also have all the engineering and transformation capabilities to move it forward.

We cater to the needs of our clients by determining the business outcome and the drivers of those initiatives. Often, people can get caught up in the minutia of the work right in front of them. We do a great job of looking at the journey ahead by considering everything holistically, especially what will affect sustainable change for our clients. We're not just coming in and writing a few lines of code, doing an assessment or providing a client with a document containing a new CX strategy. We evaluate their needs and deliver long-term sustainable growth for our clients.

We also have a tremendous focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, ensuring that we are bringing a lot of different lenses to the table when looking at solving problems. This is unique because other firms might say, "This is how we do it." We're not that dogmatic. Here, we bring everybody to the table, let them form their own opinion, listen to them and figure out the most expeditious way to solve the problem.

When you're working in an industry like ours that is high-tech and quickly evolving, you must be comfortable being uncomfortable. You know you're doing your job right in sales when you're putting yourself out there. But at the end of the day, our goal is to challenge clients to be the best version of themselves, and there's nothing about that that's easy or comfortable.

Looking ahead, I'm focused on how we continue positioning ourselves as strategic partners for our clients. It’s not just letting our work be talked about in boardrooms; it’s sitting with the executives in the boardrooms having the important conversations. Because if there's one thing we know about digital transformation, it's that things are moving fast. There are constantly new tech stacks, tools and methodologies that are brought to the table.

That said, transformations are never complete. There's no end in sight for a successful transformation. I want us to be our client's partner in that journey, but not just on a project-to-project basis. Instead, we're going hold their hand, walk down the path with them and truly affect change at their organization.