Chloé Lopes, a Sales Engineer with Nuxeo for two and a half years, plays a crucial role on the Nuxeo Sales team. She works with clients in private industries across France and throughout Europe – both generating new business as well as nurturing current clients to ensure complete satisfaction with Nuxeo’s subscription services. Passionate about open source principles, Chloé happily fills the position at Nuxeo because both Chloé’s and Nuxeo’s ethics align perfectly. Make sure to stop by and meet Chloé in person at the Nuxeo booth at Documation in Paris on March 20-21.
What are your main responsibilities in your role at Nuxeo? I cultivate strong relationships with customers, and these positive relationships begin by helping the potential client evaluate our content management system. I provide demos of the products and review the potential client’s list of requirements to ensure that Nuxeo offers the best solution for the potential client’s use case. Once we decide the Nuxeo Platform and our subscription offerings fit the potential client’s needs, I sell the client a subscription. After that, I make sure the client is happy with the subscription she purchased and wants to renew her contract. Basically, if a customer has any questions or topics to discuss, whether it is technological or commercial, I will be her main point of contact at Nuxeo, and I will work with the Nuxeo teams to answer her question.
What brought you to Nuxeo? The fact that it was an open source solution. I had worked in software companies before, but they sold their licenses. After working for proprietary companies, I felt that open source really was the future for the software world. I also saw an opportunity to work with European accounts, and that interested me.
Where are you originally from? I am originally from France, but I can’t tell you exactly where because I moved a lot. I lived pretty much everywhere in the country!
I heard you spent some time in the United States when you were young; how was that experience? Actually, I was 13 years old when I moved to Atlanta. It was really great; I lived the American Dream as a teenager, so I loved it. I stayed there for three years because my father had sold his company to an American company.
Is it challenging to work with customers and prospects from different countries and cultures? How do you adapt your approach to different situations? It’s not difficult; however, it’s really challenging and interesting. I go from working with Spanish customers to German customers, and I find that, basically, most European countries we work with like a direct approach. In France though, it is a bit old-fashioned; you have to be careful how you speak to customers. For example, you don’t refer to them using their first name right away; you have to build a relationship first.
How do you make sure the customer’s project is going well after they sign the contract and the customer is happy with Nuxeo? I call them often! Really often. What I like about this job is that we sell the customer what they actually need. We make sure Nuxeo fits the potential client’s needs before we sell them a subscription service. Nuxeo is very ethical in this regard; our sales team is really not just about making money. We won’t sell anyone a subscription that isn’t useful for their project. Because of this, most of our customers are really happy with Nuxeo. I try to call customers regularly to check on their progress, discuss their project and check if they need any help.
What has been the most interesting customer project you have worked on? All projects seem interesting to me. It can be a really small project or a huge, challenging one; it’s always different and you always learn a lot.
Do you have competitions within the Sales team? Not at all, and that’s great. It’s an amazing team. I had been used to very competitive environments in my previous sales experience, but here, it’s a very nice working environment. We all help each other a lot and it’s very encouraging.
What are you working on currently and what are your goals for 2013? Today, I am working on some very big deals. They’re very interesting but I cannot discuss them since we haven’t received their decisions on whether or not they will work with us. They are huge projects worldwide, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed. My main goal for 2013 is to gain new customers while ensuring the ones we already have stay happy with Nuxeo.
What percent of your sales go through partners? How is it different to work with partners rather than directly with the customer? Almost all of our sales go through partners, but we usually still have a direct contact with the end customer as well. So, I would say that working with partners is kind of like working with coworkers: We have strong relations with them and are used to working together.
Rumor has it that you have a cooking blog and even were in a two-day cooking competition on television against a famous French chef! Can you tell me more about your blog and how you started it? Also, tell us more about your cooking competition! I really love cooking and I always had friends coming over, asking for my recipes. That’s when I decided to start a blog so that I could share recipes and my friends could pick which recipes they wanted from the site. I often looked at various other blogs to find new recipe ideas, and that’s where I came across this small competition. I decided to give it a try, so I uploaded my recipe online and it was selected. I joined the competition and made it to the semi-finals where we had to cook with this French chef for a day. It really was an amazing experience. I didn’t win, but it was an awesome experience with great people.