Employee Spotlight: Q&A with Emily Haberlin, SDR Enablement Team Lead at Nasuni

Nasuni sat down with Emily Haberlin, SDR Enablement Team Lead, to talk about her journey within the company and what drives her day-to-day. Emily joined Nasuni as an SDR in 2022 and, last year, became the first SDR to be promoted to SDR Enablement Lead. Since then, she’s been using her firsthand experience to identify career opportunities at Nasuni for SDRs, optimize processes, improve resources, and develop training — deepening the culture of collaboration and continuous learning across the team.

Q: You first joined Nasuni as a Sales Development Representative. What drew you to sales?

I started at Nasuni right after I graduated, so it was my first job. In my last year of college, I hadn’t fully decided what I wanted to do, but sales had always been in the back of my mind. What drew me to the SDR role was how much exposure you get to communicating with people, problem solving, and dealing with rejection. I thought that learning such valuable skills so early on in my career would be a great foundation.

Q: Do you remember what it was about Nasuni that first caught your eye?

I heard about Nasuni from an SDR who worked here and had rave reviews about the culture and the training. From my first conversations with Nasuni’s leadership and SDR management, I could tell that they were very invested in their teams and that they cared a lot about the growth of each SDR. It was clear that Nasuni didn’t constrain their SDRs to going into a seller role. Instead they were open to you getting exposure to different skills and teams. That definitely stood out to me. I’ve seen people go on to so many different teams here based on skills that their managers see in them.

Another ‘make or break’ in my job search was the product. I wanted to be a part of a company that was actually driving value and believed in the success of their product. Being able to articulate to customers that our solution solves real and complex challenges is what’s behind the success of Nasuni’s SDR team.

Q: For anyone who’s less familiar with what an SDR does, can you tell me what your role looks like today?

I was an SDR for two years and then, in October, I stepped into my new role as SDR Enablement Team Lead. I’m the first SDR to take on the role. Coming from doing the job just a couple of months ago, I bring a helpful perspective because I understand the grind really well.

My day-to-day involves working very closely with the SDR team. I love it because it’s so different every day. I’ll come in some days and do one-on-ones with the SDRs where I review their calls and give advice, and then the next day I’ll run a training, and the next we’ll do role plays. That’s what I love about sales in general — it’s constantly evolving and you have to come up with creative ways to stay on top of trends and stand out in a crowd of other sellers that are also talking to your prospects. I’ve really enjoyed that challenge.

Q: I’d be interested to know more about your approach to leading a team. What insights can you share?

There is a stereotype of sales organizations where the culture is: head down, at your desk, complete your tasks. It’s competitive — and not in a friendly way! But at Nasuni, it’s different. They’ve fostered such a collaborative and supportive environment. We have a lot of fun incentives in the office and we celebrate each other’s wins. So if someone’s having success, they’ll share that with the team. When I was in the seat, that was something that I really cared about doing. Whether it was an email that generated a good response or an SDR message, I would share it with everyone else. So stepping into the team lead role, I wanted to find a way to scale that so that the whole team could win. And it’s so easy to want that at Nasuni.

Q: Can you share a recent project that you’re proud to have worked on?

Stepping into this role right from actually doing the job meant that everything was fresh in my mind. I knew the gaps that I’d felt and I am now able to work on bridging those gaps for my team. As a new SDR, you get a lot of trainings thrown at you and it’s hard to balance that with getting your tasks done. So I’ve been working on revamping our ‘High Spot’ page, an internal resource for all SDRs. I’ve grouped the resources so that SDRs can access them from one place whenever they need to. If they’re on a cold call with a prospect and they need some information on one of our features, this resource puts it right there in front of them. Or if we have a relevant training, they can go back and quickly access it. It’s a resource that all the SDRs now begin their day on. Developing that was huge!

Q: Nasuni is growing pretty rapidly right now. What excites you most about the future in such a high-growth company?

We had our Revenue Kickoff event recently in Boston to go over the plans for 2025. My biggest takeaway from that is that right now is the best time to be starting at a company like Nasuni. We went over AI strategy and the different trends that are happening within our industries and the kinds of technologies our customers are adopting. And Nasuni is already solving all of the pain points that our industries are about to go through. That puts our SDRs in such a strong position because they can go out and say “What you’re going to go through in the next couple of years, with adopting AI technology and how that’s going to grow your company, is exactly the problem that Nasuni will solve”. From a product perspective, the opportunity that Nasuni has in the market is huge.

Q: What do you enjoy doing outside of work that your colleagues may not know about you?

Traveling is number one for me. I grew up in England and have a lot of family back there and I studied abroad in Barcelona when I was in college which gave me the biggest travel bug ever. Last year I was lucky enough to travel in Europe for a couple of weeks with my high school best friends. I also love concerts and live music so combining my love for traveling with getting to see my favorite artists in cool new places has always been very exciting for me. I have a couple of concerts abroad coming up this year.

Q: Are there any themes or trends that you’ve noticed about your own journey?

Throughout my career at Nasuni, one thing that has consistently contributed to my success has been collaborating with teams cross-functionally. There are so many different teams here that the SDR gets exposure to from so early on and I think it’s why the team is so successful and how they get ramped up so quickly. From day one, you work with marketing, with partners, with sales reps – all these people who have so much knowledge. Having one-on-one time with a seller who knows the product and knows the sales cycle, means that it just all clicks so much faster. I learned so much about the minds behind marketing, the events that they pull off, and how partners go into the field – stuff that I had no prior exposure to. That’s been my favorite part about working here: the SDR team does not feel segmented from the rest of the company.

If you’d like to learn more about career opportunities at Nasuni, check out our recent job listings here.