Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on sales, featuring Celine Duros, a woman who started her career in sales at 16 and is now both an experienced sales director in emerging markets and consultant to entrepreneurs seeking the secrets to successful sales – whether you’re pitching yourself, managing teams, or selling a specific product.

Celine Duros sold earrings at a holiday market in France, transitioned to men’s fashion, and only realized after business school that sales was her true calling. She moved to Ghana a decade ago and has honed her craft by working across 25 African markets, building relationships first and selling second. With so much experience selling and consulting across the African continent, she has stories to tell and lessons to share with entrepreneurs everywhere.

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways

Actions speak louder than words

“If I had been in touch with the actual decision maker, I would have seen that there was some skepticism and the value was not as clear. You can trust the word, but really, if you want to forecast, look at the actions, cause that's where you're going to be able to actually see through.”

Stay involved in sales

“One common mistake that I've seen is that CEOs or cofounders that are not comfortable with sales, they delegate to team members. And there's so much at stake ‘cause you know, sales keeps the lights on, but it's also what gets the company to grow.”

Document your sales process

“There's usually no documentation, and that's usually what I see in a lot of organizations that I work with. Not transferring, not having an actual way of selling, not providing the tools and just like, ‘Oh, you come to meetings with me and then you learn from that.’”

Review every rejection

“Frame it from a research perspective. Actually have a discussion with the client straightaway and say our goal is to make sure that we improve our solution to make our customers happy, so I'd love to get your feedback and it's just no pressure. It's just, I'm doing research. I'm not here to sell you again after you already said no.”

Tell stories, and have a library to draw from

“Telling a story of who I am as an individual and why I work for this company, telling a founder story, a vision story, who-my-customers-are story, this is going to be building the trust, whatever topic, I have a story library of about 32 stories that you can use at every stage of the sales process.”

Listen to know what stories to tell

“I always tell my team, don't be a product pusher, be a solution finder. You can abuse storytelling if you just throw stories all the time and you don't throw the right story at the right time.”

Listen to Duros’ sales advice spanning topics like delegation, emotional intelligence, compensation, bullshit radars, and more.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the do’s and don’ts of pitching VCs, featuring Zach George, general partner at Launch Africa Ventures, one of the leading early-stage venture capital funds on the continent. Sitting in the investor seat gives George valuable insights on what entrepreneurs should and shouldn’t do to attract the right kind of investment for their company.

After earning a master’s degree at Stanford University and spending over a decade on Wall Street, Zach George turned a vacation to South Africa into a lifelong career … and, ultimately his home. He instantly saw Africa’s potential as a hub for innovation, but felt that funding for start-ups was very old school. What’s more, he recognized that African entrepreneurs required more than just capital, they needed mentorship, connections, and intellectual capital. So he created a unique venture capital firm to provide it all.

To date, Launch Africa Ventures has raised $36.2 million, making it the largest early-stage fund in Africa. After meeting with so many founders seeking funding, George has plenty of advice to share.

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways

Due diligence is your responsibility, too.

“It is almost impossible to find founders that can put themselves in your shoes as the investor. They've done thorough diligence on us as a fund and our portfolio companies and they can convince us how our portfolio companies can be better off because of what they do. That, for me, is a no-brainer.”

Be open to advice.

“I always say founders should get VCs as coaches, not captains. We don't run the ship, but we coach you, right? Now, if as a founder, you're not coachable, then that is an immediate red flag.”

Understand your customers.

“Retaining customers is a lot easier than getting new customers. So if that simple equation makes sense, why aren't you incentivizing your existing customers to refer you to other customers, right? Understanding unit economics is super, super, super important. You know, the tech is almost irrelevant, if you don't understand your customers.”

Don’t overstate interest in your company.

“In Africa, there are about 35 to 40 credible VCs on the continent and we know most of them. So if someone walks into a room and says, ‘Oh, I've got a term sheet from this VC or this investor is very interested in me, and our rounds are almost closed,’ the reality is I'm going to WhatsApp the GPs of those funds almost immediately.”

Don’t underestimate how difficult it is to scale.

“If you're in South Africa or Nigeria, you can get away with just being in those markets up to your series A. But if you're in Uganda or Rwanda or Senegal, you really have to be thinking about cross-border expansion prior to series A. And not having a roadmap for that is a yellow flag. The wrong answer is always ‘it's not relevant, I'm not there yet.’ If you're the CEO you better have a plan for how you're gonna expand to multiple markets.”

Make sure your IP is in an investor-friendly jurisdiction.

“You've got to be clean from a legal and tech perspective. So the most common structure is you have a holding company in Delaware and you have multiple local operating subsidiaries. And the Delaware holdco owns 100 percent of all the African subsidiaries. And the investors only invest at the holdco. You've got to have that set up before you talk to a VC.”

Listen to George’s advice to founders, plus his insights on the changing demographic and economic landscape in Africa, his thoughts on AI, and his desire to create a value chain of funding with blended capital that goes beyond just equity.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on downsizing with Esi Ansah, executive director of the Center for Leadership at Ashesi University and founder of Axis Human Capital, an organizational development consulting firm. From managing team morale to ensuring your downsizing plan is data driven, Ansah provides a clear blueprint for leaders facing tough HR decisions.

Without a doubt, downsizing is one of the most dreaded tasks – for CEOs and employees alike. Which is why Esi Ansah tries to prepare leaders to handle it with clarity, effective communication, and compassion. And she also reminds small to medium-size businesses that, regardless of size, every company needs to have policies and plans to deal with downsizing.

Key Takeaways

Gather data – before you even think about downsizing

“The most common mistake is the lack of data documentation. It always comes back to bite you. When you need to downsize, you need to justify every decision that you make.”

Honesty can be the hardest part of downsizing

“Sometimes it shocks people because they didn't see it coming, and they didn't see it coming because perhaps the leader in that organization did not articulate it clearly enough or, in the bid to avoid causing fear and panic, they actually avoid telling people the full truth.”

Communicating bad news requires data, transparency, empathy, and support

“One of the best things you can do, especially for SMEs, is: don't wait till all the decisions have been made and then, bam, you just release the information. Once you get a sense of whatever change in your circumstances is driving the need for downsizing, start with just sending out a couple of feelers and, you know, soft communication.”

Always follow your local labor laws

“If you skip any of those loops and an unhappy employee wakes up to the reality that, hey, I don't think I'm being treated fairly, and then off they go – sometimes without coming back to you to say, look, I realize that you've skipped some steps here. They go straight to the labor commission. And then once they call you in, that's not pleasant.”

CEOs shouldn’t offload everything to HR

“Visibility of leaders is extremely important in a time like this. The last thing you want is HR feeling already overburdened and probably handling all the pressure that comes from the team. But when you have a CEO who would go around, you know, walk the floor, talk to people, and where there's anything that he can do, you know, he does it and he makes it very visible.”

Communicate your vision for AFTER the downsizing

“If you focus on the reason why you're downsizing and you don't focus on what you are evolving to do differently, you will have people who see the doom and gloom and there's really nothing that inspires them about the future. That's dangerous. You lose more people that way.”

Listen to Esi Ansah’s advice on how to identify –— and, more critically, avoid – the most common pitfalls of downsizing. Learn how clear policies and transparent communication can help minimize messy post-layoff negotiations and allow leaders to focus on supporting laid-off employees through the transition, as well as those who stay.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategic HR with Rokhaya Ndiaye, CEO and founder of Ro&Partners, a human capital consulting firm. Gain valuable insights and strategies for shaping your organization’s long-term goals and aligning your people strategies to meet future challenges.

When it comes to dealing with humans, whether growing a talent base in a global marketplace or downsizing to meet long-term goals, Rokhaya Ndiaye (who goes by Ro) recommends employing empathy, using cultural sensitivity, and making a break from post-colonial mindsets. Ndiaye, whose company is headquartered in Senegal but conducts business internationally, understands firsthand the existing bias that talent only comes from the West. Her mission: to unlock the potential of Africa through its people. And she believes every company – private or nonprofit – should be strategically investing in its people.

Key Takeaways:

Think strategically

“Strategic HR is HR that is supporting the organization for the future. This is everything you do in terms of creating the stage for the organization to have the change management framework to be able to adapt to the changing ecosystem environment, as well as projecting themselves in the future.”

Rethink one-size-fits-all compensation

“The smart companies are adjusting to this global market we are in, they're running away from these international versus local packages. It’s about how you are paying a job, not how you are paying a local versus a national, an international person.”

Consider the impact of downsizing on those who stay

“At some point we have to downsize. But when it comes to people, we need to understand that downsizing has a very negative impact on people, but not only the people that are leaving the organization, the people that are staying as well. So we need to just make sure that we are very transparent and have a strong communication plan.”

Let people go with care

“The better you plan it, the easier for you to get through it as a company because that's not where you want your energy to go. You have to have a level of empathy, especially at a leadership level, to show people that you care.”

Listen to Ro Ndiaye’s advice to entrepreneurs and HR leaders for building strategic HR frameworks that align with your company’s values and adapt to regional and cultural realities.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on leadership with Collins Dobbs, a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in leadership and a seasoned executive coach. According to Dobbs, becoming a truly phenomenal leader requires a deeper understanding of both yourself and your team, enabling you to navigate tough conversations, develop real connections, and create a culture where people feel safe to offer real feedback.

As an executive coach, Collins Dobbs has worked with senior leaders across industries to help them navigate complex team dynamics and enhance their emotional intelligence. As an instructor for the popular Interpersonal Dynamics course (affectionately known as "Touchy Feely"), he also helps young leaders in the Stanford GSB classroom to foster self-awareness, communicate more authentically, and develop the building blocks for effective leadership in their personal and professional worlds.

Key Takeaways

Be a signal generator

“People are looking for leaders to communicate how they navigate in the good times, but also in the challenging times. Are they open to innovation? Are they open to ideas? Are they open to creating opportunities for success and failure? That's a big job of leaders to generate those signals to say, it's okay. We welcome mistakes and risks as long as we learn from them and fix them going forward.”

Be open to giving and receiving feedback

“We come in and we have thoughts. And often underneath those thoughts are feelings. And so while the thoughts sometimes say what's important to us, oftentimes the feelings signal how important they are. We try to help the students understand both their thoughts and their feelings. And then as they interact with each other, understand their intentions, the impact of the behavior, and what comes up for them and what comes up for others as well.”

Embrace the unknowing

“A piece of leadership is about: What do I do in the not knowing? I don't know exactly what I need to know when markets change, when staffs change, when skills change. That's part of leadership. And part of it is, is a willingness to stand in the unknowing and a trust in oneself and others that we can figure it out.”

Make sure you have the right support system

“I think peer groups are tremendously important. If it's a CEO roundtable, or a group of alumni, do you have a circle of people where you can really be authentic? Because you're not alone.”

Lead with space, pace, and grace

“Can we pause? Can we create an understanding? Can we see where we're missing expectations from each other? Can we state what those expectations are? And then can we make a plan in terms of how we're willing to work together to meet that?”

Listen to Collins Dobbs’ advice to aspiring and experienced leaders on how to become not just a good leader, but a phenomenal one.

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Every entrepreneur understands the critical importance of sales to business success. But often, in the early stages of growth, teams tend to focus on marketing without having a strategic plan or process for how to turn leads into sales. Yann Le Beux, co-founder of a research and design firm in Senegal, and Zia Yusuf, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Stanford Seed consultant, share their experiences and strategies for building and strengthening your sales strategy.

Yann Le Beux’s company, YUX Design, focuses on creating user-centered designs that address the unique needs of African markets, helping their clients to bridge the gap between global tech and local context. But Le had his own gap to bridge — between marketing efforts and sales conversions. Zia Yusuf, who has taught at Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner School of Design, lent his expertise in innovation and design thinking to help Le Beux and his team realize that their marketing and sales strategies must be aligned with the needs of specific customer segments. “You don't sell to companies, you sell to human beings,” Yusuf advises. “You're selling to very large organizations, but they're not your client and it's not even the business unit that's your client. It's not even the head of that business unit. There could be actually two, three different roles – and understanding how to sell to those people and individuals was kind of a little bit of a breakthrough as well.”

Le Beux admits that his small company didn’t grow quickly because it was constrained by talent issues. “But as soon as you start growing, you realize you have to feed all these people ready to work and you need to be much more consistent in your approach to business development and stop behaving like a spoiled child where clients come to you naturally,” he says.

Le Beux’s process started with creating a strong product-market fit for each of his business units, honestly assessing the competition, and transitioning from targeting companies to connecting with key decision makers. Yusuf also advises entrepreneurs to think about the true cost of sales and the effort required to get something. “When you're at an early stage as a company, you feel that every dollar that comes in is fantastic, but it may have taken 60 percent of the company working for three weeks to respond to an RFP which leads to a small dollar amount of revenue. You want it. So you're excited, but should you have spent those three weeks and 60 percent of your team pursuing a different opportunity in a different way?”

Hear how Le Beux and Yusuf worked together to balance marketing and sales while trying to scale, plus stories of partnering with Google and meeting the demands of a tech giant, along with strategic pricing during a global recession.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on cross-cultural dynamics with Michele Gelfand, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior. Gain new insights and strategies for understanding your company’s culture – from tight to loose – and how you can use that knowledge to build cultural intelligence in your organization, navigate interactions, enhance company-wide innovation, and drive business growth.

Companies and countries can be a lot like people. Some are tight. Others are loose. Neither is inherently good or bad, according to Michele Gelfand, a leading expert on the impact of organizational culture and the best-selling author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.

Gelfand says this important and often invisible force can drive behavior and ultimately performance – which is why she finds the subject so fascinating and why she believes entrepreneurs should pay attention to culture as they build their leadership and business.

Key Takeaways

Culture matters

“If we don't understand culture, we're putting ourselves and our businesses at risk. All cultures have rules, and they're really one of our best inventions because they help us predict each other's behavior and coordinate. They're the glue that keeps us together.”

Tight vs. Loose

“Tight cultures have strict rules and very reliable punishments for when you deviate from rules. They restrict the range of behavior that's permissible in any context. Loose cultures have weaker rules, their wider range of behavior that's permissible.”

Strive for flexible tightness

“Loose cultures are more creative, but they don't necessarily scale up. Tighter cultures are better able to implement and scale up, but they're not as good at coming up with these really novel ideas. And so the big trick here is: How do you bring together both of these elements?”

Watch out for resistance to cultural change

“Try to balance accountability and empowerment, but pay close attention to pushback. Extreme change can be very threatening for people's sense of control, predictability, and order that's really needed in these contexts. And what we know is that we need to manage these sources of resistance.”

Listen to Michele Gelfand’s advice to entrepreneurs for creating culturally ambidextrous organizations and learn more about her future research. Don’t forget to take Gelfand’s quiz for determining where you and your team fall on the tight/loose spectrum.

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Is AI part of your business strategy? Well, if it’s not, it probably should be. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Arun Jagannathan, two-time entrepreneur, enthusiastically agree on that. In this episode you’ll gain strategic insights and practical tools from an AI visionary and hear how one intrepid entrepreneur is pushing himself and his company to embrace AI.

Arun Jagannathan is the founder of not one, but two, startups in India. CrackVerbal helps students prepare for exams and make smarter career decisions, and Yzerly enhances corporate communication through innovative training programs. Jagannathan says, “Many employees today are asking: What is our AI strategy? Because nobody is in a bubble. Everybody is hearing this, right? And they know that if we are on a growth path, on a growth trajectory, then AI has to be a part of the strategy.” So, he’s experimenting and adapting across different facets of his business to reap the full benefits of AI.

Ethan Mollick is here to help. He’s a professor, blogger, and best-selling author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, a practical guide for thinking and working with AI. Mollick’s practical experience, deep research, and endless curiosity enable him to guide entrepreneurs on the AI journey so they can tackle it more practically, systematically, and creatively. He begins by asking entrepreneurs four questions in the face of AI: What special thing have you done that is no longer important? What impossible thing can you now do? What can you move down market or democratize? What can you have upmarket or personalized?

“I think if you think about those sets of ideas, you end up in pretty good shape,” Mollick says. He also places great importance on keeping “humans in the loop” and so does Jagannathan. “What AI does is, it makes good very easy, but great is still very hard,” Jagannathan explains.

Hear how Jagannathan answers those four important questions and learn how to ask them of yourself and your company while navigating the challenges that companies and employees face when integrating AI into their businesses.

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