Luba Ismakov: Leading Women in Tech

We were delighted to welcome Luba Ismakov to our Women in Tech webinar in December 2022 and promote her in our Leading Women Series.

Find out how Luba finds the tech industry, alongside her tips for women coming into the sector.

Luba Ismakov: My name is Luba Ismakov. I’m a Sales Director at Samsara, which is a connected operations platform. The goal is to increase sustainability in the efficiency and in the world of physical operations, and I have been with a company for about five years that’s spanned, two different continents.

So you can maybe top in my accent. I’m originally from the US spent the majority of my career there. I moved out to head up our team in India. I’m super passionate about bringing more women into tech, specifically at my company and more broadly because we have more leadership opportunities accessible to women.

I remember my first role as a Sales Leader, when the hiring manager brought me into a room and said, “we were bringing people in to get feedback on the interviews” and instantly I thought it’s not going to be me. It’s going to be the other candidates that are interviewed and I think that sense of impostor syndrome that many women struggle with is a reality for a lot of us. So since then five, or six years ago, my focus has been on how can we minimise that voice and support each other. We need to build mentorship and community so that more women can feel that they can have a seat at the table.

Zoe Haydn Jones: What challenges have you faced as a woman in tech sales? And how did you deal with them? 

Luba Ismakov: So just a little on my background, obviously tech in and of itself being a woman in the tech and a minority in the space. It’s a challenge because whenever you walk into a room and you are different than the majority of other people you’re naturally going to feel like you have to step up more and you naturally have to find your space and your place in that environment. That being said in sales, that is an additional challenge because you’re getting rejected a lot, you are constantly referring back to that resilience. So I I believe it can make it challenging. I think on the flip side something that I’ve seen as a positive trend in the last several years at least at my company is that we really do our best to hold ourselves accountable to certain goals. So for example, if we say, we want to hire more women in leadership, that’s great, but what does that mean? What are the actual percentage increases? We want to see what are we doing to empower women in those roles. What are we doing to ensure that we can retain and support them? And for me, that is a massive step forward and there’s still so much work to do in terms of finding the right talent as a sales leader, as someone going out, and then trying to find those individuals. I recognise, there’s just not a lot of people that are interested in the same way, but I think, once you, you do have people on the team, it’s thinking about how do we ensure everyone has an equitable experience that they feel included that they feel they have a sense of belonging.

So I think the challenge is in ensuring that we’re not just a minority in the conversation and then if we are a minority, how do we actually just openly discuss that topic and set realistic goals and start implementing improvements there?

Zoe Haydn Jones: Did it take you long to climb the career ladder? 

Luba Ismakov: So I’m a Sales Director, I was pretty fortunate and it was in a very high-growth company. I had a male leader that really believed in me before I even got into leadership and he basically said, I know you don’t have the experience but I fundamentally believe you can do the job and be successful and years later, I still reach out and tell him exactly what you did for me is what we need to do with more women. It brings them up on the journey because a lot of women are told early on in life that we’re not, we’re bucketed into, this is what you should be doing. And so to unlearn that and to actually be at a point where we believe that we deserve to be at the table that takes a little bit more work than then our male counterparts. And I think it’s the responsibility of organisations to do that work and sometimes it’s harder. Sometimes it means, it just slows down your recruiting process. Sometimes it means you have to implement policies that are inconvenient, but it will eventually give people more access to opportunities, and create a more diverse work environment which, we know from the data that those companies actually do a lot better in terms of revenue when you have a diverse workforce. So it’s a win-win. I just think it takes a bit more time to actually lean into those efforts.