MongoDB ASEAN: How the Corporate Sales Team Is Scaling in One of MongoDB’s Fastest-Growing Regions

MongoDB is growing rapidly around the globe, but one region experiencing particularly significant growth this year is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Our ASEAN team works with customers in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Hear from members of our Sales and Presales team to learn more about how they’re growing their careers and MongoDB’s presence in ASEAN.

Hailey Dinh, Corporate Account Executive, ASEAN

I’m currently a Corporate Account Executive at MongoDB. I don’t know if it’s fate that brought me and MongoDB together, but I’m glad I’ve chosen this path. It’s cliché to use the people-process-technology framework to explain what makes me stay, but it’s true at MongoDB. People: supportive, knowledgeable, and helpful. Process: fast, efficient, and always evolving. Technology: beautiful products with constant updates. MongoDB is such an unexpected yet satisfying journey for me.

The most exciting things about my role are freedom and support. Freedom, as in we can always be creative and flexible with how we go about doing sales at MongoDB. We have full control of our daily schedules. Additionally, we’re always encouraged to share our initiatives and get recommendations from our leaders and colleagues on areas of improvement. Our leaders are very down-to-earth people who are willing to listen, mentor, and support their employees, so I feel less pressured by hierarchy and more open to sharing my ideas and concerns. For example, I initiated the idea of organizing an enablement workshop for our partners in Vietnam just a few months after joining MongoDB. I was immediately endorsed by our Leadership, Partner, and Marketing teams to own this initiative and run with the idea!

I feel like I’ve grown at triple the rate I expected. The accelerated growth, the collaborative environment, the high market demand, the constant product development, the endless learning opportunities — all these factors have driven me to adapt and grow way faster than I had expected. At MongoDB, we all have our fair share of exposure to a highly international environment where our colleagues and customers may sit across different geographies. In terms of career development, our leaders take our career aspirations seriously, and there are defined paths and programs to help sales reps grow into more senior or even managerial roles.

Our team culture is very positive. I feel like we are all each other’s mentors and mentees, which says a lot about the learning-from-each-other culture at MongoDB. I think what makes someone successful on the team is proactiveness and self-motivation. For a company with such a high growth trajectory, we have to be proactive and self-driven in the ways we identify and approach opportunities. “Go above and beyond” is the common trait I’ve seen from many successful Account Executives here. It’s impressive and motivating to see how the majority of MongoDB’s salespeople have attained and overachieved their KPIs quarter by quarter.

My goal is to make a strong impact in my role, and I’m proud of how I’ve driven several go-to-market initiatives in terms of marketing, partnerships, and social selling toward the Vietnam market that have helped increase MongoDB’s visibility in this country. I couldn’t do all these things without our leadership’s endorsement and other teams’ support. I’m thrilled about the business direction we’re heading in this year.

William Tan, Senior Solutions Architect, ASEAN

The energy and pace of MongoDB — especially in the ASEAN region — is, for lack of a better word, electrifying. Every day, we uncover customer needs and issues with real business impacts, identify their vision, and translate it all into tangible, technical requirements that can be fulfilled by MongoDB’s technology. At a personal level, it is an endless journey of deepening one’s understanding of databases, cloud, application development, and how it all fits together. There is a deep focus on continuous learning and sharpening our minds as we continue to hone our skills in the field.

It is this daily rigor that makes my role exciting. There are no moments of boredom as new questions force me to rethink what I know, and there is no greater joy than to witness the smiles and acknowledgement from our customers when they achieve their goals and resolve the problems they set out to.

Throughout the interview process, I discovered how easy, intuitive, and powerful it is to use Atlas as a database for everything, and the many rich and interesting platform features that come along with it. I even told myself it would be okay not to get the job, since the experience of trying was such an enriching and rewarding experience already. Thankfully, I was hired!

If I were to summarize the onboarding experience in a few words, they would be “rigor” and “a detailed training plan.” The onboarding process for a Solutions Architect consists of weeks of focused tasks and activities to complete, including online courses and demos, as well as reading tons of write-ups and presenting it all to fellow teammates and managers to obtain feedback on areas of improvement. I’ve never had an opportunity to learn with such seriousness before, and I am still using the training plan to keep my skills sharp. The SA onboarding rigor is key to preparing for day one and beyond in the field.

If you are looking for an opportunity to learn something new and work with people of great technical passion in a vibrant and open-minded team, then MongoDB could be a great place for you. Many of us on the SA team come from various backgrounds. Some have experience with databases, while others do not; some are developers, while others are purely infrastructure. Combined, this gives rise to interesting approaches and insights. There are so many things to learn from one another, and very soon you will realize there is more than one way to cook a dish. There is a willingness to share and empower one another, and you can see that when one celebrates the success of another. If you want to experience the marriage of technical exhilaration with the practical abilities to solve real problems, then this is definitely the right team to be a part of.

Stephanie Lee, Corporate Account Executive, ASEAN

After three years in hardware sales, I moved to software when I joined MongoDB. I currently cover corporate accounts across Singapore, Malaysia, and the rest of ASEAN, including Pakistan and Myanmar.

With the rate at which MongoDB is growing, there is always something new to learn. As a salesperson, I find it valuable that I am pushed to grow in areas of technical knowledge to be more well-rounded. There are a lot of internal resources available for anyone who wishes to learn or upskill in the course of their job, regardless of their scope of work. MongoDB has set the bar extremely high for any onboarding experience I encounter in the future. The investment in training and Sales Bootcamp blew me away. The two-week virtual Sales Bootcamp sessions equipped me with the right skills to hit the ground running. Not only were we given in-depth training on the technical aspects of the products, but we also had targeted sessions on sales methodology that I believe is invaluable for any salesperson, but especially for those still in the early years of their careers.

Some characteristics I believe make someone successful in a Sales role at MongoDB are self-motivation, resourcefulness, empathy, and resilience in the face of rejection or failure. You are ultimately driving your own book of business and responsible for your own performance. There are also no hard and fast rules for how to land a deal or generate a lead, so it comes down to how resourceful you can be and how thorough you are in researching your prospects. I also think empathy is critical because this is a client-facing role, and you will always be meeting new people who are looking to solve their problems. We need to be invested in listening to them and putting ourselves in their shoes to feel their pain and be motivated to provide the best solution. Finally, you are bound to be met with rejection, so it is important to have a go-getter attitude and not be discouraged.

Prior to joining MongoDB, I honestly had not heard much about the company. As I went through the interview process and met the management team, however, I found myself wanting the role more and more. This boils down to two key aspects: the product and the people. Even though I am not the most technical person, the more I learned about the MongoDB product, the more excited I became to sell it. The people I met along the way, such as my hiring manager, Regional Director, and VP, gave me a glimpse into the warm, dynamic culture. Every day is exciting. If you challenge yourself, then there will always be opportunities for growth. I choose to stay at MongoDB because I believe in the long-term vision and goal of the organization. I trust that we are building a world-class team of people, and I aspire to be a part of the process.