Laura Bartkiewicz is a Senior Sales Manager at Ironclad, the contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform that passed $200 million in ARR in February 2026. She graduated in Boston as the housing market collapsed, started in recruitment, then used LinkedIn to find a visa sponsor and move to Sydney. There she joined LinkedIn's sales team in 2014, two years before the Microsoft acquisition, running outbound with Outlook mail merges, Salesforce and cold calls. She later moved to London with Beamery, took her first management role at Deputy, and joined Figma as one of its first 20 hires in London, where she built the mid-market team under Pierre Berlin and helped hire for the Berlin and Paris offices.
Laura breaks down what she hires for in a sales rep: self-awareness, ambition, drive, resilience, optimism, and enough emotional intelligence to read a room on a video call. She describes her management style as direct, blunt and friendly, with clear expectations and real accountability. She explains why selling is a team sport across solutions engineers, architects and executives, and why she trains reps to play chess, not checkers: plan several moves ahead and keep the client aligned with a long-term vision.
She also gets into what Ironclad does and why Salesforce chose it after trialling eight CLM platforms. Ironclad sits inside the CRM so reps never leave Salesforce to manage redlines, and it routinely cuts contract cycle times by more than half. Under CEO Dan Springer, formerly of DocuSign, the company has hired ex-Google CTO Sunita Verma and CPO Herman Man to ship new AI agents every quarter. On AI in sales, Laura's view is simple: trust and relationships still close deals, and AI is the velocity layer on top, handling follow-ups, tightening agendas and using tools like Gong to flag gaps in a deal cycle. Outside of work, she talks about investing her commissions every quarter into the tech companies she used daily, taking a sabbatical after her father passed, and why 20 nos will get you a yes.
If you're moving from SDR or AE into sales management, hiring your first reps, selling B2B SaaS into Salesforce customers, or working out where AI actually fits in an enterprise sales cycle, this one's worth your time.
