Searching for Your ‘Catalyst to Career Growth’ in Tech Sales? Here’s How 2 Women Accomplished This

My Ansys journey has brought me transformational growth, personally and professionally. It’s enabled me to build the life and career that I've always dreamed about.” — Becca Scheafer.

To find out how Ansys empowered Scheafer to achieve her dream career, we’ll have to go back to the start of her journey. After getting her bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, Scheafer took on a role as a Field Engineer. During this time, she recalls how her favorite part of her job was being customer-facing and helping to solve customer’s problems.

With this insight, pivoting from engineering to the tech sales field felt natural to her! Tech sales offered “a new, more fulfilling and effective way to leverage my engineering degree,” Scheafer tells us. However, pivoting into this new role involved learning new skills — and this is where Ansys comes in! Scheafer was supported in her career pivot via Ansys’ Account Representative (AR) program, which offers a comprehensive sales experience tailored for individuals without extensive Tech Sales experience.

“The AR program had great training and development opportunities with a collaborative team that I could learn and grow with,” Scheafer notes from her time in the program. “There was a clear path to promotion and to overachieve my financial goals.” And this is clearly reflected in Scheafer’s own career trajectory — she’s gone from being a part of the AR program to a Regional Sales Manager who is leading the AR program on the West Coast!

With the help of this program, Scheafer was able to grow her dream tech sales career at Ansys and is now able to fully merge her love of technology with helping people in order to assist clients in solving a wide range of technical challenges across industries. Looking back at her time growing a sales career at Ansys, Scheafer says that by “leveraging my work ethic and building on my skills, I was able to find more recognition, money, and career growth than I ever thought possible.” 

And Scheafer is far from the only person who has benefited from the AR program. For instance, take Scheafer’s colleague, Paige Richard, who never saw herself entering a sales role. However, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Biology and spending time at a SaaS company, Richard decided to take the leap to Sales and join Ansys as part of their AR program. “I realized the opportunity a sales role could provide for someone with a competitive and coachable spirit like me,” recalls Richard. 

“During my time in the program, I received a lot of individual support in sales skills, engineering, and Ansys product knowledge,” Richard says. “The program's biggest perk is the wealth of resources dedicated to your development. You get more one-on-one time with management than usual, plus a dedicated technical team to help you grow. The AR program was always setting up chances for me to learn and succeed.” And throughout her time working at Ansys, she says it’s been rewarding to see her customers succeed and notice how many organizations around her utilize Ansys. Just last year, she spied the Ansys logo on a display car in the lobby of the Porche Experience Drive Center in Carson, CA. “It was so cool! I should’ve guessed Ansys played a part in designing these amazing cars.” 

Paige Richard at the Porche Experience Center in Carson, CA smiling with the Ansys logo. Photo courtesy of Ansys.

Here, Richard and Scheafer share more about this innovative AR program, their career journeys, and why you should join them in growing your tech sales career at Ansys!

To begin, could you share more about the AR program and its benefits?

Scheafer: The AR program was designed to be an entry point for technical software sales and can be a catalyst to career growth and trajectory. We target candidates who are either early in their career or experienced in a different field and are looking to break into tech software. 

Our ARs have diverse backgrounds, with many people coming from engineering or sales — we’ve even had people from finance, hospitality, and other backgrounds. Everyone brings different experiences to the table, and their commonality is that they are new to Ansys, which creates a great space for peer-to-peer learning. We all sit out of the same office to enable development with in-person access to each other, sales leadership, and technical leadership. The ARs take on a full-cycle sales role with a focus on a specific territory or group of accounts with goals to grow our footprint/strategic partnerships and support our customers. 

What sets the program apart is the multiple layers of support from sales leadership and a dedicated technical team, all focused on the continued development and success of the AR. 

We also have a formalized onboarding and training program for the first four months. Throughout the tenure of your time in the program, we have several touch points in place to provide one-on-one coaching and small- or full-group training. The AR’s goal is to build up their knowledge, experience, and network to gain a strong baseline that will carry them through a long, prosperous, and fulfilling career with Ansys.

Since its creation in 2015, the AR program has had a profound impact on our company and the people that have gone through it. Because of its success, the program has been identified as a top initiative to sustain our growth in all regions across the globe. A few of the key benefits are that this program:

• Supports Ansys’ promote-from-within culture by building a group of talented and experienced sales reps who are ready for promotion. With how fast the simulation industry and Ansys are growing, people are our most important asset. Over 40 people have been promoted from the AR program to different positions across our company, including sales leadership, enterprise sales, and marketing.

• Builds the next generation of leaders at Ansys. Participants in this program receive sales development and technical training as well as professional development opportunities. We have experienced strong retention of ARs who have been through the program and have gone on to find further success at Ansys. (Personally, as a result of being in the AR program, Ansys supported my involvement in EDGE, a women’s leadership cohort through the Pittsburgh technology council.)

• Creates additional sales coverage, which enables more focused support for our customers.

• Helps bring diversity into our sales organization. The AR program enables us to target a wider range of backgrounds, and we have a strong focus on building diverse candidate pools. For example, as of March 2024, more than half of our ARs in California are women (this includes promoted ARs).

Becca Scheafer at the SWE conference. Photo courtesy of Ansys.

What’s the culture like on this team? 

Richard: We are a tight-knit but dynamic group! We bonded over sharing our customer stories and had a blast working together. Since 2021, the AR team has experienced remarkable growth! It's become a vibrant and fast-paced yet supportive environment where individuals truly flourish! 

Scheafer: The AR team has a reputation internally at Ansys for bringing high energy and passion to everything they do. We have teams centralized to an office together, which allows the teams to get super close. They are supportive and encouraging of each other, and always share what they learn to help each other get better. But there is also a strong, healthy competition across the team. Everyone on the team is new to Ansys and therefore going through the same learning curve together. This experience creates a special bond among the team members with a sense of unity and mutual respect. There are lifelong friendships made in the program.

How has your career evolved since completing the AR program at Ansys? 

Richard: After reaching my one-year milestone, I was fortunate enough to be promoted from the AR program to the Northern California Strategic Team. Since then, I've had the opportunity to work with increasingly complex organizations on the coolest products. It’s been quite thrilling to work with some of the most innovative companies in the world!

Scheafer: Finding Ansys was a pivotal moment in my life and career. The AR program opened up a door for me to get started in the tech software industry and gave me an entry into sales. I made a huge career change moving from engineering into sales, which came with many challenges. But the program provided me with so many resources for support and incredible training to ensure my success. 

The AR program springboarded my career. I grew up in Pittsburgh and was an AR in our headquarters in Pittsburgh. When I completed my time as an AR, I took my first promotion to a territory team and moved from Pittsburgh to Detroit. I had the opportunity to take on a strategic sales role to lead our global sales strategy in supporting key accounts. I was extremely successful and closed some milestone deals with large customers. Then the AR Program provided me with yet another opportunity — to take on my first-ever leadership role and move across the country to California. I led the first expansion of the AR program and built a brand new team out of our Irvine office. Because of the success in California, I was able to play a part in the global expansion of the program to Europe and Asia. 

Looking ahead, what are your current career goals, and how do you see yourself evolving within the sales organization at Ansys? 

Richard: I'm eager to keep serving the world's most innovative companies, and I’m confident that Ansys will keep offering me chances to grow and advance.

Scheafer: I am most fulfilled when I see my team grow and succeed, knowing that I’ve had some impact on their lives and careers. I want to keep mentoring and supporting people. As you can tell, I’m very passionate about Ansys and the AR program! So, I plan to help the program continue to grow and spread its impact. I have dreams of leading global teams someday and living abroad.

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