This article is part of our ongoing series spotlighting the talented individuals who drive Nextdoor’s sales team.
At Nextdoor, our sales team plays a crucial role in connecting brands with our unique community of neighbors. Through this Q&A series, we’re pulling back the curtain to showcase the dedicated professionals who help businesses reach and engage with our platform’s distinctive audience of household decision-makers.
In this latest installment in our Sales Spotlight series,we’re speaking with Ryan Tosto, Senior Client Partner, about his approach to sales cycles, cross-departmental collaboration, and what makes Nextdoor uniquely valuable to advertisers.
Building Lasting Client Relationships
Could you walk us through a typical sales cycle from first contact to closed deal? What are the key milestones along the way?
Most clients will take anywhere from three to six months to get the initial meeting. From there, you have to figure out who the stakeholders are internally. It can be anywhere from a two-week sales cycle to an 18-month sales cycle. The best client partners are those who can stay diligent and make sure that they’re consistently touching base with the clients.
The Power of Internal Collaboration
How do you collaborate with other departments to close deals and ensure client satisfaction?
That’s a nuanced part of being a client partner that a lot of people aren’t aware of — the fact that, yes, you’re dealing with clients, but you’re also working with your internal team, your account managers and your ad ops partners, and teams like CIA and insights that can help you drive insights to better communicate with clients.
We then work with other teams, from marketing all the way to PMM. It’s playing quarterback between all of those departments to ensure that we’re putting our best foot forward for Nextdoor, so our clients feel appreciated and no balls are dropped at any one time.
Nextdoor’s Unique Value Proposition
Which Nextdoor/ads platform differentiators resonate most with prospective clients?
The biggest upsell opportunity we have is the incrementality of our audience. There’s a really great slide we have that shows what other platforms our monthly active users haven’t leveraged in the last 30 days. By adding Nextdoor to the media mix, you’re getting a truly incremental audience of high affinity users that tend to skew more affluent, skew slightly older, and they’re generally going to be those primary household decision makers in comparison to other audiences.
Positioning Nextdoor as the Neighborhood Hub
When you’re explaining Nextdoor’s value proposition to a potential client, what aspects tend to resonate most strongly?
Positioning ourselves as a neighbor hub does differentiate us within the social space. A lot of my clients use Nextdoor to position themselves as thought leaders. Maybe you go to other platforms to drive efficient conversions. But on Nextdoor, you can talk directly to the community.
Healthcare companies use it to educate — during flu season, they’ll share resources and product and brand offers. It differentiates why you’d use Nextdoor over another channel, and it helps us position ourselves as making the world a kinder place and as a public resource for neighbors.
Looking to the Future
What market trends or customer needs are you hearing about most frequently in your conversations with prospects?
With the deprecation of the cookie and first party data becoming king, it’s becoming more and more important to understand how that ties to attribution.
This article is part of our ongoing series highlighting the talented individuals across Nextdoor’s sales organization. Stay tuned for more inspiring stories from our sales team as we continue to explore the people and partnerships that make Nextdoor a unique platform for advertisers and neighbors alike. Follow us on LinkedIn and X to catch future installments featuring more of our team members.
