Catalyze Growth Partners

Founding Head of Business Development

Pilot

Investor

Upgraded

Advisor

Founding Head of Partnerships and Revenue

I head up revenue for Upgraded, a profitability operations consultancy for Canadian SME tech companies. We help unlock hundreds of thousands of dollars in working capital for each client through four pillars:

1. Government Programs/Financing (the average mid-sized company leaves $86k/employee on the table)
2. AI Solutions/Automations (47% of white collar work is automatable)
3. Tech Savings/Rewards (we can help our average company save 20 to 50% on their tech spend)
4. Financing (~50% of founders regret their VC financing)

We are completely performance based. So:
1. If we don't think we can help unlock more than $100k, we don't take on a client. It's not worth our time.
2. We only make money if you do. 
3. Our interests are closely aligned because of this.

Founding Head of Revenue

Planswell

-Promoted to Sales Manager in May 2022
-Promoted to Interim Head of Sales from July to November 2022
-Met daily in leadership team meetings from July to November 2022
-Scaled team from 11 to 32 AEs in Q3 2022
-Led team to an EBITDA-positive monthly revenue record in September 2022
-Granted 5x my existing stock options for high performance in September 2022
-Oversaw 64% growth in revenues in under 3 months (~ >$500k to ~$800k MRR)
-Guided fully-ramped AEs to 108% attainment

Stepped away from role in November 2022 due to kidney cancer prognosis and treatment.

Sales Manager / Co-Head of Sales

Trained, coached, and managed 4 SDRs while continuing to maintain the same quota as the rest of the AE team.

Achievements:
-Top AE on team in sales for all 5 months of 2022 until next promotion.
-143% to quota in first half of 2022.
-113% to quota of SDRs on my team. 
-3 of 4 of my direct report SDRs promoted to AE.
-Won 4 of 5 monthly sales spiffs.
-Only AE on team to achieve President's Club in 2022 (120% to quota over >6 months).
-Promoted to Sales Manager in May 2022.

Senior Account Executive / Business Development Manager

Achievements:
-#1 on sales leaderboard in 7 of last 8 months as AE (of 15 AEs)
-118% to quota in 2021
-2nd on team (of 15 AEs) in sales for 2021
-Granted 20% more stock options for high performance in 2021
-1st on team with 10% more dials than next closest AE in 2021
-1st on team with 21% more talk time than next closest AE in 2021
-1st on team with 23% more demos booked than next closest AE in 2021
-1st on team with 11% more demos held than next closest AE in 2021

Account Executive

CIBC

Product lead on the Strategy, Projects, and Delivery team in Digital Business Banking at CIBC. 

I have been responsible for strategy and/or project delivery on digital business banking projects related to:
-Platform analytics
-Onboarding improvement
-Client outreach 
-Market research
-Marketing and sales enablement
-Workflow improvement
-Client feedback and net promoter score
-App decommissioning

Some of the accolades we have earned as a team while I have been with the bank include: 
-Bank Innovator of the Year from the Digital Finance Institute's Canadian Fintech and AI Awards 
-Best Bank for Cash Management (North America-wide in 2019) and Best Treasury and Cash Management Bank (Canada-wide, and winner for 6 of the past 7 years, including 2019, 2020, and 2021) from Global Finance Magazine

Senior Product Manager, Digital Business Banking

Citi

Consulted for Citi Ventures with a small team of Rotman MBA students.
Created a prototype of a marketplace enabling organizations to transact anonymized, corporate IoT data from smart cities projects. 
Heavy focus on data risk management, tech strategy and infrastructure, and data compliance. 
Earned top grades on project from panel of Citi Ventures employees and other fintech professionals and executives.

MBA Innovation Consultant

Oracle

Created and validated enterprise blockchain use cases for Oracle in the telecom industry.
Final product was hyperledger blockchain-enabled C2C and B2C marketplace allowing for mobile data trading, exchange, and payments.  

In an innovation case competition judged by a panel of industry experts and senior Oracle management, my team was awarded first place in the telco sector, and second place overall.

We were invited to author a White Paper on our use case for Oracle.

MBA Blockchain Consultant

Allegheny Holdings Ltd, A Real Estate Corporation

Analyzed, reported on, and consulted on entry and exit of real estate markets and properties, including analysis of: tenancy, rental, and leasing statistics; interest and mortgage rates; market pricing trends; and socio-political, zoning, taxation, and regulatory factors in the acquisition and sale of real estate (roughly 70% commercial; 20% land; 10% residential).
Responsible for sales enablement efforts in organization: liaised with brokers to set sale prices; provided value prop and market-related collateral to support property sales.
Led organizational change initiative aimed at reducing errors leading to suboptimal investments, and instituted new investment framework within organization.
Responsible for contracts and relationship management with construction contractors, facilities contractors, real estate brokers, and others.
A family corporation.

 Director, Operations and Research

Western University

Graduate Student Teaching Assistant

Global Affairs Canada | Affaires mondiales Canada

Based in Arequipa, Peru, while working on a business development consulting grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada), administered through Niagara College.

Directed and consulted on 4 projects: 
-Led change initiative to improve fundraising and related digital capabilities for a welfare provision charity; 
-Developed and project-managed a cultural tourism marketing plan and implementation for a large municipality;
-Created a multimedia educational partnership program for an underprivileged school, procuring donations of seed money, computers, and digital cameras; 
-Developed a home-stay tourism model and marketing plan for a rural community tourism not-for-profit organization.

Economic Development Consultant

Growth 📈 @ category-defining orgs | Working on a top-secret project 🤐 | MBA @ iE | Lean 6σ Green Belt | Cancer Survivor | Girldad | Per aspera ad astra 🌌

I am the Founding Head of Revenue at Upgraded, a tech-enabled working capital advisory for Canadian SME tech companies. We help our clients access hundreds of thousands of dollars in working capital through four pillars: government programs, AI solutions, tech savings, and financing. We are performance-based, meaning we only make money if our clients do.

I have over six years of experience in SaaS revenue generation, with a track record of exceeding quotas, driving growth, and leading high-performing teams. I have an MBA from IE Business School and a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification. I am passionate about helping tech entrepreneurs scale their businesses, avoid layoffs, and achieve their goals. I am also a cancer survivor, a girldad, and a lifelong learner.

👹Daniel Schloss

Elmerlopez.tech@gmail.com for influencer partnerships (anything else will get marked spam)

In 2021, I got into Dominican University for Physician Assistant (PA) school. I quit my EMT job, and took a break for 3 months. During this break, I realized all I was doing was fulfilling my immigrant parents "American Dream". 

I decided to reject my acceptance to find my own version of the "American Dream" and broke into tech sales as a first gen Latino-American. 

Since then I've surpassed my quotas (>100%), brought in over 4M ACV Closed Won deals, spear-headed the company-wide implementation of an auto-dialing tool, & mentored aspiring SDR's. 

I plan to empower non-traditional backgrounds in tech sales by talking about my own challenges, successes, & learnings.

This is my story📚

Elmer Lopez

10 mistakes I’ve made as an Account Exective:

1. Not Multi-threading
2. Not booking a meeting from a meeting
3. Not asking about legal & procurement earlier
4. Not asking about who else they’re evaluating
5. Not getting a critical event
6. Not understanding their timeline
7. Believing every word a prospect says
8. Being a pushy salesman
9. Talking more than listening
10. Spending more time demoing instead of the discovery

What mistakes have you made as an AE?

Elmer Lopez 🏆

Account Executive @ Popl | 1x Presidents Club

3 red flags I wish I knew before accepting my 1st SDR role.

1. An SDR manager that never did cold outbound

This manager would always tell me, “Let me know how I can help”. 

But when I asked for help, they had no idea what to suggest since they had never done the role before.

If I could go back, I’d ask:

“If one of your SDR’s was struggling to hit quota, how would you help them”.

I’d also ask for specific tactics they’d use.

2. Not asking for a solidified promotion plan from SDR to AE

I saw my SDR colleagues in seat for 3+ years. 

When I was hired, I was told that SDR’s get the opportunity to get moved up to AE every year. 

If I could go back, I would have cold called the SDR’s to ask them how realistic the SDR to AE route is there. 

Or looked deeper into Linkedin to see whether any SDR’s got moved up to AE.

3. Understanding the system for AE’s to consider a lead qualified

This ultimately affected my quota as an SDR so its obviously important. 

There was 1 AE who did not understand the SDR role & treated me like an assistant. & when it was time to convert leads, this AE would only convert the ones ready to buy that month.

What red flags did you miss as an SDR?

Popl flew out the entire sales & marketing team to Miami for sales kick off!

Some takeaways:

1.	In person SKO’s are a must

I remember my 1st SKO being over Zoom & feeling nothing after.

Now, after attending SKO in person, I understand why companies spend so much money to fly out their sales teams.

There’s something about getting everyone in the same room that Zoom just can’t replicate. 

From late-night dinners to early morning brainstorms, the team collaboration was next-level.


2.	Product updates that actually got us hyped

Seeing what’s in the pipeline for 2026 reminded me why I love working here. 

Can’t share the details yet, but all I know is that our customers are going to be very happy.

3.	We’re scaling fast…

The hiring plan for this year is aggressive in the best way possible. 

If you’re top performing AE, SDR, AM, and want to join a startup that’s crushing, do your best outbound to me 🚀


4.	The 2025 recap 

Breaking down what crushed it, what we’re doubling down on, and what we’re testing next was eye-opening. 

Data-driven but still willing to experiment, that’s the sweet spot.


5. BIG 2026 Revenue goals

Nothing like a big number to rally around. 

We left Miami with clear targets and the playbook to hit them…


6.	Honest feedback

One of my favorite parts was how open to feedback everyone was, leadership included. 

When a team can give and receive feedback without ego, you know you’re building something special.


7. Stop asking about the weather

Instead of asking about the weather on demos, mention a linkedin post of the prospect.

You could even mention a fun fact about the city they are from.

Oh & Miami definitely delivered.

(Day in the life coming soon)

Now back to making 2026 our biggest year yet bby💪🏽💪🏽

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Joining a startup felt like a big risk at the time.

Especially since I’ve only worked enterprise companies my whole tech sales career.

But that “leap of faith” has definitely been worth the journey🚀

How i went from SDR to AE with little to no closing experience.

First of all, when I joined company A as an SDR.

I was told promotions can happen in about a year if you’re crushing quota.

I said ok, bet.

Let me just destroy quota & see where it takes me.

1 year goes by…& nothing.

Which is fine, I was willing to wait a bit longer.

But then I noticed that none of the tenured reps that had 3+ years of experience were being considered for open SMB AE roles.

I also realized that none of the current AE’s were SDR’s that had gotten promoted.

That’s when I knew, it was time to leave.

No offense to those tenured reps, but my growth had hit a ceiling.

Thankfully enough, I was able to demo + close some smaller transactional deals at Company A.

& I leveraged the heck out of that experience to get my first SMB AE role.

Took me 4 months of interviewing, but I was able to make it happen.

If you’re in the same position, I highly suggest asking your AE’s + leadership if you can work some of the smaller deals they don’t care about.

it’s definitely more difficult now to go from SDR to AE at a different company, but not impossible.

I made the switch when there were mass layoffs happening left & right.

Just know, you have to go extremely hard on doing your due diligence.

You don’t want to accidentally end up in a worse situation. 

(Been there, done that)

Especially in this economy.

How did you go from SDR to AE?

Last month, a prospect made me realize that our sales team was missing out on 50% of potential booked demo’s.

All because of this 1 channel we were ignoring…

I was on a discovery call with a prospect who seemed like a perfect fit. 

Great company, clear pain point, budget allocated, with a critical event coming up.

But when I asked him what “competitors” they were evaluating.

The prospect said:

“Oh yeah we’ve been evaluating xyz companies for a couple weeks now. 

I actually asked ChatGPT for tools like yours and it gave me five options. You weren’t on the list.”

Yeah, we lost that deal lol..

Not because we weren’t a good fit but because we were late to the party.

I mean the reality is that 71% of B2B buyers purchase the first vendor in front of the door anyways.

So it made sense….

It also turns out that 50% of B2B buyers now use AI in their software buying process.

They’re typing in questions like:

“What’s the best [product] for [their use case]” into ChatGPT or Claude before they ever reach out to sales.

And if AI doesn’t know about your product? 

You’re not making their initial shortlist.

By the time they discover your product, they’ll be tossing you guys into the ring just so they can tell their CFO that they evaluated multiple options.

But in reality, they already know what product they want at that point.

After testing it myself, I noticed that our product came up once out of five tries in Chatgpt.

& our competitors were showing up every single time 🙃

We started fixing this by teaching the AI what use cases we help with. 

Instead of spending hours trying to do this manually, we used outwrite.ai .

It shows you exactly what AI says about your product and how to improve your visibility in AI recommendations.

Want the step by step breakdown on how to fix this?

Comment “Breakdown” & I’ll send you everything 💪🏽.

How many of you consult Chatgpt or Claude before buying anything now?

taplio

The Battle

👹Daniel Schloss

Elmer Lopez

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The Battle

👹Daniel Schloss

Elmer Lopez

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Elmer Lopez's LinkedIn Performance

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