Chances are during your daily doomscrolls on TikTok you’ve come across a video from Sara Uy. The 28-year-old appears on the screen with her headset on, iced coffee in hand, ready to make cold calls to prospects. In just one video, Uy goes through the highs and lows of working in sales—from booking meetings to being hung up on.
Uy’s seemingly niche sales-related content has resonated with a large audience—roughly 170k followers on TikTok and more than 25k on Instagram. She started gaining traction on social media while working at sales recruiting and training company Pareto. She’s since transitioned to running her own sales training company, called SellingSara.
“TikTok was a platform that I was able to kind of make lightheartedness of [sales] and realize that there were other people doing the same thing as me, that were having the same challenges because it really is such a hard role,” Uy said. “The community and the people that came together were awesome and they kept me going—probably just as much as they told me that I kept them going.”
Uy, recruited by Pareto after graduating from Fairfield University in 2019, held several roles at the company—starting as a graduate manager before being promoted to sales director last August. She started posting her sales videos on TikTok while working as a senior business development manager from 2022 to 2024, taking her followers through cold calling, lead generation, and other sales tips.
“It’s really authentic,” she said about her content. “I don’t try to hide the negative pieces of being in sales because that probably overcomes most of every single day. It’s very rare that you get a ‘yes,’ and it’s hard to get a really big deal closed, so if I was only sharing that, it just wouldn’t be realistic of an actual salesperson because it is so hard. I think people really resonated with that.”
Uy left Pareto last September to launch SellingSara. She offers six workshops that follow the sales cycle. Topics include cold calling, social selling, writing high-impact emails, building clientele, and more. She also offers one-on-one coaching and participates in speaking engagements for her clients. She said her pricing varies per client and what their needs are.
Uy said roughly 70% of her clients are in the B2B tech space, while the remainder are across myriad industries. She said her biggest client is the nonprofit Make-A-Wish.
“Sara brings spark, skills, and talent into her training,” Michael Hull, CEO of Make-A-Wish Michigan, said in an email. “She does a great job of making it relevant and not overly scientific. Don’t get me wrong; she has a methodical approach, but it’s one that staff on all levels can [execute] against. She is funny and relatable to my team, creating instant trust and acceptance. My team instantly used the skills she taught, and we are seeing exceptional results. If an organization needs sales skills, specifically by phone or email, Sara should be their first call.”
Uy explained that her social media presence has really boosted her career, especially as social selling has become a popular tactic in the sales world. In the last 10 months of SellingSara, she says she’s closed over $500,000 in deals from clients who have seen her content. She also credits her large social media following for garnering many brand deals, most recently with software companies like Luster and Pipedrive, which in the last year alone, have earned her $250,000.
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In addition to posting on TikTok, Uy posts on LinkedIn almost every day at 9am (when, she said, she sees the most engagement). She said she has grown her LinkedIn following from 10k to over 85k in the last 18 months.
“That’s the platform I’m actually most proud of,” she said. “If you told me LinkedIn was going to be my favorite platform when I was 28 years old, I’d literally laugh in your face, but it’s cool to feel like you have a little bit of clout on a very professional platform. And, it’s not bots. It’s real people with real jobs and corporate and the best network that you could have.”
On LinkedIn, Uy reposts many of her TikTok videos showing her cold-calling prospects or giving sales tips, pairing them with extended captions for more context. While many of her posts center on sales, she also discusses other topics like her family and work-life balance.
Uy comes from a “family of entrepreneurs” and has always wanted to start her own business. Her mom and husband encouraged her to take the leap last year to leverage her network with SellingSara.
She believes her social media presence has contributed to her success in sales, especially as social selling is a big aspect of her sales outreach.
“That’s probably the biggest thing that has separated me from an excellent sales rep to exceptional,” Uy said about her social media presence. “People don’t do social selling even though they know that that’s what is going to be the biggest differentiator—what’s going to get them to close double the revenue in 2025—but people just don’t have the confidence. They don’t want to put their face behind a screen when you’re sending a video to a client. A lot of people are still stuck in this old-school way of, ‘Oh, that’s not professional.’ Meanwhile, you need to switch your mindset from ‘it’s not professional’ to ‘this is how I’m going to stand out of the crowd.’ This is actually how I’m going to create the strongest sales relationship for another professional to want to work with me.”
As for the future of SellingSara, Uy has plans to continue growing her clientele and her internal team, which currently has five remote employees that help with content, brand partnerships, and internal sales enablement. She hopes one day to come full circle and build out her own sales team.
“I’d basically be able to give what I give to all my clients to my own company,” she said. “I think that would be really awesome.”