Brennan Petar—Building High-Impact Teams from the Ground Up

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Brennan Petar, President of Hapara. Brennan, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thanks for having me, Amy. It's a pleasure to be here.

It is so fun. You know, ever since the first time we met at Starbucks and you started giving me all of your wisdom about RevOps and moving and scaling and growing, I've been really excited to have you on the podcast and really appreciate your time.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm, I'm excited to be here too and share some of my learnings over the years.

Well, it's, it is, there are a lot of learnings, I'm sure. How did you start off? Like, you're the president now, right? How did you come up and get to the place that you're at today?

Yeah, I had a, a circuitous, interesting journey. Uh, started my career in sales, so I, I think What makes the RevOps function so critical is understanding the sales engine and how to scale it. And I had the benefit of actually feeling the burden of being a seller, carrying a quota and the responsibilities associated with it. And I actually think that that prepped me very well for a transition into RevOps. I learned the skill sets of how do you negotiate and do discovery, how do you have processes that are repeatable? And all of that allowed me actually to step into a leadership role running sales. And so, uh, took the successes I had as an individual, scaled it to a group, and then I actually found a strong passion in creating those repeatable processes. So, uh, I got asked by somebody I had worked for over the years who, who landed as a CRO to go run RevOps and I'd never done it before, but it seemed like a really fun challenge for me and one that I was well equipped to do. So I stepped into the unknown and really had a lot of fun doing it. Certainly there's challenges fraught along the journey of scaling, which I, which I can share. But yeah, I think ultimately the transition then there was unplanned, but it was the next springboard for, for the transition into president, which I'm also happy to talk about.

Well, I would love that because I think that for all of our listeners, right, most of us are coming from a background in either sales or marketing or operations, moving into RevOps. But not many of us have moved into the number one position like you're in right now. So I think that we're all, we would all be very interested in hearing how that happened and And also what made you decide to make the jump from sales to RevOps and from RevOps to president? So first of all, tell me a little bit more about what you experienced when you first decided to take the job in RevOps. Was it super different from sales? Was it— yeah, just tell me a little more about your experience.

Yeah, I, it was very overwhelming to be honest. Because as a seller, you're often given a clear task or direction of how to do something. And as a RevOps leader, you have to invent the process and the structure for others to do that same path. And it's not as easy as, all right, I want you to do this number of calls and document it in the CRM. There's all the challenges fraught with the technology and the tools and the integrations that have to happen. And then codifying it in an, an enablement plan in order to get others really bought into it. And then doing those revisions over time to see the improvements along the funnel. So like the, the, that's the piece that took a lot of, of time and effort. And I found taking baby steps along the way and then looking back was the best path for me of, all right, what's the most pressing problem to solve today? And solving that problem and then continuing to march forward while aligning to some, some overall strategies and scaffolding allowed me to, to really become this world-class organization of RevOps that, that the day I started, I couldn't have imagined the path to get there, right? It seemed daunting and overwhelming.

That makes sense. You know, a lot of times in marketing as well, which is where I came up from, you see a goal at the top. Scaffolding is a great analogy. And you're like, how am I going to put the bricks down in order to build the building along the scaffolding? And you just do it one at a time, you know, one thing at a time. And I'm currently working with a very large organization as their RevOps lead. And those challenges that you're talking about are significant. And they're exciting at the same time. And I've been in that position for several months now, in the same, same experience as what you described, where I'm like, how are we going to surmount these challenges? How are we going to work with their systems, understand their tools, understand who to go to where and what their particular preferences are in terms of how to work together How do we navigate political landmines? How do we pull together processes? And all of that together seems daunting, right? And then you look back, I'm just probably at like level 2 of a skyscraper, whereas you got to level million. But as I look back, I'm able to say we've really gone a long way already and things are starting to even out a little bit. So I really love the analogy that you said.

Thank you. And I, um, I think as you grow, as you get more resourcing, continuing to layer in the tools and systems that allow repeatable processes is super important. So I think we talked a little bit about being overwhelmed, where to start, but there are ways once you continue building momentum to insert something that saves you time, creates efficiency, and creates exposure to other teams. And one of those efforts was around conversational intelligence and really making sure we understood as a business what people were doing on these calls. Because, you know, a lead is really important. And if you lose that spin because you're not maximizing those interactions and conversations, you're, you're kind of back to putting pressure on marketing to generate more in the funnel. So we really wanted to spend a lot of time there. And then that evolved into, well, how do we create efficiencies on the go-to-market? How do we make sure we have sellers that are focused on the right customers and in the right geographies? And how do we have comp plans that are aligned to that and driving the right behaviors? And how do we, we manage all of our go-to-market in a way that's efficient? And that was one, one of the things I stumbled across, Fulcast, and was super excited a few years back to, to put that in at GoGuardian. And it, it was amazing at, at driving efficiencies for me and really aligning us as a, a full sales team on why we were doing things. Because ultimately I could give you a quota and say, here's your, here's your geography. But if you don't believe that it was built with integrity and fairness, you're not gonna be a, you're not gonna work as hard. And so it was, there was a lot of really cool things that came about from that investment too.

Well, I love that. Well, and thank you for for the shout out. I appreciate that. So tell me a little bit more now that, you know, you really like ran the whole process of revenue operations. What made you decide to move into a president and what have you learned since you've been in that position?

Yeah, I'm a growth mindset type of person. I always like to, to add more to an organization that I'm a part of. And so I expanded my footprint from revenue operations to also encompass the strategy element. So as I grew up in my career, it was a natural progression of thinking about where we go to market. So I mean, we could talk about the US as a primary market, but where else can we grow? And really putting some research and thought behind that. Or there's, I noticed some things around, we work in the education field, I've been in it for quite some time. Funding is a big challenge. And so how can you impact that? Well, one way is you actually can go get legislation passed. I took on the task of, all right, I'm going to hire lobbyists and I'm going to go get funding approved to overcome the pricing objection and grow the revenue footprint. So I was continuing to, to find other ways to bolt on to the impact I was having in the business and naturally set myself up with a skill set that translated well to a president role. So it was thinking about the whole organization, not just the sales and marketing funnel, but you know, how do you impact product development in a more meaningful way? And I think if you set up the right connectors between your, your data you're collecting and the people making decisions, then you can start influencing those decisions. And so ultimately I, I was excited when I had the opportunity to step into a role where I can now oversee it all. And it, it again is overwhelming. You could just sit with it, with all of the challenges and the burdens, but really exciting and fun too, to be able to impact at a bigger scale.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you find that that growth mindset is necessary where you're at right now, or has your perspective changed a little bit about it?

I wouldn't be sitting in the seat if I didn't have that growth mindset because I wouldn't have continue to try to do more and press into other areas. And I, I ultimately challenge anyone that, that feels like it's not of benefit to try it, cuz being uncomfortable is sometimes the best way to grow, right? If you're very comfortable and good at what you do, you can continue doing it and that's fine. But being uncomfortable allows you to see, all right, I need to improve this, or here's a weak spot that I have. And I found as a president, there are lots of weak spots I have, you know, I, I am not an engineer by trade. So giving guidance and feedback to people that are coding is not my expertise, but in the same way you can drive KPIs and understand velocity in the sales funnel, you can do the same thing with other parts of the business. So I found this natural, like, if, if I just ask the right questions and I'm curious and I kind of continue to to flush out the why behind things, I impact them even without having the expertise.

Hmm. I love that. That's very interesting. Sometimes it's hard to take a look at your weak spots and be like, ooh, that's one, right? But how are you able to really take a look at yourself and how you fit in the organization and where you are good and where you are less good? Because nobody can be good at everything, right? So how do you kind of make that self-assessment and then how do you fill in the gaps in your organization?

I think you inherently know things you're strong at. So, so I have a ton of experience in sales and RevOps and go-to-markets. So I can in my sleep tell people and, and really call them on things that I don't feel are true because I've been there, I've done that. I, I, I understand how it works. For areas that you don't understand, that's where you have to lean on mentors. You have to lean on external expertise, and ultimately you have to hire people you trust. So if you've now got a system where I've put somebody in place that I know has done this and I really trust them because they've proven their competency, or I have credibility from an external source. Then you know that all the motions that are being put in place are the right ones.

Mm-hmm.

And you can still measure and hold people accountable without having that expertise. But that, that's how I blind spot check. It's augmenting the areas that I know I don't have the skillset with expertise.

I love that. So some of those mentors and outside consultants fill that gap in the short term, and then you can fill that in within your organization over time.

Yeah. And I will say I use that same lens as a RevOps leader too. There's definitely expertise in systems and processes and things that you might not have experienced or have the know-how or wherewithal to solve. I had an instance of Salesforce that was over-automated and it was crashing. There was, it was fraught with challenges and I couldn't unwind the spaghetti noodles, but I found a consultant that could come in and pick apart the challenges. And so I think I always encourage people, if there's a problem to be solved and you can't solve it, lean on others because you can't do it all on your own.

Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. One thing I have noticed about working with other RevOps leaders is that while the tools themselves may be different, The principles guiding them are fundamentally the same, right? And being able to put that level of efficiency in there. I loved what you said earlier in the podcast about getting the efficiencies in and being able to automate and systematize things. One of the weaknesses that I have, since we're talking about weaknesses, is I'm really good at getting in details, but I'm less good at once I know what the details are. Automating it so other people don't have to get into the details. So that for me is something I have to consistently remind myself on is how do I make this repeatable automatically rather than relying on heroics or manually updating everything all the time.

So yeah, and when you're reliant on people, you often get bad data. There's something, a challenge I'm running across right now as I'm looking at my marketing funnel at, at hopitup. Is we've got gaps in sellers putting in the wrong disposition for things. And that's just a simple way of, if I automate a meeting booked, automate a rejection reason, or if I automate something, I know that there'll be better integrity in why is something stuck in the funnel. And so it's a simple thing, but if you can come up with ways to systematize that takeaway. Manual intervention, you're gonna be in a much better place as well.

Yeah, absolutely right. Well, what guidance would you give to people who are looking to kind of replicate what you did with your career, which is go from sales to RevOps and RevOps to president? What practical advice would you give them to set them on the right path?

Yeah, if, if you're in sales and you want to be in RevOps, get really close to the process. Master the funnel. Like if, if you understand the marketing, the lead marketing and sales funnel backwards and forwards, you're going to be in a really good position to advise. And often it will open up either internally at your company and or through networking, you can kind of insert yourself into, into an entry-level role. And I do think that's often where you have to start if you have no experience. But leaning in and building those skill sets is super important. And if you're in RevOps and you want to transition to something else, the path I suggest is continue to find ways to lean into other parts of the organization and build more value. And that'll allow you to tell a story, whether or not you get promoted internally or not. If you have that story you can tell about how you impacted the bigger ecosystem, there are opportunities that will surface where you can maybe take a step down, which is what I did. Ultimately, I was at a 400 or 500 person company, took a step down to a 50, 60 person company, but I get to lead it all. So I think making that mental transition of, I, I have now done this, here's the story to prove it, and now I, I can action it is, is something that resonated really well with the people I was talking to.

I love that. Last question for you. Clearly you're at the top of your game. It's an amazing path. I really appreciate your time showing us how we can get to where you're at. What do you do to stay charged? How do you stay at the top of your game?

It's really important to take time for yourself. Ultimately, I, I hit a level of burnout a couple years ago where I was going too fast and not taking care of myself. So making sure that you Eat well, be hydrated, exercise, fill, fill your mind with other ways too. I, I love to keep current on what's happening, read publications, read paper, kind of stimulate your mind in other ways. I think networking, I, I would call this a early in my career a weakness, but really plugging into others that helps fuel and recharge you and ideas get surfaced that you're like, oh, I didn't think of that. Uh, but that's a really good idea. I'm gonna try to do that. And that allows you to kind of keep current on new trends. But I say think of it holistically. Don't just pour yourself into work cuz then you'll get burnt out and, and you won't be the best version of yourself.

That's excellent advice. I also find that when I pull back and go spend time with my kids or go to dinner with my husband, it puts things into perspective for me and it allows me to be a better manager and be like, you know what, that email that went out to 50 people that shouldn't have. It's probably going to be okay. So I really appreciate it, Brendan. Thank you so much. And thank you for your time and congratulations on all of your success and looking forward to seeing, seeing Hapara grow under your leadership.

Thank you, Amy. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. Esat bismillah.