Navigating Sales and Sales Operations | S01 E12

Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido, and I'm the manager of acquisition and strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. My role at Newbreed is to oversee our internal marketing team and to make sure that we're growing our own business. But I also get to work closely with our services team to learn about the challenges our clients are facing and how we're solving for them. This season on Adding Value, we're going to focus on the incredible employees we have here and how they add value to our clients and our company every day. If you like what you hear, make sure you subscribe for more great episodes and head over to newbreedmarketing.com to take a look at our other great resources. My guest today is Pat Buno. You recently were accepted to speak at HubSpot's Inbound 19 conference. And that presentation is going to have a lot to do with the journey you've had since joining New Breed, which has been quite interesting, to say the least. I'm excited to learn a lot more about that, and I'm sure everyone else will be, too. So, Pat, thank you for joining today.

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. I am really excited to do this. Never done a podcast before. A little bit about me. I'm currently a senior revenue operations strategist here at New Breeding on our services team, but we will get into that in a minute. A couple things. I grew up in upstate New York, and I moved here to Burlington for school, went to uvm, which is right up the road from our office. And after graduating from business school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to be in Burlington. It's a really incredible place. If you haven't visited, I think most of our employees would agree that you definitely should. There's a lot of great food. The music scene is pretty incredible, and we have the lake and both the Green Mountains and the Adirondack Mountains kind of on either side of us. And I think my personal background has really influenced my professional journey in a lot of ways because I've done a lot of different things, to be honest, and to varying degrees of success. But I played lacrosse at uvm, so I have a little bit of an athletic background and did that for many years prior. And then I also spend a lot of time now in a couple different local bands, so Keep your eye out. If you're ever in the area. If you're looking for something to do, let me know. But I think having sort of a discipline background in that athletic side, as well as some of the creative pieces have really helped me build a pretty interesting skill set professionally.

I would definitely tend to agree with that. You've had a very diverse background at New Breed alone. And in getting to know you over time, I've definitely learned a lot about how your background prior to joining New Breed has helped influence that. So let's, let's dive in because I think you have a lot of exciting stuff to share. And when you first started at New Breed, you had the opportunity to work across multiple departments. You were in a business operations role and that gives you a ton of experience and exposure to the business early on. So let's start off with just telling the listeners a little bit about what that was like, starting off at a new company and getting exposure to all these different areas at once.

Yeah, I think it's pretty wild. It was definitely a timing thing. The stage of growth that Newbreed was at when I joined was very rapid and there was a lot of things that had been neglected, to be perfectly honest. So the structure at that time was my mentor. I came on as an intern and was client facing on this same team that I am now. So I was on the revenue operations team really in the background doing a little bit of production work, if you want to call it that, in HubSpot portals for clients. And after a few weeks in that position, it became really evident that New Breed's internal need for revenue operations was far greater than the need of our team to have more capacity or bandwidth on the client facing side. So I had a few meetings with our CEO and coo Patrick Bittiscomb and Taylor Forrest. You know, perhaps some of the listeners have met them or seen him on LinkedIn or anything like that, but was able to figure out that based on the skills that I had learned in a short time in the HubSpot technical back end, in the salesforce technical back end, that we needed to spend a lot of time revamping our internal processes so that our sales team could be effective, so that marketing could continue to focus on being marketers rather than dealing with technical nuance. And yeah, it gave me a really interesting, like high level executive view of the company at a very young age with very little experience.

Yeah, so that was. That must have been a really insightful experience when you first got started to be able to see the business at that level. And you spoke a little bit about the fact that you recognized that there was a need there. Can you speak a little bit more specifically as to what you saw, what needed to be fixed and the projects that you took on when you first moved into that role?

Yeah, it's going back a little bit, but some of the first things that we realized were our lead rotation was a mess. It had been in place for quite some time. The notifications were firing at the wrong time. Reps were getting leads that were getting assigned to other reps. Later reps didn't really know what a qualified lead was. Like we did at this time. We were really implementing a lot of solid solutions for our clients, but it seemed that we had lost touch with what had made us so successful in that realm in terms of, like, applying that to. To new breed. And. And it really was kind of related to bandwidth and just the fact that nobody had been dedicated to that kind of a role. But lead rotation, our Salesforce sync list was a little bit messed up. We had a lot of process gaps. Like, we didn't. There was a lot left to the individual to decide on a given basis, like, given day, what you would do in a given situation, which, you know, can be good because it encourages autonomy. But at our size, we needed to formalize a lot of things to make sure that sales could be effective and efficient with what they were. What they were doing. So that's a couple.

And how long were you in that role before you ended up making your next transition? Because you started off with the revenue operations team, you moved into this internal facing role, and then you were in that role for what, about a year and a half or so. Is that about right?

Yeah, a year and a half in business ops internally, yeah.

So then this next transition, which is where I want to spend the majority of the time, is one of the more interesting ones to me. So you were in a role where you were building out processes for the sales team and working with the marketing team a little bit to make sure there was a smooth marketing to sales handoff. But then we recognized that there was a need for a few more sales calories on the team. We had more leads coming in than we had sales reps to handle them. And our operations you had been handling for about, like we said, a year and a half. At this point, they're running pretty well. Obviously there should always be maintenance happening there, but there was room to have a transition occur. And so then our CEO, Patrick, who you mentioned, came to you and asked if you'd be interested in moving into a sales role. Mm, let's start off with that. What was that conversation like?

Yeah, I think worth mentioning. Like, prior to that conversation, we had talked about this in the past. I think I had received a lot of guidance from, if we go back to UVM again, professors and peers that really encouraged me to go into sales. For whatever reason, I really enjoyed speaking, really excited to speak at Inbound in presentation form. And I really wasn't the most process oriented or analytical person in, in college and really before that. This was kind of funny that I ended up in operations, to be honest. But Patrick came to me and really he had alluded to it probably a month prior to when we actually did it. And I remember we took like a walk because we had our one on one meeting and it was fairly nice out that day for once in early spring in Vermont. And we, we sat down at a picnic table and he talked to me about, okay, we've got all these leads coming in. We want to make sure we're capitalizing this and not leaving money on the table. What do you think about doing sales? And I was like, you know, I would. I don't know if now is the right time. And he's like, well, I've been kind of thinking about going back in the funnel myself. And then operations Pat returned pretty quickly and was like, no, you're absolutely not going back in the funnel. We cannot have our CEO doing that at the stage that we're at. And so he was like, well, think about it. And then we decided actually not to do it at that point of that conversation. And then about a month passed and the problem was still evident or a challenge, not necessarily a problem. And then he kind of grabbed me in the hall because, as you know, executives are always running around. And so he grabbed me in the hall and just said, hey, remember that conversation we had a month ago? And I said about, you know, about me doing sales? And he was like, yeah. I'm like, yeah, what's going on? He's like, did you decide? I think you should do it. And I was like, I didn't quite decide, but yeah, let's go for it. And so it was kind of. It wasn't a snap decision, but they kind of went to the back burner for a little while and then came back around. And then we had decided to go for it. So basically within the week, we figured out how to transition some operation stuff to a couple folks who we had hired into the team. I had offloaded new Hire training at that point. And we had another team member join biz ops. So we felt like we had enough room on that team for me to leave as well as go into sales. I think that's very important. Right. So we didn't leave a true vacuum in business ops. I think there was definitely a lot that fell by the wayside when I switched, but we did have some level of coverage there. Like, it wasn't just an absolute void when I. When I left.

I think that was a really important piece. Was how you prepared to move into sales was not about getting ready just for the role in sales, but it was also about offloading the work that you had on the operations side. Coming up with what that coverage was going to look like, I think was super important. But let's get into that transition just a little bit more. How do you feel that your role in operations helped prepare you, if at all, for your role in sales?

It prepared me in a lot of ways. I mean, it's the way we did operations here at New Breeder. The way that we do it is pretty transparent where we can be. So I think it's important to talk about operations. Like a lot. A lot of times operations is seen as this blocking force within an organization. Like, okay, somebody comes up with a great idea and then the operations person is there in the meeting and says, no, no, no, we're not doing that. And they won't really elaborate why. Part of like the struggle there as an operations professional is there's a reason that these people aren't really explaining why. And it's because it's probably really technical and they don't want to like spend 25 minutes explaining why we shouldn't do that. And I think it comes off as abrasive sometimes, which hopefully we can reverse that trend. But really with operations, what you have to do is you have to deal with objections all the time. You have to speak in front of groups, be that in small meetings or with your executive team or your management, or present to potentially the entire company in some situations, depending on your company size. And rolling out. Change is very much related to sales, even though it doesn't sound like it might be because sales is working to articulate and explain to the prospect why the prospect should undergo massive change. To work with, you know, an agency model, to work with new breed or with a partner, and then in the software model or other models, it's the same thing. Like a massive amount of time is going to go into changing something, and that shouldn't be neglected. By sales. So I think it was like, you know, it was honing those different skills. I think the change rollout process, while often slow and, you know, sales has this. Has this image of being, like, quick and improvised based and you gotta be on your feet. Well, I think bringing some more methodical approach to it is actually pretty valuable.

And one of the things that you worked on too, in your operations role that I don't know if you realize you did this, but it seemed like you did at least was you put together these sales scorecards for everyone on the team before you moved into your sales role. And those scorecards were essentially a way for everyone on the team, every sales rep, to understand where their sweet spot was, where they won the most. And once you moved into sales, I noticed that you did exactly that. You found where your sweet spot was going to be. And one of the things that new breed sells is revenue operations and a project that we have called inbound readiness. And you spoke really well to that. And you also did really well with smaller transactional deals too. So talk to me a little bit about how you found that sweet spot. I mean, obviously the revenue operations side is pretty logical, but did you find yourself going through a thought process of this is where I want to spend my time, or did it just kind of come naturally?

It came naturally initially. So I struggled in complete transparency. I struggled to close. That was my biggest issue as a sales rep. I really, really excelled at being a BDR for myself in a lot of ways. Like, booking meetings was not my problem. It was carrying these deals over the finish line. So I had done a few rounds of those scorecards, so I knew what it was like to think about, like, try to be almost a sales manager and like, understanding a rep's performance. And that's why we had biz ops do that here at new Breed. Right? It's a super neutral. Like, I had no stake, no skin in the game, so to speak, of like, hey, sales rep x, like John Smith, you are, you know, really poor at closing deals, over 30k or something. And that's not so personal when it's coming from, excuse me, from biz ops, because we're just a neutral party. So I had some good practice in thinking about those patterns. And it took me a while to close my first deal. I got pretty down about it, to be honest. And when I did, it was a smaller transactional deal. The sales cycle was faster. So I think, going back to your question, initially, it was easy for me to lean on revenue operations for all of My dialogue in discovery meetings in later sales process to identify those problems, bring them up to clients. But I only actually successfully closed one deal that had revenue operations in it, believe it or not. So I think maybe I spent way too much time on it and just got away from.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So do you think if you were to go back into a sales role today that you would do things differently?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think I would still lean towards. I did sell a lot of transactional deals, and I did so because I realized that I could try to hit my number with many small deals at a fast rate and build a more, as I mentioned, like, step by step process. Then when we were selling, you know, some of our reps are really incredible at closing enormous deals with many, like, RFP processes and like, all these different curve balls that happen. And, like, I just like, couldn't hang with that. So, like, getting these small clients in and going for the lifetime value later was pretty key.

Cool. So it's a little bit about the sales side and we'll probably touch on that more. But I want to start talking about how your experience in sales helped you when you moved back into a revenue operations role. Because you were in sales for about six months or so. Maybe a little bit. Yeah. So six months in sales, you moved back into an internal facing operations role. What was that transition like back? Because I know you and I talked a little bit about the challenges you faced in that transition because it seemed like it was gonna be something that was pretty straightforward. You had been in this role before, and going back into it shouldn't be a big problem, but you did face a few challenges of.

Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of challenges. This. I don't know if this would be a surprise to people or. I think I said this to you before, Guido, but, like, I'm not good with change. Like, as a person, like, I don't really like it. Like, I like having, like, a good routine and I like the stability of that. And I think that helps me in operations because I think about, okay, if this was happening to me, like, I would be frustrated by X, Y and Z. And so I bet there's someone else out there that is also going to be frustrated by this. But the challenges of going back into the role. A, I was stressed because it was a change and I got in a groove in. I figured out how to close some deals and I was definitely not the top rep, but I wasn't doing so bad either. But going back, we realized that there was like crazy amounts of pent up demand for day to day operations support that even though we had offloaded some of my work and we planned, or we thought we planned enough, there was just so many things that we thought people would continue to report and end up. So we used an internal ticketing system, but we thought people would keep sending in these tickets for minor issues and they kind of just didn't like they. Maybe it was out of respect to me being in a different job or what, but no one was reporting the things they were feeling on the ground floor across the organization. Again, taking a heavy focus on the marketing and sales teams internally. But when I got back into it, all of a sudden it was like we had done all this work actually to implement a ticketing system while I was in the role. When I first started, we just relied on random Google chats and people stopping by my desk or whatever, like ad hoc. And then we implemented a ticketing system and we did all this work to drive adoption and make sure everyone did it. And then when I stopped being in the role, it just like everybody forgot that you could send tickets. But when I went back, it, you know, it goes back to what you said before is like the maintenance of everything that had been in place. Marketing your team didn't have the ability to absorb it. We thought maybe you could, but we thought wrong.

Yeah.

And then like sales certainly wasn't going to take it over. So that really left one of my biz ops team members, but he was very focused on the services side. And then that sort of just left, you know, Patrick, our CEO, who had visibility into some of these processes, but he wasn't A able to have the time and B technically oriented to fix some of the issues that were happening.

Yeah, it's so interesting thinking about how we had plenty of people at New Breed who had the skill set to do the work that needed to be done. But just given the nature of an operations role, a lot of that stuff falls on the back burner if you don't have someone dedicated to servicing it and doing it right. Yeah, so that was the exact problem that we faced. So we had this contingency plan in place of all these people who could help out with it that had the capabilities, the skill sets to do it, but it just didn't really happen because it wasn't a part of their daily responsibilities.

Yeah, nobody was thinking about it. There was a lot of just almost like deflecting because I tried to be like truly removed from it. And we did succeed at that. No one like for the most part. Like, I would join, like a few operational meetings, remember? Yeah, yeah. And. But yeah, going back, it just seemed like everything started happening at once. Like, we had. We had new tools in the pipeline that people wanted to implement and evaluate. We had a rapidly scaling sales team at that time. We had new sales hires from differing industries than we were actually like a more diverse sales team than we had ever had.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Yeah. The training program was being revamped, which again, I was sort of removed from that. But it just felt like that demand was so high when I went back into it. Like it was almost mind blowing that we had shifted away from it for so long.

So I want to ask a slightly different question now because I think eventually you did figure out how to work your way through that backlog of requests and you're able to focus in on a few things that were critical, I guess. But one thing I think that came out of your experience in sales that I find the most interesting is how you probably learned a lot about empathy in that role in sales, because empathy plays a big role in an operations capacity for anyone. They may not realize it, but it's incredibly important. So what did you learn from being a sales rep that helped you once you moved back into your operations role, especially as it relates to empathy?

Yeah, that's a good question. So part of. I mean, the biggest one that I can say is that sales is just so hard. Like, I thought that I was going to be able to come in and just like I had been with New Breed for a while and I was like, oh, I got this. And then it just took me months to close a deal. And so it gave me empathy in the way. We'll start with my perspective first. It gave me empathy for sales in the way that once you have your sweet spot and once you know how you can close deals, you don't want to, like, you don't want to deviate from that at all as a sales rep because, you know, I mean, you think about. You take a sports analogy, you take a music analogy. There's a ton of athletes out there that have an extremely precise, like, morning routine before big games or before any game. You know, there's like elements of superstition where it's like. I mean, I think there's a little bit of superstition in sales too.

Oh, definitely.

It's definitely similar. But even famous musicians, like, I can't help but draw that comparison either. Some of them are extremely precise about, like, what they get before a show from the venue that they're playing at, like they'll only drink blue Gatorade or something. Like those are not unheard of questions. It sounds bizarre, but because they had.

Their best show that one time.

Yeah. So for me, going back into operations, I was like, okay. Before I would always just get frustrated with sales in that I'd be tasked with this new process from management or marketing, wanted to bring something new over to sales or you know, we've worked together many times and like we would be speculating about, okay, so like who are the parties that are going to be really resistant to this? Because we need to make sure that they're aware of. We have to make sure our flow of information is really critical. And I would always get frustrated with like, okay, like sales isn't filling out data in the CRM, like how can we report on this? We can't. Well, we have to have them filled out. Or like, well, what can we do for automation to move the data around? And then after being in it, like I understand how CRM data goes by the wayside because it's the last thing that you want to think about because all you want to do is hustled to the next call and make sure you get your follow up email out. And then you know, you're losing track of the hours and then, and then all of a sudden you forgot to fill out what CRM your second biggest prospect is on. And so in that way it made me really mindful of like, let's keep anything that's not applicable to them like off of sales radar. Like we don't, like, don't bother them as much as possible. Let's limit manual data entry everywhere. And that level of empathy I think was pretty key. And understanding their role a lot better definitely made me more effective in operations.

One thing that you and I would talk about before your move into sales was especially as it relates to your point about data entry was, well, it's just a part of their job. They should just do it. And after you came back, I feel like your mindset in particular definitely shifted. It totally shifted. Yeah. And that's just one, one example of many that I remember talking to you about where it just your mindset towards the sales process and sales reps in general was just very different and I think much more effective.

Yeah.

So one of the last questions I wanted to ask you was you, you made this transition back and forth from revenue operations into sales and back again. Would you recommend that someone else in an operations role do the same thing.

Oh hell yeah. Like you. Yeah. Like, I think it would be a shame if people didn't do this. Like it should almost be like, if I could design the ideal operations hire out of school. Like on one hand it would be super valuable for like very experienced operations professionals to do this. But I think it's hard to make a case for that when you're like very well established in your organization. And like, it takes a certain element of like context for me to be able to do this. But if I were designing a track of hire, it would like in training, I think it can be really hard and I would understand why everyone would say or anyone would say no to this. Especially generally operations type professionals and their stereotypical personality type, which is probably not what I am. But you know, if you could come in to a job, be an operations person for a while so you understand the ins and outs of the business and then do like a six month stint in sales, like it's like, it's almost invaluable to me now. Like I can't imagine doing what I was doing prior without knowing the ins and outs of sales. Almost like I think the, the human element picking up the phone, like I, I one easy one is I happen to be, when I was an intern here, I happened to be given the task of answering the incoming phone lines for New Breed, which is like a really old timey thing. Like you think about inbound leads from your site and like you kind of be surprised how many good inbound leads come in only from the phone. It's kind of weird, but like it happens. And like that really helped me shake some fear of the phone. And like being in operations, you might have to like call support of some, you know, software that you use because calling them is just gonna be way more effective than sending them an email and little things like that. And don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy, but it was really worth it. At the end of the day.

It's interesting looking at your transition, everything that you went through and how well that prepared you, and thinking back to some other people who might not have gone back and forth in the same way that you did, but did go through similar paths where we've had at least two, if not three people that come to mind immediately at New Breed, where they started off in a business development role in not a strict sales account manager role or sales executive role, but started off as a business development rep, stayed in that role for six to nine months or so, and then moved into A revenue operations team, and we've had a lot of success with people transitioning there. It doesn't seem to be very logical from the outside looking in, but we've seen it work plenty of times for us.

Yeah, I think this is along the same lines of what I would like to discuss at Inbound. But the biggest thing is just I think this comes from like sports or creative pursuits or whatever you like to do. Even though I mentioned I'm not good with change and I'm not really great with routine or I really enjoy having a strong routine. But the biggest thing here is just be okay trying something that's like, maybe way out of your comfort zone. You know, if you're a musician, improvising and like jamming is one of the most fun things you can do, especially when there's like no pressure involved. And even when there is, when you manage to pull together something that sounds even kind of cool while you're just improvising, that's super fulfilling. And same in sports. Like, you can't. You can practice, but you can't plan for every situation in the game or, you know, be ready for every given situation. And I think the big lesson here is if you see an opportunity that scares you a little bit, you know, weigh the pros and cons. I'm not telling you people to go make snap decisions and like, change their career paths randomly, but if your organization needs something, you've identified that need and you have the autonomy and ability to go after it, like, you might as well try it. And, and also your organization and other stakeholders are only going to be grateful for that. So you're gonna build yourself this really wide skill set, you know, having some certain specialties, but you're gonna be able to become very valuable to that organization. You're going to learn a lot about yourself. You're gonna learn a lot about what you can and can't do, which is important because you don't want to do everything. Jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing. You don't want that. But there's something to learn from any kind of experience like that. And I think keeping an eye out for opportunities within your organization can really yield a lot of results. And you'd be surprised where it kind of carries you.

Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. You think about just athletes and musicians. Like you mentioned, some of the best athletes are two sport athletes and their exposure to, like, if you're a football player, their exposure to either soccer or basketball helps them immensely. I think about, like Tony Gonzalez and Antonio Gates. Like, they both have basketball backgrounds, and they're incredible tight ends as a result of that. Um, but anyway, I, I think that's, that's a great point to end the episode on, just about expanding your horizons a little bit, pushing yourself, challenging yourself, and exposing yourself to different opportunities.

Yeah.

So I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much, Pat, for joining me today. We've got more great episodes on the way, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for our other great resources. And thank you for joining us today. We'll see you next time.