The End of the “Meeting Goal Above All” Culture: Modern Day Sales Story

I want to tell you a fairytale. A modern-day tech fairytale.

Once upon a time, there was a sales team that generated revenue that had increased 31% YoY while only investing in a slight headcount increase. At the same time, across all business segments in the sales’ average win rate was almost 55%. Believe it or not, the same sales team had zero regretted attrition throughout the entire 2019 year.

Seems almost too good to be true.

Except, it’s not a fairy tale, it’s real.

This is the exact story of the Buildium sales team. We spoke to Ben Nadol, VP of Sales at Buildium, to find out more.

A little bit about Ben. Ben has 20 years of technology sales experience. He’s had the opportunity to participate in world-class sales engines with organizations such as Oracle; Kronos; Google; and, HubSpot, where he was responsible for leading their Corporate North American Sales Team.

OK Ben, talk to me a little bit about your sales background and your leadership experience.

I’ve had the privilege of working for a bunch of great sales organizations over the past two decades and have selectively borrowed things from each of those experiences. For instance, at larger companies, what I realized was the modus operandi was to create a territory that one person would be successful in and put two people in it. You knew when you were hiring those two sales folks that you weren’t setting them both up for success. This tactic really disappointed me and, honestly, made me not want to lead. I am inspired to lead when I am responsible for people’s success and I wanted to help people win; not just encourage my team to make more phone calls.

This is most often referred to as servant leadership. I want to come to work and help people win and do their own job better. The job is to be of service to my team and help them design the role they want to do during their journey at Buildium. That is my job to make it happen. I consider it a privilege to be able to do this.

What makes Buildium’s sales team so different from other tech companies?

What a great question. My experience with folks on this team is that they take a lot of pride in what they’re doing. It’s not always just about hitting a number, but more so the privilege we have to help small businesses grow. I am so humbled by that. They approach everything by focusing on doing what they can to help the end user, period. It blows me away every day, the level of pride they take in their work, and their commitment to prioritizing what’s best for the customer and their team. This is what servant leadership looks like when you apply it in a sales scenario.

Switching gears slightly, in your experience, what is the least productive thing a salesperson can do for themselves and their career?

One that comes to mind is your quota being the most important thing in your mind. I realize that this is pretty easy to do, it is a sales role, but the irony here is when you do that you likely end up missing your overall goal.

When you make the number the north star, the most important things become the last thing on the list. It’s important to take the time to become a master of what you’re selling and staying in the zone of curiosity and empathy that is core to how we approach our outreach — not in how many phone calls that takes. If you’re looking to be happy and productive, the number can prematurely wear you out. You’ll need to be able to think about the long term if you want to maintain a healthy and successful career in sales.

What would make someone successful at sales while at Buildium?

Three things come to mind: an intellectual curiosity from a product and domain perspective, empathy; as a sales professional it’s our job to figure out what the individual is trying to solve for and make sure that our team is a consultative partner in that process, and a strong moral compass; I like to position this as if you were going to do something that might have benefitted you but you knew it was wrong would you still do it if no one found out? We want folks who are motivated by doing the right thing over winning the sale.

So in 2019, Buildium’s sales team had no employee turnover. Just how unheard of is 0% attrition?

I’ve been at this for over two decades now and in all of those journeys I haven’t seen this ever before. It’s rather rare and it’s rare because of the way people think of sales organizationally as being pretty transient. That’s not the case at Buildium. The sales team is in a unique position to help our potential customers be successful, and it’s as a direct result of the team member’s tenure here. We invest in them — in their training, their expertise, their growth. We create a model where people want to stay.

We like to say that Buildium is a company that is powered by relationships — with each other, with our customers, and with the industry. The unique success we’re having with our sales organization is a direct reflection of our ‘humans first, then everything else’ philosophy, and it’s something I will carry with me for the rest of my career.

Buildium is hiring! Check out our open sales roles here.