We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Travis Patterson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Travis below.
Travis, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
I started HireAE, also known as Hire Account Executives.com before the pandemic. I remember my first software sales position working in midtown Atlanta Georgia. I was given a shot of a lifetime to use my relationship-building and sales skills to present software for the first time ever. I was trained and how to present and then trained on how to sell the value proposition. With a background in human resources but more so with a focus and recruiting, I had a certain hunger that matched the account executive role I had never appreciated. Being a recruiter, you are responsible for hunting the right person for the right job opportunity. Being an account executive, you are responsible for hunting the right customer for the right opportunity. From that inaugural accomplishment of the first sale, I would forever be in the people business going forward. With all of those similarities, I realized I had an advantage. I remember making my first sale and just remembering all the declined responses that I received prior. It was worth it all.
The idea to create this platform, HireAE, was born from consistently needing to find resources to improve my sales process. When I started solving the main issue, I would find the right people who mastered each part of the sales process and ask for help and mentorship. If this were already placed together by the sales enablement teams, most salespeople would thrive faster with less stress. It’s stressful when you are expected to sell without knowing the software process’s shortcut and the cheat code to close deals.
In sales, no matter what industry, you are terminated if you don’t sell. Essentially it is similar to starting your own business every time you are hired. You learn the product, and then you learn the customer, and you may be provided tools to connect the two, but you are fully responsible for what happens next. It is simple to get a job interview, but what do you do to keep your job once you are hired? This business was created to provide training before, during, and after employment as a software sales professional. As a human resources professional, I quickly realized that I did not possess the skill set of web development, but I knew how to hunt the people who did. I faced two choices: either I’d hire someone to do it for me and pay them, or I would find the information they knew and build it. It did not happen overnight, but within three years, I combined my new information about web and app development with my previous experience in recruiting and human resources and my new love for saas, software as a service sales.
HireAE was created to help software companies hire world-class sales professionals faster and with confidence.
Travis, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My foundation is in human resources. To arrive here as a tech founder, 50% of my career as a human resources professional was dedicated to the job candidate experience, the employee experience, and improving the process from that perspective on the business side. The other half of my HR experience was founded and dedicated to getting them to the top of the funnel to help them get hired and migrate through the hiring process. In my career, sometimes I was responsible for hiring 40 people a week, training other recruiters on how to use social media to recruit the way I did, and being fully accountable as the head of recruiting. I’ve circled the human resources desk at least twice in my career. My journey would begin as a human resources assistant to being a People operations manager and then starting my own business as a résumé writer and interview coach to share insight and resources to get job candidates to the next step. When I switched from being HR at that desk, I became the job candidate and consultant to assist HR professionals. Over the last 12 years, I’ve helped job candidates, businesses, government, HR professionals, and executive leadership from every angle of the HR desk. In my résumé business, Patterson résumé resources, I noticed the one factor that was missing, if that was helping them get hired, not just get the job interview. I have always been a problem solver. My focus has primarily been on the customer experience and the overall experience of the person I am helping get to the other side of the bridge. When I started my business ten years ago, my tagline framed me as the bridge between strategy and solution. This is still true to this very day.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
My résumé clients would often ask me about career change including people from my YouTube channel would ask me the same thing. Travis, how do I change careers? Travis, how do I pivot in my career or pay? After helping a dozen people change careers and elevated their pay, I became confident that I could do this now with ease to help myself and anyone else that came away. I started in customer service with my first job, and my van graduated with my customer service experience and human resources experience. With my human resources experience, I had a very in-depth insight into human resources professionals’ needs and the departments we serve. I took this insight and my skill set along with my experience to understand what the next step of my career could be if I wanted to change careers slightly, and that is what led me to learn about technology and software. I began a career in sales based on my experience as a recruiter, and then I expanded my career change fully as a software sales professional coming from being the person needed to purchase tools and resources, including software in human resources. When I helped my clients pivot, I noticed they received an increase of at minimum $5000-$10,000, so I wanted to ensure I did the same. I even help my wife change careers from healthcare and utilize her skills to get into artificial intelligence machine learning. My career change allowed me a $20,000 increase and an immediate $40,000 increase from the previous role. Wanting a career change could simply be based on your desire for more money, but I have seen time after time their more money does not make a better career. I know many high-paid professionals who hate their job and equally low-pay employees who hate them. On the other side of the same coin, I know many people who are low-paid to love what they do regardless of how much they make, and that’s when I started noticing what both groups had in common. Those core principles are enough to change careers no matter how much money you make. One core principle for a career change is family. For your family’s needs, you may need to change careers to be at home more or to get off the road to spend more time with your family. Another reason people change their careers is because of stress. The actual job that a person may do could be physically or mentally demanding, and taking that same skill to another job could be the difference between life and death. This is not the final, but I will say a third core principle of changing careers would simply be getting on the right track with an actual career instead of job hopping. To be fully transparent, one of the greatest influences for me is changing and pivoting my career who is becoming a husband and then a father. In my single life, I moved to the beat of pure passion without purpose, and now I have purpose and direction.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
Funding is such an important part of growing a business and expanding it. Much like other parts of the business, I had to learn what it took to do so. The truth is, now that the business is visible to others, a lot of people have shown interest in investing in my business, but I learned especially being here in the tech capital of The South of the US, Atlanta, Georgia, that every investor is not a good investor or a good fit for my business. I spoke to a start-up coach that helps other coaches utilize Google for their business. But even with multiple offers at this point for me to take on investors, I thought it would be important to recognize that every investor will become a boss to me. I am coachable and do not despise wise counsel through advisers or mentorships. I knew that I needed to be strategic, and anyone I would allow to become my boss because someone who is not intimately connected to his business may want the business to go in a different direction so that would not fan the flame of the original direction of the founder. As of today, October 2022, my business is self-funded. One of the biggest ways I have funded the business so far is through sales commissions. As an account executive, you will make your base salary, but you will also have the opportunity to make the same amount and commission, doubling your revenue. Two major factors in why I love software sales are because has an account executive, you will not only make a high-paying base, but you also have the opportunity sometimes to triple your income, and that will make way for you to buy a home, a new car, or start a business. The money I’ve earned through bonuses, commissions, and sales has been a blessing to help me take the next step. And funding my business, I also feel it will be important to build it in the direction that it is intended to grow for venture capitalists/investors to not take the business in a direction that it didn’t show that it could go. Ultimately I decided that if I could plant and water my business tree, I could show its real potential. You can go into Lowes or perform a google search right now for the price of trees. A seed costs a lot less compared to a tree you have to load onto the back of a truck to transport. I’m growing a $1B tree right now.
Contact Info:
- Website: HireAccountExecutives.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hireae
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TravisCPatterson/