Barrett King is a front of house partnerships leader who builds bridges, tops leaderboards, and fulfills visions through active listening for the world’s leading software enterprises. Today Barrett is the Head of Alliances at high flying fintech Ramp.
Here’s what you need to know about Barrett..
He grew up in a small cow town on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His dad worked in early dotcom software and his mom was a marital & family therapist who loved to give back. The perfect combination for a career in partnerships?
Barrett was a high school athlete and musician who went to study art & design at Full Sail University. At Full Sail, with their job-like deadline driven course work, he learned an intense work ethic and uncovered his most important gift, given by a friend: his words were his art. He was even elected to serve as class speaker at graduation!
Over the last few years he’s weathered the loss of both of his parents, causing him to reevaluate his life and make some important changes to be a better husband, father, and professional. He quit drinking, dropped 40 pounds, and runs a 5k 5 days per week alongside other fitness activities. Barrett, you’re making us look bad..
His career began in hospitality, serendipitously meeting the GM of Legal Test Kitchen in the Seaport, during a dinner with his aunt. This chance encounter led to a role as their Head of Hospitality. At LTK he expanded their private party & fine dining business by developing local partnerships with Fidelity and other Seaport based businesses to be their “go to” dining choice.
Next, Barrett became the first sales rep hire at Objective Logistics, a software company selling to restaurants. 60 days into his tenure he was promoted to replace the outgoing Sales Manager. He knew the vertical cold and hit his stride selling restaurant leaderboard & scheduling technology to increase restaurant ROI. He landed the MA Restaurant Association and a national deal with Another Broken Egg Cafe before the startup was acquired by Bit9.
After 9 interviews, Barrett landed at HubSpot as a Channel Account Manager under the guise that he was either “a master bullshit artist or an exceptional sales person”. After just 8 months in the role he was tapped by Dave McNeil to lead Partner Sales training, helping shorten rep ramp time and impacting productivity across the org.
Barrett re-entered the Partnerships team and became a 4x President Club award winner as well as the first Team Lead in the Partnerships org. He later went on to lead an Enterprise team, better understanding the “up market” motion and how top partners worked with the best sellers of the biggest deals at HubSpot.
Last, Barrett led Partner Ecosystem Strategy under Michele Eatherton & Brian Garvey, supporting their up market motion and partner strategy in general. HubSpot gave Barrett a SaaS MBA. He learned how to get shit done and feel empowered to drive impact. There was something special about HubSpot giving smart people the space to solve problems for 8+ magical years of his career.
After moving to New Breed, he notched the final step of partnerships: learning how ecosystem partners deliver on their end of channel partnerships. Then a year later, when Barrett was presented with an opportunity from a former HubSpot leader in Mark Stoddard to lead Alliances at Ramp, he just couldn’t pass it up.
The opportunity at Ramp is massive. Barrett recently joined at a very similar stage to when he started at HubSpot. He is working across their core business lines – ERP, HRIS & ISV – to educate customers & front line sellers on the value of Ramp’s platform. Responsible for developing partnership motions, with a combination of strategy & GTM responsibility, he has a large mandate to drive meaningful impact. At Ramp, in love with the problem space, he’s ready to allow this next phase of work to speak for itself.
Partnerships Succeed with Active Listening & Value Alignment
When Barrett was asked to step out of a high performing sales role, he had to learn to design effective training for the broader org. Using everything he had learned about people in restaurants and enterprises, he distilled his lessons down to emphasize active listening.
Partnerships, from the front of the house to the back, are all about listening with the intent to understand.
At HubSpot, their most successful partnerships all had similar characteristics: value alignment with what HubSpot and the channel partner were mutually trying to achieve. In order to build something with meaning together, they had to find ways to pair their solutions together. On the HubSpot end, by leveraging their tools & technology to help marketing agencies sell more business, both the agency and HubSpot were able to drive increased revenue & value per customer through a focus on delivering ROI centric services.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Your Network is Your Net Worth – “90% of your success comes from who you surround yourself with. The way you win in your career is being around really important people (relative to what you care about)”
How are You Paid? – “You’re either the smarter person in the room and paid the most or, if you’re not, what you don’t make up for in money you make up for in knowledge gain. Every once in a while you get both. Those are your lightning strike moments, hold onto those as long as you can!”
Goal Alignment – “What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of people do I want to do that work with? How do those 2 decisions impact the life I want to live? I try to be very intentional about living in accordance with the answers to those questions”
Barrett enjoys building things that have a meaningful impact on world class organizations. He’s determined to drive outsized returns to his partners that they themselves can use to grow exponentially. Long term, he wants to continue to ensure his experiences at places like HubSpot and Ramp are aligned to that professional northstar that feeds everything he wants to accomplish personally with family & friends too.
If you want to learn more about Barrett, you can find him spending time with his family, building Alliances at Ramp, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing all your hard fought lessons and experiences. We’re excited to see the world class partnership engine you build at Ramp in the quarters ahead!