Brian Moseley is an entrepreneur, small business owner, and partnerships leader with a championship mentality. He has built startups and Enterprise teams by learning from legends. He’s taken notes and lessons to heart to build the future he wants to live in. Today, Brian serves as the Director of Enterprise Sales at industry-leading SEO technology company Semrush.
Growing up in St. Louis alongside a younger brother, Brian’s dad was a computer programmer, and his mom was a nurse turned healthcare executive. Brian had entrepreneurial skills from an early age; for example he would make extra money by selling his neighbors garage sale items on eBay.
When the Internet was in its infancy, he remembers his dad telling him, “If you learn how to build websites, you’ll be a millionaire.” His Dad inspired his sense of travel and love for technology, while his mom taught him how to save, invest, and, most importantly, empathize with people.
A dedicated athlete, Brian excelled at ice hockey playing in high school and for his college’s ACHA club team. During college, he and his roommate made extra money by selling websites to the local college bars and pizza places.
The First Startup
As Brian prepared to graduate from college, he met his first Mentor, Michael LaBroad, a former Budweiser marketing executive and CMO of Bass Pro Shops & the NHL. Michael had a small marketing consulting firm and hired Brian as his first employee. Brian got to sit next to Mike for two years, learning the ins and outs of marketing from an industry veteran. Mike later helped him get his first sales job at Total Hockey, an ice hockey retailer where he sold large-scale jersey & equipment packages to youth hockey programs throughout the midwest.
New Zealand Ice Hockey
After a successful collegiate hockey career, Brian still had aspirations to play hockey at a high level. He wasn’t able to play professionally, but he found a semi-pro league in New Zealand, which drafted him for their 2011 championship-winning team.
The New Zealand Business Brokerage
When not putting in time on the ice, he worked at a local business brokerage as a sales & marketing associate. His job was to help small business owners sell their businesses. He helped small business owners evaluate what a business sale might look like and various valuation scenarios. It was an old school, offline, “Mad Men” type role, but Brian learned a lot about small businesses and how to evaluate them.
The First Marketing Agency
When he returned to the United States, he joined a sports marketing agency in St. Louis. Selling website & social media packages, his team won business with steak dinners and relationship selling. It was hard to differentiate, and Brian didn’t feel that this way of operating played to his strengths.
One day, he received a call at his desk from Brian Signorelli, an Account Executive at Boston-based SaaS startup HubSpot. He didn’t sound like a salesperson he’d ever heard, approaching their conversation by asking him questions and trying to uncover his problems.
The sports marketing agency where he worked wasn’t interested in buying HubSpot, but Brian wanted to invest. A week later, he called Brian Signorelli back and asked for a referral for an Account Executive role opening at HubSpot. Flying to Boston on a beautiful June day, with sailboats on the Charles River looking like a timeless portrait, HubSpot (and Boston) felt like home.
HubSpot Agency Sales Rep
Brian interviewed with Pete Caputa & Dannie Herzberg in an office filled with other rising stars from schools like MIT, Harvard, Babson, Bentley, and more. As soon as the offer came in, he leapt at the chance to grab this transformational career opportunity.
His first sales manager, current Sequoia Capital venture partner Dannie Herzberg, was one of the best professionals he had met in his entire life. Dannie was an incredible leader with a superpower of motivating and inspiring salespeople to overachieve their targets. Brian took advantage of the coaching, laying out his goals and working with Dannie on action plans to achieve them. This included taking Toastmasters to learn to become a better public speaker and more effective communicator.
Brian started as a hunter, signing on new agencies to the HubSpot Partner Program and quickly became the #1 achieving sales rep in North America. With his deep experience working with agencies and the small businesses they served from his early years as an entrepreneur and agency executive, he helped build a training program to teach other agencies how to sell effectively. This playbook later became productized at HubSpot.
HubSpot Agency Sales Coach
In his next role at HubSpot he entered into a “farming” type role, coaching agencies on how to sell HubSpot as part of their own service offerings. He would even help teach them how to interview & hire the right sales reps. Alongside Pete Caputa he learned what made a successful agency program, watching Pete run weekly business groups & agency community meetings to help enhance their business & growth acumen.
HubSpot Sales Manager
Finally, Brian became a manager himself at HubSpot. In this role he led a sales team of 8 people, learning what worked and didn’t, taking a lot of coaching to figure out what it means to be a good sales manager.
Databox
Working at HubSpot was an incredible run over almost four years and then Brian left to join his former HubSpot mentor Pete Caputa when he became CEO at Databox. As a Senior Sales Manager, Brian helped Databox grow their ARR from $120k to $600k and signed up 250+ agency partners in his first year as they transitioned from an Enterprise solution to a more of a touchless product led growth motion.
Leveraging the learnings from his agency coaching sessions at HubSpot, the Databox Agency Program grew to nearly 400 agency partners within 2 years of Brian’s arrival; tripling the size of the company.
Databox planned to grow thoughtfully and efficiently, but at the time Brian wanted to try another large scale hyper growth environment. He joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) to try working for one of the biggest companies in the world. But Brian soon learned that the big corporate environment wasn’t for him advocating internally, writing long memos, and learning a different culture & customer focus selling to Enterprise level CIOs & CTOs. It just wasn’t his passion.
Semrush
Semrush was looking for a leader to build out their first partner program and Brian was far more attracted to the marketing technology space. With 600 employees, 50k customers, and on the cusp of to $100M in revenue, it felt like a great opportunity. For the third time in his career, Pete Caputa helped him land a great role reporting to Semrush President Eugene Levin.
Brian’s work at Semrush over the past four years has felt like the culmination of all his skills. He was tasked with launching, selling, and building their first Enterprise partner program for a high ACV product – SplitSignal. Brian sold their first 25 customers and hired out the GTM team around this new partner program. He partnered with top SEO organizations to teach them how to sell & service to their end customers.
Most recently, Brian has been helping to build another Enterprise partner program for Semrush’s new Enterprise Platform. He’s responsible for organizing the GTM strategy, running discovery, and onboarding initial customers through alpha & beta programs as they begin the full commercial rollout.
Enterprise SEO is a complex space and he’s had to leverage all of his HubSpot, Databox & Amazon Enterprise partner knowledge to bring it all together. With the mentors, leadership, and experience Brian has encountered throughout his career…he should be just fine.
Incentives & Alignment – Finding CHI
Over Brian’s career in SaaS sales, he’s worked with multiple revenue teams and many reps, learning the power of incentives. Sales people will do what you pay them to do! This can be good..but sometimes bad.
HubSpot did a great job of incentivizing CSMs, Marketers, and Customer support reps on all the right metrics – leveraging a “CHI” score. The Customer Happiness Index measured how much customers were using the product (6+ tools led to the highest retention) and sales were tied to retention. Databox taught him to measure the metrics that matter and make them visible to your teams – “sunlight is the best disinfectant”.
Both organizations preached that it’s not just about “selling the most”, weighing retention and customer happiness is equally important. In order to get promoted at both organizations, customer retention was always part of the conversation.
Brian believes that Sales & Marketing alignment is one of the greatest things a SaaS company can aspire to achieve. At HubSpot, Brian always remembers VP of Sales Mark Roberge and VP of Marketing Mike Volpe co-presenting sales and marketing performance. Mike would present how many qualified leads were generated and Mark would show how fast his sales team was closing them. Marketing shows “these are the right leads” and Sales confirms “yep, marketing was right”.
As Brian has continued to build GTM teams and partner programs, he’s constantly working to help his Agency partners grow and be successful.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Take Plates Off Trays – “The best opportunities come from always trying to take the plates off the tray of your manager. Ask managers about their goals and try to master their job & care about their goals to make their lives easier. If you can better empathize with how to help your manager, you’ll find more opportunities”
Toastmaster Appreciation – “Get comfortable with public speaking and drop your crutch words. Try recording yourself on a call and listen to it back. It’s painful, but one of the best things you can do for your career.”
Be Someone Worth Helping – “Successful people might not mind spending time with you, but you have competition. How do you stand out to ensure they keep making time for you? Follow up and let them know how their time and advice have helped. Be specific. Offer to lend help in return and keep working to be someone worth helping.”
Brian gets a lot of energy from building GTM teams and programs. In the years ahead, he wants to take that builder mindset to other aspects of his life. He has some real estate investments and a part-time sailing business he plans to grow. You might see Brian one day soon washing boats between calls, chasing warm weather from port to port. Wherever the wind might takes him.
For more about Brian you can find him leading enterprise partner programs, sailing, scaling passive income opportunities, possibly officiating his fourth wedding, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see all the personal, professional, and even hybrid experiences between the two you launch in the coming years!