Haley Wilcox is a competitor, listener, and solution driven revenue leader who has built partnerships through environments spicy and mild. Today she is the Director of Enterprise Sales & Partnerships at Boston food technology leader ezCater.
Haley was always competing on courts, fields, and tracks throughout her childhood. At Providence College she obtained a Marketing degree while also taking a couple newly offered sales classes her senior year. The exposure piqued her interest in the field. Athletically, she needed new goals to chase and got into running. She has completed several half marathons and successfully ran the Boston Marathon in 2016 too.
She began her career at local B2B media network TechTarget. They had visited Providence to recruit for their sales training program at a campus career services event and Haley jumped at the opportunity. She learned discovery, cold calling, negotiation, objection handling, and more as she ramped up on their product suite covering a Data Center & Storage territory.
Haley loved working at the intersection of media and technology. After a couple years of building relationships locally, she joined HubSpot as an Inbound Growth Specialist. But she had also heard about fast growing ezCater and they offered her the chance soon after to join an earlier stage startup building a new playbook for rapid growth.
Joining as one of their early sales reps, Haley became a part of helping ezCater establish their B2B go to market model. She was an integral part of the company’s transformation from a transactional marketplace company acquiring individual customers to an Enterprise focused growth stage startup selling to B2B decision makers who implemented corporate food programs.
From 2017 to 2020 Haley was a top individual contributor, consistently ranking as a top sales rep in goal attainment company wide. She was part of a pilot team that launched the early stages of selling into Enterprise businesses. Her consultative skill set perfectly aligned to this evolved approach, listening and focusing on customer needs to provide tailored solutions as they piloted an Enterprise sales model. Haley (and ezCater) grew quickly. They created the value proposition, ironed out personas, and built a GTM engine to acquire F1000 companies on the eve of COVID. Then, everything changed.
Adaptability and resilience became her most important new skills. Each day was fluid and Haley developed a professional resilience she didn’t previously know she had. ezCater was in a unique position in that both sides of their marketplace were heavily impacted. Restaurants shut down and businesses sent workers home. They had to be experts & consultants in addition to technology providers.
Team members were coaching restaurants on how to change their menus from buffet style to individual food orders & packaging while getting food to essential workers safely. Both sides of their marketplace – restaurants and workplaces – relied on ezCater to guide them. Their previous core business model of “on demand” food transformed into an ongoing offering custom made for different use cases in retail, construction, lab environments, and more. In some scenarios they even replaced full blown cafeterias tailored to customer specific needs. This transformation led to significant growth with a diversified customer portfolio across verticals like professional sports, higher education, and technology who all signed on.
2023 was a year of expansion. Haley helped enhance their cafeteria alternative offeringto help position ezCater as a comprehensive food tech platform for workplaces.
Currently, Haley is leading the Strategic Partnerships team, partnering with real estate and hospitality providers to help provide food programs that align with today’s evolving workplace. In addition to the Partnerships team, Haley oversees the Enterprise Demand businesses consisting of Enterprise Business Development and Enterprise Acquisition functionalities. These teams consult large companies on the best food and beverage program for today’s environment.
Successful Partnerships Rely on Relationships & Solutions
Haley has been most successful in her career building relationships through trust and listening. Whether it’s her customers, partners, or teammates, trust is the foundation of all of those relationships.
Haley cares deeply and demonstrates it by listening and asking the right questions before she even thinks about opening her mouth to pitch a product. She has learned to ask good questions and get to know the customer before pairing their problem(s) with a solution.
Where she has been very successful is through understanding in the food and beverage space, there will never be a “one size fits all” model. Her success has driven from understanding customer needs, and consulting based on industry knowledge and use cases.
She loves working directly with workplace teams. Those are the people that care about optimization, making the office a great place to work, and understanding the impact of food on a company. When she talks to Procurement teams, especially in services businesses, she understands the need to focus on the efficiencies of vendors and potential savings. Or with real estate & facilities teams, she can help optimize workplace and building logistics through a streamlined program.
It’s all about building trust to ask the right questions, understand the impact, and then provide a solution that’s a win-win for all parties.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Listening – “Listen intently. Understanding your client’s needs to provide the best recommendations leads to strong relationships”
Building Relationships – “I’ve been super successful by building long term relationships to establish trust. It’s hard, and it takes time, but I’ve found it to be crucial for long term success”
Have Mentors – “Find a mentor that works for your style. Where people haven’t been successful is picking someone based on their role or title. I’ve been successful with mentors who have similar styles to how I work with customers and think about strategic decisions. I’ve learned so much from mentors that prioritize my values and style, focused on customer needs”
Haley is extremely passionate about building and developing strong GTM models through partnerships. She has really enjoyed building strong partnerships who align with her values. She believes those partnerships are what really helps drive long term business growth and strong relationships. Going from product to solution selling has been so much fun at ezCater and it has been incredibly rewarding to help the companies she has worked with think more innovatively and achieve their goals through workplace innovation. For more about Haley you can find her chasing a new goal running around Boston, bringing innovation to workplace experience programs, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the partnerships, relationships, teams, and technologies you continue to influence in the years ahead!