Joe Haftel is a customer focused leader who keeps an open perspective, from sales to project management to implementation, in order to find a perfect fit helping customers implement software to grow their businesses. As the Implementation Project Manager at Paperless Parts, Joe is helping machine shops throughout the U.S. digitize and adapt to meet the needs of tomorrow.
Growing up in Nashua, NH as the youngest of three children, Joe learned a lot from his two talented older sisters. His parents were both engineers who studied and met at RPI. Fortunate to have grown up in a technically minded family, he wanted to use his knowledge to help mentor others. He attended UConn and graduated as a Molecular Biology major. From an early age he sought out mentorship and finding ways to give back. Even today he volunteers as a high school football coach on the weekends to help others grow. Startups offer a similar promise.
Realizing as he neared graduation that a career in biology wasn’t quite a perfect fit, he went to Bentley to get his MBA or “Undergrad Part 2” as he calls it. From Bentley he transitioned into startups, working for a local seed stage startup called Avrio AI. Avrio AI was building an AI recruiting software platform and Joe started as one of their first BDRs, working closely with Marketing to bring on their early customers. The team of 10 worked tirelessly but the product was not quite ready for primetime.
He wondered if he was even cut out for startups or tech sales. Next, he found an opportunity with Zoovu, an commerce platform building a product finder for online retailers. When they encountered some COVID headwinds, Joe joined Datadog’s commercial sales team. He loved the fast growing environment and learned a ton about prospecting, but he was still seeking a slightly different role that allowed him to work with customers over a longer time horizon.
Wanting to gain more experience in the realm of project management, he pivoted to a role at Beth Israel Medical Deaconess Center. He loved the problem solving elements of this larger organization and realized he thrives in problem solving environments with limited resources – i.e. startup environments.
Joe returned to the venture backed growth stage via a fast growing Boston based vertical software company serving manufacturers called Paperless Parts. Paperless Parts is a manufacturing quoting software platform that is helping the rapidly reshoring manufacturing industry with the digital tools it needs to grow.
As an Implementation Project Manager, Joe gets to be the primary customer contact on Day 1. He helps put dedicated plans in place to onboard customers and lead the training of the platform for new clients. He gets to demonstrate his product knowledge and act as a liaison between engineering, customer teams, and clients as they move from implementation to fully ramped customers.
Joe will lead client calls, establish configuration specs, and make sure that timelines & expectations are clarified. Joe is responsible for ensuring that customers are properly positioned before they are introduced to the Customer Success team. He’s responsible for building out their growing handover processes, already having completed 50+ customer implementations. Through those experiences he’s built relationships and processes to ensure that their product is best positioned to provide a white glove experience and get every ounce of his effort from the time investment.
Success Lies in Building Cross Functional Relationships
The best advice Joe has received that he’d give to himself or anyone else getting into startups is to make yourself cross functional from the very beginning. Joe has made a personal effort to meet all the sales people he works with across implementation so he can understand the go to market side of the business as well as the various challenges and opportunities within the team.
He makes himself available as a go to resource to become more well rounded and trusted on the front lines with clients. In order to do his job best he must understand the perspectives of his colleagues in sales, customer success, engineering and product. By knowing their perspective, the roadmap priorities, and responsibilities of his counterparts he can better facilitate actionable conversations with clients and lead with transparency by leveraging the full knowledge of the organization.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Keep an Open Perspective – “Whatever role you start out with, don’t think that’s the only role you’ll have. Be open minded and be understanding about what you like in each role you’re doing. And be open to opportunities. Be transparent with your manager too. Understand your pros and cons of what you like and don’t like in your role.”
Know the Values – “Make sure you know the company values. Even if the job is good or the pay is good, it’s important to have an idea of the leadership group and their priorities to better understand the company and its values too”
Vocalizing Optionality – “Understand the potential paths forward. Coming in open minded and being able to assess what you really want is critical. If you come into a more generalized role like a BDR role, be aware of what’s going on outside of your day to day and talk to management to put it out in the universe what you’re looking for”
Eventually, Joe would love to lead a Services team, running implementations and working with customers. He’s always thinking cross functionally about how he can help support his sales & engineering counterparts. As he continues to gain skills he’ll look to take on more leadership opportunities and ideally the opportunity to build out his own team one day.
For more about Joe you can find him on LinkedIn or commuting up to New Hampshire to coach leadership & win some football games on the weekends. Thanks for sharing Joe. Excited to see the manufacturers and future solutions oriented customers you help digitize in the years ahead.