Noah Massucci is a curious leader, brought up by educators, who’s all about diving in and figuring things out alongside his team. Today he serves as the Director of Sales Engineering & Implementation at hybrid workplace experience platform Robin.
Noah grew up in Vermont alongside an older brother and sister. His mom was an elementary school teacher and his dad was a guidance counselor. When not competing on the local soccer fields, Noah learned from the best.
Noah attended Southern Vermont College. While in school he worked part time for a local semi pro team, the Vermont Voltage. He sold advertising and even worked the booth announcing their games. It was here he faced his fear of public speaking head-on, especially after his infamous slip-up pronouncing Canada as “Canadia” in his debut. By overcoming fears and putting in the effort, he turned those nerves into skills and came out wiser
After graduation, he took a role as an Athletic Director at a high school. He didn’t have much idea yet of what he wanted his career to look like but knew he enjoyed building & being around teams. The experience taught him how to handle the occasional crisis when issues arose.
Next, he took a sales role at local office supply company Crystal Rock. He would head out in their delivery truck each morning with a stack of 100 pamphlets to knock on doors all day until his 5:30pm pick up. It was pretty challenging. But nothing in his career would have happened without it. Outside sales taught him to find ways to break through, establish personal connections, and take chances. It takes a lot of guts to walk into a random office and try to sell.
But Noah was ready to venture outside of Vermont. He moved to Boston to join Wayfair. Starting as a Business Account Manager, he developed and grew a book of business in their Sales org. Joining Wayfair on the eve of their IPO, he realized there were so many other roles outside of sales within rapidly growing technology organizations.
He transitioned to their Storefront engineering team as a Project Manager. Wayfair veteran Anthony “Enzo” Enzor-DeMeo took Noah under his wing as he ramped into his first semi-technical role, climbing a steep learning curve and learning the world of Revenue Operations.
Next, Noah joined HubSpot as a Senior Product Specialist on the HubSpot Sidekick team. He supported sales reps, implementation engineers & customer success. Working on a small startup team within HubSpot was an invaluable experience and, once the team born out of HubSpot Labs graduated into the core HubSpot CRM org, he knew he was destined for a startup.
He learned about Yesware through a conversation with an energetic leader and their Head of Sales, Paul Hlatky. Paul was looking for someone with the background & domain knowledge to help Yesware scale their revenue operations. Noah was looking to find an opportunity on the ground floor of a startup building a function. He gets excited about building something from scratch. At Yesware he helped the team scale out their Professional Services model. His contributions included the development of Salesforce reports utilizing data sourced from Yesware, as well as the seamless integration of Yesware with the Microsoft suite.
After helping to build out their revenue operations engine, luck & opportunity brought him to Robin. Founder Zach Dunn and Director of CX Lauren Squier were seasoned leaders who trusted Noah with the autonomy to build their initial Sales Engineering function while providing him guidance along the way.
Robin was looking for someone to come in and refine the pre-sales to position them for future success. Noah spent much of his career studying top performers, picking up bits and pieces of their leadership styles to refine his own approach to leading and mentoring. His CRO, Carl Oliveri, instilled in him the value of continuously learning and borrowing from leaders who can elevate your skills.
Noah has been at Robin for the last five years, helping the startup grow from a single sales engineering resource to leading their entire sales engineering & onboarding team. They have four Sales Engineers, a team of three Onboarding Specialists, and a Sales Enablement resource that report to him.
Noah leads with curiosity, gaining perspective through his own experiences and the insights of his team each day. He and his family live outside of the city now but he makes it up to Robin’s Seaport office often to spend time with his team and the great people of Boston tech.
Key Elements of a 90 Day Plan
After onboarding as a “first of” at a couple early stage startups, Noah has a lived approach to building a 90 day plan.
What’s worked best for him is holding himself back from thinking something needs to happen immediately. Instead, his initial goal is to learn as much as possible and figure out how to help by understanding the customer, product, and approach to everything as humbly as he can.
He makes it his mission to understand the team, the customer & the product in his first 90 days. He also assumes they have tried some of the initial ideas he might come up with. He aims to be generally curious and learn through listening.
Taking a player coach approach, he then sits in the role alongside his team. Noah wants to understand and participate in the role before asking anyone to do anything. He wants to be able to do anything he would ask his team to do. It’s also the easiest way to earn respect!
When Robin’s onboarding team was handed over to him, he had to walk into a situation where there was an existing team with existing ways of operating. He needed to see what they saw and what they needed before trying to change anything.
Curiosity has been his guiding principle. Like when Ted Lasso was playing darts – Noah aims to be curious, not judgmental. He’s watched a lot of people try to come in and implement things out of the gates, often committing the error of rushing into the final stages of a repeatable process without laying the necessary groundwork.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Solve The Problems Everyone Avoids– “ When I was starting out in my career, I honed a bunch of my technical skills by tackling the annoying problems nobody else wanted to touch. My advice? Seek out those pesky problems everyone avoids and get really good at fixing them. Suddenly, you will find yourself as the go-to person everyone relies on in the organization.”
Leading My Way – “I had an idea of what a leader looked like and thought I didn’t fit that criteria. Someone encouraged me to take this class on ‘using your own story to lead’ and that was one really helpful turning point that helped shape my leadership style and how I could continuously get better and more comfortable as a leader”
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask For Help – “There are so many people in my career that have helped me along the way and played a role in my success. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, there is always someone there to give advice or share their perspective.”
Noah doesn’t want to just continue building his role(s), he wants to continue building early stage startups and teams. Starting early and building something from the ground up continues to get him excited. When he joined Wayfair right before their IPO and heard stories about the “early days”, he knew that’s where he belonged. And he loves being a part of the team at Robin.
In the future he’ll continue to chase early stage opportunities building teams and companies to lay the foundation for later success. That way he’ll be able to say “I helped build this” and feel like he continues to build on his accomplishments.
If you want to learn more about Noah you can find him leading pre-sales at Robin, playing with his family to the south of Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We look forward to seeing the early stage startups you continue to impact around Boston in the coming decades!