Bert Harkins builds, leads and optimizes Revenue generating teams for growing companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.  He is frequently called on by executive teams, Boards, and investors to serve as interim and/or fractional CRO or CSO.  He also works extensively with sitting CROs and CSOs to build or improve their client-facing revenue generation teams.

For more than 25 years, Bert has been delivering superior revenue growth SaaS technology companies serving the corporate, fintech and social good verticals.  His specific areas of expertise include:

• Go-to-Market Planning and Execution
• Revenue Optimization and Enablement
• Revenue Operations
• Revenue and Sales Playbook Development
• Lead Generation
• Enterprise and Commercial Sales
• Sales Manager Coaching
• Sales Enablement

During his distinguished and high-impact career, Bert has served as:

VP – Sales Enablement, Blackbaud Corp. – Bert built a team to provide sales enablement services to support a sales function with 350 sales representatives. He created a global team of over 90 associates focused on Sales Training, Sales Operations, Sales Process Improvement, Sales Engineering and Sales Metrics and Planning. He created a centralized hiring process that dramatically reduced recruiting, interview, onboarding times from months to weeks, and he reduced time-to-productivity for new reps from 6.5 months to 4. He also created comprehensive list of sales productivity measures used to make actionable business decisions in real time.

SVP, Corporate Sales Support, Fiserv Corp. – He built and led a corporate-wide sales enablement function to support the sales teams across this Fortune 1000 organization. He also implemented consistent methodologies for proposal creation, lead management, solution architecture, sales program management, sales effectiveness and sales training. In addition, Bert built a Commercial Sales function to serve as a shared service for all sales teams to nurture leads, improve market coverage and close incremental new business.

As SVP of Sales and Marketing for Fiserv and earlier as VP and Divisional Chief Marketing Officer, included among Bert’s accomplishments were:

• • Led sales and marketing for a $200MM-revenue software division focused on payments and risk management solutions
  • Continually surpassed 100% of sales quotas
  • Managed the overall marketing efforts for a division of the company that generated approximately $1.5B in annual revenue
  • Led a team of 45 marketers in providing all areas of marketing support, including field marketing, creative development, event management, lead generation, and market awareness
  • Created the first divisional marketing organization in company history.

Earlier in his career, Bert served several roles for Checkfree Software, including VP of Strategic Marketing and VP/Regional Sales Manager. He began his career with Wachovia Corp.

He received both his undergraduate BA and MBA with a dual concentration in Finance and Marketing from the University of Tennessee.

More from Bert

The Argument for Revenue Operations | Sales Enablement Needs a Rebrand |