We’re back for the next installment in Bandalier’s Alumni Series with an exciting guest - Renee Barmada, our first-ever employee! She recently caught up with Jeremy to discuss her experiences and how they’ve influenced her career path.

Renee came to Bandalier with a ton of hospitality experience and a dash of in-person sales experience. She came across the role on Indeed (where we still advertise!) and realized the role would be a great option to use her existing skills and continue her professional development. After interviewing with Matt and Jeremy, she became the first member of Bandalier’s team. Though she had sales experience, Bandalier’s structure was an entirely new experience:

“In hospitality and retail, you have to physically do something all the time. There’s a big difference between that and working only on your computer. You have to learn how to set your own standards, outline the day, and determine what success is going to look like. Ultimately, you make the choice of whether you’re going to win or lose that day, and it’s a matter of how hard you work.”

Renee loved her new role, but she knew that the transition would be a tough one. As she explains,

“Hospitality gives fast money, but there’s no opportunity to grow past that. Now, I’m in much better shape - career-wise. Every sacrifice I made to work at Bandalier has paid off tremendously.”

After working with Bandalier for a little over two years, Renee moved to another opportunity with a local tech company. She wanted to grow further and found her current role in Enterprise Business Development shortly thereafter. Renee has crushed her sales quotas every quarter, and she credits her training at Bandalier for getting her on the right track:

“Matt’s Sales 101 training was the foundation for my success. At higher levels, companies just want to train you on the product and let you make the sales - they don’t want to teach you how to make sales. I’m reaching out to companies with hundreds of thousands of employees, and it’s tough to reach folks directly, but I still use a lot of the tactics that I learned at Bandalier.”

We’re so proud of Renee’s growth and success, and we’re looking forward to giving more folks opportunities to develop professionally as she did. If you’re interested in joining Bandalier’s team, head over to our careers page!

Up next in our Bandalier Alumni series is Nick Viviano! If you follow our blog, you probably remember his feature in our New Leaders series from summer 2020. Nick’s had a big year, and he recently took the time to catch up with our CEO, Jeremy Ruch, to talk about the role Bandalier played in his growth.

​Nick joined Bandalier at the end of 2019. At the time, he was working as a licensed financial advisor, quickly realizing that he liked the sales aspect more than the stock trading one. He was referred to Bandalier by a friend, James, who was our Client Delivery Manager at the time. 

“James knew I was just looking to get started in sales and build a career, and he said Bandalier would be a great option. He was right, of course. I really liked all of the training I got. It gave me all the skills I needed to work toward success in sales. Bandalier’s training made it easy to get started with my client, too - all I needed was the keywords that would keep their prospects engaged.”

Once Nick wrapped up his training, he hit the phones for one of our long-term clients. It was a tough program, and Nick had to learn a whole new industry. Fortunately, he was able to use his new sales skills to find immediate success, booking two demos during his first week of calling!

Of course, we were all due for some big changes when we made the shift to working fully remotely in March of 2020. Bandalier was incredibly fortunate to have some practice with remote work, but the sudden shift also meant that our clients were adapting their outreach strategies, too. Nick’s focused shifted to pulling folks in for webinars, rather than demos, and he explored alternative methods of getting in touch with people as they worked away from their desk phones.

Thanks to the resilience of Nick and his team, they were able to drive results for their client. His focus didn’t go unnoticed, and as Bandalier expanded, Nick was promoted to a Program Manager role. He had stepped into the role of team lead almost accidentally in the months prior, so the new title simply formalized his responsibilities. He eased communication between Bandalier and his client, motivated his team, and tracked their results. As he describes it,
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“The hardest part to learn was accountability for the team. Before, I was just responsible for myself and my own goals - now I had to watch the team’s, and figure out what was happening if someone was falling behind. I had to find ways to motivate the team, and different things worked for different people. Alex and I always had a friendly competition going on. Since I was still making calls, we’d joke with each other and see who could get the most activities and best results each week. I did my best to lead by example. I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself. It was definitely hectic, but I thrived in that busy environment.”

Nick’s hard work and dedication caught his client’s attention - in the fall of 2020, they offered to hire him directly. Nick joined their team as the sole Sales Associate, working closely with their account executives to keep delivering incredible results. The role is designed to grow with him, and in time, Nick hopes to return to managing a team.
We’re incredibly proud of Nick and his accomplishments! We love building teams of ambitious, passionate salespeople - if you’re looking to build your sales career, check out our careers page. If you’re a growing company that wants to work with people like Nick, book a call with us here!

​Like many of our best team members, Jasmine was a referral from a past team member. Her sister, Juliet, had worked with Bandalier a few years previously - our team would see Jasmine in the background of Zoom calls every now and then. When Jasmine was looking for a remote opportunity in the summer of 2020, Juliet encouraged her to join the team at Bandalier. Given the quality of Juliet’s work, we had high hopes for Jasmine. Our team had been asking Juliet to bring Jasmine on board for months! She finally joined our team in August of 2020.

As Jasmine said, her first few months were a “huge adjustment - it was my first career job, first remote job, and my first sales role. There was a lot that I was unsure of, but the training programs helped build my skill set and confidence.” Jasmine also relied on her teammates for help - “even though we were all remote, it still felt like everyone in the company was very connected.” Her infectious positivity endeared Jasmine to our team, and she became a cornerstone rep on her program, always there to help her team members work through the challenges they ran into. Over time, she realized that it was “interesting to learn how much of sales is just a numbers game, especially where emails are concerned. It helped inform how I set my goals. It was interesting to see how applying the things I learned about setting attainable goals from Bandalier U to my work with the client. Sending enough messages meant I could lock down a demo, and that was an exciting experience every time.”

Thanks to Jasmine’s excellent time management skills and work ethic, she joined our leadership team in February of 2021. She started officially leading her program, using her experiences to inform her management style. 

“I’d think about what I wanted from management to inform my actions, and it helped a lot that I was on the ground doing the same work as the rest of my team. I constantly had to remind myself that not everyone works the same way that I do, so I had to keep in mind that everyone communicates differently and would be receptive to different forms of feedback to help them reach their goals. My biggest lesson from leadership was about what motivates people - whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic and finding a way to help everyone work together better.”

Jasmine made such an impact on her client that they offered to hire her directly in the summer of 2021. As she describes it, “I moved into leadership as my client  was looking to reshape their SDR team; they needed team players that they already knew, and it was a perfect opportunity.” While we were sad to see Jasmine leave our team, we knew that she’d be seizing an amazing opportunity with her client. As she wrapped up her conversation with Jeremy, she offered this piece of advice to new Bandalier reps:

“Take any opportunity that comes your way - you may not think you’re good at sales, but you may surprise yourself. Keep setting goals and don’t turn down an opportunity when it comes your way. Bandalier offered me a gateway to so many opportunities that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise.”

We’re excited to celebrate Jasmine and all of our other incredible alumni - keep an eye on our blog for the next post in our series! If you’re looking for an opportunity to work with ambitious young sales professionals, check out our careers page to apply.

A core value at Bandalier is kaizen - the idea of continuous improvement. This is something that helps us learn and grow over time, and we’ve used it to build an intentional culture around hiring and management. That’s why we maintain an obsessive focus on feedback we receive from team members, and keep a close eye on retention metrics. 

Any Bandalier team member’s experience with the company begins with our interview process, and we spend a lot of time ensuring that even those people not selected (which due to the competitive nature of our roles unfortunately winds up being the majority of applicants) get something from the process. Over 75% of candidates report having a positive experience with their Bandalier interview. Our roleplay section gets a lot of comments due to the interactive nature of this section, and a few reviewers have said that it set Bandalier apart from their past interview experiences. You can find a more detailed breakdown of why we use roleplays in our interviews here. 

Once they join the team, 92% of team members say they’d recommend Bandalier as a place to work to their friends. This is something we’re really proud of, and we have actually built it into our recruiting strategy. Many employees have referred friends to roles here at Bandalier. Since April, 125 people have applied after being referred by a current team member. In part because of this, we’ve been able to build strong bonds across our team. We’ve had distant colleagues, friends, couples, and siblings work together at Bandalier (which gives us great ammo for trivia events).

One area we’ve been particularly focused on improving based on employee feedback in 2021 is compensation and benefits.  Our full-time team members receive 14 days of PTO along with 10 federal holidays, plus the option to flex their schedule. We also offer health insurance and introduced parental leave this year. 

But that’s just benefits - lots of folks are focused on compensation, and for good reason. Bandalier prioritizes connecting talent with new opportunities. In some cases, that means helping our team members like Rob and Christian work with clients directly: Bandalier has connected 5 team members with in-house opportunities in just the last few months. However, we also promote growth within Bandalier. Our leadership team is composed solely of folks who were promoted from our sales teams, and we offer rapid growth for folks that are eager to take on more responsibility. Someone can go from being a brand new sales rep to a program manager over the course of six months - but we also offer paths for folks to explore more sales skills, or subjects that align more closely with their long-term career goals.

Looking for a new challenge? Feeling stuck with your current position? We almost always have openings and do NOT require you to have customer success or sales experience. We train all new team members regardless of experience and background. Apply today at bandalier.co/careers!

Our company mission is to connect talent with growing tech companies in places that don’t typically have access to these industries. To achieve this, we needed to find a place that has a large, high quality talent pool. Our Founder and CEO, Jeremy, had an idea: towns near universities are a breeding ground for talent. Binghamton was in the search.

​While exploring potential university towns, Jeremy had to keep in mind that we needed a head of office who knows both the industry and the area around our potential HQ. Before long, Jeremy was referred to a man named Matt Scanlon, a sales leader in Binghamton, by 2 different people and did cold outbound to pique his interest about discussing this “Bandalier project.” Fun fact - it wasn’t until the second attempt and referral that Matt actually gave him a chance.

After exploring the area with serious intentions, it was clear that Binghamton would be a great home for Bandalier. It had an up and coming downtown area that would be perfect for a small office, with space and opportunity to grow with the company (which wasn’t certain at the time but look at us now!). There is a great talent pool of both locals and college students/recent graduates looking to start their career in tech. The final selling point was the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator (aka “the Incubator'' internally and locally). Just opening at the time, the Incubator provides an amazing environment for a startup AND extra connections to a motivated workforce at Binghamton University, SUNY Broome, and local talent!
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The Incubator has supported us through great times just as well as through our toughest (notably 2020), and has been home to many of our team building events.