Joshua Trott is Chief Revenue Officer at Patch, the platform helping companies navigate carbon markets and scale climate action — and, by his own description, 'not really a sales guy.' He has never held an individual-contributor sales title. His career began in strategy consulting at Booz & Co. (which became Strategy& after its PwC acquisition), inside the energy, chemicals, and utilities practice, where he spent years designing governance frameworks and operating models in rooms full of C-suite executives. After a senior operations-and-strategy role at a large publicly traded utility (where he built a data-analytics function), he got his first quota at the expert network GLG, moving from leading customer success to a general-manager role owning the full P&L including sales. He went on to become CRO at Workrise, helping transform a labor marketplace for oil-field workers into an enterprise supply-chain platform valued at nearly $3 billion, where he also took over marketing for the first time. His through-line: in operationally intensive industries, closing is the audition and delivery is the real contract, RevOps is the operational backbone you build first, and operators who become sellers are the most underrated commercial talent pool in the AI era.
“You do what every smart person with an MBA does — you go and tell people what to do with their business, even though you don't know a lot.”
“The value was less in the things that they were buying, whether it was a product — it was actually in the trust that you earned over time to help them solve problems.”
“I've literally never held an individual contributor sales title. I went from leading CS to overseeing sales and CS simultaneously.”
“You're not selling them a platform. That's just a surface layer. The growth engine is actually the delivery.”
“A lot of the historical SaaS playbooks think the work is getting the deal closed. In these industries, all the work happens after the first deal is closed. The first contract is the audition — then you play for the real contract.”
“I've seen a lot of people think RevOps equals Salesforce. And I'm like, that's part of it — but there's so much more that can be done.”
“One of the key responsibilities once you're CRO is it's not just hitting the number — it's demonstrating control over that number.”
“Expansion in these industries isn't a product problem. It's actually a trust problem.”