How Del Patara Leads Her Team at Braze
Over the course of her career, Del Patara has discovered the key to business growth: diverse, high-performing teams while prioritizing a thoughtful relationship between team and technology.
As the Vice President and Global Head of Business Development at customer engagement platform provider Braze, she leads new business strategies, which involves building and scaling global practices and teams. Patara is no stranger to growth. She has worked in new business revenue growth and business transformation for more than 15 years, and joined Braze six years ago to help acquire customers in emerging markets.
What Does Braze Do?
Braze is a leading customer engagement platform that powers lasting connections between consumers and brands they love through cross-channel messaging, journey orchestration, Al-powered experimentation and optimization.
While there are many reasons why Del feels fulfilled by her role at Braze, she’s especially energized by the work she does to help early-career professionals jumpstart their careers. Her team is composed of individuals with a variety of backgrounds, from finance to professional sports, yet all of them show an appetite for refining their skill sets — and having fun in the process.
Patara’s team culture is rooted in psychological safety and trust, which encourages teammates to voice their opinions, take calculated risks and own — and learn from — their failures.
“When I see people find their unique skills and voice, productively experiment, and appreciate the losses as well as the wins, I feel confident that they’ll create value for themselves, their peers and the organization,” Delsaid.
Below, Del shares more about her leadership philosophy, how she empowers her team to thrive, and the work her team is doing to drive business success.
Who is Del Patara?
Patara is a go-to-market leader with more than 15 years of experience specializing in new business revenue growth and business transformation. Prior to joining Braze, she served as Head of Sales and Partnerships at Doddle, a first- and last-mile delivery startup, which was acquired by supply chain solutions provider Blue Yonder.
Del Patara’s Career Journey at Braze
What is your role at Braze, and how long have you worked at the company?
I have been with Braze for nearly six years. My role has evolved over the years, starting with building new teams, and acquiring new customers in emerging markets. Since then, I have led new business strategies, building global practices and teams pre-IPO, and scaling them to deliver revenue growth for Braze and our customers. I’m proud to lead a team that welcomes early-career professionals and invests in their professional and role-specific skills.
How Leaders at Braze Guide Teams and Cultivate Culture
What’s your vision for leading your team?
At the core of my vision is the belief that building diverse, high-performing teams and prioritizing a thoughtful relationship between team and technology will help us solve complex business challenges and grow meaningful careers. Empowerment plays a key role. My hope is that team members operate from a baseline of psychological safety and trust. When I see people find their unique skills and voice, productively experiment and appreciate the losses as well as the wins, I feel confident that they’ll create value for themselves, their peers and the organization.
How do you build team culture? What does that look like at your company? Why is that important for the work that you do?
Team and company culture feel very cohesive at Braze. As an organization, we rally around a set of Braze Values, including “Take Your Seat at The Table,” “Don’t Ignore Smoke,” “Shape the Future,” “Embrace Curiosity,” “Seek the Truth” and “Be A Human.” I’m sure every team within Braze adds its own flavor to those values. What I find special is that we dedicate time, effort and resources to the spaces where we overlap. We treasure our collective identity but are eager to enrich and add to it with every new hire. It’s satisfying to see new joiners sign up to one of our many Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) or clubs, and better yet, when they advocate for a new one. Several of our team members have stepped up to lead ERGs they care about.
Braze is an AI-powered customer engagement platform that helps brands build meaningful connections that are relevant and feel personal. The Business Development team spends the majority of its time speaking with those brands. Our customers are working as a team. Between chief marketing officer and chief technology officer, marketer and engineer, they are striving to deliver the best possible experiences for their consumers. We build our ways of working in the same spirit. Every project is a team effort, from Business Development Representatives and Account Executives to Partnerships and Customer Success. Our shared culture orients us toward a unified vision for our customers, whose success is the heart of the organization. Following the analogy, our people are the heartbeat.
How Leaders at Braze Support Employees’ Career Growth
How do you help your team grow their careers? What tools and support do you offer to allow them to stretch their skills?
The word “team” has three meanings for me. The first is the Business Development team of individual contributors. The Business Development team is focused on finding new customers and helping them envision a more creative, AI-powered and modern approach to customer engagement. For many of our team members, the next career milestone is to be promoted to a full-cycle sales role/AE so we’re always looking at creative ways for high performers to get first-hand experience with full-cycle deals.
One of the programs we invest in heavily is Braze’s Tech for an Equitable Future. The program helps underrepresented founders grow and scale their businesses through a product grant program that offers 12 months of free access to the Braze customer engagement platform and supporting services. Individual contributors within the Business Development team volunteer every year to staff the program. Our involvement helps us better understand the market and our customers, and it also allows ICs to take a more comprehensive role in the customer journey. They get to review grant applications, collaborate with or even run the deal cycles and contribute to getting more underrepresented founders set up for success. It's a powerful hands-on experience.
What is Braze's Tech for an Equitable Future Program?
Braze’s Tech for an Equitable Future program helps underrepresented founders grow and scale their businesses through a product grant that includes 12 months of free access to the Braze platform and supporting services. Business Development team members volunteer on the program and gain broader experience across the customer journey.
The second cohort in my “team” is my first- and second-line leaders. Investing in their growth is key, and I’m excited about a new collaboration with our talented Talent Development team on the Braze Leadership Accelerator Program. This program is designed specifically for senior leaders who demonstrate strong performance and the potential to scale their leadership capabilities as Braze continues to grow. It represents a deliberate investment in their professional development and long-term growth. We operate in a dynamic market where skill expansion is critical, and I’m pleased to have nominated leaders from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region to join the program.
The third cohort is my peers, the revenue leadership team. We are in constant dialogue around how we uplift and enrich each other and our unified team, as well as customers. When I joined, Braze was already invested in AI as a part of our customer offering, so while the event of AI isn’t new to us, it is gratifying that this group continues to innovate and invest in best-in-class AI tools internally to accelerate our vision into action.
How Braze’s Business Development Team Helps Customers Boost Revenue and Brand Loyalty
What is something exciting that you are currently working on with your team?
The team is focused on helping our customers digest how AI-powered decisioning and optimization can positively impact their revenue outcomes and brand loyalty. It’s a thrill to see our customers move beyond their legacy ways of working and toolkits, and modernize their execution. It’s also an amazing learning curve for our team; they get to be at the forefront of a new standard in customer engagement.
“It’s a thrill to see our customers move beyond their legacy ways of working and toolkits, and modernize their execution.”
The results are now speaking for themselves. A recent study by Forrester Consulting, “The Total Economic Impact of Braze,” showed that a composite streaming entertainment provider using BrazeAI Decisioning Studio achieved a 14.65 percent improvement in subscription reactivation and 106 percent relative lift in its cross-sell conversion rate, resulting in a combined $99.6 million in revenue gains over three years. It’s exciting and satisfying to see that the care and expertise that goes into those early conversations is converting to real value for Braze customers!
How Braze’s Business Development Team Grows and Makes an Impact
What is the employee value proposition for those thinking about joining Braze?
The value proposition is built on contributing to a vibrant, global vision and operating with iconic brands at the frontier of customer engagement technology. For commercial and customer-facing careers, the journey often starts with Business Development. Looking at my team today, I see people who joined straight from college, made the leap to sales from pro sports, switched careers from finance and consulting, or came from similar roles in other industries. Backgrounds are diverse, and promotional paths are, too. People who started in Business Development have gone on to have successful careers as AEs, AMs, Solutions Consultants, Partner Managers, Solutions Strategists, Marketers and Sales Leaders, with many others promoted within the department and building their specialism in new Business Development. Promotional roles aside, we orient ourselves on the skills we wish to acquire, and there’s a lot of fun and camaraderie on our team, too. That fun is fueled by our desire to be as creative and innovative as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Braze do?
Braze is a leading customer engagement platform that powers lasting connections between consumers and brands through cross-channel messaging, AI-powered experimentation and optimization, and journey orchestration. It helps brands build meaningful, relevant and personal connections with their consumers, ultimately boosting revenue outcomes and brand loyalty.
What is the Tech for an Equitable Future program at Braze?
The Tech for an Equitable Future program is a product grant initiative that helps underrepresented founders grow and scale their businesses. The program provides selected startups with 12 months of free access to the Braze customer engagement platform alongside supporting services.
Members of the business development team volunteer for this program annually, allowing them to gain hands-on experience across the customer journey by reviewing applications, and collaborating on or running deal cycles.
How does Braze support career growth for business development teams?
Braze supports career growth for its business development team through several structured opportunities and initiatives. For instance, Braze looks for creative ways to give high-performing individual contributors hands-on experience with full-cycle deals so they can transition into account executive roles. Additionally, the Braze Leadership Accelerator Program invests in first- and second-line senior leaders who show high performance and the potential to scale their leadership capabilities globally.
