Jesse Hartheimer, Chief of Staff, Sales
“We were able to turn a customer pain point into a product that's now helping thousands of our other customers. It taught me that, at the end of the day, you should listen to your best customers when they tell you what they need and what their pain points are.”
Meet Jesse
My role at Xometry has evolved over the years since I started in 2017, and today I am the sales chief of staff. My first role was as a business development sales representative, going after new business. I did that for a year, and then in 2019, I moved to an account executive role. So, rather than bringing a new business, I was working on maintaining the business we already have with some of our larger accounts. In 2020 I moved to a senior account executive role, working with larger Fortune 100 and 500 accounts. And I stayed in that role until earlier this year when I was promoted to my current role. So I started with boots on the ground as one of the troops and worked my way up over seven years to a manager role.
I had no manufacturing background when I came to Xometry, and early on I leaned heavily on the pre-sales engineering team to learn from them. We have such a deep bench of smart people here, across all of our different processes that we offer.
Turning Customer Pain Points into Custom Solutions
I helped grow one of our customers from inception to a $6 million-a-year account. We had an audit with them in 2022, and in one meeting we had the head of our operations team demonstrate what their workflow looked like. At that time, they were using Asana to show which jobs had been taken, which were on track, which were not, etc. And our customer said, “If I could see something like this across my team, we would spend a lot more with you guys.” That was the inception of Teamspace. It was cool to be in the room when that was initially created and then work with the product team and that customer over the next 12 months to finalize that product. We were able to turn a customer pain point into a product that's now helping thousands of our other customers. It taught me that, at the end of the day, you should listen to your best customers when they tell you what they need and what their pain points are.
Simplifying the Vendor Sourcing Process
Xometry’s biggest value add when it comes to larger programs is the project management piece. Our business model has forced us to become really good at managing a large partner network — 10,000 shops across the world. We wouldn't be successful if we hadn't figured out how to properly manage a network that large. In my eyes, the real value adds are: No. 1, us being able to source and select vendors from our network that fit the job correctly, and No. 2, being able to manage those vendors. That is often half the job of a sourcing specialist or supply chain specialist. And by allowing us to do that, we can save them a lot of time, and a lot of money. We can do for them in just a few days what would have taken them several weeks.