01 About
Steven Bartz is Director of Sales at Five Nines Technology Group, a managed IT partner headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. He sells and negotiates complex managed services agreements for banks, hospitals, and law firms across the Midwest and nationally.
I have spent more than ten years in professional sales, most of it in complex B2B deals where the buyer is an owner, a president, a CFO, or a board, and the decision carries real consequence. My work lives in that room: translating risk into business terms, building the case with evidence, and getting to a decision both sides can stand behind.
The current chapter is sales leadership at Five Nines Technology Group, a managed IT partner serving regulated industries: banking and financial services, healthcare, and legal. Player-coach by design. I run the discovery calls, build the evaluations, present the findings, and close the deals, while also owning the sales system itself: the playbook, the target client profile, and the enablement, scoring, and reporting infrastructure the whole team operates inside.
Empirical over anecdotal. Every recommendation I make traces to a source: CRM data, billing history, a device census, a funding rule I actually read. That discipline is why leadership brings me into executive conversations, and it is the through-line of everything on this page.
02 Revenue Growth & Wins
The company's largest recurring revenue negotiation
Instrumental in negotiating a five-year managed services contract with a nationally recognized rehabilitation health system at $208,000 in monthly recurring revenue, roughly $12.5M in contract value at signing. The account has since grown to more than $251K in monthly billing.
Second flagship contract
Central to negotiating a five-year agreement with a multi-state agricultural equipment dealer network at $125,000 MRR, about $7.5M in contract value at signing. That account now bills nearly $158K per month.
Growth during my tenure
Five Nines has grown from $1.4M to $2.6M in monthly recurring revenue since I started in November 2022. The two flagship contracts above equal more than a quarter of that net growth at their signing value alone.
What the team has sold under my leadership
In almost four years, the sales team has sold $918,856 in new monthly recurring revenue, nearly all of it on three-year agreement terms. That is managed services alone; it excludes Office 365 licensing, product, and project revenue.
Full-environment transformation for a rural health system
Sold the complete rebuild at the start of the relationship in late 2023: network refresh, server and storage infrastructure replacement, Azure AD and Office 365 migration, switch and firewall refresh, and a laptop fleet. More than $1.5 million in hardware and project billing landed in the first six months, alongside a co-managed services agreement that started at $28,220 MRR, the largest co-managed agreement in company history. That agreement now bills more than $47K per month.
National background screening provider
Closed a managed services agreement at $75,905 in monthly recurring revenue, roughly $911,000 annualized.
Infrastructure modernization for a regional bank
Closed a $253,000 virtualization infrastructure replacement, alongside a $64,000 firewall replacement program and onboarding for the same institution.
Network separation for a professional services firm
Closed a $151,000 network separation engagement for a multi-entity professional services organization.
03 Work · Programs & Systems
The build side of the job: a BDR program stood up from scratch, and an AI-assisted revenue operation behind it with eight live tools, analytical models, document systems, and more than sixty shipped deliverables. Everything here was built to run without me.
BDR Program
Built the company's BDR program from scratch: the business case and the economics behind it, incentive design, talent sourcing, the right technology access for enablement, and the training resources that ramp new hires. The program scaled to generating more than ten meetings a month. Then I engineered myself out of it, handing off a repeatable system the account executives now manage day to day.
Sales Command
A live sales operations dashboard pulling real-time CRM metrics on a 15-minute refresh: AE and BDR scorecards with day-prorated weekly pacing, weekly and monthly attainment registers, weighted period scoring, individual rep pages, and a leadership-only insights view. Now carries board-grade reporting: a standards page benchmarked against the sales model, a weekly tracker in the board's own format, one-click PDF exports for partners, and Monday-morning alerts that flag stalled deals and untouched targets before they cost a quarter. Hardened over multiple engineering passes for query batching, retry logic, and failure-state honesty (an error banner instead of a plausible zero).
Channel Partner Scorecard
Partner-facing scorecard evaluating four channel programs across 76 member companies, built from billing history: return on channel spend, cohort retention, blended rates versus standard pricing, break-even in warm introductions per year, and a data-driven ask that branches on each program's actual trajectory.
Investment Comparison Models
Board-ready pricing comparisons for six-figure managed services decisions: current spend versus proposal, staffing economics, federal funding estimates, and a house visual style refined across a dozen iterations. One recent model surfaced $293,000 in annual savings for a rural hospital; another reconciled a prospect's license export and device census down to the individual endpoint to defend the per-user price.
Investment Comparison Calculator
The comparison model generalized into a reusable, industry-neutral calculator any rep can run with a prospect: plan and term pricing from the published rate card, an internal staffing table, a 32-line tools-and-services checklist that re-prices itself as the plan changes, optional funding or grant offsets, and conservative market-rate estimates with cited sources for costs the prospect has not tallied. Exports a branded one-pager or PDF straight from the page and saves scenarios for reuse.
Sales Funnel Calculator
A live funnel calculator built on documented stage-to-stage conversion rates, so pipeline coverage targets and activity requirements come from math rather than gut feel. Paired with a maintained conversion-rate baseline the whole team works from.
Commission Engine
Rebuilt the sales commission master workbook: per-AE quotas, accelerator tiers, and statement generation, with an independent Python recompute that verifies every figure before a statement goes out. The audit found and fixed real silent errors, including a formula desync that had been dropping dollars. Packaged as a reusable skill so the process survives beyond me.
Territory & Market Plans
A six-territory national expansion plan layering rural healthcare and community banking market data, with census-shapefile territory maps, account-level target lists of eligible independent hospitals, hiring order, and branded plan documents leadership can work from. Companion channel plans for a national financial services partner with revenue milestones built from actual base figures, and an industry segmentation of the full 6,300-company account universe to sharpen targeting.
AE Talent Pipeline
A named-candidate sourcing system for expansion hiring: 538 sales candidates at 128 managed services firms across five metros, vertical-experience flags, a firm-level target map, and a paste-ready Sales Navigator playbook that turns the list into a standing weekly pipeline. Backed by a four-round interview process that ends in a scored, live mock qualifying call rather than a resume conversation.
Brand Document Factory
Packaged, reusable document skills that produce on-brand deliverables on demand: designed multi-page brochures with two structural arcs (case-making and plan documents), branded letterhead documents, and executive decks. Templates enforce brand rules automatically, down to blocking over-promises and off-brand punctuation at build time. Distributed for org-wide use.
USAC Healthcare Connect Fund Practice
A working practice around federal rural healthcare broadband funding: appeal briefs for denied funding requests with verified regulatory citations, an internal USAC reference guide, and funding estimates integrated directly into client pricing models.
Call Script System
Four decision-tree call scripts for healthcare and specialty prospecting, each with A/B-tested openers, role-based pitches, an objection library, and a booking cascade, and each paired with an interactive click-through call flow the rep works from live on the phone. One script carries the core intro-meeting motion; three carry new service lines. Built so a first-month rep sounds like a tenured one.
Database De-duplication at Scale
A full read of 25,150 CRM company records surfaced 454 duplicate pairs, tiered by confidence. The 183 high-confidence pairs were merged by script rather than by hand, each with a preservation note for any data the merge would have lost and a complete audit trail. The rest sit in a reviewed queue, not a guess.
Enablement Library
Authored the 2026 Sales Playbook and built the library around it: vertical playbooks for banking and rural hospitals, a BDR pitch guide and call scripts written in plain language so a first-week hire can run them, AE onboarding guides, a CRM deal-creation standard with annotated screenshots, and documented vendor learning paths for every seller.
04 Operating System
The less visible work: an agentic operating system that makes every session compound instead of starting from zero.
Standing instructionsCLAUDE.md
A versioned operating manual covering voice, brand rules, verification standards, tool routing, and what never ships without approval. Every session loads it; every deliverable obeys it.
Working memoryObsidian vault
A structured memory vault indexing brand standards, playbook positioning, people and how they decide, recurring plays, and a running log of every deliverable produced.
Wake / Sleep loopNightly reflection
A scheduled evening reflection reviews the day's sessions, extracts generalizable lessons, and writes them into memory; a wake routine loads them back. The system gets better while I sleep.
Scheduled automationRecurring tasks
A weekly pipeline report delivered every Friday morning, Monday workspace organizers, and dashboard refresh cycles. Recurring work runs itself.
Verification disciplineNo fabrication
Every figure traces to a source, and anything unconfirmed is flagged rather than guessed. Financial models get independently recomputed before they go out. It is a standard, not a preference.