Welcome to Blue dot: Scott Newell

The Blue dot Team

Meet Blue dot’s new senior sales manager for the United States: Scott Newell. Scott is a veteran SaaS sales executive who brings rich experience in enterprise sales, implementation and leadership to the Blue dot team. Previously, Scott has worked for Amazon, Smartsheet and – most recently – Avalara, where he was an implementation engineer who specialized in custom API builds.

Scott says he was drawn to join Blue dot’s team in part due to the company’s upsetting of the status quo and aim of changing the value-added tax (VAT) reclaim space using technology as a catalyst. He says Blue dot’s SaaS model is unique in its ability to make the determination process consistent, unbiased and scalable – a critical aspect to Scott, who is passionate about identifying and resolving inefficiencies.

Automation is an especially big draw for Scott, who admits he has little patience for repetitive calculations and tasks. He says he admires Blue dot’s mission of breaking the norm of the industry, shunting manual review of employee spend by automating for better, faster and more accurate determinations.

Scott’s career has traced the intersection of tax and technology, which he acknowledges can be a difficult place to navigate. These two highly technical, detail-oriented topics demand knowledge of specifics yet also beg for automation and generalization, he says. Threading the needle of this conflict is a complex task, for which Scott’s academic background in finance and tax, coupled with firsthand experience with ERP systems, cloud services and tax scenarios has appropriately readied him.

Looking for inspiration during tough projects, Scott often finds himself looking to an unexpected role model – birds. In his own words, here’s what he finds so encouraging about his feathered friends:

“Birds go through careful and meticulous evaluation of every component of their nest material.  They search and find the perfect stick, pinecone, or piece of straw that enables the nest to come together as a cohesive whole.  They don’t suffer from analysis paralysis however – they work tirelessly and adjust their search criteria on the fly as they build.  They stay flexible on the details but stubborn on the end goal.  I think of this every time I find myself getting frustrated by minutia and it inspires me to lift my sights higher and to be flexible in the moment.”

In his free time, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter – particularly with hiking trips and trips to the local rivers and beaches in the summer months. He’s also been a certified ski instructor for 23 years and tries to visit the mountains at least once a week in the winter. His record is 126 days of skiing in one season. Here are a few other fun facts about Scott:

 

About Scott

Favorite movie – Wayne’s World

Favorite book – “Eon” by Greg Bear

Favorite food – Sushi

Favorite song – Retrowave and Synthwave music (an interest developed during his time as an implementation engineer troubleshooting JSON logs)

Favorite color – Deep metallic blue

Favorite animal – The Norwegian Forest Cat

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