Podcasts about GTM

"No data, no agent. Bad data, bad agent. Good data, good agent." Cris Mendes thinks data readiness is the number one reason the agentic enterprise fails, and he has the receipts — he ran the experiment on his own team before he sold it to anyone else.He's VP of Revenue at Momentum.io, acquired by Salesforce in large part because of the go-to-market motion he built there. Before that: Drift, Airtable, and LogMeIn. Before all of it, U.S. Navy search and rescue swimmer. I've known him almost twenty years and introduced him to LogMeIn myself, so take the enthusiasm here with whatever salt you need.His argument is that everyone is buying agents on top of a data layer that was never built. The average customer conversation moves about eight thousand words; maybe eight of them make it into the CRM. Companies don't have a first-party data layer, they have a human-input data layer — and that's what every agentic project quietly runs aground on.The story worth the listen: Momentum had a brutal drop-off after the first call. Rather than sampling a few calls and guessing at messaging or ICP, Cris pushed 800 first calls through deep research and got one answer back — the reps weren't prescribing a next step. So he had Momentum listen to the last ten minutes of every call and fire a clip into Slack whenever an AE either didn't prescribe or tried and missed. With humor, so it didn't read as surveillance. Prescription went through the roof. As he puts it: a team respects what you inspect, but you can't inspect everything — unless the inspecting is automated.WHAT WE COVER- Selling shovels in a gold rush, and why structured data was the bet- Why "not everything called an agent is an agent" — deciding vs. automating- The last ten minutes of a sales call as sacred ground, and how to enforce that at scale- Bringing AI into QBRs: "it got so real so fast" — no more recency bias and self-preservation dressed up as a forecast- 10x growth six quarters running, zero attrition, 95% of the team over quota — and why he credits hiring over product- Whether AI cuts headcount: expands capacity, thins middle management, and the ~10% of companies that are actually AI-forward are hiring hardest- Auto-advancing pipeline stages on deal milestones instead of trusting a rep's guess — "otherwise you're just buying something like Clari to miss your forecast very expensively"- His IDEC hiring model, and why he'd trade relevant experience for intrinsics every timeCONNECT WITH CRISLinkedIn: Cris Mendes — Cris with no H, Mendes with an SMomentum.io---The GOATS of Growth has two Founding Sponsor slots open — category exclusive, $1,250/mo, in front of GTM leaders and founders who don't answer their phones. Includes personal introductions where guests opt in. jay@thegoatsofgrowth.aiSubscribe, rate, and review — and send this to whoever on your team is being asked to "roll out agents" this quarter.CHAPTERS00:00 Twenty years, and a Navy rescue swimmer03:39 Selling shovels in a gold rush04:13 "No data, no agent"05:33 Is it deciding, or just automation?07:07 Running Momentum on Momentum08:33 800 first calls, one missing skill10:27 You respect what you inspect14:46 Does AI actually cut headcount?20:41 Killing hype in the QBR22:05 Zero attrition, 95% over quota25:57 8,000 words spoken, 8 reach the CRM31:43 Auto-advancing deal stages on milestones35:44 Orchestrate, or get orchestrated out38:39 IDEC: how Cris hires40:53 How to reach Cris

Lindsay Rios is a Fractional CRO & owner of GTM Done Right, helping B2B companies turn accidental growth into intentional growth. Many of the businesses she works with have built revenue growth through referrals, word of mouth and organic inbound. But eventually those channels stop producing the same results, growth becomes less predictable, and leadership realizes they need a more intentional go-to-market strategy. This is where Lindsay comes in to identify the real causes of stalled growth, whether it's a misaligned ICP, a disconnected revenue strategy or what she famously calls a "poopy pipeline." Lindsay also partners alongside Mandy McEwen, where they help business with their revenue growth by integrating social selling into their GTM strategy. Links https://www.lindsayrios.com https://yourfuturebiz.com https://nextwave.golumi.io If you're enjoying Entrepreneur's Enigma, please give me a review on the podcast directory of your choice. The show is on all of them and these reviews really help others find the show. iTunes: https://gmwd.us/itunes Podchaser: https://gmwd.us/podchaser TrueFans: https://gmwd.us/truefans Also, if you're getting value from the show and want to buy me a coffee, go to the show notes to get the link to get me a coffee to keep me awake, while I work on bringing you more great episodes to your ears. →  https://ko-fi.com/entrepreneursenigma Support me on TrueFans.fm → https://gmwd.us/truefans. Support The Show & Get Merch: https://shop.entrepreneursenigma.com Want to learn from a 15 year veteran? Check out the Podcast Mastery Community:https://www.skool.com/podcasting Follow Seth Online: Instagram: https://instagram.com/s3th.me LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethmgoldstein/ Seth On Mastodon: https://indieweb.social/@phillycodehound The Marketing Junto Newsletter: https://MarketingJunto.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What kind of founder walks away from a multi-billion-dollar fintech company to start building rockets?Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, joins Joubin Mirzadegan to talk about life after one of the most consequential companies in modern finance, and why he's now betting on Cowboy Space Corporation, an orbital infrastructure company building AI data centers that ride to space inside its own rockets."I still have that dog in me," he says.Baiju opens up about building alone for the first time in 15 years and what he learned about product-market fit while scaling Robinhood through its most chaotic years.Connect with Baiju:XLinkedInConnect with Joubin:XLinkedIn​Email: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow Grit on LinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Building AI tools that replace one-size-fits-all personality tests with real career plans is what got Corey Kossack into K12 education. He's the founder and CEO of Orchard, an AI-powered career counseling platform for schools, and Aspireship, an employee upskilling platform — work born from watching his own father cycle in and out of a job he hated for years. Kossack has spent his career helping people who want to help themselves climb toward ambitious goals, and Orchard is the result: an AI career counselor named Orchie, paired with real interviews from working professionals across hundreds of occupations. For Ruckus Makers wrestling with overworked counselors and an outdated career-readiness playbook, that's the credential that matters. Most schools still run career readiness on a conveyor belt: next grade, next test, college, then hope for the best. Corey Kossack argues that model was built for a workforce AI has already started dismantling — and he's built a system for what comes after it. This is the episode for any Ruckus Maker rethinking what career readiness actually means right now.

For about a decade, a customer data platform's job was to be the place your customer data lived. What happens to that job when the most valuable thing a system can do goes beyond remembering and evolves to deciding and acting?Agility, in a category that's been declared dead more than once, isn't chasing whatever the market renames itself this quarter. It's being able to change what your product does without losing the thing your company is actually good at.Today we're going to talk about what it takes to evolve a category from the inside. Specifically:- Why fifteen years of data infrastructure turned out to be an advantage rather than baggage to shed.- What actually changes — in the product and in the company — when a system stops solely storing customer data and starts acting on it.- Where the line sits between a marketer steering an agent and a system running on its own.This conversation also kicks off a four-part series we're running this week with the product team at Treasure AI: four leaders, four vantage points: the vision, the roadmap, the operational reality, and the design.To help me start it off, I'd like to welcome Rafa Flores, Chief Product and Growth Officer at Treasure AI.About Rafael FloresAs a proud immigrant from Honduras, Rafael's journey is rooted in three core values passed down from his family: the power of education, treating everyone with dignity—no matter their background—and lifting up the next generation. Once he was an wide-eyed kid with big dreams, and today, he's living them. He's dedicated his career to scaling SaaS companies from startup spark to high-growth success. At Meltwater, he played a key role in driving product innovation and market readiness that led to a successful IPO. At Datanyze, he led strategic initiatives that culminated in an acquisition by ZoomInfo—boosting their data intelligence footprint. At ARM, he spearheaded innovation in Retail SDK and IoT, opening new frontiers in connected experiences. And at 6sense, he led all automation, data, and AI-powered products, building inclusive teams and solutions that empower GTM leaders to sell smarter. At Treasure Data, he helped orchestrate a landmark $600M acquisition by ARM and secured record-breaking funding for the Customer Data Platform. Now, he's back—leading Treasure Data into a new era of intelligence and automation built for scale. It's more than a comeback; it's a homecoming. This is a team he deeply believes in—brilliant, driven, and purposeful. Beyond tech, he's a devoted father of three and married to a registered nurse whose compassion and strength inspires him every day. My expertise lies in product strategy, CDPs, data privacy, and scaling GTM solutions—from agile startups to Global 2000 enterprises. He's passionate about solving hard problems with technology, driving sustainable growth, and mentoring rising product leaders. As a member of the Forbes Technology Council, he aims to share insights, spark dialogue, and help shape the future of innovation—one conversation, and one leader, at a time.Rafael Flores on LinkedIn---------- Resources ---------- Treasure AIReach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad creditCheck out the Treasure AI Studio sandbox for yourself.Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show.Connect with Greg on LinkedInDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more.Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology.The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don’t miss this massive channel shift! Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode of the Ultimate Partner Podcast, host Vince Menzione sits down with Alexandra Zagury, Corporate Vice President of Channels at Microsoft, to explore ecosystem shifts, partner-led growth, and AI transformation. https://youtu.be/9jrSGX5bM90 Key Takeaways Microsoft’s telemetry and propensity data offer unprecedented insights that many partners are currently failing to unlock. Partners must evolve past basic licensing models and build comprehensive managed service stacks across the entire customer lifecycle. Establishing an AI Center of Excellence on the Microsoft platform is critical for capturing future market share and technical intensity. The modern tech ecosystem demands a shift from product-led growth to true partner-led growth driven by multi-partner collaboration. Renewal engines targeting 110% to 125% retention require an always-on motion starting well in advance of contract expiration. Investing in sales readiness and precision velocity training ensures that end sellers can effectively articulate the value of the Microsoft platform. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Microsoft, telemetry, Hyperscalers, channel, small medium enterprise, telcos, hosters, SSPs, Cisco, CSP, agentic GTM, propensity data, SPX, PUPP, cloud descent, MSPs, managed XDR, Agent 365, skilling, co-sell, renewals, flywheel, AI Center of Excellence, enterprise Transcript Alexandra Zagury Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Alexandra Zagury: One of the things that I think is the best kept secret at Microsoft is the telemetry that we offer our partners. [00:00:08] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. [00:00:22] Vince Menzione: I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology. Partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:41] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s [00:00:46] Guest: start. [00:00:50] Vince Menzione: I am thrilled because I get to have a leader that is somewhat new in role and is the corporate vice president of channels for Microsoft. And so Alex is here to, is joining us for the first time at Ultimate Partner. I’m thrilled to have you. Thank, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Welcome, welcome. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Thank you. You and I are gonna be in the center seat in the middle. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna. So I am thrilled. Um, you’re relatively new in your role at Microsoft. [00:01:24] Alexandra Zagury: Seven months. [00:01:25] Vince Menzione: Seven months, [00:01:26] Alexandra Zagury: yes. [00:01:26] Vince Menzione: Wow. That’s a, that’s a crazy. So take us through, ’cause for those who don’t know you, but a little bit of an introduction, your title, your role, CVP, and uh, your remit. [00:01:37] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that and what your organization is focused in, in your mission. Yeah. [00:01:41] Alexandra Zagury: So hi everybody. Really exciting to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Vince. I always love to be with partners and with the channel. So my, I came to Microsoft to lead a new role, which we call Global Channel Sales, and it was part of the strategy of Microsoft to really bet on the growth in small, medium enterprise. [00:02:04] Alexandra Zagury: With the channel partner led growth. So my remit is really to lead our managed partners, but also to lead the strategy when it comes to the channel. Very specifically looking at the telcos, the distributors, the hosters. The sis and, uh, the SSPs of course. And, and so my role can be summarized in one word growth, and that’s what we do every single day is map our ambition to your ambition and figure out how we actually conquer this age of ai. [00:02:40] Vince Menzione: It’s a pretty big role. It’s a pretty, you know, I forgot about hosts ’cause we don’t, we don’t talk about them as much these days in the cloud. [00:02:48] Alexandra Zagury: Still a lot [00:02:48] Vince Menzione: of opportunity. You’ve got, and you’ve got all the telcos as well, which are pretty significant organizations, right? Lumen Field, just around the corner. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Right up the. Right up, I said across the river, but it’s across the pond in Seattle. And, uh, what does that look like from an organization perspective in terms of dollars? Are you allowed to disclose numbers? [00:03:08] Alexandra Zagury: No, we [00:03:08] Vince Menzione: don’t talk numbers. Okay. And, but you have a long career in this type of environment, in this role. [00:03:15] Vince Menzione: 10 years at Cisco, right? [00:03:17] Alexandra Zagury: Mm-hmm. [00:03:17] Vince Menzione: Tell us a little bit more about your background, [00:03:18] Alexandra Zagury: please. Yeah, sure. Um, well I started out as a, a sales leader. Uh, actually I started out in banking, if you wanna go all the way back. Um, but I fell in love with the channel actually, when I was at Yahoo, believe it or not. Wow. [00:03:32] Alexandra Zagury: Because it was the first interact sales model that I had the privilege to operate in, and I really understood. Stood the power of going through a channel. And then I was at Blackberry where I, I, I also, um, well had various sales leadership roles, but our model was all through, was all through the channel. [00:03:51] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. Um, some startups and then help [00:03:54] Vince Menzione: in those days too, right? [00:03:55] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. It was all sps and I learned from Jim Balze the channel fundamentals. So, um, and then ended up, of course, at Cisco the last. Nearly 11 years, which I think is also one of the greatest channel companies. Yes. And really has thrived in a partner, partner led growth, and in a partner led model. [00:04:12] Alexandra Zagury: And so when, when Microsoft called, I mean, this was just the opportunity of a lifetime. To lead the channel during an era where we’re all getting disrupted, we’re all having to blueprint new systems, new ways of working, where go to market is getting identified, and we’re all having to figure out how to become customer zero ourselves, but then also how to go to market. [00:04:36] Alexandra Zagury: With, with agents. And so this was the, the most exciting time that I could think of to join the Microsoft ecosystem and really take us to the next level. [00:04:44] Vince Menzione: Well, your background is perfect for this. I, I, Rodney Clark is a friend, has been a guest on the podcast and in, in the studio, and I think of Cisco is the quintessential channel company. [00:04:56] Vince Menzione: Like when I think about how channel got created and how it worked well, it was always Cisco that did it. So give us like your perspective now, like seven plus months and like how does this feel like you’ve You’ve got a big remit and, uh, various, uh, routes to market. We’ll call them, uh, channels to market. [00:05:14] Vince Menzione: So take us through a little bit of that, like Yeah, sure. [00:05:16] Alexandra Zagury: Describe [00:05:16] Vince Menzione: the transition, what it’s been like [00:05:18] Alexandra Zagury: for you. So one of the things we’re focused on is supporting the channel through the transformation, and we look at it in a couple of lenses. The first lens is really helping the channel become customer zero. [00:05:29] Alexandra Zagury: We really believe that the partners that invest in. Actually identifying their own processes and their own go go to market are the channels, are are the partners that it can actually win because if you are using it, you’re gonna be able to sell it. The second layer is all about technical intensity, and I’m very passionate about this because I see it from two lenses. [00:05:51] Alexandra Zagury: One is. I would like each and every of our partners to lead in building an AI Center of Excellence based on the Microsoft platform. It is a unique opportunity. I can give you lots of numbers, right? We’ve all heard about the trillions of agents that are gonna be here by 2030. We’ve all heard about the tam. [00:06:12] Alexandra Zagury: I mean, our TAM is going from 777. Million to over a billion, uh, to over a trillion. I, it’s, the numbers are just enormous, insane, right? Over half a billion of customers in our base that are using, that are, that are based already on the Microsoft platform. So all the goodness of our IU IQ platform can be unlocked with all the services that the partners can build. [00:06:36] Alexandra Zagury: So investing in that technical skilling and building those practices are gonna be, is gonna be essential. The third part. The third pillar is all about ag agentic, GTM. So once you’re actually using, uh, the Microsoft platform, you’re gonna have to reimagine all your business’s pro processes, your sales processes, and the more that you are integrated into how we do, how we do things. [00:07:00] Alexandra Zagury: One of the things that I think is the best kept secret at Microsoft is the telemetry that we offer our partners. Yeah. I mean, it’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen the quality of propensity data. And now I’m gonna give you the ABCs, which is please, A SPX, which is where we get all our copilot data, PUPP, which is our proposal upsell, uh, planner, right, cloud descent, where you can actually get your next action directly to your sellers. [00:07:27] Alexandra Zagury: There is just so much goodness that we give, which is part of our, our investment in partners. Which takes me to the fourth pillar, and that is all about value alignment and one of the things that I’m very focused and I bring with me from, from Cisco and the work that I did with MSPs is really thinking through what is that value exchange between us and the partner. [00:07:49] Alexandra Zagury: I believe that I’m in the business of earning your trust. Earning your preference. And, and, and we do that by really mapping that value alignment. So not just, one of the things that the whole industry has copied from Microsoft is really looking at our incentives across the customer lifecycle. Yes. So really mapping the value alignment across the customer lifecycle, not just at the point of the deal. [00:08:13] Alexandra Zagury: ’cause that was the whole purpose of CSP. That’s right. The investments we make in tele telemetry, the investments we make in our go-to-market assets and having those bi-directional feedback loops so that we can be continuously improving. So those are sort of the things that I’m thinking about every day. [00:08:29] Alexandra Zagury: There’s a couple of others as we lead and support you in this transformation. ’cause I think of my job as to supporting and driving growth with you so that we have that joint ambition. But also supporting the transformation that both of us are on this journey. [00:08:44] Vince Menzione: And Microsoft was the first with Jay McBain was with us yesterday, and we talked, we’ve talked about this before, but you were the first company to take and look, get rid of the old metal systems, right? [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: The bronze, silver, gold, mm-hmm. And move to basically a point system for partners so that they can come at it from a kind of a global perspective on how they drive success. What was, um, what did you learn about this partner community, your first months that you didn’t expect? [00:09:12] Alexandra Zagury: Can I say something controversial? [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: Absolutely. Okay. [00:09:14] Alexandra Zagury: I love, [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: we love controversial, [00:09:15] Alexandra Zagury: so I think one of the things that I was surprised was that I didn’t see all the partners really unlocking the value of CSP. Yeah. What do I mean by that? When Microsoft moved to the Point System, and I was on the other side, really, I was so jealous of CSP when I was running managed services. [00:09:34] Alexandra Zagury: Here’s an offer that is for partners, for Partner that gives you that initial. Guarantee in terms of the margin that helps you throughout the customer life cycle with all the incentives and, and programs that we have. And I didn’t see, I mean there are some partners, but I was surprised not seeing more partners really building their value stack and their services across the lifecycle. [00:09:59] Alexandra Zagury: And I think there’s such a great opportunity now to do that. That was one of the most surprising things I thought. Oh my gosh, there must be so many, so many services stack, so many people really unlocking, unlocking that, that value. That was a, that was a little bit surprising. [00:10:14] Vince Menzione: Why? Why do you suppose, why do you suppose that was happening? [00:10:17] Alexandra Zagury: I think some of the things that we were listening here, there’s some, sometimes complexity. There are things that we still have to. Get better on, and I’m one of the first ones to say that like our partner experience, we have, um, you know, a lot of focus right now on partner center and ensuring that we’re identifying it. [00:10:36] Alexandra Zagury: I don’t know if I can say it, but, you know, one of the things that we’re looking at is replicating internally. We have Agent J. That supports our sellers through the sales process. Nice. We’re looking at having something similar for our partners. Very cool. Getting some claps there. So, yeah, so, uh, I think, you know, that I, some, there are some lockers that we, we have to acknowledge a lot of them are operational and comes with being a 50-year-old company. [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: I, I’ll give you my perspective too. I wanna get your thoughts on this. ’cause I got to, I’ve gotten to know this MSP community, which is a, you mentioned managed services and that, um, I think that some of them, well, I think Microsoft is leaning in, in a much bigger way. Um, we had Jose on stage yesterday and just the, the energy around the room, there he is, he’s back here. [00:11:23] Vince Menzione: The energy in the room around the MSP community is palpable and it maybe it wasn’t there a few years ago. Maybe some people got off the bus, so to speak, like they weren’t really paying attention mm-hmm. To all the change and all the investments. That you men, you’re mentioning or being made to support this, would you, what would you say about that? [00:11:42] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, I’d say that that that is correct, but I’d also say that what I learned, you know, leading MSP at Cisco was that. All the stars have to be aligned, right? And if one thing is not right, if you don’t have product market fit, if you, if you, if you don’t have a good way to, uh, consolidate your offer, if you don’t have that investment in practice development, like there’s a series of things that we need to get right. [00:12:07] Alexandra Zagury: And I think Jose and I spent a lot of time thinking through those things and we’re, we’re ready to, to welcome the community and specifically around security. I mean, that was the second thing that I was really surprised because I lost so many deals on the other side to Microsoft, and I was like, and then I come on this side and I’m like, there’s all this opportunity everywhere. [00:12:28] Alexandra Zagury: I look underneath this chair, this opportunity, and I’m like, why are people not going after it? There is the opportunity to build managed XDR solutions, the opportunity to reinvent the song. There’s, there’s just so much opportunity and I think people get so stuck in the. Just thinking of it from a licensing model and not thinking it from the, the full on end-to-end value that you can then unlock through the best licensing model on the planet. [00:12:55] Alexandra Zagury: And so, look, we’re here, we’re, we’re ready to talk to all of you and, and really figure this out ’cause we are gonna place really bet big bets next year on ensuring that we’re growing with the MSP community. [00:13:08] Vince Menzione: So what are you personally focused on in changing Microsoft to drive this. [00:13:13] Alexandra Zagury: Well, uh, I don’t know. [00:13:14] Alexandra Zagury: Changing is a, is a, is a big word. Well, I like evolution, change, [00:13:17] Vince Menzione: evolution, evolving. [00:13:18] Alexandra Zagury: You know, I [00:13:19] Vince Menzione: transition. [00:13:21] Alexandra Zagury: I think there is, there is a couple of things that I’ll say that one of the things that I, I’m really focused on right now, the first one is skilling. We’re at a time of such transformation. That investing in skilling, and if you look at our skilling model, it has four pillars. [00:13:37] Alexandra Zagury: The first pillar we’re best in class, in which is certification specializations, and making sure that our ecosystem is certified to go to market. The second one, which we call project ready. It’s sort of how we help you, uh, technically skill the folks that sit in your practices. And there’s more work to do there, and there’s more that you can learn about how we can actually help you. [00:13:59] Alexandra Zagury: And then the middle part I’m obsessed with right now, which is sales ready and tech sales ready. So it is ensuring, because AI is new for everybody. Yes. It’s a muscle, it is a proposition that you have to sell it’s value that you’re selling. I, I love what the gentleman from Lenovo was talking about. It’s, it’s that CSB always on motion. [00:14:21] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. And so really getting very crisp to the end seller at the, at the reseller. For example, at the end, seller at the partner about why Microsoft. Why now, how do I sell and how do I win? And giving them the assets, the competitive battle cards, the, the, the ability to end objection handling all these. Great, we have them. [00:14:45] Alexandra Zagury: I mean, the amount of content we have, but it’s about doing it at what I call precision velocity. [00:14:51] Vince Menzione: Precision [00:14:51] Alexandra Zagury: velocity, right? Which is this concept of how do we get very precise at a persona level. So that we get the velocity of impact. And so I’m, I’m very obsessed with that right now. And there’s two other things I’m very obsessed with, right? [00:15:04] Alexandra Zagury: The other one is this practice building, ensuring that we are together building these AI centers of excellence, um, especially for all our managed partners. This is something that I’ve put on, uh, every single PDM in our org is gonna, is gonna be talking about that. And then the third one is one that I find super interesting, which I think all of us. [00:15:25] Alexandra Zagury: Have a lot of work to do, which is partner to partner. [00:15:29] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:15:29] Alexandra Zagury: If we look at a customer outcome, thank you. A customer outcome is built of many partners, right? There’s so many different touch points. I think some folks talk about seven partners in, in a customer outcome, and so how do we actually. Use agents, use agent solutions to suddenly unlock this opportunity because most of the time you’ll see an SSP with an si, maybe an ISV in the middle of a transaction to deliver on that customer outcome. [00:16:04] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. So what can we Microsoft do? And I’d love ideas, right? I haven’t cracked this. I don’t think the industry has completely cracked this. It’s more of a, a science than, than, well, more of an art than it is a science today. So that’s the third thing that I, I, I’d love to really improve and, and get better at. [00:16:20] Vince Menzione: I wish you got to see my slide earlier. ’cause I had the seven seats. I had this, I had the seven partners surrounding the customer. Customer is able to make their decisions now because with their cloud commitments [00:16:31] Alexandra Zagury: mm-hmm. [00:16:32] Vince Menzione: They’re in the, they’re in the seat where it used to be. I would rely on the partner to tell me what to do. [00:16:38] Vince Menzione: I, I’m cobbling together the best solution for my organization. Based on the trusted partners, to your point, those seven seats, and that’s partner to partner action. And Jay McBain was here yesterday and he took us through a great example. It’s AstraZeneca, that Microsoft won AWS, thought they were gonna win the deal, and then there were Microsoft partners in involved. [00:17:00] Vince Menzione: And the, the decision was made in December, but the deal didn’t happen until July. And that whole process was because all these different partners showed up. And influence the decision and the solution areas for that customer. [00:17:12] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, that’s the best example of PLG partner led growth in action, which I think, again, that is the other thing that I’m super excited about is that actually p proving in the AI era that it’s about PLG as partner led growth, not the other PLGI. [00:17:31] Vince Menzione: I love that. I love that. Instead of product led growth, it’s partner led growth. So I understand there’s three layers that you’re very interested in that you want, you were gonna take us through today. Okay. Do you know about this, [00:17:44] Alexandra Zagury: the layers [00:17:45] Vince Menzione: of we have, uh, copilot chat. Oh, yes. 365 and, and agents. [00:17:49] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. [00:17:50] Vince Menzione: From a product perspective, I thought maybe, [00:17:51] Alexandra Zagury: yeah, sure. [00:17:52] Alexandra Zagury: This is, I mean. This is the, uh, advantage of choosing the market Microsoft platform. Yeah, so as you look, look at it, there’s, there’s definitely different options, but when you look at Microsoft, what’s really, really interesting is that we have all the, all the layers. There’s no AI without data, and we’ve got that data foundation. [00:18:15] Alexandra Zagury: We also have the intelligence data foundation, right? Then we’ve got the, the layer of actually building those AI agents, and then the last layer that we have is actually the experience or the application layer. So when you look at our platform is a completely integrated platform with the different choices. [00:18:35] Alexandra Zagury: We are not behold, beholden to one LLM or another LLM. You’re actually able to bring your data and, and bring the LLM that you want to deliver on the, on the outcomes that you need. And I think that is very, very unique about our proposition. Yeah, I [00:18:50] Vince Menzione: agree. [00:18:50] Alexandra Zagury: But the other thing that is unique, it’s the most exciting product out there. [00:18:55] Alexandra Zagury: Agent 3, 6 5, our own oh oh seven. It really is a differentiated proposition that every single partner can build services around. Starting with your advisory services, tell me customer, what is it that you are thinking of? Then you actually move on to thinking about security because again, just like there’s no AI without data, you have to start with that data foundation. [00:19:24] Alexandra Zagury: There’s no AI without security and no security without ai. And so really thinking through how, uh, agent 3, 6, 5, I love it. I get these claps once a, I love, love really thinking about how Agent 3, 6 5 really unlocks, not only. A security budget, but an observability budget because you can do both. You are talking to both, uh, folks at the customer, right? [00:19:47] Alexandra Zagury: You can actually start talking about how you’re gonna actually govern all of these agents, manage all of these agents, but also there’s the observability layer, which is gonna tell you what actually can you do? How can you actually deliver on the outcomes that we all want from ai, which is productivity. [00:20:05] Alexandra Zagury: Experience and efficiency and all the other things. So I think this is the biggest opportunity this channel has ever seen, and every single partner is gonna have to make a choice on what platform they’re gonna lead with, and we believe it should be ours because it is completely integrated across these three layers with our very own oh oh seven. [00:20:30] Vince Menzione: I wanna get your perspective, but it feels like many of these partners in the MSP community are stuck at that CSP level. We were having this conversation about getting through that, coaching ’em through it. What would your be your perspective on that? [00:20:44] Alexandra Zagury: Um, I’d say, uh, use this moment to unlock that opportunity. [00:20:50] Alexandra Zagury: First off, invest in your skills. Get your, get your team skilled and, uh, on Microsoft, build your center of excellence. Map out your strategy where actually you’re gonna monetize and use all the different assets that we have. And if you are being really, um, I mean, most of them are serviced through a distributor. [00:21:12] Alexandra Zagury: Make your distributor accountable for supporting you in packaging the offers and giving you the, uh, information that you need in terms of skilling. And then in terms of co-selling, again, distributor has a lot of tools that can help you understand how to unlock the co unlock, the co-selling opportunity with Microsoft. [00:21:35] Alexandra Zagury: I think that’s another really big competitive advantage that Microsoft has. When, uh, Microsoft changed what it started by, by, by changing its strategy. I think clarity is kindness. We were very, very clear that where we want, we wanted partners, of course, to play an enterprise with a services stack, but we were very clear that we were betting on a partner led growth in small, medium enterprise, right? [00:22:03] Alexandra Zagury: And so we’ve built our whole operating system. Around that. And so I think it’s really about finding the information that you know you want, planning your strategy, getting skilled and go to market with us. Our co-sell Advantage is very, very unique. It is one of the only companies that has the sales teams completely aligned because CSP is our hero motion. [00:22:29] Vince Menzione: So being with a customer through the journey on CSP, but also renewals are a big component of growth. Talk to us about that. [00:22:36] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. Renewals are, uh, a machine and an engine that is just absolutely beautiful. It’s your [00:22:42] Vince Menzione: flywheel. [00:22:43] Alexandra Zagury: It is your flywheel. Um, and it is the gift that keeps on giving. We, of course, have a very focused, um, and in fact, one of the things that I’ve done since. [00:22:52] Alexandra Zagury: Uh, since we’ve started, it started a very focused motion in terms of looking at our renewals. We have very specific targets. We, we like to see a renewal at 110% at the moment of renewal. And then we like to see a motion, t plus three, T plus six. That gets us to that a hundred and and 25%. But what we’ve also found out is that this needs to be an always on motion. [00:23:18] Alexandra Zagury: So one of the things that we’re doing is using this concept of precision velocity becoming very rigorous. ’cause we have all the data. Yeah. In terms of what is that next action, and really looking at starting that renewal process, we see that the partners that are able to reach the targets are the ones that start at T minus. [00:23:36] Alexandra Zagury: Six, maybe T minus three, you’re cutting it, but T minus six. And really building that constant motion, getting out in front Yeah. With the customer is really important. And then of course, we now even have these amazing go back motions, uh, with, with our partners where we actually, after the renewal, we go and. [00:23:56] Alexandra Zagury: The renewal was not at the target. We just constantly keep on going. Uh, going back with the, with the partners and we’ve unlocked a, a bevy of data. We, our operating model, we call it the pods, where the PDM sits at the center and orchestrates it with all the different roles that we have. And so we now have a very systematized moment, uh, motion of how to do the renewals. [00:24:18] Vince Menzione: So for the partners in the room, what’s one investment that they should make and what should every partner in the room do differently? Going into, uh, July 1st. [00:24:27] Alexandra Zagury: Well, I think the first thing, remember, CSP is our hero motion, so really for, uh, real, really focused on that. But the one investment, can I say two? [00:24:38] Vince Menzione: Please, please. [00:24:38] Alexandra Zagury: Your time. The, the first one is skilling, right? This is the time. [00:24:43] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:24:43] Alexandra Zagury: Technical intensity is super, super important, and really making those investments in skilling not only from a practice perspective, your your, your technical practice, uh, teams, but also from a sales readiness perspective. [00:24:59] Alexandra Zagury: This is a new muscle. It’s we’re all learning how to truly sell outcomes, and so getting your sales teams ready. Is is really important. And then the second one very tied to that is building your AI Center of Excellence based on the Microsoft platform. Because as we go into FY 27, you will see that the partners that prefer and grow with us are the ones that will see the investment come to them. [00:25:28] Vince Menzione: So I want to use the term front. I I, I’ve been avoiding the term frontier firm, but I think it is super critical. Everything I’ve heard today, like you need to be customer zero. You need to get in train, advance on it and go build against it. [00:25:41] Alexandra Zagury: Absolutely. Well, if you had, let me a third, I would’ve said customer zero. [00:25:46] Vince Menzione: You have it? Alright. We have less than a minute. Would you be okay if we ask for like maybe one question? Yeah, absolutely. We’ll do like one, maybe two. So good to have you by the way. Thank you, Vince. So nice to have you here. [00:26:04] Vince Menzione: I think we did such a good job. Oh, here we go. Here’s, here’s fun. A mic is coming your way. [00:26:20] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Here we go. Okay. [00:26:22] Guest: So we’ve been very keen on, um, skilling our people, and I still find it very hard to get all of the information out of Partner Center to get a complete global view. Are you and your team thinking about maybe having an MCP server access and having a real portal working with that data? [00:26:41] Alexandra Zagury: You just touched on one of our areas of improvement. Absolutely. In fact, um, thank you for, stay tuned for holding us accountable to that. That is definitely one of the things that we’re working on is how to integrate skilling hub into partner center. Right. As most of you will know, there are it Qs, and so that’s one of the things that we are definitely prioritizing, but thank you for holding me accountable to that one. [00:27:09] Vince Menzione: Awesome. [00:27:13] Vince Menzione: We have one more back here, David. I see. We wanna see how fast they can move that microphone across the room. Relay system here. The relay team. There we go. [00:27:25] Guest: That was excellent, Alexander. Thank you. And welcome. [00:27:28] Alexandra Zagury: Thank you. [00:27:29] Guest: Can you point to a specific example? ’cause I think it’s so critical what you highlighted just the skill piece and the customer outcomes piece. [00:27:35] Guest: Right. Can you point to a specific example of a story that you really love that highlights, uh, customers lighting it up with ROI. [00:27:44] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, I think, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re a platform, so I just saw a win wire. Like at Microsoft, we get these win wires all the time about how an SSB actually won a, a deal against one of these big AI only companies. [00:28:00] Alexandra Zagury: And it was really about selling the full platform, right? Yeah. Because if, if you, if you put a full platform against an LLM proposition, I mean, the full platform really stacks up because it’s completely integrated. It’s not behemoth to one, you’re not making a bet on one company. And it really highlighted our mantra around trust and intelligence. [00:28:24] Alexandra Zagury: The customer was able to see, they, they were an M 365 customer, so all their iq, all their intelligence was already there. They knew that they, there were guardrails against it. They had a problem with shadow ai and by actually standardizing on copilot and going on that journey from copilot paid to agents, they sue the, they saw the full, uh, value proposition. [00:28:49] Alexandra Zagury: And so we won that deal and it was one of the. First E seven deals that we won, so it was great. [00:28:55] Vince Menzione: Fantastic. Great. Congratulations. [00:28:57] Alexandra Zagury: Thank you [00:28:58] Vince Menzione: Alex. I am so honored and thrilled that you got, you chose us to be your I I would say the first big Yeah, absolutely. Presentation in front of the partner community. [00:29:07] Vince Menzione: I’m so excited to have you. [00:29:08] Alexandra Zagury: Thank you [00:29:09] Vince Menzione: guys, and hopefully many more times ahead with us. [00:29:10] Alexandra Zagury: Absolutely. Invite me at anytime. [00:29:12] Vince Menzione: Okay. Well, thank you [00:29:13] Alexandra Zagury: so much. [00:29:14] Vince Menzione: Thank you. So great [00:29:15] Alexandra Zagury: to have you. Thank [00:29:16] Vince Menzione: you so much. Thanks for listening to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. [00:29:26] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. For show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.

Elena Burger is joined by a16z's Andy McCall and Joe Schmidt to break down two very different ways AI startups can go to market: the lighthouse and the landgrab. Should founders win a handful of marquee customers whose credibility unlocks an entire industry, or move quickly across a broad market where the ROI already speaks for itself? Drawing on Joe's Lighthouse or Landgrab framework and Andy's experience building sales organizations at Samsara and Meraki, they explore how founders can determine which strategy fits their market, when social proof matters more than math, and why the current rush to adopt AI has created a rare window for startups to sell big software again. They also get tactical on POCs, pricing and ACV, hiring early sales teams, moving from mid-market to enterprise, and why founders shouldn't spend too much time perfecting their GTM strategy before talking to customers. As Andy puts it: spend 1% of your time on strategy and 99% executing.   Resources: Read Joe Schmidt's "Lighthouse or Landgrab": https://a16z.com/lighthouse-or-landgrab-how-to-pick-your-ai-sales-strategy/ Follow Andy McCall on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amccall/ Follow Joe Schmidt on X: https://x.com/joeschmidtiv Follow Elena Burger on X: https://x.com/VirtualElena Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The problem with marketing is that so many teams think their job ends when a lead becomes an opportunity. The highest-performing GTM teams know that's where the REAL work begins.In this episode, Amber sits down with Aviv Canaani, CRO at Datarails, to unpack how the company transformed from a 90% outbound sales motion into a scalable revenue engine powered primarily by inbound demand. Rather than optimizing marketing and sales separately, Aviv shares why the entire funnel should be treated as one connected revenue system and how RevOps, automation, and marketing architecture make that possible.In this episode:Why marketing and sales should operate as one revenue engineHow Datarails shifted from 90% outbound to 90% inboundWhy the best marketers take bigger creative risksHow RevOps can automate the revenue engine, not just report on itWhy attribution has limits, and what leaders should measure insteadHow AI is changing the future of GTM operationsIf you're trying to create more pipeline, improve sales efficiency, or better align marketing and revenue teams, this episode will absolutely challenge how you think about building a modern GTM organization.-----------------------------------------------------

Welcome to the Personal Development Trailblazers Podcast! In today's episode, we're talking about how to rethink your relationship with alcohol, quit drinking on your own terms, and create a healthier, more fulfilling life beyond alcohol. Colin Casillas is the founder of Prepared Sobriety™, a peer coaching practice for high-earning professionals who are quietly rethinking their relationship with alcohol. Colin spent six years in enterprise sales and GTM leadership before making his own deliberate decision to retire from alcohol on April 16, 2025. The results showed up fast. He lost 14 lbs in four months without changing his diet, dropped his LDL by 29%, and came off two daily medications, including blood pressure meds. Colin is not a therapist and he doesn't use recovery language. He coaches the way a peer would, one high performer talking to another, using a five-stage framework built from his own experience and the patterns he's seen in the executives, founders, and sales leaders he works with. He lives in Boise, Idaho.Connect with Colin Here: https://www.instagram.com/preparedsobriety/https://preparedsobriety.com===================================If you enjoyed this episode, remember to hit the like button and subscribe. Then share this episode with your friends.Thanks for watching the Personal Development Trailblazers Podcast. This podcast is part of the Digital Trailblazer family of podcasts. To learn more about Digital Trailblazer and what we do to help entrepreneurs, go to DigitalTrailblazer.com.Are you a coach, consultant, expert, or online course creator? Then we'd love to invite you to our FREE Facebook Group where you can learn the best strategies to land more high-ticket clients and customers. QUICK LINKS: APPLY TO BE FEATURED: https://app.digitaltrailblazer.com/podcast-guest-applicationDIGITAL TRAILBLAZER: https://digitaltrailblazer.com/

If you work with an agency, there are a few things you usually only learn once the campaign is already running. In this special in-person episode, Michael sits down with Belkins Managing Director Alex Sribnyi to talk about what actually happens behind the scenes of B2B lead generation: why some agency-client relationships work, why others fall apart, what companies often misunderstand about outbound, and how the role of an SDR is changing. Alex has spent more than 10 years in the industry, managed hundreds of SDRs and Account Managers, and worked across thousands of B2B client strategies. So this conversation goes well beyond theory. Michael and Alex get into:

What is a venture capitalist??? On today's Back in Business episode of AUIMLB, Jess Schultz, co-founder of the Amplify Group, gives Mary a crash course in turning startup dreams into actual revenue. From banking and SaaS sales to venture capital and now running her own consultancy for early-stage B2B startups, Jess has seen the startup world from just about every angle. Together, she and Mary get into GTM, startup funding, angel investing, and the often-misunderstood world of equity.Need some expert help for your startup? Head to Jess's website: www.amplifyscales.comHave a question or thought for Mary? Leave us a voicemail for your chance to be featured on the show: https://www.allupinmyladybusiness.com/voicemail/Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, then come hang with us on Instagram (instagram.com/allupinmyladybusiness) & Threads (threads.com/@allupinmyladybusiness)!Learn more about A Mary Nisi Production: www.amarynisiproduction.comFind your next DJ at Toast & Jam: toastandjamdjs.comLaunch your DJ business with the Toast & Jam Lab: lab.toastandjamdjs.comOriginally aired April 16, 2024Support the show

"Our mission is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world."From the dot-com crash to AI, Glenn Fogel has spent nearly three decades helping Booking Holdings evolve through every major technology shift while staying true to that mission.He also shares with Joubin Mirzadegan why "you're always selling," and how Booking is using AI to amplify what every employee can accomplish.Guest: Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking HoldingsConnect with GlennLinkedInConnect with Joubin:XLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow GritLinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

You've gotta be boots on the ground, doing it yourself first before you build out a team to help you sell. He needed to be the one selling, partnering, and figuring out the messaging before scaling the team.This episode of How We Got There, I am joined by Josh Koshy who is the VP of Sales at Appiphony. If you aren't aware of Appiphony, they are both a top PDO and an ISV after launching their first app a few years ago with Josh at the helm of GTM the whole time. Josh shares lessons learned from their own journey of building their own ISV, which they also bring to their projects on the PDO side where they are building apps for other companies on the AppExchange….mostly around GTM. Drive Connect was their initial product and now it's more of a suite of apps, including doc gen with esignature and storage of files in Salesforce from Google and Sharepoint. Their listings are excellent ones to check out on the AppExchange.Founders and admins tend to stumble onto your listing on the AppExchange, but larger deals come from motions outside of the AppExchange. Partnerships have really been a force multiplier that Josh and team have been leaning in, specifically SI partners. Now most qualified leads come from that channel, about half of their revenue comes from partners - SIs, resellers, and Salesforce. Their largest deals tend to come from Salesforce AE/SE referrals, even if the volume of deals is smaller than from SIs.Referral partnerships via SI partners is hard work to start but then gets easier as trust builds across successful projects. Some care about adding a competitive advantage with the ISV's solution set, some value referral fees, and some value footing the bill for Salesforce AE-focused events by helping the SIs stay in front of their Salesforce counterparts. A really unique approach that makes sense!One thing they overinvested in early was sponsoring events without a fully built out sales and marketing team, so the lesson learned here is perhaps waiting a bit longer before getting booths at those types of events. Josh and his team is an example for ISVs to learn from. He brings a beginner's mind to all of the gtm motions and is always willing to meet and share at events, make sure you say hi to him as you run into him at DreamforceThis episode is brought to you by ⁠ISV Accelerators⁠. ISV Accelerators is your inside guide to co-selling with Salesforce: activating the right reps, accelerating real pipeline, uncovering new revenue, and closing more deals together. Senior alliances leadership without the cost of a full-time hire, and speed to answers on whether that hire is even worth making. See what your Salesforce partnership could really do.⁠⁠#salesforce⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#isv⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#gtm⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#salesforcepartners⁠⁠ #appexchange 

→ Wanna use SEO to generate revenue?  Book a call here  https://www.breakingb2b.com/book-a-call Episode #495 - Sam sits down (well, stands up actually!) with Aimen Chouchane, a marketing leader who's joined 4x different B2B tech companies as their very first marketing hire. We dig into the common mistakes founders make, the trap so many fall into chasing LinkedIn's AI hype, and why a strong support network matters far more than people often think.   Here's what you get on this one:  

This is a sales leadership story that starts nowhere near a boardroom. Before running commercial strategy for one of the world's largest logistics companies, Travis Brooks-Garrett had to sell just to get by.Travis is VP of Commercial at DP World, moving roughly 10% of global trade through its ports, warehouses, and transport assets. In this episode, Luigi and Regan sit down with him to unpack what actually separates sellers who thrive in chaos from sellers who freeze.What you'll learn:→ Why relationships aren't built when times are good — they're built in the furnace of when things go wrong→ Why "transactional" doesn't survive in today's market, and what partnership actually looks like instead→ The real difference between price and value, and why both matter equally→ Why the best commercial operators combine relationship skills with the ability to present hard numbers→ How Travis uses AI as an "equalizer" for his old-school, relationship-led sellers→ Why he cares more about outputs than inputs, and what that means for how he manages a team→ How to find "quick wins" to build trust and momentum inside a struggling team→ What he actually looks for when hiring "deal makers" versus sellers who just talk a good game→ Why he believes there's no such thing as a truly lost deal, only deals that come back laterThis is a real conversation about sales leadership under pressure, not theory. If you lead a commercial team through any kind of disruption, this one's for you.

Will AI agents replace the human enterprise seller? Nathan Rader and TJ Williams are weighing in on that debate, and not as outside observers. Early in their careers, both sold enterprise software at IBM, Oracle, and Google. Nathan later led go-to-market at a string of growth-stage startups including Parsable, HighRadius, and Karat, while TJ went on to lead sales organizations at Dropbox and Degreed. Today, they're each confronting AI's impact firsthand — Nathan as Chief Revenue Officer of Oro Labs, and TJ as an Operating Partner at Brighton Park Capital, leading the firm's go-to-market advisory practice.In this episode, host Usman Rabbani sits down with Nathan and TJ to discuss how enterprise sales is evolving as AI agents take on more of the work traditionally done by sellers. Together, they trace the arc from Lotus Notes to AI-native GTM stacks, and what separates the shift in tooling from the shift in what actually wins deals. Their conversation spans where human judgment remains irreplaceable in the sales process, why efficiency gains from AI haven't yet translated into top-line growth, what happens to the talent pipeline as entry-level SDR and BDR roles disappear, and what will separate great go-to-market organizations once every competitor has access to the same tools.TJ expands on several of these themes in his recent thought piece, How to Build a Sales Team That Wins in an AI World, which makes the case for investing in the SDR pipeline rather than gutting it, and for hiring sellers who treat AI tools as a core part of the job rather than a threat to it.For anyone building, leading, or investing in a go-to-market organization, this episode offers a grounded, experience-driven view of where AI is genuinely changing enterprise sales, and where the fundamentals still hold true. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a world where 21,883 software companies are all chasing the same narrow pool of buyers, automation isn't a competitive edge — it's the noise. Neal Goyal, who has closed $41M in software revenue with 81% of it sourced from LinkedIn, makes a compelling case for slowing down to speed up. This episode breaks down why trust is the only moat that can't be replicated, how LinkedIn is actually a stage where your ideal buyers are sitting in the audience, and why the kindergarten rules you already know — give before you ask, show up for others first — are the most powerful GTM strategy available right now. If you're over-automating and under-relating, this one is a wake-up call.Key Takeaways[0:00] — The counterintuitive edge: doing things that don't scale is the most powerful thing you can do in a world where everyone has the same automation tools[6:09] — The ecommerce SaaS explosion: from 5,000 to 21,883 software companies chasing the same TAM — and why that kills trust by default[8:47] — You're not competing against direct mail competitors; you're competing for the finite bandwidth of a 3–5 person marketing team[13:33] — Why 100% inbound pipeline is a "cancer" — it feels great but attracts everyone, not the right ones[16:46] — 81% of $41M in closed revenue sourced from LinkedIn — what the first 8–9 months of posting with zero engagement actually looked like[18:48] — The theater analogy: your buyers are in the seats, but only 1 in 100 sellers ever gets on stage[21:15] — The lurker phenomenon: LinkedIn engagement is low because it's public and professional — and that's exactly why the relationship value is high[21:18] — Why your LinkedIn connect request is like asking for someone's phone number at a bar — and what to do instead[26:37] — The bank account model: you can't make a withdrawal from an account you never opened. Deposits (engagement, value) must come before asks (connection requests, pitches)[32:47] — Email as a trust eroder by default — and why "who sent it" matters infinitely more than any subject line[34:45] — "Relationships beat algorithms" — why building rapport on LinkedIn before hitting the inbox changes the open rate entirely[36:46] — How to get organizational buy-in for a long-game strategy: lead from the front, be the best BDR on your own team[40:38] — What to do when your target prospect isn't posting on LinkedIn: write about them, spotlight their work, and watch what happens[44:09] — The founder question almost nobody is asking: where is your moat beyond technology? Care at scale is the answerTweetable Quotes"Automation takes away the most valuable skills we learned in kindergarten — give to others before you ask for anything in return." — Neal Goyal"Trust doesn't scale. That's exactly why it works." — Jeff Mains"You're not competing against direct mail companies. You're competing for the limited bandwidth of a 3-person marketing team alongside 21,000 other software vendors." — Neal Goyal"Nobody remembers who liked their post. They remember who left a comment that showed you actually read it." — Jeff Mains"Every cold pitch you send is a withdrawal from an account you never opened." — Jeff Mains"Only 1 in 100 sellers posts on LinkedIn — but your buyers are there 7, 8, 9 times a day. That IS the stage." — Neal Goyal"If you post 3 times a week, you move to the top 1% of content creators on LinkedIn. That's how low the bar is — and how big the opportunity is." — Neal Goyal"Care is going to be the thing that stands out above everything we talk about with AI. If you can demonstrate it, you're going to win." — Neal GoyalSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Do the things that don't scale — on purpose. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, the same sequences, and the same targeting data, doing what everyone else is doing makes you invisible. Genuine human attention is rare enough that when a prospect receives it, it stops them cold. That's your competitive edge.2. Trust is the only moat automation can't replicate. With the software landscape growing 4–5x in a few years and churn becoming a top threat, the relationship you build before the sale is what keeps the customer after it. The companies that invest in their customers the way they invest in prospects will win the retention wars ahead.3. LinkedIn is a stage, not a social app — and almost no one is using it that way. Your buyers are on LinkedIn every day. Only 1 in 100 sellers posts. If you post three times a week, you're in the top 1% of creators on a billion-person platform. Stop thinking about it as a channel and start thinking about it as the most accessible stage you'll ever have.4. Deposits before withdrawals — always. The bank account model isn't a metaphor, it's a system. Comment authentically on your prospects' posts before sending a connection request. Connect before pitching. Build before asking. This sequence flips connect acceptance rates by 3–5x and transforms cold email into warm email.5. Lead from the front to change a team's culture. Philosophy alone doesn't move teams. Results do. When Neal steps into a new org, he operates like an IC first — showing, not just telling. When the team sees the long game producing pipeline, they buy in. You can't coach trust-building from the sidelines.6. You're not competing against your category — you're competing for attention. Whether you're at seed stage or Series C, the real battle is for a limited-bandwidth buyer with 3–5 people on their team and 21,000 vendors in their inbox. The question isn't "are we better than our direct competitors?" It's "are we worth their attention right now, and are we earning it?"Guest Resourceshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nealgoyal/Episode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/https://jeffmains.com/books/SaaS Fuel ResourcesWebsite - https://championleadership.com/Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmainsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains

This week, former Forrester Research Director Jeff Clark is in the studio with our host Ian Truscott to discuss an article from Matt Heinz on his Substack - Most GTM Alignment Is Theater - What two decades of alignment frameworks miss, and what the GTM teams actually winning are doing instead. The discuss 5 things that inspired them from the article: It's not the process, it's the discipline What AI is changing/not changing The ICP conversation The Win/Loss conversation The importance of trust Then, Ian moves to our virtual bar, The Rose and Rockstar, and joins Robert Rose, Chief Trouble Maker at Seventh Bear, to discuss the impact of AI on early marketing careers. Specifically, they discuss the tension between being encouraged to use AI tools (and the trope that you'll be replaced by someone who is using them if you don't) and the increasing “detect AI in the writing” functionality that is being inserted into tools and LinkedIn's “AI Slop” button, and how using AI is seen as poorer quality.   Enjoy! — The Links The people: Ian Truscott on LinkedIn  Jeff Clark on LinkedIn Robert Rose on LinkedIn Mentioned this week: Most GTM Alignment Is Theater - Matt Heinz We didn't start the fire... - Robert Rose - Lens This Old Marketing: Doing the Job Is no Longer Enough Rockstar CMO: The Beat Newsletter that we send every Monday Rockstar CMO on the web and LinkedIn Previous episodes and all the show notes: Rockstar CMO FM. Track List: We'll be right back by Stienski & Mass Media on YouTube Piano Music is by Johnny Easton, shared under a Creative Commons license Trust by Prince on YouTube You can listen to this on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, and Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Max Depth Podcast. Today we spoke with a founding engineer at Autumn. Autumn is building the first real-time signal intelligence platform for GTM teams. We monitor posts, commits, blogs, and announcements, surfacing buying signals the moment they appear. Define your ICP and the signals that matter, and we deliver a condensed, real-time feed filtered by intents.   

AI adoption feels chaotic right now. Saumyo Mukherjee calls it "good chaos."He's VP of Business Systems at Braze. 24-person team. Supports 2,000 employees. Sits between every GTM function using AI.This episode covers vibe coding sprawl. Duplicate automations. And a handoff automation that replaced 1.5 days of manual work.Plus his take on in-app intelligence, token budget and why tool-switching kills CSM productivity.Real tactics from inside a fast-scaling SaaS company.---Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.---What you'll learn- Why "good chaos" beats no chaos- How Braze runs quarterly AI hackathons- The sales-to-services handoff fix that saved days- Why token costs are the new budget battle- Why in-app intelligence beats tool-switching--- Timestamps0:00 - Preview & Introduction1:30 - Meet Saumyo Mukherjee, VP of Business Systems at Braze3:52 - Vibe coding sprawl problem7:53 - The AI idea box & Sales-to-services handoff fix11:52 - Balancing freedom and guardrails (Quarterly AI hackathons)14:32 - Anthropic, token costs, and budget strategy18:30 - Why in-app intelligence wins19:45 - Braze's return to Gainsight---Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com---Where to Find the GuestSaumyo Mukherjee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saumyo/---Where to Find Josh:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

Most reps end a discovery call and just send over their notes. That's the mistake.In episode three of this mini-series, Luigi and Regan break down how to deliver a discovery call brief that actually moves deals forward — not just documents the conversation.What you'll learn:→ Why a raw meeting summary leaves the buyer to do all the interpreting — and why that's backwards→ The exact structure: executive summary, problem statement, current state, future state→ Why sharing the brief as an editable document (not a static PDF) drives real collaboration→ How the brief becomes the foundation for your proposal and internal buy-in with the buying committee→ Why adding real metrics (not made-up ones) is what separates a "nice to have" from a must-fix→ The trust-building reason you won't get commercial data in the first meeting — and how the brief earns it over time→ A real example of how one rep's discovery brief process led directly to a dramatically higher win rate from proposal to close→ The warning about letting an LLM invent numbers in your brief — and why you always double-check itThis is a practical, tactical breakdown of the follow-up step most reps skip entirely. Stick around to the end for free templates and access to the Growth Forum community.

The biggest problem with most ABM programs isn't execution, it's that they try to personalize at scale before they truly understand their buyers.Everyone wants the results of account-based marketing. Few organizations build the foundation required to make it work.In this episode, Carolyn sits down with Steve Armenti, former ABM leader at Google and founder of Twelfth Agency, to unpack one of the biggest misconceptions in modern B2B marketing.Together they explore why high-volume personalization is becoming less effective, why AI can't replace strategy, and why the highest-performing GTM teams build what Steve calls a "market of one", a deep understanding of every target account before scaling outreach.You'll learn:Why most ABM programs never create real demandThe hidden flaw in high-volume personalizationWhy AI amplifies strategy instead of replacing itHow leading GTM teams build a 360° account viewThe "market of one" framework for modern B2B growthIf your ABM strategy isn't producing the pipeline you expected, this episode may change what you believe the real problem is.-----------------------------------------------------The difference between guessing and knowing is almost always hiding in the data you already have.In less than 30 days, Passetto builds the marketing measurement system that gives marketing leaders continuous visibility into what's driving pipeline and revenue—and the evidence to confidently make and defend their next investment decision.

AI isn't just changing sales. It's completely rewriting how revenue teams operate. In this episode of Topline Spotlight, Sam Jacobs sits down with Justin Shriber, CEO of Terret AI, to break down how modern revenue organizations are using AI to improve forecasting, shorten sales cycles, ramp reps faster, and operationalize winning sales behavior in real time. Justin shares: Why traditional sales enablement is broken How AI helped reduce rep ramp time by 40% The "answer-to-action" engine powering modern RevOps The hidden dangers of decentralized AI adoption Why companies are struggling with inconsistent AI-generated data The real debate: build your own AI stack vs buy from vendors How leading teams are using AI agents today One of the most interesting conversations in GTM right now. If you're a CRO, RevOps leader, founder, or GTM operator trying to understand where AI is actually delivering value, this episode is worth your time. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:40 Meet Justin Schreiber and Terret 04:17 How AI is changing sales productivity 06:07 The biggest problem in revenue execution 09:37 Why great strategies never get executed 11:01 Building AI that's secure, accurate, and scalable 13:32 Buy vs. build: The future of enterprise AI 16:25 Why AI needs centralized governance 17:35 Jurassic Park, AI agents, and organizational chaos 20:15 Justin's biggest inspirations for building great companies 22:58 Where to find Justin and Terret Try Terret: terret.ai

"The answer to every problem is a model."Parag Agrawal shares the ideas behind Parallel: products that continuously learn, and teams designed around versatile problem solvers.He also shares why he built an AI agent for himself, anyd why AI's biggest opportunity is expanding what people can achieve.Guest: Parag Agrawal, founder and CEO of Parallel, and former CEO of TwitterConnect with ParagXLinkedInConnect with MamoonXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow Grit on: LinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

AI can speed up the work, but it still cannot replace the human connection that moves trust forward.In this episode, John sits down with Katrin Gurvich, a GTM Strategy & Operations leader at Navan, to talk about networking, referrals, AI, hiring, and what modern sales teams need to protect as the go-to-market world gets more automated. Katrin shares how she built connection as a skill, why referrals have lost meaning when they become a checkmark, and why AI-assisted work still requires real ownership from the person using it.If you are in sales, RevOps, enablement, leadership, or any GTM role where AI is changing the way work gets done, this conversation gives you a practical way to think about human touch, buyer trust, personal brand, and how reps should use the time AI gives back.Want to build a team AI can support but never replace? Visit www.jbarrows.com and learn how you can Make It Happen.What You'll LearnWhy networking is a skill you can build through repetitionWhy referrals only matter when real trust sits behind themHow AI use reveals ownership, curiosity, and judgmentWhy human connection still matters in modern GTM executionHow onsites, events, and personal touches can change sales conversationsWhy reps need to use AI-given time to get sharper, not just fasterKatrin Gurvich is a GTM Strategy & Operations leader at Navan, where she partners across sales and revenue teams to translate high-level strategy into day-to-day execution. Her work spans diagnosing business health, improving pipeline visibility, and helping revenue leaders separate real signal from vanity metrics like quota attainment.Before Navan, Katrin held roles in sales planning and analytics at Dropbox, management consulting at HealthScape Advisors, and corporate and institutional banking at PNC, giving her a cross-functional view of how strategy, data, and operations intersect. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Case Western Reserve University, where she studied economics, psychology, and world literature.Visit and learn more about Navan:Website: https://navan.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/navan/?viewAsMember=trueFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/GetNavanInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/getnavan/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@navan?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pcYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@GetNavanConnect with Katrin Gurvich:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrin-gurvich-559142130/John Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution—helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnmbarrowsCheck out John's Membership: https://learn.jbarrows.com/pages/individual-packages?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcastJoin John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter

Chain Reactions is Back: TBPN isn't the only game in town.The first live marketing talk show goes under the hood of the growth machines running frontier tech. No hype, no founder worship, just marketers who have done the work telling you what they actually see.​Every other week, a rotating crew goes live to decode the moves everyone in marketing is quietly talking about, break down a real product in real time, take hard sides on a hot take that matters, and put their own instincts under pressure with no time to hide behind a framework.​The first one pulls the curtain back on Myosin itself. Blake gets into where the company is headed and what's happening behind the scenes. Matt breaks down HiveMind and how we're building AI-enabled GTM systems from the inside.​This is Chain Reactions, reborn as the show from marketers, for anyone who wants to understand marketing better, without the BS hype.

This week, Simon Daniels, Principal Consultant at Accenture Song, a marketing and revenue operations expert and former Forrester analyst, is back in the studio, and he arrives clutching the results of the “Accenture Song Client Buying Index 2026”- which was shared at a recent “Rethink' event, and in keeping with the editorial policy of the show, he shares his 5 f'in' favorites.  Ian then joins Robert Rose, Chief Trouble Maker at SeventhBear, in our virtual bar, to discuss the tension of quality, price, or convenience when it comes to having AI create our content, as we assume everyone wants quality, but maybe they want it quicker, cheaper, and more convenient.  Enjoy! — The Links The people: Ian Truscott on ⁠LinkedIn⁠  Simon Daniels on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ Robert Rose on LinkedIn Mentioned this week: Accenture Song: Growth Through Relevance What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It - Podcast Robert's podcast: This Old Marketing  Robert's newsletter: Lens, his websites, robertrose.net and seventhbear.com Rockstar CMO: The ⁠Beat Newsletter⁠ Rockstar CMO on ⁠the web⁠, ⁠Twitter⁠, and ⁠LinkedIn⁠ Previous episodes and all the show notes: ⁠Rockstar CMO FM⁠. Track List: ⁠Stienski & Mass Media - We'll be right back⁠ Piano Music is by Johnny Easton, shared under a Creative Commons license You can listen to this on all good podcast platforms, like ⁠Apple⁠, ⁠Amazon⁠, and ⁠Spotify⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to Gartner, at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept due to escalating costs, poor data quality, or unclear business value. There are a lot of factors working against them, and too often failure happens when teams are right in the middle of building. They’ve spent significant time, money, IT capacity on something that may very well have been doomed from the start. So how do you know if something is actually worth building with AI or if you should just focus on buying instead? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Keith Weaver, Senior Director of Global IT and Enterprise Applications at Highspot. Thanks so much for joining us today, Keith. I’d love if you could just kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Keith Weaver: I have been leading our global IT team at Highspot. I’ve been in IT for, I think, getting close to 20 years now, just overseeing all kinds of different systems and specialties within those systems. Our IT team at Highspot is IT operations, making sure everyone has devices, equipment, all of that globally. We’re now in seven countries. As well as system engineering, making sure everyone has the right tools, that they’re optimized for the business. And then we have specific teams in IT that specialize in financial systems and HR systems. In the world of AI, it’s a whole new world and it’s a lot of fun. RR: So 20 years in IT, you’ve kind of run the gamut. But it sounds like the last two and a half years have crammed almost 20 years’ worth of change into a very short window. When we were planning for this episode, you mentioned to me that you read four or five newsletters every morning just to keep up with the pace of innovation. Can you walk us through why you’re spending so much time learning and how IT has had to evolve to keep up with this pace of development? KW: What I’ve seen is mostly it’s the same things that we’ve done, except it’s done at a much faster pace. It is kind of an unheard of pace that AI is moving. Every day, the reason I read five different newsletters is because there are so many new things getting released, whether it’s a new model or a new tool, and then there are things within the tools that are getting released. Trying to understand all those things, the new protocols that are getting released, the new ways people are building or executing on AI, or the new things people are learning, is just really critical. And all of that is at a speed that we’re just not accustomed to. So I think that the objective of what an IT team does to continue to keep the business unlocked, able to do their best work with the technology and tools while making it secure and scalable, those things are the same. It’s just the speed now that it’s running, and the speed from the business. The business is moving so fast, and their expectation is that IT continues to deliver at that pace. I’ll give you some examples. I get probably, me personally, not my team, but me personally, I probably get 20 to 50 requests for new connections, new skills, new tools every week. That’s in Slack, in Jira. It’s just nonstop, and that’s just unheard of before AI. It just didn’t happen. It would be like, “Oh, we have this big initiative, and we’re gonna do this thing.” And now it’s just like, “Can I have this? Can I have that?” And all good things, it’s just how do we do that, and how do we keep up? RR: So when you have 20 to 50 requests hitting your desk every week, it can probably start to feel a little overwhelming. And I wonder if the folks who are sending these requests your way maybe don’t know the considerations behind every single one of these ideas. I’d love if you could give us a view of what you’re seeing across the industry as both technical and non-technical teams are all noodling on the idea of how to build with AI, how to buy AI tools, how to bring them all together and create a combination that actually works. What are you seeing? KW: Well, I think if you think back a year to a year and a half ago, mostly people were buying tools. Building was… It’s so funny ’cause we’re talking about a year ago or a year and a half ago, but building was much harder. And really with Claude, the Opus class models that came out, it really started unlocking the ability for everyone to start building. And so since then, the conversation shifted from, “Yeah, we can go buy this tool,” to “We can build this internally.” And there’s a lot of excitement to build because building’s fun. The pendulum just swings often on these things, and so we’re kind of in that wave where everyone’s super excited about building something. And I think we’ll end up in a place that is more normalized, where we’re building some, we’re buying some. We’re doing a hybrid approach. I think that is where we’ll end up. It’s just, it has swung really far to, “Look, we can just go build that thing.” RR: So it sounds like we’re kind of in the early phase of a cycle that you’ve seen time and time again, where surrounded by enthusiasm, but maybe we don’t have much direction. And like you said, building is fun, so I imagine you probably hear a lot of, “Hey, look what I built,” or, “Why can’t we just build this?” So when something like that lands in your inbox, what’s the first thing that goes through your mind? KW: If it’s, “Look what I built,” there’s lots of questions, like how is it being deployed? What’s the next step with this? Who’s gonna own it? How is this actually out in the world, and how are we gonna make sure that it’s as scalable and secure? If it’s a conversation, I would say this is more so where we hear, “We want to build this thing,” or, “We can just go build this thing. Why would we buy this?” I think the thing that I would ask is, what is the long-term path for this? Because deploying is just the first step. It’s the iteration. It’s the test. It’s continuing to deploy it. It’s maintaining it. It’s supporting it. It’s the full life cycle of any software project. What resources are gonna do that? How are we going to maintain this and support this long term? Those are usually the questions that I start asking. RR: And you’re quite equipped to speak to the build side of the equation because you’ve done it. You’ve tackled the planning, the deployment, the maintenance, the ongoing support, the full life cycle, like you said, of a software project. And you’ve done it with AI. I’d love if you could walk us through your first test case. Tell us a little bit about what you were thinking going in, and what you learned along the way about what works, what doesn’t, and what was surprisingly difficult. KW: Yeah. So we built an IT AI agent and an HR agent, and we did that with a cross-collaborative team. I think we started it last fall and then deployed it in February or March this year. And I would say the main objective there was not that these are the tools that are gonna change the way we function. The main objective was a learning. It was an R&D investment. So we knew that we had to, as an IT team, be able to help the business deploy these agents, and we found some use cases that we could. The IT one we can own in-house. The HR one, we already collaborate with them very closely on a number of things. So it felt like a good first step for us to dip our toes, learn a lot about how to build these, what works, what doesn’t. And these agents are more than just chatbots. They really were taking actions in tools like Jira and Workday, Highspot itself. And we built them using the Workato platform, and what we learned through it is it was actually really exciting and really easy to get to a place where this mostly works, and this is pretty, it feels like this could be really powerful. That was, like, the first three weeks. The rest of the time was, “Oh, gosh, how are we going to get this thing so that it doesn’t give somebody some really poor answer from a security standpoint or an HR answer that needs to be rooted in truth?” And then how can we make sure that it repeatedly does these actions no matter what people prompt, that it’s really controlled? I often described it to my team like it was training a four-year-old. I have four kids and they’re all older now, but it was like I was back in those toddler stages. Like, “Why’d you decide to do that? That was a bad decision. Stop.” And trying to train it and get it to that point, it just took a massive amount of time. And since we’ve launched it, it’s a lot of resources to read the conversation, understand what was asked, understand what it did and where it went wrong, then refining it, then retesting it, then redeploying it. It’s a cycle. It’s this continual cycle, and that takes a lot more resources and time than I originally thought it would. RR: Ballpark, what did that investment look like? How long did it take you to build? How many queries did you have to manually validate before you trusted the thing? And how much are you still investing today to keep it alive? KW: In the beginning, you just start giving it manual prompts and testing it to see what it does. Then you produce your test cases, and you manually go through those test cases, and every time you make some major changes, you go through those test cases, make sure that it’s still hitting. Because just changing one little thing, for example, if you take a tool and change the prompt or the description of that tool, you actually have to do regression testing on all the things that someone could prompt, because just changing that one little description, the agentic reasoning could choose to use that tool or not use that tool at the wrong places. So it’s really important to do this regression testing. Then we started going through how do we automate some of this testing, and we were able to do some of that. But I think the biggest takeaway is with software, traditional software, you do regression testing, but if you change this bit of code, really that’s what you have to worry about, anything within that bit of code, not the whole stack, not the whole thing. This was, I think, a really big takeaway. We would make a small change, and something unrelated, completely unrelated, would start acting weird. And then you have model changes. You’re like, “Oh, I want to move to the latest model.” Well, that latest model now, the reasoning’s different, how it picks up tools might be different, and so that also has been a challenge. I think over time, especially as the tools evolve, the automated testing will get easier. We can have Claude, for example, go through and give it a bunch of questions, evaluate the responses. But you’ve got to build that too. That’s all something you’ve got to build in order to maintain this thing. RR: Now, you said this project was conceived last fall, launched, not necessarily finalized, ’cause it’s never really finalized, but launched publicly in the February March timeframe. So now we’re almost a year out from initial conception, couple months out from launch. Given your point about things changing so much in the last year and a half, now knowing what the landscape looks like, would you have built differently or would you have built at all? KW: It’s a great question. I think if I go back to my objective that I needed to learn and I needed my team to learn how to deploy these things and the challenges of it, I wouldn’t change what we’ve done, and they’re still deployed in production right now, although we are not spending a massive amount of time making them better. Would I change what I’ve done? No, but that’s because of where my objective was. My objective wasn’t to massively change the HR process or the IT process. It was to learn. And I think that given the right investment, we could move them further along. However, I do not believe that building something that every business has to do, IT and HR stuff, that… all those questions that we get, both of those teams get, are the same across most organizations. Most of the things employees need to do in these functions are the same across all organizations. So I don’t know that I would double down and want to go build the agentic functionality behind IT and HR. What I would want to do is look at our specific processes, things that are unique about our business, not only where we have the information, but what tools we use, and then maybe specific processes of how we do something, and figure out how do I build that piece and tie it into something that’s delivered. And there are so many, just talking about the IT space, there are so many systems right now that have the agentic functionality and give you the ability to tie in all your different tools. So I would probably try to leverage those rather than just building everything from the ground up. RR: As an aside, I will say I have used both the IT and the HR agents. They’re quite cool. The HR one talked me through my vision insurance at 8:00 PM on a Saturday, so thank you for that. Very helpful. So you mentioned that this was something that you and the team invested in as a learning, so you could understand what the process of building an agentic workflow looked like, an agentic tool looked like. So having now seen what it looks like, what must be invested in order to do this successfully, how do you draw the line between what you can build, what you should build, and what you’re better off just buying? KW: I think you should build the things that are unique to your business. You could think about this as your moat, but I think it goes beyond that. It’s where your processes or the way you handle something is very unique. In those cases, it may make sense to build something from scratch. But if it’s not unique to your business, like go back to the HR and IT, most of it’s just not unique. And so in most cases, when you don’t have something unique, then it likely makes sense to buy it, because you get the power of the organization that has built that tool behind it, pushing that tool forward much faster than you’re ever going to push it forward, ’cause we’re just not gonna hire that many engineers to do it. And so if there’s an IT tool out there that is bringing all that agentic functionality to the forefront, then why would I not leverage that, as long as I believe in the company, they have a track record to deliver, and they have the ability to build on top of it for some unique IT process that I have or some deterministic termination workflow that I want to execute. If I can do that, then I would say let me build what’s unique and tie it into something where the base or the product is being delivered. RR: Outside of that uniqueness component, if you’re a GTM leader trying to make that call, what other questions would you be thinking about and asking yourself? KW: I think I would just go back to that uniqueness test. Is this unique to my business? Is this a unique sales motion, a unique thing that we do here because of what we’re selling or how we’re selling that I can’t expect a vendor to build this or be able to deliver it? Or is it roughly the same thing everyone else is doing, the same problem everyone else is trying to solve? There are unique components, ’cause there are always unique components to this, but those unique components can be built alongside or included within that tool. And here’s the wonderful thing, if you just take AI or Claude, for example, we’re using Claude internally, you have a tool that has all the MCP capabilities like Highspot, like Salesforce, and you have some unique process with some maybe even proprietary tool that you want to do. Well, the great thing is you can bring that all into Claude. You can use Workato or build a skill within Claude and use that, whatever you’re building for that unique process, that unique system, and tie it in with those other tools that already are giving you a lot of functionality, and now you’ve expanded what you already had, and you’re spending your time in that uniqueness layer. What’s unique to us? That, to me, there’s value in that, to build there, because you’re not gonna get another organization to spend the time, money, or energy building on that. RR: So it sounds like it kind of comes down to a basic cost benefit call. Is the upfront investment and ongoing maintenance worth what that unique build will actually deliver? KW: When you’re doing the cost analysis, you can’t look at just what it costs to build. You have to look at the full life cycle. An analogy for you is, if you go back, maybe 20 years when SaaS really became a big thing, you had Salesforce kind of leading the charge. In all of the sales cycles, they would say, “You no longer need servers, and you no longer need admins.” The business manages this themselves, and everyone was super excited. Oh, this is gonna, the ROI’s gonna be so great on this. The business is gonna own this. We can move really quickly because we can change workflows and do this stuff and own it all internally. We don’t need an IT team to manage servers, et cetera. And everyone got really excited about this, and I remember all those years ago being like, “Guys, I don’t know if that’s really gonna be true.” So now you fast-forward, and it hasn’t been 20 years. For the last 15 years, we’ve been actually hiring system admins like crazy. We have Salesforce admins, NetSuite admins, Workday admins, Jira admins, and we are spending millions of dollars on these admins to maintain these systems that were supposed to have a great ROI. And I haven’t seen any studies on it, but I bet if we could compare on-prem with old software that we used to buy and put on-prem to SaaS, we would say that it was a lot cheaper to do it. And we’re not gonna go back. We’re not gonna do that any differently anymore, but I think we have to use that same type of lens. The ROI is not just the build. It is how are we gonna maintain this and keep it long term. RR: Yeah, and that’s the pendulum swing you mentioned earlier. Excitement, then reality hits, then we’re back to the next shiny thing. For those in that stage of enthusiasm that maybe don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, what do you wish they understood before kicking off a build or approaching IT with an idea? KW: I think the full cost. That you can’t do the math by just looking at what it costs to build, or that I can get a couple of my key people to go build this thing in Claude, but it’s how are we going to scale this in the organization? How are we going to deploy this thing? How are we going to maintain it? How are we going to support it? Who’s gonna take the support questions at midnight when they come in? And then how are we gonna iterate to keep ahead and make sure that it can do everything that we need it to do and stays ahead of where the business is going? RR: And when you’re having those conversations, at what point should IT actually be in the room? And what happens when you’re not? KW: I think that IT should be brought in the room as soon as a team is saying, “We can build this instead of buying it.” And really, I think that IT is not there, or hopefully we’re not there to say no. We’re there to help shed a light on what it’s actually going to take long term so that we make the best decisions. Because ultimately, I think we understand the technology and we understand the challenges of deploying stuff like this and then maintaining it long term. That’s what we do. And so if we’re in the room earlier, we can at least shine a light on it and give kind of that picture of reality so that we’re making the best decisions and there’s no surprises. Because the worst thing is that decision to build is made, they start building it, they realize they need IT’s help, and IT has a roadmap. We don’t have the resources or the ability to step in and solve this problem. Now you’ve wasted money. RR: Yeah. I saw a really interesting stat from some original research by Influ2. They surveyed marketing and sales leaders that are in the market for technology, and of those leaders, only 10% of them saw the IT perspective as valuable during the evaluation. 38% of them, however, then came back and said our biggest blocker, the number one blocker, in fact, was IT. So that disconnect is very clear, and it’s causing very clear consequences down the line. KW: I think what I would say is the best IT teams don’t want to be blockers. We don’t get excited blocking what the business is doing. We get excited leveraging the technology and moving it forward as fast as possible and seeing the business successful. So that’s what we want to do. It’s really hard when decisions have been made that back us into a corner and we’re like, “There’s no way to scale this, support this, continue this.” And then we’re seen as a blocker, but if we just had the conversation earlier, we could actually mitigate that much earlier. RR: So it sounds like the theme here is that your IT team wants to be a partner, not a gatekeeper or a blocker. And so knowing that, bring them along for the ride. Give them a seat at the table. Your programs, your investments will be better for it. If you had to boil this all down to one tip for marketing, sales, or enablement leaders on partnering with IT as they bring AI into their tech stack, what would it be? KW: I think if you can bring the IT team in and have a forward-looking view over the next year, over the next two years. It’s really hard to look two years out with AI and how fast it’s moving, but over the next year maybe, this is where we want to get. This is what we want to automate. This is what we need to fix. This is what we need to deliver in order to continue to execute on our objectives. If IT is on the same page there, we can be a proactive resource and help to get them there. We read all these things every day, there might be something that I’m seeing in the market or happening that I can bring to the table. Or at very least, when you come to me in six months and say, “Okay, I pulled the trigger on this thing,” we had that conversation. I knew it was coming. I knew the direction we were going, and directionally I was aligned with you, and so now I’m supporting that initiative rather than it being a surprise with no resources. So let us help with the roadmap. I think if we could do that across the whole business with IT, we would win together. RR: The one pretty clear takeaway, I think, whether you build, whether you buy, or whether you land somewhere in between, bring your IT team into the conversation, and you’re set up either way. Keith, last question for you. Just curious, what would you say to someone who looks at this build, buy, blend conversation and asks, “Why don’t I just build Highspot myself?” KW: When you build something as big and as complex as Highspot, there’s a lot of learnings that happen, a lot of iterations, a lot of changes to get to where you are. And trying to build that from scratch is very difficult. And I think the next thing that you may hear is, “Well, we can cobble this together.” I would just say you’re going to maintain that thing that Highspot has a full engineering team to make that as wonderful and as best as it can be. And how many engineers can you staff to do that and keep the velocity of it so that whatever you’re building is gonna move faster and be better than what Highspot’s building? And then what’s that gonna cost you? Going back to that build versus buy, when you start looking at how many engineers it takes not only to build it, but then to maintain it, support it, deploy it, I think the ROI doesn’t pencil out. RR: The moment you throw out the phrase cobble together, I think you’ve kind of already answered your own question. Keith, thanks for the window into a world most of us in go-to-market rarely see. This was a lot of fun, and I’m really excited to share the news. IT is there to help, and when you give them a seat at the table, your AI investments will be better for it. KW: Yeah. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. RR: To our audience, thanks for listening to this episode of the Win/Win Podcast. Tune in next time for more insights on how to maximize go-to-market success with Highspot.

Databox is an easy-to-use Analytics Platform for growing businesses. We make it easy to centralize and view your entire company's marketing, sales, revenue, and product data in one place, so you always know how you're performing. Learn More About DataboxSubscribe to our newsletter for episode summaries, benchmark data, and moreIn this episode, Rick and Pete break down exactly why: the semantic layer, the metric definitions, and the standardized math that make an AI's answer trustworthy instead of a guess. If you've ever wondered why connecting five random MCP servers to Claude doesn't give you the same results as a purpose-built data layer, this is the episode.What you'll learn:Why raw data connected directly to AI can actively mislead youThe three things a system needs (semantic relationships, metric definitions, consistent statistical math) before AI can safely draw conclusionsReal examples of AI skills built on Databox MCP — sales pulse, content performance partner, weekly growth dashboardWhy "just hook up your MCPs" burns through AI credits without getting you a real answer

After leaving a long sales career, David Rubenstein spent a year meeting more than 300 founders across 41 countries and turned what he heard into a framework for how companies sell now. In this episode of Founded & Funded, David sits down with Madrona's Anna Baird and Eric Wong to dig into why AI left buyers with more information and less clarity, why deals stall out of fear rather than disinterest, and how founders can cut through. The conversation covers selling against build-it-yourself AI objections, the return of in-person selling, and why the founder's own brand is more important to drive pipeline. This was originally an AMA with Madrona portfolio companies, but we wanted to share David's full sales playbook with founders, GTM leaders, and operators for a grounded look at how buying behavior shifted and where to focus when the old tactics stop paying off. Full Transcript:  Chapters (00:00) – Why AI Made Your Buyers Harder to Sell To (01:30) – How David Met 300 Founders Across 41 Countries in a Year (03:06) – Why the Old Go-to-Market Math Stopped Working (04:40) – AI Gave Buyers More Information and Left Them More Confused (05:27) – The SPRINT Framework for Diagnosing a Stalled Deal (07:03) – Give the "How" Before the Number So Results Read as Proof (08:54) – The Question Every Executive Buyer Asks Late in a Deal (10:16) – 3 Hidden Fears That Kill Deals During Implementation (12:00) – The Trigger Most Founders Leave Out of Their Customer Profile (15:24) – Why the First Seven Minutes of a Sales Call Are Wasted (16:19) – How to Sell Against "I'll Just Build It With Claude Code" (22:24) – Why AI Sales Prep Gives You the Average, Not the Edge (25:48) – Why Founder Brand Now Drives Pipeline (28:50) – Free vs. Paid Pilots and Why Skin in the Game Wins

Winners don't ask more questions in discovery. They ask fewer — and go deeper.In episode two of this mini-series, Luigi and Regan break down the art of the discovery call question: which ones build trust, which ones create defensiveness, and why the single most common question type sellers reach for is the one to avoid.What you'll learn:→ Why "why" questions create tension and put buyers on the defensive→ The difference between closed, open, and "thoughtful" trigger-verb questions→ Why 80% of sales questions are current-based, and why that's the wrong focus→ How to build your discovery call questions around past, current, and future buying stages→ How to figure out where a prospect really is in their buying journey→ Why identifying the buying committee changes your entire discovery call question list→ How updating your discovery brief after every touchpoint keeps your problem statement sharpThis is a practical, tactical episode built on real call examples, not theory. Stick around to the end for access to the CoachPilot community with live coaching and a free template covering dozens of discovery call questions across past, current, and future stages.

Everyone's plugging Meta, Google, and LinkedIn straight into AI via MCP and asking it where to spend their next ad dollar. Matt Chanella breaks down why that's exactly backwards — and why AI is going to make your ads more expensive, not more effective.In this episode of B2B Reality Check, Matt unpacks the two traps every B2B ad team falls into when they outsource strategy to AI:→ AI generates infinite creative variations — far more than you could ever run to statistical significance→ AI ad reporting always defaults to raw conversion volume, with zero context on campaign goals, funnel stage, or lead qualityMatt walks through why offline conversion tracking is the bare minimum, how to structure your AI context (project files, skills, clean conversion hierarchy) before you ever ask it to analyze spend, and why AI should be a thinking partner — not the decision-maker — for your ad strategy.In this episode:Why lower barriers to entry for AI-generated ads don't mean better ad performanceThe statistical significance problem with AI-generated creative testingWhy AI ad reporting can't distinguish high-intent conversions from low-intent ones (scroll depth, newsletter signups vs. booked meetings)How to give AI the right context before letting it touch your ad reportingWhy not every campaign (YouTube pre-roll, CTV, LinkedIn thought leadership) is designed for direct responseFAQQ: Can AI accurately tell me where to spend my next ad dollar?A: No — AI tools connected to your ad platforms track conversion volume and signal, but they can't tell you conversion quality: how many conversions become booked meetings, opportunities, or closed deals.Q: Why shouldn't I let AI generate all my ad creative variations?A: AI can produce far more creative iterations than you could ever run to statistical significance. Without a proper testing ramp and enough audience/budget to reach significance, you can't actually determine a winning message.Q: What's the minimum conversion tracking needed before using AI for ad strategy?A: Offline conversion tracking is the minimally viable setup — and even then, it should only be used for reporting, not for AI to dictate strategy.Q: Why does AI ad reporting always favor lead-gen campaigns?A: AI has no context on campaign objectives, measurement methodology (multi-touch, influenced, incrementality), or whether a campaign was designed for direct response versus brand consideration (the 95-5 principle). It defaults to whichever campaign produced the most raw conversions.Q: How do I set AI up correctly before using it for ad reporting?A: Build a project or skill collection with full context on your ad goals, objectives, segmentation, targeting, and measurement approach — before you ever ask it to analyze performance.

Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder & CPO @ Graphite, reveals his journey to becoming a founder and some of the major moments from Graphite's product development story. He dissects frameworks for determining when it's time to quit your full-time job to pursue becoming a founder and analyzing the costs vs. benefits of that decision. We cover how to decide what customer problems to solve, understanding how software development trends impact what you're building, and product market fit and selling considerations. Lastly, Tomas shares valuable strategies when it comes to selling to developers.   ABOUT TOMAS REIMERS Tomas Reimers is the CPO and co-founder of Graphite, the a16z and Anthropic-backed AI code review platform that Cursor acquired in December 2025. Previously, he was an engineer at Facebook. Passionate about advancing developer velocity, Tomas holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.   SHOW NOTES: The origin story behind Graphite (1:05) Signs that it's time to quit your job / found a company (4:03) How Tomas & his co-founders knew it was time to break up with their jobs (5:40) Understand what leaving your job will mean career-growth wise (7:33) Embracing regret minimization (9:28) Pros & cons of developing in blue ocean vs. red ocean areas as a founder (11:49) Strategies for determining what software to build / how is software dev evolving (14:00) Tomas's framework for determining bets (15:50) Recommendations for selling as a founder (17:52) Identifying if sales isn't working or if product market fit is off (20:35) Using customer insights to experiment & make a PMF pivot (23:05) Why developers don't want to be sold to, they want to be taught (24:42) How to apply teaching vs. selling into early GTM strategy (27:20) Utilizing demonstrations to gain developer buy in & trust (29:24) What Tomas is looking forward to in Graphite's future / software dev in general (32:04) Rapid fire questions (33:34)   LINKS AND RESOURCES The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick's quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. Founding Sales - The Startup Sales Handbook - rhe distillation of Pete Kazanjy's experience at his first software startup, TalentBin going from a founder with a product marketing and product management background to early sales guy, early sales manager, and eventual post-acquisition sales leader at Monster Worldwide in addition to his later experience founding Modern Sales, the nation's largest sales operations, enablement, and leadership community. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts - Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When every pitch deck looks the same, sameness becomes the fastest path to the rejection pile.In this episode of KP Unpacked, KP Reddy and Nick unpack why AI-generated pitch decks have become the new resume red flag, why Zero RFI scrapped ROI calculators entirely in favor of just doing the work, and why a GTM leader took a salary cut to join a startup without ever doing the math on what a successful exit would actually pay them. KP walked them through the numbers. Their face went white.The conversation spans the Bay Area network effect (Nick is two weeks into testing a potential move and already has data), why construction innovation teams are now spinning up working prototypes two days before board meetings to justify replacing vendor software, and why Autodesk's $250M bet on World Labs might be the smartest move they've made since buying Revit. The deeper thread? AI is creating a sameness problem. Pitch decks look identical. Buildings are starting to look identical. And if your pitch for a construction AI startup looks like everyone else's, you've already lost. KP's new sales process: send an NDA, send your files, let us show you the value. If we created it, pay us what you think it's worth. If we didn't, pay us nothing. Four meetings replaced by one.Key questions answered:Why does KP refuse to open a Claude-generated pitch deck?What did the GTM leader's face look like when KP ran the startup math?How did Zero RFI replace their entire sales process with "send us your files"?Why did Zero RFI delete all their ROI calculators?What is the "show me, don't tell me" sales model and does it actually work?Why are construction innovation teams building working prototypes before board meetings?Are large engineering firms starting to replace vendor software with internal builds?Why is Autodesk's World Labs bet smarter than anything Procore is doing?What does "Zoom is for tactics, in-person is for strategy" actually mean?Why is the Bay Area network effect getting stronger, not weaker?Should startup employees be money-motivated and why is that not taboo?What happens when every building starts looking like an AI-generated pitch deck?If you're a founder sending Claude pitch decks and wondering why you're not getting meetings, a GTM leader considering a startup salary cut, or an innovation team trying to justify your budget to a CFO with a working demo, this episode will make you rethink what standing out actually requires when everyone has access to the same tools.Listen now.

The fastest way to break trust between sales and marketing is to let each team bring its own scoreboard.  Marketing can point to MQLs. Sales can point to missed revenue. Everyone can be technically right, and the business still loses. No wonder Denise Persson and Chris Degnan have little patience for functional victory laps. At Snowflake, the question was never, "Did marketing look good?" It was, "Are reps productive, is new business moving, and are we working from the same plan?"  In this episode, Drew sits down with Denise and Chris, co-authors of Make It Snow, whose sales-marketing partnership shaped much of Snowflake's climb from startup to billions in revenue. They get past the usual alignment talk and into the operating discipline behind it. For the pair, trust showed up in honest feedback, fast action, rep-level visibility, and a shared refusal to declare victory unless the go-to-market motion was actually working.  In this episode:  Denise shares how she earned sales trust by listening to SDRs, AEs, and managers, then building marketing around what each territory needed  Chris explains why sales leaders need marketing partners who roll up their sleeves, take feedback fast, and care more about the shared number than looking right  Together, they show how a CMO-CRO partnership can hold through CEO changes, board pressure, hiring misses, and the politics of a winning company  Plus:  How to push sales-marketing alignment beyond the C-suite  Why "no rep left behind" became a practical GTM rallying cry  What it took to move Snowflake from "data warehouse for the cloud" to "the data cloud"  Where AI fits into Snowflake's marketing team today, from change-makers to workflow automation  Listen in as Denise and Chris share what their Snowflake run taught them about CMO-CRO alignment, sales-marketing trust, and building one revenue-focused go-to-market team.  For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcasts/ To learn more about CMO Huddles, visit https://cmohuddles.com/

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with Andrew Davis, SVP of Marketing and Sales at TextUs, to explore what happens when one leader owns both marketing and sales—and why great go-to-market execution feels more like conducting an orchestra than running individual teams.Drawing from a career that spans door-to-door sales, demand generation, startup marketing, and executive leadership, Andrew shares how creativity, analytics, and relentless curiosity shaped his approach to building high-performing GTM organizations.The conversation explores the intersection of storytelling, revenue operations, and cross-functional leadership, while unpacking practical lessons on ICP validation, demand generation, conversion optimization, and decision-making.They dive into:Why Andrew defines GTM as the orchestration of every business function around a shared growth objective.How combining creative storytelling with data analysis became his competitive advantage in marketing.Why marketers should think like revenue operators, not just creative professionals.The importance of defining what success looks like before launching any campaign or initiative.How video marketing became a powerful differentiator by simplifying complex B2B software products.Why measuring pipeline and revenue matters far more than vanity metrics like website traffic.The value of partnering closely with sales and why marketing and sales should operate as one unified GTM team.A simple website navigation change that dramatically increased qualified pipeline for a new product offering.Lessons learned from expanding into a new ICP before the market was ready and how customer conversations revealed hidden adoption barriers.Why talking directly to lost prospects often provides better GTM insights than dashboards alone.How ownership, accountability, and cross-functional trust create stronger execution across an organization.Andrew's advice to future GTM leaders: don't hesitate; execute, learn quickly, and iterate.Andrew's core message is simple:Great go-to-market leaders don't just generate attention—they align people, measure outcomes, and continuously adapt based on what the market is telling them.This episode is a practical masterclass on modern demand generation, marketing leadership, sales alignment, and building GTM organizations that consistently execute.Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedInConnect with Andrew Davis on LinkedInBrought to you by: stratyve.com

Tony Holdstock-Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Inngest, the durable execution platform that quietly powers your favorite AI agents.We get into why agents work in a demo and die in production, building their own cloud to get 20x lower cost, growing 35x after AWS and Cloudflare copied them, growing a dev tools company without a personal brand or Twitter account, why he thinks evals today are like “asking the criminal if they committed the crime”, and the thing they built to score 100% of your production agents without paying for LLM as a judge.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, Merge, and Monaco for supporting this episode.Numeral: Sales tax on autopilot https://www.numeral.comFlex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every model, one API https://www.merge.dev/turnerMonaco: The revenue engine for startups https://www.monaco.com/Timestamps:(0:00) The hidden infra layer every AI agent runs on(1:46) Building complex chains of logic(3:31) Why agent SDK's don't go far enough(4:49) Healthcare was the original event-driven nightmare(6:32) Storing traces on your infrastructure enables self-improving loops(14:26) Why Inngest was already in the right place for AI(15:49) Score agents off product events, not LLM's(17:31) The OpenAI copy-paste signal(21:24) Swap in LLMs and cut costs 20x(23:44) How customers pulled the product forward(25:41) Orchestration belongs outside the sandbox(29:48) Building a neocloud to cut costs 20x(32:09) Most neoclouds just resell AWS(32:54) All AI infrastructure is converging(34:49) Why Claude can't just build your backend(36:44) How to build a software factory(39:12) Agents are a lottery you get addicted to(42:44) Loops must exist until AGI hits(45:38) If models keep getting better, why orchestrate?(48:28) When incumbents steal your features(52:30) Why you can't vibe code infrastructure(55:54) Why Tony has no personal brand(59:38) Dev tools GTM without Twitter(1:03:20) Lessons from the founder of DuckDuckGo(1:10:39) Truth as a company value(1:13:08) Taking too long adapting to AI(1:15:10) Startups are 100% R&D(1:17:19) Ali from Databricks(1:19:03) Writing his own code, Voice-to-text with local models(1:23:53) Evals are batshit insaneReferencedInngest: https://www.inngest.com/Principles by Ray Dalio: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501124021?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackTraction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591848369?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackFollow TonyTwitter: https://x.com/itstonyhbLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyhb/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Discovery call questions matter, but most reps get the sequence wrong. The meeting is actually won or lost in the first few minutes, before a single discovery question gets asked.In this episode, Dave and Regan launch a new mini-series breaking down the exact process from initial meeting to signed contract. This episode covers the first meeting structure that determines whether a deal progresses or dies before it even gets going.What you'll learn:→ Why 80-90% of prospects research you before the call, and what that means for your personal brand→ The give before you extract principle and why it triggers the law of reciprocity→ Why leading with this is what I do kills momentum in the first meeting→ The stage zero research that changes the entire dynamic of a call→ How to structure a first meeting: research, intro, discovery or insight, social proof, next steps→ Why qualifying someone out in the first meeting is a win, not a loss→ How to avoid the interrogation feeling that kills trust in discovery calls→ The exact next-step framework that keeps deals moving instead of going coldThis is a practical, tactical episode built on real call examples, not theory. Stick around to the end for access to the CoachPilot community with live coaching and templates that build directly on this episode.

"There's 20 fires going on at every moment in the office and you have enough water to put out four."Mark Roberge shares what it takes to build and scale a company, from finding product-market fit to knowing when it's time to grow.He also shares the framework behind his new book, The Science of Selling, and why founders should scale based on their own data, not another company's success.Guest: Mark Roberge, Founding CRO of HubSpot, HBS Professor, and Co-Founder at Stage 2 CapitalConnect with Mark: XLinkedInConnect with Joubin:XLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow Grit on: LinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Episode 435 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Kojo Osei, Partner at Matrix. The venture capital industry originated back in 1946 in the Boston area, when The American Research and Development Corporation was founded by MIT president Karl Compton and Harvard professor Georges Doriot. From that point, an industry was born, and firms were created, but very few have had the lasting impact and track record as Matrix, one of the OG firms that helped institutionalize this industry. The firm has a tremendous track record through the years making investments in legendary companies like Apple and FedEx… plus category creators like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Oculus… or current investments like Canva, Suno, GOAT, and Flock Safety. Matrix is investing out of its 12th fund, an $800M fund for seed and Series A investments, and the firm continues to have a strong presence on both coasts. Kojo is a Stanford grad, who was the Head of Product at Sirona Medical, the AI operating system for radiologists, before becoming a VC. Now based in NYC, Kojo has been an investor with Matrix for over five years. Some areas of interest these days for investments include agent-driven commerce, how the software infrastructure is getting rebuilt for agents, and model application integrated companies. His investments include companies like Channel3, BoldVoice, Ampersand, and LM Studios. Chapters: 00:00 Introducing Kojo Osei, Partner at Matrix 03:24 What is Agent Driven Commerce 09:45 Koji's background & Early Career 13:20 Joining Matrix as a VC 14:37 Advice for Aspiring Venture Capitalists 17:05 The First Year in Venture Capital 20:26 Details about Matrix's 25:01 Investment Areas of Interest for Kojo 27:48 The Art of the Cold Email to a VC 34:17 Exploring the 'Why Now' Philosophy 37:59 AI: Current State and Predictions 42:06 Common Mistakes Founders Make 44:23 GTM for Developer Products 48:11 Leveraging AI in Daily Workflow 49:23 Kojo's Recommendation & Personal Interests Podcast Sponsor: This podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors and $44B in loans as of Q4 2025 – SVB delivers expert guidance, specialized products and a team that knows the innovation economy inside and out. Learn more at SVB.com.

Building a great sales organization has always been difficult, and the pace of AI has only raised the stakes. Chad Peets and Chris Degnan join John McMahon and John Kaplan to share what they're seeing as founders race to build go-to-market teams in one of the fastest-moving markets in software. They discuss why companies overhire, how leaders should evaluate revenue quality, what separates "patriots" from "mercenaries" in the hiring process, and the operating principles that produce durable sales organizations. Chad Peets is the Managing Partner of RPT Partners and has spent more than 25 years helping software companies build world-class go-to-market organizations. Previously Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures, he helped hire more than 7,500 software sales executives, including more than 500 who joined Snowflake during its growth. Connect with Chad: LinkedIn Chris Degnan is a Partner at RPT Partners and the former Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake, where he helped build the company's go-to-market organization from its earliest stages to more than $4 billion in revenue. He is the co-author of Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions: How Snowflake Scaled its Go-to-Market Organization. Connect with Chris: LinkedIn "Make It Snow" by Denise Persson and Chris Degnan Connect with RPT Partners: Website info@rptpartners.com More from Revenue Builders: Hiring to Ensure Success featuring Chad Peets What It Really Takes to Build a Billion-Dollar Revenue Engine featuring Chris Degnan Key takeaways from this episode: 00:00 – Why the best sales careers are built through mastery, not compensation. 10:48 – Why hiring for tomorrow's org chart often creates today's leadership problem. 12:12 – Why many AI companies are overstating revenue quality, and what leaders should look for instead. 25:58 – What leaders often overlook when separating long-term builders from short-term opportunists in the hiring process. 35:17 – A practical framework for evaluating whether a company is worth joining before you sign the offer. 41:37 – Why great technology and great sales organizations create a competitive advantage together. 45:14 – What the next generation of elite sellers will need to master to stay relevant as buying evolves. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Most companies think of education as a support function, the real shift is treating it as a go-to-market engine.In this episode of the UnChurned Podcast, Josh Schachter and Samantha Murray sit down with Yash Tekriwal, Head of Go-to-Market Engineering Ecosystem at Clay, to unpack how he became the company's first-ever GTM Engineer, why Clay rebranded its entire education team, and what it actually takes to build a learning ecosystem people don't just consume, but live inside of.Yash shares the origin story of the GTM Engineer role, why he believes "education" has become a dirty word in tech, and how Clay is rethinking everything from LMS platforms to certification to attribution.They also dive into:- The origin story behind the first-ever "GTM Engineer" title- Why Clay killed its education team and rebranded to a GTM engineering ecosystem- Why traditional LMS platforms get learning fundamentally wrong- The "control the environment, not the process" philosophy of learning- Why brand affinity and "vibes" matter more than marketing attribution- Rethinking certification and skill assessment in the age of AIIf you're building a GTM team, leading customer education, or trying to figure out how learning and community actually drive growth, this episode is a masterclass in building an ecosystem instead of a content library.Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.Chapters00:00 – Intro & Backstory01:03 – Yash's Pre-Clay Career and Failed Startups05:30 – Why He's More Of A Founder Than When He Was One06:32 – Becoming Clay's First-Ever GTM Engineer09:41 – Category Creation and Market Sizing13:42 – "We Killed The Education Team At Clay"15:36 – Why Education Became A Dirty Word In Tech21:08 – Yash's Path From Teacher To GTM Engineer24:54 – The Build vs. Buy Problem With LMS Platforms28:09 – Control The Environment, Not The Process32:37 – Why Attribution Doesn't Matter — It's All Vibes36:18 – Inside Clay's Six-Pod GTM Ecosystem42:16 – Yash's One-Year Goal: Rebuilding CertificationJosh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.comWhere to Find the Guest:Yash's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashtekriwalWhere to Find the Hosts:Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/Samantha's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-murray613/

SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin For ten years, social selling meant monitoring LinkedIn for prospects and dropping "Great job!" comments and hoping someone took a meeting. Everyone knew it was hollow. Nobody said it out loud. Then an agent booked 682 qualified inbound meetings without lowering the bar once, and another agent saw a prospect complain about a product online, analyzed their account, and solved the problem in real time. That's not something a human social seller could ever do. Agents didn't end sales. They just made it impossible to pretend the hollow parts were working. In this closing AMA, Jason Lemkin takes questions from the floor on what's actually changing in sales, GTM, and company building in the agentic era, and what to do about it. You'll learn: Why the inbound BDR role should go extinct and what replaces it What agents can do in social selling that humans never could, and what that means for your team structure Why your sales team needs to be product experts now, not relationship managers, and how to tell the difference How to find your GTM engineer without posting a job description that attracts nobody Why it's an inertia grab not a land grab, and what that means for which vendors you commit to today What Jason actually looks for when investing right now (hint: one thing)

AI for sales is everywhere right now, but most of it is noise. This episode is about what actually works: AI sales coaching that lives inside a rep's daily workflow instead of sitting unused in a Google Drive.After 18 months of building, Dave, Luigi and Regan officially launch CoachPilot on this episode of Revenue Leaders. It's the AI coaching layer that sits on top of your CRM and coaches every rep on every deal, live.The three of them have spent decades in sales, built hundreds of playbooks, and onboarded over 200 SDRs for companies like Stripe. They kept hitting the same wall: even the best playbook fails because it never lives in the rep's daily workflow. CoachPilot is their answer.What you'll learn:→ Why the number one problem in every sales org is adherence to the sales process, not talent→ The playbook problem: why even great playbooks end up sitting unused→ What a day in the life with CoachPilot looks like: morning briefings, live call coaching, post-call CRM updates→ The live coaching sidebar that prompts you on objections, pacing, and talk ratio mid-call→ Why they built their own call recorder instead of integrating with existing tools→ The four IP layers: forecast score, coaching score, deal score, and methodology score→ Gartner's 2.8x revenue stat: why action-based AI paired with humans beats AI alone→ Why AI can't replace sellers in complex, multi-stakeholder deals→ The 50% unapproved AI usage problem inside sales teams and why governance matters→ Who CoachPilot is NOT for: the honest ICP conversation most founders avoidWhether you're a founder, sales leader, or rep, this is a rare inside look at why three sales veterans killed their own consulting business model to build a product.⭐ Learn more about CoachPilot: https://coachpilot.comFollow us:https://www.instagram.com/davidfastuca/https://www.linkedin.com/in/luigiprestinenzi/https://www.linkedin.com/in/reganbarker/https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfastuca/

איך נראית הקמת סטארטאפ בתוך חברה גדולה, ואיך מנווטים את הצעדים הראשונים בעידן ה-AI? הפרק השבוע פותח את סדרת הפרקים החדשה שלנו, שבה נלווה מקרוב את ההקמה והפעילות של Agent Talent, פרוייקט ששואף לפצח שוק חדש של מרקט-פלייס שמחבר בין חברות שמעוניינות לשכור אייג׳נטים כעובדים מצד אחד, לבילדרים שבונים אייג׳נטים מהצד השני. לאורך הסדרה נביא את הסיפור מאחורי בניית הפרוייקט, האתגרים, הטעויות, ההצלחות והניסיונות שמתרחשים בזמן אמת. הצטרפו אלינו למסע של המוצר הזה, ושל הצוות שמקים אותו - לאן הם יתקדמו אנחנו נגלה ביחד תוך כדי תנועה. בפרק הראשון, גל ברוך ונדב שלזינגר, צוות הפאונדרים של אייג׳נט טאלנט, חוזרים לנקודת הזינוק ומספרים על השינוי המחשבתי שעברו - מהשלב שבו הם פעלו הם חשבו שהם רק ״בורג״ במוצר, ועד לנקודה שבה לקחו עליו בעלות מלאה. הם משתפים בהלם של תחילת הדרך כשהבינו שגיוס בילדרים לפלטפורמה הוא החלק הקל, בעוד שהבאת חברות ולקוחות משלמים היא האתגר המרכזי, ומתארים את הכאוס האינהרנטי של ניהול תפקידים בתוך צוות רזה שפועל בקצב שיא. הפרק הוא הצצה לדינמיקה של פיצוח שוק ומוצר, החל מהרגע שבו נכנס הכסף הראשון לחשבון הבנק ושינה את רמת האמונה של הצוות בפרויקט, ועד להחלטה לזרוק לפח מתודולוגיות עבודה קלאסיות לטובת ריצה מהירה ותיקונים יומיים. בפרק הזה, וגם הפרקים הבאים, נדבר על תובנות מעשיות סביב בניית ICP משתנה, ניהול קשרי לקוחות בגישת High-Touch, עבודה בצוות שמורכב חלקו מעובדים אנושיים וחלקו מאייג׳נטים, הרבה תובנות על בניית GTM - ועוד ועוד ועוד. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most founders treat product-market fit like a feeling. Mark Roberge thinks that's as absurd as calling profit a feeling.The founding CRO of HubSpot, Harvard Business School lecturer, and Stage 2 Capital co-founder joins Josh to break down his new book, The Science of Scaling. The argument at the center of it - the decision of when and how fast to scale shouldn't be a gut call. It should be gated on retention.Mark shares the leading indicator of retention (the one metric that predicts churn in a customer's first month), the 5-50-500 playbook a Microsoft leader used to launch new products, why Drift's founder flew across the country to onboard $50/month customers, and what "AI-native sales team" should actually mean in 2026 (with numbers attached).If you work in Customer Success, this episode makes the case that you own the most strategic metric in the company. All proceeds from Mark's book go to McLean Hospital for mental health care.---Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.---What You'll Learn- Why we scale haphazardly, not scientifically- A quantitative definition of product-market fit - How to design a leading indicator of retention- Real LIR examples from Slack, Harvey, Facebook, and Gainsight - The three maturity levels of an LIR- How a Microsoft leader used the 5-50-500 rep model to de-risk new product launches- How to pick your threshold based on the blitzscale risk in your category- Why product-market fit and go-to-market fit must be sequenced, not pursued at once- How to know when to move past founder-led sales - How to bring unit economics into board meetings - Why blitzscaling fails more companies than it saves (and why VCs push it anyway)- The two metrics that define an AI-native sales team in 2026- Mark's four phases of the AI revolution in go-to-market ---Timestamps0:00 - Preview & Intro1:30 - Meet Mark Roberge3:07 - The Science of Scaling (All book proceeds go to McLean Hospital)7:30 - We scale haphazardly, not scientifically9:06 - Microsoft's 5-50-500 playbook13:19 - Is product-market fit a feeling?15:48 - The leading indicator of retention, explained17:30 - Time to value vs. recurring value19:42 - Designing your own LIR24:04 - Why go-to-market fit comes after PMF26:06 - Pitching this framework to VCs28:15 - How to know when you have go-to-market fit31:15 - Bringing the science to larger companies33:00 - When to move beyond founder-led sales35:51 - AI and the four phases of the GTM revolution37:20 - What "AI-native sales team" means in 2026---Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com---Where to Find the GuestMark Roberge: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/The Science of Scaling: https://a.co/d/0boDpDUcStage 2 Capital: https://www.stage2.capital/---Where to Find the Host: Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

In today's podcast episode, we discuss the patterns behind where AI agents are being built, the technologies that are enabling marketers to do things they couldn't do before, and where marketing campaigns are actually won or lost before a single ad is ever run. Join Senior Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson, Principal Analyst Yory Wurmser, and Head of GTM at Rokt mParticle, Nicholas Craig. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube or Spotify.   Get more insights like these with our free, industry-leading newsletters covering advertising, marketing, and commerce. Sign up at emarketer.com/newsletters Follow us on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/emarketer/ For sponsorship opportunities contact us: advertising@emarketer.com For more information visit: https://www.emarketer.com/advertise/ Have questions or just want to say hi? Drop us a line at podcast@emarketer.com For a transcript of this episode click here: https://www.emarketer.com/content/podcast-secret-behind-every-great-ai-agent-behind-numbers © 2026 EMARKETER   Rokt is the global leader in ecommerce, unlocking real-time relevance in the Transaction Moment. Rokt's AI Brain and Ecommerce Network help the world's leading companies deliver more relevant customer experiences and unlock incremental value from every transaction. Learn more at rokt.com.

With every vendor claiming their platform is a revolutionary AI silver bullet, how do enterprise leaders distinguish between genuine innovation and what's essentially just marketing hype wrapped in a new algorithm?Agility requires a clear-eyed strategy for adopting new technologies, especially AI, focusing on practical outcomes over speculative promises.Today, we're going to talk about moving past the theoretical promise of AI and into its practical application for enterprise marketing. We'll discuss:- How to demystify AI for the broader marketing organization so your teams can actually use it.- Moving beyond theory to discuss tangible applications that drive efficiency and better customer experiences.- Why a solid data foundation isn't just important for AI, but is the absolute prerequisite for its success.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Daniella Harkins, SVP, Product GTM at LiveRamp. About Daniella HarkinsDaniella Harkins is SVP, Product Go To Market at LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP), the leading data collaboration platform. She works at the intersection of product and commercial teams to drive the structure and transformation of the two functions team toward the next evolution — empowering them to achieve max productivity. She holds a deep understanding of the market and field and translating it into GTM activities such as pricing, product stories, salesplays, and launches. Daniella holds a Bachelor of Arts in French from Temple University and an MBA from St. John's University Rome, and speaks French and Italian. Daniella Harkins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharkins/ ---------- Resources ---------- LiveRamp: https://www.liveramp.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fChaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other generative AI tools, Chaser is the only platform that brings AI-powered project management into Slack, where teams already work. Chaser is based in Toronto, Canada. Learn more at trychaser.com.The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1 Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead. Everyone told you the future is 100 specialized agents, one for every job. That's not what's happening at SaaStr AI. Their AI VP of Finance didn't get its own app. It moved in with the AI VP of Marketing. The agents are collapsing into each other, sharing knowledge, sharing context, going deeper together. In this episode, Amelia and Jason do a live breakdown of their AI VP of Finance: how they wired Bill.com, QuickBooks, Brex, and PandaDoc into one agent, what the agent found on day one that their human finance team never did, and why contract close to invoice now takes 30 seconds instead of a day. Then Sam Blond, founder and CEO of Monaco and one of the most respected sales minds in SaaS, joins to talk about why outbound still works, what brand and message market fit actually mean for AI agents in the field, and why Monaco is building toward one GTM platform that does everything. You'll learn: Why SaaStr's agents are merging, not multiplying, and what the "monorepo" model means for your own AI stack The exact integrations that power their AI VP of Finance (and which ones took 10 minutes vs. an hour) How the agent surfaced collections problems and automations the human team never knew existed Why "set it and forget it" is a myth, and what happened when Qualified was still selling 2026 tickets weeks after the event ended Sam Blond on brand, message market fit, and what actually makes AI outbound work for companies that aren't SaaStr Why FDE relationships are now more valuable than any AE, and what that means for how you buy and sell software This is for you if: You're a founder or operator wondering whether to build a separate finance agent or fold it into what you already have You run outbound and keep hearing it's dead (it's not) You're evaluating your GTM stack and wondering if you need five agents or one You want a real, unfiltered look at what it takes to run AI agents in production, including the failures

In 2020, Airwallex lost nearly half its revenue overnight. Today it's worth $11 billion.Jack Zhang reflects on the decisions that kept the company alive, raising capital during uncertainty, and leading through its toughest chapter.This episode is a candid look at why Jack chose to keep building, even when a $1.2 billion acquisition was on the table.Guest: Jack Zhang, founder and CEO, AirwallexConnect with Jack ZhangXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow Grit on: LinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins