Revenue Problem Solvers

Product can ship in a month now. Sales and marketing are the new bottleneck. Wayne Townsend, Chief Product Officer at Data Axle, is rebuilding a 50-year-old data company in real time. Less than a year into the seat, he’s moving it from shipping data files to delivering answers through natural language, APIs, MCP and AI agents. Before this, he was CEO of ClickSquared and ran a $600M martech practic...

Your best quarter for new logos could be setting up your worst quarter for churn. Christina Singh has spent almost 20 years on the post-sale side of growth-stage SaaS. She helped scale UserTesting from $60M to $110M, and grew Split.io from $8M to $35M ARR while keeping retention above 90% for 7 straight quarters. Her take: most churn starts as conflict inside your own company, long before a custom...

Your team is proud of how the product works. Your buyers might be tuning it out. Matt Darrow, co-founder and CEO of Vivun, learned that the hard way. His team built a sales reasoning model they say beats the frontier labs at a tenth of the cost. Buyers shrugged. Then they stopped explaining the tech and started talking about what it made possible: expertise, live, on the calls where deals are won...

Doug Camplejohn was hired to run a quarter-billion-dollar product. His honest opinion of it? He wouldn't have paid for it himself. Doug has founded four companies, three of them acquired, including Fliptop, acquired by LinkedIn in 2015. LinkedIn brought him in to run product for Sales Navigator. He used it, wasn't impressed, and told the CEO exactly that, even though the business was alrea...

A cleaning company got named as a competitive threat in the industry's largest player's own SEC filing. Three years earlier, they were just another vendor competing on price. John Ravaris explains what changed. He stopped letting salespeople make promises and started putting operations people in the room with clients instead, the ones actually doing the work. Revenue doubled. Then the mark...

One in three headphones in his first Kickstarter batch came back with a virus on them. That was the moment Mark Clayton, a former first-round NFL draft pick, almost walked away from the company he built out of a broken pair of headphones. Mark spent 7 seasons in the NFL with the Baltimore Ravens and St. Louis Rams before starting LIVV Audio with zero background in consumer electronics. In this con...

Your CEO just told you brand can't be measured. Sandra Rand has heard that line more times than she can count, and she's done letting it slide. Sandra is the VP of Marketing at Spreetail, one of the largest e-commerce operators in the country. Before that, she led a rebrand at Thrasio that drove a 168% increase in lead flow, and grew user acquisition by 24% at GETIDA with marketing respons...

Most companies build a demand gen engine, hit their number, and walk away. Brydon McMillen says that's exactly the moment it starts to break. Brydon's path here wasn't typical. He came up drafting electrical diagrams for billion-dollar energy projects with a chemical engineering degree, until a co-op placement handed him a broken chatbot nobody else wanted. He rebuilt it, drove a 352%...

There's a job title at Salesforce that doesn't exist anywhere else, and once you hear what it does, you'll wonder why every company doesn't have one. Mark Grimwood spent almost two decades at Salesforce, rising from corporate recruiter to SVP of Recruiting for the company's entire global sales organization. Along the way he held a role most people have never seen: VP of Recruit...

Two weeks into a new CRO role, Steve Shauck got the call: they were doing a layoff. Not exactly what the recruiting process had promised. In this episode, fractional CRO Steve Shauck sits down with Karl Ortmann to unpack what happens when the company you were sold doesn't match the company you land in. Steve has run global sales teams at GE Digital and Oracle, led two successful PE-backed exit...

You're hitting your numbers. Then you hit a wall, and nothing you try seems to move it. Michael Kleinman has seen this exact wall before, and he knows why most founders never get past it. Michael built Fresh Pair from a New York City apartment into an 8-figure retailer with over 30,000 SKUs before selling it in 2011, then built one of the most-read editorial platforms in men's apparel with...

Your team is already using AI right now, without your permission, without IT knowing about it, and without any guardrails on what data is walking out the door. Michael Lamb, Senior Director of Marketing Technologies at Mitel, has spent the past year leading digital integration through four major acquisitions while building the framework that governs how Mitel's marketing teams use AI. On this...

Ask five people at your company what you actually do. If the answers don't match, your messaging is broken, and it's costing you pipeline. Nima Chadha, CMO at Venti Group and founder of Offload Marketing, has spent her career fixing exactly this problem for companies working with names like SAP, Adobe, and Okta. She started in sales, not marketing, which means she's heard broken messag...

Your customer's health score looks fine. Their relationship with your team already went cold months ago, and that's the part most CS teams never catch in time. Lukas Alexander, VP of Customer Success at ChurnZero and former 8-year CS leader at Cision, joins Karl to break down why multi-year deals don't actually solve churn, they just delay the conversation you should be having in month...

Is your AI rollout quietly increasing your churn? Julie Persofsky has spent her career proving customer success is a growth engine, not a retention afterthought. She took Influitive from zero to $10 million in ARR while outselling the sales team from the existing customer base, and today over 80% of her client portfolio is AI companies. On this episode, she and Karl get into what's actually ha...

The industry average for sales training completion is 30–40%. Most companies treat that number like a ceiling. Dr. Eve Kedar treated it like a problem worth solving. At Seagate, she built the Systems Selling Academy, a global enablement program that hit 80% completion and tied directly to a 20% lift in sales growth. Her approach wasn't more content or better modules. It was community, peer coa...

He got fired for a DUI. Started a side hustle to buy diapers and formula. Twenty-one years later, his company clears over $3 million a month. Ben Buckley is the founder and CEO of Digital Dreams, an 8-figure commercial AV integration company that has installed LED walls and enterprise security systems for Apple, Samsung, Salesforce, and Madison Square Garden. He runs it with zero paid ads, zero KP...

Most AI adoption advice sounds the same. Add the tool. Run the pilot. Hope the team figures it out. Chris Fossenier, Chief Growth Officer at Member Solutions and former corporate AI Champion at Vendasta, has a different playbook. And he's got results to prove it. In this episode, Chris breaks down exactly how he built a functioning AI revenue engine inside a real $6M business, with a non-techn...

He ran an agency for 16 years. Then walked away from it on purpose. Not because it failed. Because after looking at his own numbers, Jason Kramer realized the project model was structurally designed to let revenue leak out. Money already earned. Clients already won. Just falling through the cracks because the model wasn't built to hold them. In 2018 he founded Cultivize, a CRM consultancy buil...

LinkedIn is the most misunderstood platform in B2B, and most revenue teams are paying for it in flat pipeline. Eli Igra Serfaty has built his entire practice around LinkedIn, working with clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. In this episode, he dismantles the misconceptions that keep B2B teams busy on LinkedIn without generating results. You'll hear why impressions are t...

Most companies treat operations as a cost center. Jennifer Doty built a career proving it is actually a revenue engine, and that the gap between sales and delivery is where most revenue gets quietly lost. Jennifer spent nearly 20 years at MetLife, ultimately leading all of US group benefit operations, a function of over 1,000 people. She now serves as VP of Operations at Three Flow, a benefits tec...

Sales ignoring your leads is a symptom. The real problem is that marketing and sales never agreed on what a lead was in the first place. Lisa Cole has walked into that problem at company after company, and she has a system for fixing it. As a four-time CMO and two-time published author, she has driven results that are hard to argue with: nearly $50M in pipeline at one organization, and at another,...

Your board has already said no to more headcount. So what is the actual path to more revenue? Sreedhar Peddineni has built two category-defining companies from the technical side. Gainsight, where he served as CTO for 8 years and helped create the infrastructure behind the customer success movement, and Host Analytics, now Planful, which reshaped how enterprise finance teams plan at scale. His thi...

Jay Baer sold out a full year of sponsorships before the website existed. 44 pitch calls. 45 days. Zero product built. He called it the most successful revenue initiative of his career. That's not a fluke. That's three decades of professional marketing applied to something most people would have called a hobby. Jay is a 7x New York Times bestselling author, one of the most in-demand keynot...

Your demand gen strategy might already be obsolete, and your buyers are the proof. Kalyn Rozanski spent her career doing what most executives only claim to: seeing what's coming before it arrives. She co-founded a B2B innovation consultancy that grew to serve Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, and GlaxoSmithKline. At its peak, she stepped away to start over, because AI was reshaping the entire l...