Revenue Builders

The next leadership opportunity is rarely earned by chasing a title, compensation package, or predetermined timeline. Mark Thurmond explains how consistent execution, continuous learning, and the ability to attract trusted people create career momentum that compounds over time, giving revenue leaders a more durable way to evaluate their next move.   Mark Thurmond is Co-Chief Executive Officer...

Enterprises have poured money into AI, and most of it is still doing research. The return comes when agents start taking action inside real systems, and that’s where most companies get stuck. If no one can say who authorized an agent to take a specific action, across specific systems, at a specific time, that agent never leaves the pilot. Arcade, fresh off a $60 million raise, was built to answer...

Strong technology alone does not earn access to a hyperscaler. Partner leaders must understand the company’s internal products, supply dependencies, power structure, and competing priorities before they can build an agreement that gains support. In this segment, Alan Chhabra explains how Cerebras aligned its offering with AWS Trainium, why complementary architectures can overcome internal resistan...

Most sales leaders coach the outer game: pipeline, routing plans, pricing, KPIs. That’s maybe 15 percent of performance. The rest sits under the surface in self-doubt, fear of other people’s opinions, and the stories reps tell themselves about who they are. Collin Henderson was a two-sport Division I athlete who developed a stutter at 11 and once pre-recorded his answers to a pharma sales evaluati...

Pressure often takes over before a leader realizes it. In this segment, former professional hockey coach and mental performance coach Greg Poss explains how shallow breathing, frustration, and blame can reveal a shift into what he calls a lower-brain state. He shares a simple breathing practice for restoring focus, outlines the structure behind his 21-day training program, and explains why account...

Many leaders spend their careers chasing a scoreboard someone else set. It works until the how stops working, and nobody ever trained them on the why. This conversation picks up our Rethinking Success series dissecting the definition of success and failure for yourself while inviting real risk into your life. John McMahon connects a study of high school valedictorians to the sellers who win comple...

Most organizations structure territory planning around guesswork and political compromise. But Meghan Gill learned at MongoDB that territory strategy starts with operational discipline. In this clip, she walks through how to build field operations that run the operational cadence on the ground, structure territories so leaders have real data to work with, and use centralized dashboards to enable s...

Most deals die quietly in discovery, champion development, or economic buyer misalignment. But what actually separates consistent closers from perpetual stallers? In this replay, Anne Gary sits down with John McMahon and John Kaplan to reveal the blind spots in your sales process – and the coaching framework your leadership team needs before you finalize your 2027 plan. From preparation rituals to...

The war on talent isn't won by matching OTE. Sam Costello knows this and in this segment, breaks down his evolved interviewing approach -- separating stories from facts, owning the dialogue -- and explains why candidates actually stay long-term. It comes down to rare ingredients most companies never get right.   Sam Costello is CRO at Harness, where he's spent 7.5 years scaling the platform f...

Most SKOs are packed with inspiration and breadth – 30 topics, motivational speakers, CEO talks – but when reps walk out on Monday, they don't know what's different. In this episode, John McMahon and John Kaplan break down how to build an SKO that actually answers the question reps need answered: what do I need to do differently tomorrow?   Key takeaways from this episode:  00:00 – Why i...

Buyers rarely make decisions on logic alone. In this minisode, Randy Riemersma breaks down the six emotions that influence how deals progress and explains why elite sellers know how to create urgency, build confidence, and sustain momentum throughout the buying journey. Randy shares his perspective on the role of fear, curiosity, hope, desire, confidence, and urgency in complex sales, along with w...

Proprietary data, not the software, is the long-term value driver. On this episode, Ann Davis, CRO at Crunchbase, walks through how knowing which customers to pursue drives 2x pipeline growth in six months, why sellers need to stay in control of the conversation, and how she built a headless AI interface that connects Salesforce, Gong, and private market data so reps know exactly what to focus on...

Hiring mistakes often happen when leaders focus on capability and experience without understanding whether a candidate is truly energized by the realities of the role. In this clip recorded earlier this year, Jason Forget, then President and CRO of Cockroach Labs, shares the interview question he uses to uncover long-term fit, why startup environments demand a different type of motivation, and how...

You can have the best product in the world, perfect messaging, and market timing on your side… but if you don't have elite people in your sales organization, none of it matters. Brad Scott has built sales teams at Snowflake, Veza, and now Glean – three of the most different growth trajectories in tech. In this conversation, he breaks down how to hire for the traits that actually predict success: i...

Most first-line managers are trying to do everything at once – recruit, develop, forecast, and hit their number – all in 62 working days. But Scott Rudy has learned through building teams at high-growth companies that what separates managers who make their number from those who don't isn't effort; it's operating rhythm. In this clip, Scott breaks down how second-line managers should coach first-li...

Most companies spend September and October planning for 2027, but they skip the part that actually matters: figuring out how their teams will execute on it. That's why we're revisiting this episode with Dr. Chuck Bamford, who walks through how to align strategy from the boardroom all the way down to compensation plans, daily activities, and the conversations your reps have with customers. He cover...

Winning complex deals requires more than executive sponsorship. The strongest business cases are built by connecting value across the organization. Daniel Simon shares how he worked with stakeholders across product, engineering, finance, HR, and legal teams to uncover specific use cases, quantify time savings, and build an ROI story that resonated from end users to the executive team. The result w...

CROs who chase pipeline numbers miss what really matters. Sam Costello's path from sub-$1M to $100M at Harness taught him to stop managing revenue and start building the machine that produces it, which means recruiting elite, coachable talent, running a champion-first sales process with discipline, and building a culture of radical candor where MEDDPIC reviews are hunts, not compliance exercises....

AI adoption has changed the standard for go-to-market execution. Seong Park, SVP of Customer Support & Services at Cursor, explains why the old model of selling certainty is giving way to curiosity, experimentation, and workflow discovery. He breaks down why the real work starts after signature, why pilots only matter if they lead to business-critical adoption, and how revenue leaders can guide cu...

Michelle Bove didn't start in enterprise software – she started as a soccer referee in seventh grade, hustling for an extra $10 per game, then moved into door-to-door sales at a three-person startup where she learned rejection quickly and loved it even more. That hunger never left. Today, as an AVP of East Sales at Wiz, she's built her career at some of the sharpest sales cultures in software hist...

High-performing teams create the conditions for talent to succeed. In this Revenue Builders segment, Lindsay Shookus shares lessons from Saturday Night Live on cultural fit, team buy-in, trust, and performance under pressure. Drawing from examples of SNL talent who found success in different environments, Lindsay explains why fit often determines whether strong people can thrive inside a specific...

Most sales conversations still lean on product specs, and most leadership still gets reduced to quota math, until the market gets hard and both approaches break down. Rob Potter, CEO of Oomnitza, joins John Kaplan and John McMahon to argue that revenue and retention run on the same fuel: story, evidence, and belief rather than pressure. Shaped by three decades under RSA and EMC leaders like Art Co...

Enterprise sellers often lose deal quality by moving too quickly from customer pain to product answers. In this Revenue Builders minisode, Stuart Gwynn of MongoDB explains why the best sellers slow down in discovery, hold the line with the customer, and use disciplined qualification to determine whether a problem is real, urgent, and worth solving. Stuart shares how pipeline creates the courage to...

Senior leaders are often judged in moments they could not plan for. Mark Thurmond’s path from sales rep to co-CEO of Tenable was built through consistent execution, difficult operating assignments, and crises that demanded calm before certainty. He explains what the RSA breach taught him about transparency and customer trust, how he and Steve Vintz kept Tenable moving after the death of CEO Amit Y...

In this clip, Alex Bilmes, CEO of Endgame, joins Revenue Builders to share what his team learned from analyzing more than 30,000 real AI workflows across go-to-market teams. The data shows AI gaining traction in account intelligence, conversation readiness, deal acceleration, pipeline inspection, and team enablement. But the larger lesson is that the strongest teams are not just using AI to genera...