MarTalks- The #1 Ecommerce and MarTech application podcast

The board wants enterprise logos. Eighteen months and five expensive hires later, the pipeline is full and nothing has closed. Justin Michael has watched this movie enough times to tell you exactly where it goes wrong — and what the board should have been looking at instead of the pipeline number. Justin Michael is the author of 12 books on enterprise software sales, including Tech-Powered Sales a...

CFOs are no longer giving you 18 months to prove a software investment. The tolerance is now one quarter — or less. In this episode, Darrell sits down with one of the most operationally precise post-sale executives in enterprise SaaS to talk about what it actually takes to deliver on an AI promise, not just sell one. Agam Vasani scaled Zuora's professional services organization through their...

Everyone in B2B commerce wants to talk about AI. The buyers actually writing the checks are still trying to get off the fax machine. Recorded on the floor of the B2B eCommerce Association's inaugural event, this conversation is about the gap between where B2B technology thinks the market is and where the market actually is — and why the companies that skip the boring digitization step are the...

Most B2B manufacturers are still running digital commerce on platforms someone built in-house a decade ago — and the cost to replace them has kept everyone frozen. ElasticPath CEO Bryan House is changing that math, and this conversation is the clearest explanation of why the B2B commerce market is the most underserved greenfield in enterprise software.  Bryan House is the CEO of ElasticPath, the c...

The biggest integration problem in commerce — getting a selling channel to talk to a fulfillment system — just got a solution. Kelly Goetsch rallied 62 vendors, including every OMS in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, behind a single open standard. If you've ever paid for a custom integration, this episode is for you. Guest Bio: Kelly Goetsch founded the MACH Alliance and serves as President of Pip...

We speak to Tod Klubnik, about how martech and ecommerce businesses can scale their sales teams at pace. Some of the key questions covered, included:  What are the mistakes to avoid when hiring a large number of sales professionals early in your business’s journey? (2:00) Who should own go to market - sales or marketing? (6:00) And how do martech providers progress from serving SMBs to the enterpr...

Most founders know they need a lawyer. Almost none of them know they need one before the problem shows up. George Brunt wrote the first shrink-wrap software license in history. Managed 23,000 patents at Alcatel. Raised $83 million. He's been in the rooms most founders will never get near — and the pattern he keeps seeing is the same one. The CEO who waits until there's a contract dispute...

Welcome back to MarTalks. This week Darrell sits down with Anabel Maldonado — CEO of PSYKHE AI, ShopTalk startup competition winner, former luxury product copywriter, and the person who has been screaming into the void that e-commerce has been solving the wrong problem for a decade. Here's the stat that should make every retailer put down their coffee: online conversion rates are still hoveri...

This week on MarTalks, Darrell sits down with Michael FanouS the co-founder of Nyne.ai, VC scout, part-time sleep deprivation case study, and quite possibly the only person whose career trajectory starts at a coin convention at age six, detours through Jake Paul's car channel, and lands squarely in the middle of Silicon Valley's AI arms race. Michael is 20-something, running on two hours...

What do you get when you mix two dot-com survivors, a generator that still runs, and enough saltines to outlast the apocalypse? This episode of MarTalks. Rich Lyons rode the dinosaurs in digital commerce since before the word "e-commerce" even existed.  He's also been front row for every glorious crash that followed. Whitman Hart? Bankrupt. March First? Bankrupt. Divine? You guessed...

Travis Hess - CEO of BigCommerce and veteran of the digital agency landscape (Accenture, LiveArea, PFS) - joins MarTalks to discuss leading a $350M+ public software company through a major strategic pivot.  Fixing a broken Go-To-Market: Why "trying to be everything to everyone" is a public market trap and how to narrow focus to ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for real growth.  The "S...

Jamal Reimer – author of Mega Deal Secrets, ex-Oracle Key Account Director, and closer of multiple $50M+ deals – joins MarTalks for a masterclass on landing uncommonly large enterprise deals. Why pipeline building is brutally hard in 2025 (and the simple fixes most reps miss) The #1 mistake sellers make with executives – and how to speak their language with financial value stories How to turn any...

Vanessa Cartwright – 25-year digital agency titan (Astound Commerce, Blast Radius, Fluid) and the sharpest M&A / transaction-readiness advisor in the game – goes completely unfiltered on MarTalks: Why women still walk into mostly-male boardrooms in 2025 (and how the loudest voices in tech are currently celebrating zero-empathy leadership) The brutal loneliness of being CEO: no real peers, can’...

Kelly Goetsch (founder of MACH Alliance, ex-ATG, President at Pipe17) just detonated the biggest news in commerce ops this decade: He quietly rallied ~62 vendors (every major OMS, WMS, 3PL, ERP) to launch the Order Network Exchange (ONX) – a single, MCP-powered standard that connects ANY selling channel to ANY back-office with zero custom code Result? Brands can now rip $500K–$1M in integration co...

Tom Griffin – the man who ran global sales & partnerships at Demandware through its $3B exit and now President at Passport – pulls back the curtain on: Why Demandware’s partner ecosystem became legendary (and how to copy it) The 4 types of partnerships most founders confuse – and which ones actually drive revenue The expensive mistakes he’s made (and seen) building go-to-market from zero How t...

In this episode of MarTalks , host Darrell Rosenstein sits down with Jonathan Summerfield , founder and CEO of Xiatech , to unpack how modern retailers and SaaS enterprises can finally escape the limitations of monolithic systems and move toward a truly composable, data-driven architecture . Jonathan shares his journey from Marks & Spencer and Tesco to building one of the leading data-orchestr...

How to Crack the B2B Marketplace (Without Losing Your Sanity) What happens when you mix a passion for B2B eCommerce, a knack for storytelling, and a borderline obsessive drive to educate an industry? You get Justin King, founder of the B2B Commerce Association—and quite possibly the only guy who ranks on the first five pages of Google for "B2B eCommerce." (Seriously, try it.) Justin join...

B2B e-commerce is messy, complex, and full of surprises. But what if there was a way to cut through the noise and actually move fast? In this episode, I sit down with Lorenzo Ramponi, Andrew Martin, and Brendan Gualdoni to talk about: ✅ Why legacy e-commerce systems are a nightmare – and how composable commerce actually makes life easier ✅ How Brendan transformed Wiley’s entire e-commerce stack...

In the latest *MarTalks* episode, I had the privilege of hosting three enterprise sales powerhouses—Brad Habansky, Chris Sterbenc, and Brian McGlynn—to discuss one of the most daunting challenges for startups: landing that first big deal. These seasoned pros shared their war stories, scars, and hard-earned wisdom on navigating the complexities of enterprise software sales. Here’s what stood out:  ...

Martalks E-Commerce Innovation with Eli Finkelshteyn, Founder of Constructor** In the latest *MarTalks* podcast episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Eli Finkelshteyn, the founder of Constructor, to talk about how *real* innovation in e-commerce isn’t just about flashy features—it’s about leveraging technology to drive actual business outcomes. Spoiler alert: Eli and his team are doing...

** Alex Hase and the Marketplace Magic with Mirakl** 🎙️ *What happens when you mix entrepreneurial grit, a love for building teams, and a passion for eCommerce innovation? You get Alex Hase, CRO of Mirakl, and one of the most dynamic leaders in the marketplace revolution and an awfully nice fellow.   In my latest MarTalks episode, Alex brought us along his trek in eCommerce—from joining his first...

Nat Pavic from Salesforce Commerce and Liesel Walsh who led marketing teams at  Boston, Proper, Party City, Petco and Restoration Hardware shared their extensive backgrounds in the industry and their evolving relationship with customer data as new technologies have come online to address and service their customers. The emergence of digital twin technology, which modernizes product management by p...

This episode of Martalks features Casper Rasmussen, global VP of Valtech and president of the MACH Alliance, and Kyle Barz, global head of technology for Mars. They discuss their collaboration, and how Valtech helped Mars to transform their ecommerce architecture and adopt a composable model. Read more about this episode on the Rosenstein Group blog: https://bit.ly/4eIWPqA Rosenstein Group: martec...

Today, early ecommerce personalization tools can limit the customer’s ability to shop the full depth and breadth of a catalog on a merchant’s website – leaving a lot of incremental revenue untapped. PSYKHE AI is a recommendation engine designed to solve this exact problem. Alongside standard personalization functionality, it also personalizes ecommerce site grids, based on a wide range of data, in...

Data orchestration is a growing priority for enterprise brands, as they seek to gain greater visibility and control of data across connected systems. Leading the charge in this space is Sana Remekie, co-founder of Conscia, a composable data orchestration solution which works for enterprise brands. Sana joined us on this podcast episode alongside Conscia’s implementation partner Orium, with CEO Jas...