Buyer Truths

Michael Scholz, VP of Product & Customer Marketing at commercetools, came into an analyst relations renewal as the named budget holder. His CEO and chief strategy officer had both pointed the rep his way. He wasn't a gatekeeper, and he was genuinely open to buying more across the multiple brands and products he owned. The hustle lost the deal. The listening won the expansion. One account manager w...

Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and co-founder of Mutiny, went in ready to buy an AI-native CRM. She had budget, authority, and a three-week timeline. The vendor she wanted to pick kept replying three days late, and somewhere in the delay her read flipped from "this rep is slow" to "this company is a mess we can't trust with our data." She bought HubSpot instead. In this episode, Jaleh walks us through: Why she...

Becky Abraham is the Global Director of Sales Enablement at Safeguard Global. Within the same renewal cycle, she cut one six-figure tool and expanded another. One vendor panicked and offered a 40% discount nobody asked for. The other showed up three months early, listened to her internal conversations, and painted a vision of what her team could do differently. The discount lost the deal. The visi...

Accord vs Aligned vs DIY: Why the Vendor Who Did More Lost at WordPress VIP Josh Fosberg leads the media and publishing segment at WordPress VIP, managing a sales org that was drowning in PDFs, scattered emails, and deals happening in rooms they couldn't see. They needed deal room software. They had three options: Accord, Aligned, or build it themselves on WordPress. Accord's seller was excellent....

Alicia is the VP of everything post-sale at Daxko's boutique division. She inherited a 234-step manual onboarding process and an average of 17 emails per customer deal. After a 90-day internal sprint with her CTO cut the problem by only 30%, a company acquisition finally unlocked the budget to look outside. A teammate surfaced Onramp. The demo went well. Then pricing hit the table -- and it cost m...

Rob runs marketing at LockThreat, an early-stage GRC startup he joined with no MarTech stack and one strong conviction: they needed HubSpot. First he had to survive two failed Zoho consultants and months of internal politics just to get approval to switch. The HubSpot sales rep was excellent. The implementation partner was a disaster. And now the guy who fought hardest to bring HubSpot in can't br...

How a $500M SaaS RVP Bought an AI Writing Tool to Close a Sales Skill Gap Keith is an RVP at Bullhorn, a $500M CRM and ATS platform for recruiting and staffing firms. When he noticed a communication skill gap across his 35-person mid-market sales team, he didn't go looking for a vendor. He already knew one. He had been following Nate, the founder of Fluint, on LinkedIn for years and had even bough...

Kathleen is a CMO who was first introduced to One Mind through a trusted VC referral, not a cold pitch. What started as a novelty demo featuring digital Deepak Chopra took two years to become a signed contract, as the tech matured, use cases sharpened, and the One Mind team methodically built trust across her entire buying committee. The deal was tens of thousands of dollars, and she signed before...

Pete Vomocil 💛 is a CMO overseeing marketing for a 1,800-person company while running new ventures on the side. When his team needed a headless CMS that could serve both heavy-duty engineering and self-serve marketing, his engineering team screened 20 vendors down to 6. Three made it to finalist calls. The vendor with the best sales orchestration won. A year later, Pete ripped it out and rebuilt...

Madhav runs marketing at Storylane, an 11-person team at an angel-strapped $10M ARR company. When 1 in 5 demo requests started citing ChatGPT and Perplexity as their source, he knew he needed an LLM visibility tool - but the category barely existed. He evaluated 6 vendors. He chose Profound. And he did the whole thing without ever talking to a  salesperson.     In this episode, Madhav walks us thr...