Categories: Podcasts
This month on the Revenue Builders Podcast, we hosted conversations exploring what it takes to qualify and close deals as AI raises the stakes for sales organizations to execute and drive revenue. Complex buying committees, quick-moving competitors, and more informed buyers are challenging teams to qualify earlier and prove differentiated value faster. The leaders featured this month share insights on turning sales methodology into a system, training for pressure, and navigating AI-driven deals.
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July Featured Episodes:
The Hidden Cost of False Velocity with Randy Riemersma
Duration: 1 hr 1 min
Topic:
Many stalled deals do not fail because the solution is weak. They fail because the team moved too fast before the buyer had a reason to care, a sponsor willing to mobilize, and enough confidence to take the risk. Randy Riemersma joins John McMahon and John Kaplan to unpack how false velocity, shallow discovery, and weak executive alignment create fragile opportunities that collapse late. He explains why elite sellers slow down early, uncover real business pain, connect operational problems to strategic outcomes, and manage the emotional side of buying when the decision starts to feel personal.
Randy Riemersma is the founder of Sell with Precision, where he helps sales leaders strengthen go-to-market execution, leadership effectiveness, and sales operating discipline. He has spent decades in B2B sales, leadership, consulting, and executive coaching, with a focus on helping teams sell with greater clarity, precision, and business relevance.
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Why Fast Growth is a Pipeline to Expose Weak Sales Organizations with Chad Peet and Chris Degnan
Duration: 56 min
Topic:
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 and Chris Degnan are Partners at RPT Partners, bringing complementary perspectives on go-to-market scaling. Peets spent over 25 years helping software companies build world-class GTM organizations, including his role as Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures, where he helped hire more than 7,500 software sales executives — over 500 of whom joined Snowflake during its growth. Degnan lived that growth from the inside as Snowflake's former Chief Revenue Officer, building the company's GTM organization from its earliest stages to more than $4 billion in revenue, and later co-authored Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions: How Snowflake Scaled its Go-to-Market Organization.
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How Great Sales Leaders Turn Instinct into a System with Frederik Maris
Duration: 1 hr 5 min
Topic:
Sales organizations stall when knowledge stays trapped in the heads of a few experienced people. In this Revenue Builders replay, Frederik Maris explains how leaders turn field experience into repeatable execution through sharper qualification, stronger frontline management, and deliberate coaching. He shares how conscious competence helps managers teach what top performers do instinctively, why early wins matter for new reps, and where leaders must take accountability when talent fails to develop. The conversation gives CROs a practical view of the systems, behaviors, and management discipline required to build a team that can scale.
Frederik Maris is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of EliteGTM, where he helps founders and revenue leaders build more predictable go-to-market organizations through advisory, recruiting, and enablement. His career includes senior leadership roles at Splunk, Zoom, DataRobot, BMC, Veritas, and PTC, giving him firsthand experience building and transforming complex enterprise sales teams.
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Training for Pressure with Greg Poss
Duration: 1 hr 3 min
Topic:
Pressure does not create a response. It exposes the response that has already been trained. Former professional hockey coach and mental strength coach Greg Poss returns to explain how leaders can recognize fear-driven reactions, return to a more deliberate state, and build resilience before the stakes rise. Greg, John McMahon, and John Kaplan examine why external achievement delivers only temporary satisfaction, how a leader’s emotional state influences the team's performance, and why productive discomfort must be paired with a clear path forward. They also discuss practical tools including breathing, visualization, self-awareness, and Greg’s 21-day process for building more consistent responses in high-pressure environments.
Greg Poss spent decades coaching professional hockey in the United States and Europe, including leading the Mannheim Eagles to a championship and coaching the German national team. He now works with athletes, coaches, and business leaders to strengthen mental resilience and improve performance under pressure.
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Why Partner Leaders Must Master the AI Landscape to Win Hyperscaler Partnerships with Alan Chhabra
Duration: 1 hr 2 min
Topic:
AI partnerships are no longer won by managing a channel or securing a marketplace listing. Leaders must understand how countries, power, cooling, chip fabrication, hyperscalers, model providers, software companies, and enterprise risk fit together before they can build an effective partner strategy. Returning to Revenue Builders, Alan Chhabra explains how Cerebras navigated the technical and political realities of working with AWS, why successful partner leaders need more than relationships, and how sovereignty is changing infrastructure, model selection, and cloud decisions. He also examines why software companies are moving aggressively on AI while traditional enterprises remain more cautious.
Alan Chhabra is the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebras Systems, where he leads global partner expansion across hyperscalers and the broader AI ecosystem. He previously spent nearly a decade building MongoDB’s global partner network and held senior leadership roles at BMC Software.
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