In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Max Elster, Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, joins co-hosts Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore what B2B revenue leaders often miss: a clear, consistent understanding of why they win.

Max introduces the concept of a Value Intelligence Layer, a data-driven framework that links discovery, business cases, and outcomes into a single narrative that everyone from SDRs to CROs can use.

Drawing from years of experience across SaaS and enterprise sales, Max shares how leading GTM teams are moving away from feature pitching and toward outcome-led selling, especially in a world where AI has made building software easier, and differentiation harder.

From strengthening discovery questions to creating scalable outcome playbooks, this episode is packed with tactical ideas for revenue leaders rethinking how they sell in the age of AI.

What You’ll Learn

• The “Why We Win” Blindspot: Why many sales orgs still can’t answer the most important question, and how that gap leads to poor qualification, forecasting, and deal execution.
• From Features to Outcomes: How modern buyers evaluate value, and why understanding customer priorities matters more than your internal product roadmap.
• Creating the Value Intelligence Layer: How to unify customer impact, product usage, sales stages, and discovery insights into a single GTM operating model.
• Scaling Outcome-Led Playbooks: What it takes to align SDRs, AEs, SEs, and CS teams around a shared value narrative from day zero to renewal.
• AI as a Differentiator (Not a Replacement): Why the best teams use AI to personalize engagement, not to automate it, and how AI helps surface deeper buyer context.

Key Topics

• Why most GTM teams don’t know why they win
• Building discovery questions that lead to business cases
• Embedding outcomes into CRM and sales stages
• Creating a “value intelligence” system across teams
• How AI and call data can power more relevant sales motions
• Turning post-sale value into pre-sale advantage
• Aligning playbooks across SDRs, AEs, SEs, and CSMs

Guest Spotlight: Max Elster

Max Elster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, a SaaS company helping revenue teams operationalize their value story. With a background in B2B software and product development, Max built Manoa to bridge the gap between feature-led selling and outcome-driven growth. His team helps sales orgs unify discovery, use cases, and customer impact into one connected system.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Company: Minoa.io 
• Max’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maxelster

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for Part 2 with Max Elster, dropping next week!

Mark Petruzzi (00:36)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're excited to welcome Max Elster, co-founder and CEO of Manoa. Max has spent nearly a decade in B2B software and AI. He co-founded Manoa to solve a critical gap he observed across SaaS and enterprise companies that most revenue leaders don't actually know why they win. Manoa helps teams uncover the value

drivers behind deals, building what Max calls a value intelligence level, layer rather, that connects discovery, business cases, and customer outcomes into one system. Today, Max will share how CROs can shift from feature-led selling to outcome-led value selling, and what it means to scale revenue teams when differentiation and ROI storytelling are more important than ever.

So we'll cover four themes today. Why the old sales playbook falls short, building the value intelligence layer, stories from the field moving from features to outcomes, and the future of revenue leadership in an AI world. Max, welcome to Selling the Cloud. Thank you so much for joining us.

Max Elster (01:46)

It's great being here with both of you. As you know, I've been an avid listener and kind of follower of your newsletter. So it's an honor to be here and speak a bit about Valley Intelligence.

Mark Petruzzi (01:57)

Well, it's an honor to have you here as well. So topic one, why the old sales playbook falls short. So Max, you said CROs often can't clearly answer why they win. Why is this such a big problem today?

Max Elster (02:09)

been particularly relevant, I think, over the last couple of years, right, when we came out of basically post-COVID world and everybody was almost adjusting to a new environment, a new set of buying, a new set of selling. And oftentimes what we see is that companies understand the what and the how. They understand which deals they work on. They understand their internal sales process. They understand the RICP. They understand the different stages, of course, in order to

get a lead to a close one opportunity. But oftentimes what we see that actually they don't know enough about is why they win and why they lose. So what are the underlying criteria that helps the chief revenue officer detect whether an opportunity is truly qualified? what are the data, what's the previous data that actually helps you make a good call of whether a certain deal will close or not? And what are the underlying value drivers, use cases that you're selling and how do they relate to?

the conversation around the outcome. you're trying to deliver and then how can you reverse that back to why your customer is actually buying or not? And oftentimes the, the why is not really clear to a lot of revenue teams, the what and the how it's pretty, pretty set and pretty default, understandable, but the why is often what's missing and what, what's the consequence of that is that sellers start to, start to basically just rely on more like deal heroics, right? They look into like previous deals, they feel rather confident about a deal, but they don't actually know.

is this deal going to close because of actual factual reasons of why other customers that have been similar to this particular account have closed in the past? And that's a massive gap and more revenue teams are starting to ask that question of why do we actually win and why do we lose on a basis of understanding your use cases and your deployment of use cases better.

KK Anderson (03:42)

So that's really interesting. When I think of a huge misconception with salespeople that we have seen, every day for 25 years, it's that a salesperson believes that their primary job is educating about that product, describing the features and advantages of using that product. And it's all about how quickly can I talk about what I'm selling when really

the primary goal of a salesperson is to listen and to understand and to figure out what are their outcomes, what are their business problems, what do they need to fix, do they have a pain they need to fix? And then, and only then, can you go into why you, why now, why this feature, why this benefit, et cetera. And so when I think about

you're right. All of these sales organizations have all of those tacticals in place and button down the process, the tools, et cetera. but they probably, those that are more successful are the ones that are selling to outcomes, right? The ones that are, answering or solving a problem with, and that's why they win. Right. That's, that's kind of where my, where my head is going. And so.

When you see sales leaders who are relying on features and broad messaging and educating buyers, what gets lost in the conversation?

Max Elster (04:56)

it's great question. mean, we've, we've analyzed over like tens and thousands of different conversations, call recording data, but also business cases that are being built with customers, outcome plans, sales. Right. And I think a lot of the actual sauce that's missing is around the business priorities. Everybody talks about the features and functions, but when you go a level deeper or a level more like basically a level higher, you kind of uncover business priorities, right. And you can map.

individual functionality and individual features to those business priorities that matter to that organization. And I think five, six years ago, you could probably still sell on feature and function and product. And having been a product kind of manager by background, right? I think that's kind of what drives an organization, right? It's features that are released. gets everyone excited about the new products that are being launched that you can sell to customers. But when you look at it from a buyer's angle, they don't care too much about your internal release thoughts.

They care about their problems that they need to solve and then how your individual use cases map to their problems. And I think what specifically happened, I would say, in the last 12 months, and I think that's why this topic becomes more relevant than ever, is that a lot of revenue teams see that their competition is not sleeping either. And I think it's because of AI. It's becoming easier and easier to build. There's going to be an abundance of software in the future where essentially every...

person out of a single bedroom is going to be able to ship a product and actually release it to an audience. And yes, there will be differences between you as an incumbent or you as a player that's been in a category for a long time, but you need to make sure that you can display and communicate your differentiated value drivers better than the person that's building a new software out of a kind of one bedroom apartment. And I think that's kind of what's becoming evident right now that a lot of the data that we are looking at.

really showcases that the sellers that are performing better are first understanding the business priorities and then actually map them back to the individual use cases that map to their persona, that map to that individual use case and the industries that they're targeting. And ultimately in a world of AI, it's more important than ever to be more differentiated and understanding the business priorities and linking that back to your unique differentiated value is the only answer on how you can solve that problem because everybody's going to be able to build sooner or later.

Mark Petruzzi (07:06)

So Max, building a sort of a moat is gonna get more more important because you're gonna have to do it with your products, you're gonna have to do it with your processes, and you're certainly gonna have to do it the way you sell to your clients going forward. So what does it look like to move from feature function selling to outcome selling, especially at scale?

Max Elster (07:28)

Right. Yeah, mean, we work with companies that have thousands of employees, right? And they are spread across multiple different regions and languages and countries. I think scale is often the biggest question, right? Of ultimately trying to move away from individual pitch decks and individual messages that maybe sellers have put onto a spreadsheet and try and iterate on to something that can be unified across an organization. Essentially asking the question of how can

Every SDR to the AE, to the sales engineer, to the customer success manager, even thinking about account management, talk about the same language and talk about the same value that this organization is delivering to customers. And I think there are very tactical pieces of how you can change that. think the underlying theme definitely is that it is a change management process, right? You have to educate your team on a new narrative that buying is going to be different and sellers have to adjust to that new buying cycle and the way that buyers actually evaluate software.

But on the other side, they're very tactical things that I think you probably also have an interesting perspective on that you can, you can build. One of them is how do you build better outcome led playbooks, right? When you're delivering and you do discovery, how do you make sure that before you even jump into feature and functionality, what are the discovery questions that are related to an individual persona that you're going to be talking to? How do you capture metrics as early as in the discovery and not just wait until you want to prepare a proposal to gather metrics that help you then.

create a solid business case for the CFO, right? Like actually building those playbooks and almost moving everything early into the cycle and not just waiting until the CFO question comes around of, can you kind of make sure that I understand what am I buying here, right? What's the ROI? What's the outcome plan? What's the net present value in this opportunity? And making sure that a lot of those questions can be built into discovery playbooks where you already start gathering. And I always say like mutually lining on.

the outcomes that you're trying to deliver. The champion on the other side is not an enemy, right? They have the same interests as you. If they're excited about the opportunity, they want to be part of the creation of understanding how your solution maps to the pain points and the priorities of the organization. And they want to help you with that, but you have to ask the right questions in order to get them there. And then I had a conversation this morning where I talked to a sales leader out of Europe. She manages a couple of ⁓ sellers that then have sales managers. And what she said is that

Discovery starts in the outbound message, right? And how do you make sure that the data that you already have about the outcomes you deliver and the why of why customers renew and expand, how can you make sure that an SCR can talk about that, right? And if they talk to an executive in their outreach or they call somebody on a cold call, they want to have, make sure that they have those benchmarks and those data points available. And that's often where organizations are just under high scrutiny right now to just bring all that together.

And of course the data economy kind of, think, gives the answer to that. There's so much in an organization at scale that people are not leveraging that they are considering as we speak.

KK Anderson (10:15)

Really interesting. So what advice would you give a CRO who has a sneaking suspicion that their current sales playbook is falling short? Where would you start? ⁓

Max Elster (10:27)

think probably the

first couple of things that they need to be looking at is pick your first, like pick your most successful like top 10 deals over the last quarter or last six months and talk to those sellers and understand, okay, can you walk me through how did you position the unique value of our organization compared to the differential compared to status quo and let the sellers answer that question, right? And oftentimes there's a lot of ⁓ insight in how they positioned why.

this particular organization is different than others. And ⁓ it's just making sure that those individual wins that have already had great success ⁓ or the specific expansion deals that you're working on, how can you make sure that you'd templatize that and build a playbook around it from discovery questions that you could ask and enable sellers to work on to the renewal conversation where you're trying to basically expand with somebody on additional use cases. And I would always start with kind of where do you win and where do you lose and make assumptions around that.

and then make sure that you align the company on those individual success stories. And then it's a process, of continuously picking the winners every single quarter and making sure that you re-communicate again and again why this method is important so that the more junior sellers or the people that are just getting rammed can take those wins and the underlying ⁓ outcome stories and outcome maps that you've built for customers as an example for their internal processes and their opportunities that they work on. And that's just, of course, a very tactical piece, but I think

looking at like, even like running reports and Salesforce and picking a few of your kind of recent deals and talking to those sellers often creates a unified story of what you can actually scale towards the rest of the team. And then I always say, when companies come to me and they ask, okay, how can we even get started? I always say, and sometimes it's companies that make like 50 to like a billion in revenue, right? Like 50 million to a billion in revenue. And they come to me and say, okay, how do we understand what are our value drivers?

And I often say, what do mean, right? You have had some great success getting to 400 million in AR, right? And there's probably some, some KPIs that you're tracking well along that in order to make sure that you're delivering value and you've gotten to that point of time. But what a lot of organizations are I think overseeing is that the customer success organization and the account management teams, they are trying to renew with customers based on the value that you're delivering. And they are somewhat trying to tie the story between the outcomes the customer is interested in and your product and taking those and actually building playbooks for the pre-sales team.

can be an incredible starting point because otherwise we wouldn't be renewing and expanding with customers.

KK Anderson (12:47)

You can even use that data with the existing team to figure out who are the right people they should be spending their time with. the old 820 rule, 80 % of ⁓ sellers are spending their time on the wrong accounts, right? So let's move on to the second topic here.

Max Elster (13:03)

Spot on. Spot on.

KK Anderson (13:06)

and kind of focused around building the value intelligence layer. So you describe the importance of creating a value intelligence layer. But what does that really mean in practice? Like, is that a tangible thing? Is it a process? What does that really mean in practice?

Max Elster (13:23)

Yeah, I mean, how we would

describe it and kind of the definition for the value intelligence layer is essentially trying to find a way to better map the features that your products basically have accommodated and map them to individual outcomes of customers and then relate them back to what does customer impact look like, right? And this could be even a simple, like you go into a spreadsheet, yours is a chief revenue officer. You know which products or which features are most popular within.

kind of your individual user group, and you try to map them to the outcomes that you want your sellers to drive within your customers' accounts. And you refer that back to then, ideally, customer impact, right? How do these individual outcomes that map to the features actually help somebody drive impact within their companies? that's measurable on the post-sale side. That's measurable on, like, if you look at product telemetry data, right? Are people actually leveraging the features within your product that actually result in

dedicated outcomes across your organization. And that's, think it's essentially building that single source of truth in order to understand how does an individual feature connect to a customer impact and how do you make sure that when you talk to a prospect, you can go into a conversation and say, this is apparently the problem that you're trying to go after. This is the outcome that you're trying to go after. want to reduce costs in 2026. have.

different use cases that accommodate that, right? That I would love to walk you through and understand whether that's helpful, right? Whether that's like the potential use cases that could be deployed in your organization. And you almost open up the room. I'm not sure if you've ever used a car configurator in the past where you can kind of configure your Porsche or the BMW or the Mercedes that you would like to explore. It's almost similar to that, right? You open up a shared space and you try to explore the future car that you want to buy. And you want to do something ideally with the prospect as well, where you talk about

This is kind of the value intelligence that we have built. These are the features that we have. This is the outcomes that we usually drive with customers. And this is the proof and the customer stories and the impact that we're succeeding with with customers. So it spans from pre-sales to post-sales. It's essentially this unified layer. it helps, that data layer helps to create better business case because every business case will not just talk about features and functions, but it will also relate back to the customer impact. It will help an outcome plan, right? Everybody talks about.

mutual success plans on the wholesale side, they will not just be individual checklist items anymore, right? They will actually be basically deployments, right? Which use cases did we deploy and how can we make sure that we measure them quarter by quarter, month by month or year by year to say this customer is actually on track. We're not just seeing whether they're using our features, but we actually see whether they are delivering the outcomes and we're working with our customers to keep ourselves accountable.

And I can tell a good story there. Actually, one of our customers, Cognite, is a leading software AI manufacturing company. A couple hundred million AI are a pretty successful category leader. And their Northstar internally is to drive customer value. And everything basically that aligns within the organization is around that principle of driving the Northstar, which is helping a customer succeed and deploy the right use cases and making sure that not just

The customer success manager can talk about the value, but also the customer can go internally and say, we deployed these four use cases with Cognite. That's how they operate. This is how successful they are. This is where we still see gaps. And you almost keep yourself and the customer accountable on a mutual story of how you are succeeding with them. And it's building a different narrative. You're almost handing over the relationship of customer impact also to the customer. It's not just a vendor.

specific relation that you're trying to build. it's really vice versa. You're trying to mutually succeed and both parties have to understand how the feature usage relates to the impact that you can get from a vendor specifically.

Mark Petruzzi (16:48)

So Max, take us a little deeper in how do you pull data from systems like Salesforce, Gong, and general call transcripts to fuel this layer?

Max Elster (16:58)

Yeah, of interesting ones. So one big layer that we tap into are case studies and any existing successful stories that you have, right? Where you've essentially articulated the problem that you're trying to solve for a customer and the relatable metrics that go along with it. Some companies have a better case study system than others, right? Some companies are still very feature oriented in their case studies, but it's a good starting point at least, right? To then say, okay, this is what the case studies say. Another data point is Gong where

we pull or like any sort of call recorder, right? ⁓ Where we pull call transcripts and make sure that we can map the talk tracks of a seller or an account manager to these individual case studies and the results that you have seen with other customers, right? So that's another big data point. The third data point is Salesforce, where a lot of organizations have some sort of overview on the medic or a med pic or a spiced scenarios of what is the problem we're solving? What are the metrics associated with that? Right? And all these different data points.

are essentially fueling this customer value intelligence layer. And you could almost see it as like a small database, right? Like on a, that's not like where like all that information is gathered and summarized. whenever an SDR wants to send an outbound message, they query that database, right? And they can say, Hey, I'm targeting Kristen at a Pepsi at PepsiCo, right? And she's this persona, she works in this department. What should I send to her? Which relatable customer stories can I bring up in my cold email or in my cold call?

that actually would relate to her job and the problems that she's potentially facing, right? Or there's another account manager that taps into that same quote unquote database where they're trying to now expand with an existing customer and think about what are the additional use cases I could deploy. And then that database will help to make sure that you can find your path in upselling and cross-selling the next use cases and the next products that you can offer. And essentially that, like those different data points are continuously fueling.

the quality of your value intelligence layer, the more calls we have, the more case studies that are being released. Of course, the better the system gets over time and the better it can actually help organizations communicate outcomes over features.

KK Anderson (18:54)

So it's almost like a generative AI interface for your querying and asking questions. Is it also listening to the problems that your prospects and customers are telling you about? ⁓

Max Elster (19:05)

100%. I mean,

that's the interesting part of the talk track of the seller, but then also the underlying pain points that the customer is articulating. ⁓ So it's both. It's of course the customer's pain and the way they articulate their problems and relating it back to your value proposition. ⁓ I often say it's essentially two contexts cloud. It's the context cloud of what is your value proposition if you put it into very abstract words, right? Like what do you deliver and how do you make sure that's measurable?

And the other context cloud is the pains and the business priorities of your customer and essentially merging them together. And you're trying to align how do we, what's the, what's the similarity between everything that we do as an organization and the products and features that we've shipped and the outcomes that we deliver to the pain points that the customer has. you, you build a natural coherent mapping between both of them.

KK Anderson (19:53)

And does it also give information about, like in some kind of an LLM model, give information about the prospect or the company

Max Elster (20:00)

you bring up a good point. think a lot of companies, they start to tap deeper into account research, right? So when I'm a seller and I'm trying to prepare for my next meeting, I'm trying to get a better understanding of what is this customer even about, right? And how do they make decisions? What are their current priorities based on what I can find from just like online research? The problem with that oftentimes is that it's generic and it's not tied to the previous value that you've delivered for customers.

Right? Anybody can run a chat, you would see prompt and say, Hey, let me prepare for this podcasting interview. Right. But the people don't actually know what's what are the, the different podcasts that you've run in the past and how is my maybe unique value proposition in those types of environments. Or when I'm selling to somebody, how do I make sure that their specific challenges are tied to my individual value proposition that I can bring as an organization? And that's something where chat should be T unless it has a lot of context struggles to give you.

a performant high quality answer, right? It can always guide you in some direction, but it doesn't have all the context about the value intelligence there or the outcomes that you're delivering to customers because it doesn't access your product data and basically the outcomes that you're delivering across the board. So that's where we see systems like Chatjibiti and others and typical LLMs struggle. Doesn't necessarily mean that we don't use them as a technology or our customers don't use internal tools for their technology, right? I think LLMs are a great starting point, but you...

have to give them enough context and business context in order to really help you find the right path.

KK Anderson (21:22)

so I'm thinking about like if I were prospecting and I was in a prospecting motion, like having this single source of know value truth, right? How does that change the way I operate day to day? How does it differentiate me as a seller, as a prospector?

Max Elster (21:36)

I think very clearly, let's take an example. If I'm in an SDR at a software company selling to large FMCG companies, and I come in and say, we have built this platform with these individual features. And that's usually what individual users are reporting back to. this is what our platform does and the value it provides.

it can get very generic, right? And everybody has hundreds of those messages every single week in their inbox of something that is platform and feature pitching. How this is going to differ and differentiate you is that you're going to come in and you're going to say, hey, Kristen and Max, I work at this company. We have worked with three different FMCG companies in the past six months around these two core pain points. And after six months, these are the relatable ⁓

metrics that we have deployed, that we have basically mutually measured together with the customer, that we would love to see if that's also relevant to you. And if you are interested in solving similar pain points and you're interested in basically seeing similar outcomes for your organization. And it's less about the message itself, but it almost gives you more credibility as you're reaching out to these people and you're almost seen as somebody that actually understands their business, but also

can give relatable examples from other companies, not just on a qualitative, this is what our product does, but on a deeper level of these are the benchmarks that we have deployed for this customer and this is the outcome that potentially we could build for you as well. And let's mutually explore it before we jump into a conversation.

Mark Petruzzi (23:01)

So Max, what's the one thing CROs can start doing today to better capture the why we win?

Max Elster (23:09)

Yeah, think probably, how would a good consultant do it, right? I think usually it's like, let's do an assessment today and see already what you're doing today. So I would probably look at every single exit criteria in my sales process and just see what are we actually tracking? Are we tracking whether metrics and impact and the business case has been built before stage three, stage four? Is that something that's already happening today? Or is there...

almost like a free way for the seller to just continuously sell on features and function without actually getting any step in the sales process where you say, this is what we're going to do today, and this is kind of we make sure we measure that in the future.

I think it's a tactical step. So I think that's something that I would probably recommend to everybody just thinking about exit criteria and making sure that you can align your thinking and the outcomes you want to drive to your sales process. That's oftentimes a good starting point. It drives immediate quick wins. You can measure it. You can keep yourself and the teams accountable. And it's an easy way to get started.

Mark Petruzzi (24:05)

Excellent, excellent.

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