In Part 2 of our conversation with Max Elster, Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, we go deeper into how sales teams are actually operationalizing outcome-based selling; at scale.

Max shares how revenue teams at companies like Vanta are moving beyond founder-led, feature-centric narratives, and building scalable, repeatable playbooks rooted in customer outcomes, business impact, and data-backed storytelling.

Whether you’re leading a 10-person sales team or a 1,000-person GTM org, this conversation will help you reimagine enablement, coach for value, and build business cases that win over CFOs.

What You’ll Learn

• Vanta’s Transition from Features to Outcomes: How CRO Stevie Case transformed Vanta’s narrative, and drove shorter cycles, higher win rates, and stronger executive engagement by focusing the team on value-led discovery and storytelling.
• Why Business Cases Shouldn’t Be Optional: Hear how teams went from building 10 business cases per quarter to over 500, without hiring hundreds of SEs, and how that shift boosted win rates by up to 15 percentage points.
• Teaching Reps to Think Like CFOs: Max explains how the best sales teams equip champions to model ROI and outcomes with buyers, not for them, and why the strongest business cases are co-owned with the finance team.
• How AI Accelerates Discovery, Coaching, and Differentiation: From call summaries to intent signals to customer benchmarks, Max shows how LLMs and predictive tools are giving reps the context to build relevance at scale, without losing the human touch.

Key Topics

• From founder-led sales to repeatable revenue engines
• Vanta’s shift to value-led selling, and what it unlocked
• Building outcome plans that close deals faster
• Why the CRO’s best insights come from AEs
• Coaching for customer outcomes, not product demos
• How AI is reshaping forecasting, discovery, and enablement
• The real future of revenue leadership in an AI world

Guest Spotlight: Max Elster

Max Elster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, a revenue platform helping companies scale value-based sales across the deal cycle. With a decade of experience in AI and B2B SaaS, Max works with companies like Vanta, Cognite, and others to operationalize value intelligence, from discovery to renewal.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Company: Vanta
• Max Elster: LinkedIn | Email: [email protected]

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for next week’s episode!

Mark Petruzzi (00:36)

So let's move to topic three, stories from the field, moving from features to outcomes. So I have heard you say how you've worked with Vanta's CRO on shifting from feature led to value led sales. Walk us through that story.

Max Elster (00:52)

Yeah, I think it's a great example. Stevie, who is Vanta's chief revenue officer, she came from Twilio in the past and came to Vanta's organization, around probably somewhere between like the 20 and 40 million AR range. like basically Vanta is a good example, right? They initially were, basically kind of building this idea around a trust management platform and compliance and the importance of security and compliance with startups.

And then they expanded over time. one important thing was that as they have more competition, they need to differentiate themselves. they basically, one way of differentiating is to focus on value, right? So Stevie came in and she talked about this publicly as well, many different times where she said that one of the most important things that she drove as an organization was evolving the company from a feature led organization, the initial founder led sales days to...

basically focusing the company on value selling and moving away from feature to an outcome led and value led story across the board, pre-sales to post-sales. And then of course it starts with changing your narrative. It starts with changing the decks that you're creating. It starts with making sure that every single seller can talk about the business case and the value that in this case, Vanta provides different than their competitors are oftentimes against StatusCrow, So why should I do anything about the specific initiative here?

And they have seen great success, And actually making that transition, but ultimately I would put it even into a larger scope. any successful company out there, whether you look at the old days, the SAP is the oracles, or whether you look into modern companies, Databricks, Snowflake, many of the other kind of modern go-to-market tech organization, like go-to-market teams, they all rely on the value principle and they all operationalize their thinking around how do we make sure that everybody can speak to.

value across the board, not just pre-sales but also post-sales. And Vant has a good example where Steve done a great example at also articulating that a way. And yes, I think they're a great customer of ours. We're very happy to have them then kind of go take the ride with them. But I think they're just a great example of how they have transitioned. And the outcomes are incredible, rent rates go up, sales cycles go down.

You can actually make sure that everybody is more proficient at articulating the value that you're driving. So even thinking about discounts, especially in very competitive markets where you want to avoid discounting every single deal, And if you can uniquely position value to a procurement team, that's going to help you actually have that conversation over your competition.

KK Anderson (03:01)

And all of that is stemmed from having outcome plans and business cases in that kind of value intelligence layer as you describe it. that the sellers are talking to outcomes and talking so that they can then derive the value to lead the sale.

Max Elster (03:15)

a good example of company, a couple thousand employees where have actually measured that they built mutually created over 500 business cases a quarter. And before it was almost basically 10 to 30, In a quarter where individual SEs were building business cases to support the sellers. In a future world, basically every seller will be able to

build a business case, have that being automated and have it readily available to them for every single deal. So what happens was that actually we saw that VIN rates go up six to sometimes even 15 percentage points for specific segments, which was incredible. And it's less because you bring a business case late into the deal and you try to justify the value to a procurement person. It's more of there's a process and a guidance for an SDR or a seller or an SE to talk about value earlier. It's almost like

teaching a kid kind of basically ride the bike. If you give them a little bit of a guidance of how to start with, they will do it themselves. And it's similar, in value where if you teach them that the end result will be you driving the bike or you actually closing more deals, they will kind of think backwards and think about, if I just need to get to a final business case that includes a few different questions I need to ask, but that will help me and the customer and the champion have an internal story they can tell to their buying committee.

I can do that, I can make sure that every single discovery call has these like three to four questions that would help me then shape a better narrative as we go along the sales cycle. And then it's becoming a routine and a habit, right? And as soon as it's a habit, it can actually get scaled and be successful across the company.

Mark Petruzzi (04:43)

So Max, how did these stories resonate differently with executive buyers like CFOs who we all know scrutinize every purchase?

Max Elster (04:52)

looking at, have a few CFOs in our advisory board and I always say the CFOs will do it themselves if you don't do it for them. So they will run internal projections and internal business cases themselves. And if they don't believe in it, then they are the ultimate gatekeeper and they can just say, no, I don't believe in this. So as a seller, you're either destined to keep it up to them and you can't control it or you do it yourself. And you can control the outcome plan and the business case you're presenting to them.

or equipping a champion ideally to do that. And we have a couple of interesting stories where sellers have actually reached back to us and said that the executive, whether it's a CFO, it's a CSOR, whether it's a CIO, they actually came into the application and they almost modeled the assumptions to the base minimum. So they came in and tried to understand if we almost have no success here, what is the minimum value? And they compared that internally to other initiatives and projects that they are currently exploring.

And it resulted almost a CFO to have ownership and accountability on the business case, Because they actually control the assumptions and the narrative and they're doing it based on the framework that the vendor provides to them. And it just changes the dynamic. I also say,

I don't think a CFO is kind of this alien on the other side that doesn't want to talk to you, But they want to see that you can relate to them. They want to see that you have experience dealing with similar businesses and the more you can do that proactively, the better. And yes, I think I had CFO conversations where I presented them a business case and they said, I don't believe in this number. And then I went back and said, okay, then tell me what you believe in. And then I think like you almost opened up the room and you have a conversation about a mutual goal that you're trying to go after and you find a good solution.

It brings everybody closer together. think that's the ultimate desire of running a good sales process.

KK Anderson (06:25)

Really, really interesting. Okay, let's move to topic number four, which I know is a really hot topic with our audience. And that is the future of revenue leadership in an AI world. So I've heard you say in a previous conversation that many CROs, and I agree, fear their jobs because of AI and how quickly things are changing. And I just.

I want to get your perspective, but do you think that is?

Max Elster (06:50)

Uncertainty is always a difficult thing for us humans, Some get excited by it, but the majority of people get afraid of uncertainty and not knowing what the future beholds. And I think that's the scenario right now where things are moving so quickly and it's hard to estimate where it's going and how you potentially react to it or how your competitors potentially are reacting that you're missing out on, right? That I think a lot of people either start almost freezing, And they start

Not to move. that's a risk or they start to move too quickly. they make like, test a lot, but they don't make fundamental decisions about which AI solutions or strategies do I deploy and what's the underlying reason for that. think a lot of people are just trying to move and make a decision, but they actually forget about what I'm actually trying to solve in, my process and, kind of my day to day execution with my teams.

And which solutions and vendors and strategies and data plays do I want to run in order to make sure that that can actually get accomplished? AI hasn't really changed that, ultimately it's going back to kind of yourself first and thinking about which problems do I want to solve for my revenue team? And then how do I apply the right AI solutions to that? I do think though that the quality of LLMs today give us an enormous opportunity to tap into

unstructured data sources and data sources that have previously been so messy and so complex to analyze that it's going to open up a lot of more opportunities to improve your day-to-day work, whether it's one individual seller, or whether it's a CRO trying to almost run better analytics around the idea of, for example, why do we win? Why do we lose? Why do think there's so much data there that actually has never really been tapped into that now is possible with LLMs? But I would say

It's going back to the fundamentals of thinking which strategies do you want to change? What are the underlying solutions and options that you have? then deploying and testing the ones that feel most suited for that particular purpose. And I think you will be successful, it's just probably give it a bit of time to, have everyone adjust it. But then it's a new reality that we all work with. I'm sure you too see it with your clients as well every single day, Where you help them have those conversations internally.

KK Anderson (08:48)

see AI reshaping all of these different roles of the direct level team members? So the sellers are obviously on chat, GPT all over the place. They're using AI inside a gong. They're using generative AI. The leaders are using predictive AI.

AEs, SCRs, like what are the big ones that stand out to you?

Max Elster (09:10)

I mean, we all become more intelligent, right? think that's kind of, we all essentially, we have ourselves and then we put an additional intelligence layer on top of that, which is gonna make us a smarter seller. It's gonna make us a smarter advisor to our customers. It's gonna make us more credible, more relatable because we can actually tell stories that are similar to what others have seen. So think that's very tactical. think sellers start to tap into those resources of previous deals, previous conversations. So do think about,

Gong or the respective call recorder that you're using in the past, you didn't have an opportunity to get an account level overview of 150 plus conversations, Of like what actually is kind of the underlying executive summary around this particular account. Now it's possible, right? Because you have all those conversations that can feed into Gong summaries or kind of other tools that you're using in order to help prompt yourself for a business case, help yourself prompt for a better...

code outbound, you're sending whatever you're doing in your sales process that can actually get leveraged by those individual call recordings. what we're seeing is that a lot of the forecasting providers are starting to open up their signals to more and more data points, which is interesting. If you think about your forecast, maybe in the past, it was limited by how well your Salesforce fields were filled out. think nowadays you can tap into many more signals and data sources around an individual account. Not just the conversations that you're having, but also

Did they fire executives in the past two weeks, right? That could potentially impact your deal, right? Or it could risk the forecast. And all these different data points can now be merged and made accessible in your day to day, whether you're a chief revenue officer that runs the forecasting process with your sales manager. So whether it's an AE trying to become a more intelligent seller and more credible seller and advisor to your prospects. I think that's where AI is just getting started,

started my first company back in 2019 where we built speech technology with natural language processing. And I remember back in the days that we were competing with Google and AWS on some first speech models. And it was incredibly difficult and almost hard to actually transcript a meeting. Nowadays, we talked six years later and we have almost perfect transcripts for almost every single language in the world. We can take those data points and put them into other sources, ask questions around it. It's pretty crazy, but also pretty exciting.

I think opportunity for go-to-market teams to truly advance and be even more customer oriented than what they were a few years ago.

Mark Petruzzi (11:23)

So Max, what happens when every company has great AI building tools? What will still allow differentiation amongst the best revenue leaders?

Max Elster (11:34)

listening and building strong relationships. we're to go back to, core human strengths and qualities where we were social animals, And we want to come together and learn from each other. And I think that's what AI gives us more opportunity to not do cumbersome work that you would otherwise be spending a lot of time on and actually focus on how can you drive.

better conversations with customers and how can you potentially show up more often, Maybe take that flight and just be with your customer and spend time with them, get to know them and make sure that you bring all the information that would be helpful with you. But all that information is there, You just need to tap into that and then you can focus on the actual conversation and trying to understand the other side better. it gives us an enormous ability to actually be closer to what we're supposed to be doing and not just typing letters on the computer.

that's a great opportunity, but also it's a big opportunity will be to almost let the team run a little bit. Everybody's worried right now that teams are using chat, JBT and other systems. it gave everybody a first stint of what is possible with AI. And I often suggest to let people run and explore themselves. And at some point you grab everyone together and say, let's talk about the kind of individual projects that you've always tried out at home, On the weekends, during the week, like what are the things that have been, been working for you and how can we.

now build a system around it that we can scale across the company because otherwise we're to be running around like headless chicken and everybody's going to be doing their own thing. But it's actually not solidified in one neutral story that you can execute on. And I remember a few years ago, everybody talked about great customer experiences. And I think we kind of come back to that again now where everybody had some internal runs on AI technology. And now it's probably getting everyone back in the room and thinking about what actually works. What do we want to deploy? What do we want to scale?

KK Anderson (13:09)

But after work, what is the point?

Max Elster (13:11)

I think that's kind of phase two of the AI go-to-market story right now.

KK Anderson (13:15)

I feel like AI is going to help the sales profession get back to what it originally was, which was building relationships and trust and credibility and having the time before we had all of these tools and technologies and everything had to be inputted into CRM. And, there was so much admin, before those days, was, your Rolodex and who you knew.

And it was the relationships and that was the value, the value that you had as a salesperson. And now with AI being able to take so much of the busy work back, it's like you can focus again now on relationships. I always, mean, shoot, you can even use different generative AI tools as like your assistant, like your strategist and ask questions like, Hey, I'm thinking about this customer. I'm thinking about this challenge they have.

Max Elster (13:56)

Mm-hmm.

KK Anderson (14:01)

What are some questions that I can ask? what are some, just ask questions as if you're talking to like a sales coach, right? That's too.

Max Elster (14:07)

like different projects in ChatGBT and other tools where I kind of built those individual projects for me, I have a product coach who's advising me on how do I best navigate a new product idea. I have basically almost like a company coach that's helping me think about culture and strategy and then have a sales coach, That's helping me on some more tactical piece on go-to-market.

And I'm kind continuously building that out as, we speak, I have an investor kind of related one where it helped me craft a good investor update. So there's many different sorts of these like micro projects that you can build. And you bring up a good point though of like, ultimately it's about the relationships. And I often compare that with what happened in coding, Which is actually moving at a faster pace right now as go to market, essentially what engineers are doing now is they work with cursor in order to automate some of the work around.

writing code, And what happens is they come back to their core strengths, which is thinking about engineering problems and thinking about product problems and talking to your peers about that. And then the actual writing of code can be automated or at least partly automated, And you can have more time thinking about the solutions and the scoping of that, which is a more important task and the actual writing of it, So I think that's going to be an interesting.

time where I coding kind of you can see that that's almost like a little bit of a headwind they already had of time and then go to market will follow. And it's going to be built around the relationships as you said, specifically in go to market, it's going to come to the core strengths of what the individual kind of people are actually doing in their function and department. Hopefully, I mean, that's maybe I'm an optimist hopefully in this regard.

KK Anderson (15:33)

the engines that you're using are selling the cloud listeners and reading our newsletter and recommending that you come and be on our podcast. We're so glad that you're here today. And I know that you have been a listener as well. So for the CROs that are listening today, what's the one thing, and it's gonna be hard to boil it down into one, but what's the one thing that they can do to future-proof their role?

Max Elster (15:44)

Thank you.

KK Anderson (15:59)

in the age of AI. The first thing they should do.

Max Elster (16:01)

I would say the first thing that they should do is I would pick 20 sellers and I would like the first thing I would probably do tomorrow if I would be a chief revenue officer right now, I would go into like a channel and say, Hey, I'm actually curious to learn from my team, whether it's 20 people or 50 people. What are the AI applications that they've built at home during the work time and have 15 minute conversations for every single one of them.

and learn what they're doing and why they're doing it. And note every single action, note every single problem that they're trying to solve and then aggregate it at the end and think about a strategy that you can then deploy to everyone else. Because I think a lot of sellers are already doing something and they would love to, tell their story of what they have been experimenting with through the chief revenue officer and the chief revenue officer can future proof themselves to build a strategy around that, but also then guide and lead the managers below them to execute on that strategy.

Often it's talking to the sellers. They're the ones that are testing a lot. I think actually reducing the width between the chief revenue officer and the AEs would help them get more future-proof and understand what's actually possible with AI. So that's probably what I would do tomorrow if I were a chief revenue officer.

Mark Petruzzi (17:03)

That's great. Well Max, this has been a great discussion. Do you mind if we jump into a few rapid fire questions? Our audience loves them Cool. So what was the first product or service you have ever sold?

Max Elster (17:12)

Of course.

It was actually a ticket management software that was sold to event organizers and clubs in 2015.

Mark Petruzzi (17:24)

Nice.

KK Anderson (17:24)

Okay, who's your favorite CRO or CEO that you like to follow?

Max Elster (17:29)

That's a good question.

I'm a big fan of Patrick Olsen at Stripe. I think they've done an incredible job building the company, the culture, the go-to market as well for a company that initially was built out of almost like a one bedroom apartment and now became, I think, is it now, 50, 60 billion company, Fintech. great company. The person that I admire for the work he has done in the team.

Mark Petruzzi (17:51)

What about a leadership or go to market practice that you believe every sales, marketing, executive leader should adopt?

Max Elster (17:59)

principles of the qualified sales leader. I've re-read it again, John McMahan's book. I think it's kind of the Bible and the principles for a lot of the thinking that we have building our product, Thinking about value and outcomes and making sure that it follows through. But the best go-to-market organizations have applied some form of the qualified sales leader's principles that John McMahan and the team.

in the early days of BMC and Blade Logic and some of those companies have initially built and it still stays true today. he's on the board at Snowflake, Building the next $100 billion company plus and it stays true. So I think that's a great principle. would definitely read the book or take some summaries in order to develop our thinking.

KK Anderson (18:38)

I can't wait to check that one out. We'll put it in the notes as well. my favorite question. Advice that you would give your 21 year old self.

Max Elster (18:44)

I would probably say is to ask a lot of stupid questions and learn from others. when I look back over kind of the last like 10 years or so, think it's, I always try to kind of reach out to different people that were great in their qualities. And I try to just say, hey, I'm a person trying to learn about the field that you operate in, and I have a few questions and usually people are actually very happy to talk about themselves and in a good way.

I think they, if you ask the right questions and they can tell about their stories and how they made decisions, they will open up and they will become mentors. They will become friends. And I think that's something where, if I think about the probably thousands of conversations I've had, think oftentimes it's just being curious and asking more questions that will help you become more curious about yourself, but then also you learn from others and you can apply those tactics in your day to day, whether it's on a professional or on personal site. And

People are very open to help, you just need to ask for it.

Mark Petruzzi (19:31)

Excellent. Max, this has been so informative and so enjoyable. Thank you for taking the time with us. Where can our audience find you if they're looking to get in touch, learn more about the company? What are their best ways?

Max Elster (19:46)

Yeah, LinkedIn is great. So I'm available on LinkedIn, maxelster, or if you want to send me an email, it's max at minoa.io. So pretty easily accessible there. Just send me an email and happy to find some time.

Mark Petruzzi (19:56)

Perfect, thank you again, Max.

Max Elster (19:58)

Awesome. Thank you too. was great and incredible questions.

KK Anderson (20:01)

Thanks Max.

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