Ed McDonnell was three weeks into ninth grade at an all-boys Catholic high school in New York when his mother told him they were moving to Denver.

She'd taken a new role as director of nursing education. Ed left behind every friend he'd ever known, enrolled in another all-boys Catholic school in Colorado, and started over. He made new friends. He figured out a new culture. He found his footing. Then, midway through junior year, his mother took a VP of nursing job back in New York — and they moved again.

Three high schools. Four years. Two cross-country relocations. And a 14-to-17-year-old learning in real time how to walk into a room full of strangers and build relationships from scratch.

That ability to lead through change didn't just become a skill for Ed. It became his operating system.

Today, Ed is the Chief Revenue Officer at Braze, where the company recently posted an $821 million quarterly revenue run rate with nearly 30% year-over-year growth and rising net dollar retention. Before Braze, he held the CRO seat at Asana, spent more than a decade helping build the marketing practice at Salesforce, and cut his teeth in enterprise software at Eloqua before its acquisition by Oracle.

But this conversation isn't about a résumé. It's about a leadership philosophy forged in disruption.

Ed talks about the advice his father — a New York police officer — gave him before college that still guides how he builds relationships today. He shares the career moment where getting let go became the catalyst for reinventing himself. And he walks through the 6P's, the framework he uses to run every quarter: People, Pipeline, Programs, Process, Performance, and Possibilities.

In this episode:

• The "Be the USA Today" advice from his father that changed how Ed connects with people
• How getting let go became the most important inflection point of his career
• The 6P's framework Ed uses to run the revenue engine at Braze
• Why the best performance cultures start with leadership being in the work, not above it
• How Braze maintains a performance mindset while celebrating wins at every level
• The operating rhythm that keeps Ed's organization accountable quarter after quarter

This episode is for sales leaders who believe that resilience isn't something you learn in a workshop, it's something that gets forged every time the nest gets shaken.

One of the most important lessons Peter Mahoney carries throughout his career was inspired by his daughter Marianne. She was born with significant special needs, and in that moment, everything Peter expected about his life shifted. But Marianne set a goal for herself when she was young: she wanted to live independently. It took ten years of work. And about two years ago, she got there.

Watching that journey taught Peter something he's never let go of - the most important things take time and persistence. There are no shortcuts to the things that actually matter. You set a direction, you keep showing up, and you trust the process even when the progress is slow.

It also put everything else in perspective. Today Peter is the Chief Commercial Officer at GoTo, a billion-dollar company going through significant transformation. People around him ask all the time why he isn't more stressed. His answer is honest: he's seen what real hard looks like. A tough quarter or a deal that falls apart matters, but it's not the kind of hard that should rattle you. That calm isn't detachment, it's clarity. And it changes how he leads, how he makes decisions, and how the people around him show up under pressure.

That same patience shaped his career. Peter has never been afraid to take a step backward to move forward. From leaving a 30-person team to start over as an individual contributor, to spending a full year in IBM's training program before he ever sold anything. The moves looked unconventional. They were deliberate.

In this episode:

• The lesson Marianne taught Peter about persistence, patience, and keeping perspective
• Why he never panics under pressure, and how that steadiness shapes the teams around him
• The Sunday reflection system where he maps his week against his goals and writes down the honest truth
• Why he gave up a leadership role to become an IC product manager, and how that detour built his path to CEO
• His philosophy on AI: give me the framework, but let me do the thinking

In his own words, Bryan Cox was just an average college tennis player. His record was roughly .500. But in his own mind, he was winning all the time.

That disconnect wasn't delusion. It was a skill. Somewhere between the thousands of points lost and the matches that didn't go his way, Bryan had taught himself something most people never figure out: how to forget.

Not how to ignore failure. How to metabolize it, extract the lesson, and then let it go so it doesn't weigh you down the next time you step on the court. Or the next time a deal worth a third of your quarterly forecast evaporates overnight.

That discipline has carried Bryan from his early career through Flexera and Grafana Labs to his current role as Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Braintrust, one of the fastest-rising AI companies in enterprise tech. This past quarter, he watched a massive deal disappear at the start of Q2 through no fault of his team. His take: if you've put in maximum effort and exhausted every angle, you can live with the outcome. What you can't live with is knowing you left something on the table. The team finished well above their number anyway, and Bryan says he's prouder of that than any single deal closing.

That resilience traces back to a culture Bryan has been building deliberately since making the leap from individual contributor to sales leader. A colleague at Grafana told him bluntly that he was talented but "living in a small pond." Bryan took the hit, moved to Grafana, and discovered what elite execution actually looked like. But the bigger shift came when he stopped optimizing for his own performance and started asking why he was doing the work in the first place. The answer was coaching. Seeing other people flourish.

His framework for running the sales org is borrowed from Steve Kerr's Golden State Warriors. Bryan calls it the motion offense. When the team reaches a certain stage of an opportunity, everyone circles it and starts passing the ball. He sends a note. An SE pulls someone aside to talk through technical requirements. Someone meets the prospect for coffee. The board gets engaged. Field marketing steps in. No one plays hero ball. Everyone touches the rock.

It only works if every function operates at a high level and if you hire people who genuinely want to play within a system. Bryan's less interested in the LeBron types and more interested in players who move without the ball.

What we cover:

• Why learning to forget is the most underrated skill in sales leadership
• How losing a deal worth a third of the quarter's forecast became a point of pride
• The moment Bryan realized he was "living in a small pond" and what changed when he left
• Why Braintrust runs under capacity on purpose and lets product-market fit drive growth
• The motion offense: how Bryan's team circles opportunities like the Warriors pass the ball
• Why having a technical founder in a technical space is non-negotiable when choosing where to work

This conversation is for sales leaders who believe the best teams are built on resilience, selflessness, and knowing when to pass the ball.

Stephen Hamill grew up in South London in a neighborhood that was as diverse as it was tough.

He was an immigrant kid from Ireland in a school full of immigrant kids from all over the world. It wasn't the kind of place where people sat you down and mapped out your future. But somewhere in the middle of all that, in 1981, a device called the ZX81 showed up. It was a 1K computer you plugged into your television. And Stephen was obsessed.

He taught himself to code on a machine that demanded efficiency because there was literally no space to waste. That became the hobby. Sales became the career, because rumor had it you could control your own destiny rather than waiting 20 years to get your boss's job. And eventually, those two threads found each other.

Today, as Chief Revenue Officer at 8x8, Stephen runs a global sales organization from Singapore, covering a region where buying behavior, customer needs, and the ability to sell on value shift every time you cross a border. He's held leadership roles at Oracle, Adobe, and Genesys, and he's spent the better part of two decades operating across Asia Pacific, a geography he says people mistakenly treat as one market when it's really dozens.

In this episode, Stephen shares the operating philosophy behind how he builds revenue organizations that scale, and the growth framework he's used across every sales role he's ever held.

What we covered:

• What growing up in a working-class immigrant neighborhood taught him about clarity and drive
• The deal where he went from #14 out of 15 on a tender list to #1 by telling the customer their strategy was wrong
• His four guiding principles for running a sales org: hit the number, make your people successful, build for scale, and play a clean game
• The multiplicative growth framework: sell more things, to more people, more often, at a higher margin
• Why selling across APAC is the hardest and most rewarding challenge in global sales
• What the "zone of genius" concept means for sales teams in the AI era

This conversation is for leaders who believe the best results come from standing by what you know is right, even when it means going against what the customer asked for.

John Belle didn't grow up in the United States.

When he was young, his father took a job overseas in the Philippines, and John spent his formative years moving through international communities before heading to university in Japan. At first, he did what any kid would do in a new environment. He leaned hard into being American. He memorized NFL quarterbacks. He learned to play hockey, which, as he puts it, doesn't come in as handy as you'd think in Southeast Asia.

But over time, something shifted. He stopped performing where he came from and started absorbing where he was. He went to classmates' homes after school, ate their food, watched how families from Belarus, Sweden, and China all operated differently. And he began to realize there isn't one right way to do anything. There are dozens, and most of them work. That kind of mental flexibility, a genuine neuroplasticity, has shaped how he reads people, enters rooms, and leads organizations ever since.

The career inflection point came when John, after years closing a handful of massive enterprise deals each quarter as a field salesperson, was asked to run inside sales. He went from thinking about twelve deals a quarter to twelve hundred. From planning his route around a territory to figuring out how to make hundreds of people in offices across the country execute at the highest possible level. It was, by his own account, one of the greatest professional gifts he's ever received, because it forced him to stop thinking like a hero and start thinking at scale.

In this episode, John shares:

• The three dimensions that come together in a great CRO, and why most leaders over-index on one at the expense of the others

• Why organizations don't naturally develop the right behaviors, and why it takes a purposeful act of leadership to teach them

• The five-page document he hands every new leader called "Who I Want Us to Be"

• How JustWorks drove a 30% gain in sales efficiency

John Belle is one of those leaders who shows the merit of building a philosophy piece by piece over the course of a career. Not by reinventing the wheel, but by paying attention, putting it in your own words, and making sure it's authentic enough that your team actually believes in it.

Richard Petley wasn't supposed to end up in enterprise software.

He comes from a family of academics. Teachers, educational psychologists, people who built careers in classrooms and lecture halls. He was studying English literature at university, surrounded by classmates headed toward journalism, creative writing, and law.

But Richard had a secret.

The summer before university, he needed work. Through a chain of connections he hadn't planned, he landed in IBM's pre-university employment program, a gap year scheme that brought together a wildly diverse group of young people, most of whom would go on to do something completely different with their lives.

Richard was one of the 20% for whom it stuck.

He finished his gap year a day before starting his degree. He finished his degree and walked back into IBM the next day. No gap. No hesitation. He had found the thing that lit him up, and he wasn't going to let it cool off.

That clarity of direction carried him from IBM to Oracle to his current role as Chief Revenue Officer at Teradata, one of the foundational platforms powering the infrastructure behind today's AI revolution.

But what makes Richard compelling as a leader isn't just the trajectory. It's the operating philosophy underneath it.

Early in his career at IBM, Richard spent a year as an executive assistant to Larry Hearst, the country leader who went on to become chairman of IBM EMEA. The role wasn't glamorous. He wrote briefings, assembled presentations, and handled logistics. But he watched. He studied how Larry engaged with people, how he prepared for high-stakes moments, and how he carried himself when the pressure was on.

That experience taught Richard something he still operates by today: your career isn't shaped by a single breakthrough moment. It's shaped by a series of set piece moments that you identify, prepare for, and deliver on, one after another, over the course of years.

He also carries a leadership framework he picked up from a former military leader at Oracle, built on three pillars: integrity, organization, and success. People follow leaders they can trust, leaders who show up prepared, and leaders who win. All three matter. None of them work alone.

And when it comes to running a global sales organization, Richard believes in something deceptively simple: build a management system at the beginning of the year, define the KPIs and the scorecard, and then run it with total consistency. No surprises in forecast calls. No unfamiliar data. No distractions. Just a clean operating rhythm that lets people do their best work because they always know what's expected.

In this episode:

• How a gap year at IBM, taken completely by chance, set the course of Richard's entire career
• What spending a year as an executive assistant taught him about leadership at the highest level
• The three-pillar framework (integrity, organization, success) he's used for decades
• Why "no surprises" is the operating philosophy behind the best enterprise sales teams
• How to identify and prepare for the set piece moments that define your career trajectory
• Why authenticity isn't optional, and why everyone can spot a fraud from a mile off

Richard Petley is CRO of one of the most important data platforms in the world. This is a conversation about what it actually takes to lead at that level, and it starts with showing up the same way every single time.

Carl Borsody was watching a doctor work under pressure when something clicked.

The situation was tense. The stakes were real. And this doctor never flinched. Not because they didn't care, but because they understood something most people miss: the room was already filled with enough urgency. Adding more panic to it wouldn't help anyone. What the moment needed was someone steady enough to think clearly while everyone else was reacting.

Carl carried that lesson into his career in enterprise sales, and it became the foundation for how he leads. His heart might be racing. His brain might be running through a dozen scenarios at once. But his team never sees that, because they don't need more pressure injected into the system. They need a leader who absorbs the tension in the room instead of amplifying it.

That quiet intensity has carried Carl through more than two decades at Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks, where he led the U.S. Major and Strategic Accounts business. Today, as Chief Revenue Officer at Uniphore, he's rebuilding a GTM organization around a focused AI platform, and doing it with the same steadiness that's defined his entire career.

What makes Carl's perspective unusual is the path that got him here. After eight years in management, he made the rare decision to step back into an individual contributor role. Most people would see that as a step backward. Carl saw it as an accelerator. Those years in leadership had given him what he calls "cheat notes," a deep library of patterns around deal strategy, executive engagement, and objection handling that most sellers spend an entire career building one deal at a time. When he eventually moved back into leadership, he brought a seller's instincts with a leader's peripheral vision. It's a combination that's hard to find in a CRO.

Carl also shares his approach to procurement negotiations, where he disarms tension by simply naming it out loud, and explains why the best sellers never use product names or technical jargon in front of a business buyer. One CIO put it to his team bluntly: "I guarantee you're smarter than me. But if you want my business, talk to me like I'm in fifth grade."

What we cover:

• Why staying calm under pressure isn't passive, and why the best leaders never inject urgency into a room that already has enough
• The "cheat notes" advantage: how moving from leadership to IC and back gave Carl a pattern library most CROs never build
• His approach to procurement negotiations: name the dynamic, cut the posturing, and get to the real conversation
• Why Carl hires for deal-finding capability over industry expertise, nine times out of ten
• The language trap that kills executive conversations, and how to sell without ever saying a product name
• How Uniphore's pivot to a focused AI stack is reshaping what Carl looks for in his team and how he builds repeatable process

Carl Borsody is a leader who believes the best revenue organizations are built on steadiness, not volume. This conversation is for sales leaders who know that the loudest voice in the room is rarely the one people follow.

Kiva Kolstein was sitting across from his CEO on his very first day as Head of Sales.

He had spent the entire week before building a 30-slide deck. Business journal quotes. Leadership frameworks. Case studies from sports icons and Fortune 500 executives. Every slide was polished. Every slide was smart. Every slide was borrowed from someone else.

After the presentation, the room applauded. Then his CEO pulled him aside.

"Those were some great stories from some great leaders. But we didn't hire any of the leaders you quoted. We hired you. I want to know who you are."

It stung. But it was exactly right.

Kiva had spent his first day as a leader hiding behind borrowed conviction, trying to sound like a leader instead of being one. That single conversation reset everything. It taught him that people don't follow slides. They don't follow quotes. They follow belief.

Today, as President and Chief Revenue Officer at AlphaSense, a company he's helped scale from 50 people and $10M in ARR to over 2,000 employees and $500M in ARR, Kiva operates from a set of principles that are entirely his own.

He calls the framework Four Ps: Purpose, Power, Precision, and Presence. And in this episode, he walks through exactly how that operating system drives durable, scalable growth.

But the conversation goes much deeper than frameworks.

Kiva also shares what step-parenting taught him about intentional leadership.

Why he spent 18 months going back to making cold calls as the most junior person at a commercial real estate firm, and why he'd do it again.

And the Rocky 3 scene that perfectly captures what happens when a leader "gets civilized" and loses touch with the grind.

In this episode:

Why great leaders build environments and then trust people to deliver results

The Four Ps framework: how Purpose, Power, Precision, and Presence drive organizational scale

What step-parenting taught Kiva about hyper-intentional leadership

The "back to basics" chapter that regrounded him after years in leadership

Why precision is the most underinvested lever in most sales organizations

How AlphaSense has successfully integrated four acquisitions in four years, and what other CROs get wrong

Kiva Kolstein is one of the most thoughtful voices in enterprise revenue leadership. This one is worth your full attention.

John Allen was a freshman at BYU when he walked into an open tryout with 300 other hopefuls for a spot on the basketball team.

He wasn't recruited. He had no guarantee of playing time. He just knew he wanted to be there, and spent the first 60 to 90 days of his college career training like it was his only job. Sprints at the track. Shots in the field house. Early mornings before anyone else showed up.

When the final list went up on the Marriott Center door with one name on it, it was his.

Then he showed up to his first practice and realized his new teammates were bigger, stronger, and faster than him. He showed up the next day anyway. And the day after that. Five weeks in, something shifted. He belonged.

That same instinct, to just keep showing up even when you're not sure you belong, followed him to JP Morgan, where he spent his early career in the energy group in Houston. Then 2008 hit. Markets tanked, promotions lost their shine, and John found himself asking a question he hadn't expected: is this actually what I want?

He called his dad, who happened to be the CEO of G&A Partners, a growing professional employer organization. One honest conversation led to another, and John made the jump. He left one of the most recognized banks in the country for a family-owned business with 80 employees, enrolled in the University of Texas MBA program at the same time, and figured he'd reassess in a few years.

Seventeen years later, that bet has paid off in full: G&A Partners has grown to over 800 employees, and John sits in the Chief Revenue Officer seat.

In this episode, John talks about what it takes to build a culture where accountability is earned through consistency, how curiosity separates good salespeople from great ones, and why the leaders who outlast everyone else are usually just the ones who refused to stop showing up.

What we cover:

• Why showing up every day, even when you clearly don't belong yet, is still the most reliable path to earning your place
• What the 2008 financial crisis revealed about what John actually wanted from his career
• How John went from "special projects manager" to Chief Revenue Officer by selling his own deals on the side
• The six-year accountability framework G&A Partners uses to keep every level of the org aligned
• Why curiosity is the trait John looks for most in salespeople, and why it unlocks creativity that can't be taught
• What it means to be accessible as a sales leader (and why John's wife thinks he takes it too far)

John's take on what separates good sales leaders from great ones: "If you love something and you work really hard, there's a good chance you can achieve some pretty great things. And when someone tells you that you can't, that's the first sign that you're going to show them that you can."

This conversation is for sales leaders who know that the most reliable competitive advantage isn't a methodology or a tech stack. It's the decision to keep showing up, long after most people would have walked away.

Navid Zolfaghari didn't learn his most important sales lesson in a boardroom.

He learned it at a poker table in high school.

Not the bluffing. Not the bravado. The math, the psychology, and what happens when you pair them together and commit to playing the long game.

That early lesson became the operating system behind his entire career: if you make the right decisions consistently, variance sorts itself out. You will win long-term. And that same principle, what poker players call "plus EV" thinking, is how Navid manages deals, develops reps, and leads go-to-market organizations today as SVP of Sales and Success at Zapier.

The best leaders don't panic when a quarter goes sideways. They ask one question: are we doing the right things every day?

Navid's path ran through two startups he founded himself, then Google, Metronome, and Branch, each one sharpening his ability to connect the dots across an entire organization rather than just the revenue function. As a founder, he was the SDR, the AE, the product leader, and the people manager, often all in the same day. That altitude-shifting experience is what made him the kind of sales leader who doesn't just own a number. He owns the system.

In this episode, Navid shares the frameworks that have carried him throughout his career in sales leadership, including two he's held onto for decades.

What we cover:

• The poker principle and why "plus EV" thinking is the foundation of long-term sales leadership
• Why Navid stuck with his most expensive rep through two years of underperformance, and why it paid off with a near eight-figure deal in year three
• The startup vs. big company question and why it's harder to go from Google to a startup than the other way around
• Systems thinking as a leadership edge and why the best executives never stay exclusively in their lane
• The Rule of 2x, a framework from sales trainer Skip Miller that cuts timelines in half by changing how you schedule the next meeting
• "There is no tomorrow," the Rocky 3-inspired urgency philosophy Navid still brings to his team today

Navid's take on what separates good sales leaders from great ones: "If you do the right things, I will run through the variance with you. Long-term, we're going to win together."

This conversation is for sales leaders who understand that urgency and patience aren't opposites. Used together, they're the combination that compounds into outsized results.