Revenue Remix - Inspiring Visionary Leaders

Most B2B founders think stalled revenue means they need more pipeline. More leads. More salespeople. More budget. Janelle Amos has been inside enough demand gen engines to know that's almost never the real problem — and acting on that instinct is exactly how companies end up with 10X pipeline and zero closed revenue.

Janelle is a three-time in-house Head of Demand Gen turned founder of Elevate Growth, where she helps B2B SaaS companies in the $5M to $15M range build pipeline that actually converts without adding headcount. Her clients have seen close-loss ratios drop from 48% to 11% in a single quarter — not by adding leads, but by fixing the right problem.

This conversation is a continuation of one we started on her show, Her Path to Revenue. We scratched the surface there. Here we finish it.

We get into the client engagement where Janelle walked in, told the CEO she was cutting pipeline in half, and delivered 600% ROI on marketing spend. We talk about what demand gen actually looks like in 2026 vs. 2022, why the self-educating buyer has changed everything, and why Janelle calls great demand gen investigative journalism.

WHAT WE COVER:

— Why 10X pipeline with zero closed revenue is a systems problem not a marketing problem

— The engagement where Janelle slashed pipeline in half and delivered 600% ROI

— Why AI didn't change demand gen fundamentals — it just made it more expensive to ignore them

— ABM PTSD: what actually went wrong and why companies are still recovering

— Demand gen as investigative journalism — building pipeline for a buyer who doesn't want to talk to sales yet

— The fastest signal that tells Janelle the problem is with sales not marketing

— Why frontline operators know what's breaking before leadership does

— Why "that's just how Jimmy is" is not an acceptable answer from a CEO

— The volleyball setter and spiker analogy that reframes the entire marketing and sales relationship

CONNECT WITH JANELLE: LinkedIn Website

Summer on Her Path to Revenue

ABOUT:

Revenue Remix is hosted by Summer Poletti, founder of Rise of Us. Feedspot Top Revenue Podcast 2025. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, iHeart, and everywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe: @RevenueRemix on YouTube

Follow on LinkedIn

demand generation, B2B demand gen, B2B pipeline, pipeline strategy, pipeline conversion, revenue growth, GTM strategy, go to market strategy, B2B SaaS marketing, B2B SaaS growth, marketing ROI, sales and marketing alignment, revenue operations, RevOps, lead generation, lead conversion, close loss ratio, ICP, ideal customer profile, self-educating buyer, buyer journey, B2B content marketing, account based marketing, ABM, demand gen strategy, growth stage companies, messy middle, scaling revenue, founder led sales, marketing fundamentals, AI in marketing, marketing without headcount, B2B marketing 2026, women in B2B, women founders, fractional marketing, Elevate Growth, Janelle Amos, Revenue Remix, Summer Poletti, Rise of Us, Her Path to Revenue, pipeline ROI, marketing attribution, B2B SaaS, SaaS marketing, SaaS pipeline, SaaS revenue, startup marketing, scaleup marketing, demand gen engine, broken pipeline, fix pipeline, marketing systems, revenue systems, B2B podcast, revenue podcast, marketing podcast

What happens when a five-time private equity CRO and organizational communication PhD sits down to assess 158 AI tools built for sales?

You get the most grounded, no-hype breakdown of AI in revenue that we've had on this show.

JD Miller, CRO of the Year and author of The AI Handbook for Sales Professionals, joins host Summer Poletti for a conversation that goes well beyond what he's covering on the rest of his book launch tour. We skipped the standard AI overview and went straight to the hard questions founders and sales leaders are actually sitting with right now.

JD didn't set out to review 158 tools. He started by asking CROs what they were actually using and the list kept growing. What he found was a marketplace flooded with AI washing — tools slapping ".ai" on their name the same way companies added ".com" in the late nineties. He lived through that bubble. The parallel is uncomfortably familiar.

What separates this conversation from every other AI-in-sales episode right now: JD's PhD is in organizational communication. He studies how groups make decisions, negotiate politics, and build trust. That lens applied to revenue changes what questions you ask — and it's exactly why his book's subtitle is Reclaim Your Time and Expand Your Humanity. Not just efficiency. Humanity.

We dig into the Salesforce research showing salespeople spend 66 to 72 percent of their time on non-selling tasks. AI's biggest near-term revenue impact isn't AI BDRs or fully agentic outreach — it's giving salespeople their time back so they can do the thing only humans can do: build real trust with real buyers.

We also get into where AI goes badly wrong. Sloppy outbound at scale. Personalization that pulls the wrong field. A vegan burger company that sent JD 120 pounds of steak rub and five pounds of kimchi because their bot misread a rooftop grill page. These aren't edge cases — they're what happens when you skip governance and just push the button.

For founders at the $5M to $10M stage, JD lays out a practical maturity model and consistent advice: find the problem first, then find the tool. Summer also shares what she's been doing with clients that stopped JD mid-conversation — and why one founder cut his sales meeting time by a third.

If you're a founder, sales leader, or GTM operator trying to adopt AI without losing the human trust that actually closes deals — this is the episode.

What we cover: — The AI washing problem and what the dot-com bubble predicts about where this is heading — The 72% problem and what reclaiming that time does for revenue — Where AI creates real pipeline vs. where it destroys buyer trust — AI maturity model: where a scrappy $5–7M ARR founder should realistically start — AI governance, shadow AI, and why banning tools without alternatives creates your biggest data leak — Real AI sales fails including 120 pounds of steak rub and one confused vegan burger company — The custom GPT a founder built to clone himself and how it changed his sales motion — What a communication PhD understands about group decision-making that most sales leaders miss

Resources mentioned:

JD Miller's book: The AI Handbook for Sales Professionals AI Sales Fail competition: ai-sales-fail.com

Connect with JD Miller on LinkedIn

Getting cited by AI is cool. I still remember the first time Perplexity quoted me. It earned exactly $0.

This is the bonus episode nobody asked for but everyone running a B2B revenue team needs to hear.

We just wrapped a panel talking about what's working in 2026—AI citations, discovery, getting recommended by LLMs. All important. All necessary. But here's what nobody said out loud: citations don't convert. Discovery doesn't close deals. Recommendations don't onboard clients.

There's no revenue without a system to convert, land, onboard, and retain.

The real problem most scaling companies have:

They're not short on content. They're short on content that does a specific job at a specific stage for a specific buyer having a specific challenge and feeling a specific way about it.

It's a diagnostic problem before it's a production problem.

Here's what I do instead: Four conversations in this exact order.

1. Sales first. They hear the same objections over and over. They know why deals stall, why prospects ghost after great demos, and what helped close the big ones.

2. Customer success second. They know what happens after the yes. The features clients don't expect to love. The use cases that emerge from real adoption. The things product never imagined.

3. Onboarding third. They hold the fears buyers never voice out loud. The technical concerns they don't want to raise. When buyers can see exactly what implementation looks like before they sign, deals move faster.

4. Marketing last. On purpose. I don't come with a list of assets to produce. I come with a set of problems to solve.

What gets built:

• Objection-proofing content
• Nurture sequences mapped to the buyer journey
• Deal room assets
• Content with a specific job

Why AI recommendations still aren't enough:

Your buyer's main job isn't to buy your stuff. Your salesperson's main job is to sell it. The person who visits your website is your internal champion. A bot doesn't know what the finance leader is thinking. It can't send the right asset at the right moment to the right person. It can't arm the internal champion while they're fighting for budget. It can't revive a stalled deal.

Real client example:

Investor-backed SaaS company. Strong product. Demos landing well. Prospects impressed. Then radio silence.

Marketing kept generating leads. Sales kept booking demos. Pipeline kept filling. Revenue didn't move.

Before I recommended a single hire or new campaign, I had those four conversations. What I found:

• Buyers weren't saying no—they were saying "not yet"
• Customer success was sitting on proof prospects never saw
• Buyers were scared of implementation but wouldn't say it out loud
• People hadn't been contacted in 2+ years

We built a content strategy to solve all of it.

This isn't instead of discovery, citations, and AI recommendations. It's in addition.

Discovery gets you found. Revenue systems get you paid.

Citations are table stakes. Conversion is the game. Recommendations are wonderful—but they don't seal the deal, onboard the client, or retain them.

In this market, when everything's in flux, a little bit of something you can count on is all we need.

If this resonates, let's talk. Find me on LinkedIn or theriseofus.com.

Traditional inbound marketing isn't dead—but it's not working the way it used to.

If you're running the same demand gen playbook from 2018 and wondering why pipeline is down, this episode breaks down what's actually changed and what's working now.

I brought together three marketers tackling the same problem from different angles:

Sean Parnell (StoryBrand & Blue Ocean certified) makes the case that clear positioning and messaging still win—even in an AI-first world.

Dave Lee helps B2B companies get shortlisted when buyers ask their LLM for recommendations instead of Googling vendors.

Gaurav Verma is running a zero-budget experiment where three content marketers are beating six inbound SDRs on pipeline.

0What we cover:

• Why AI changed buyer behavior (and why that matters more than AI overviews stealing your traffic)
• The fatal flaw with gated content in 2025: if your best stuff is behind a form, AI can't find it—and neither can your buyers
• How to build topical authority when you don't have a content team or budget
• Why "voice of the customer" language matters more now than ever (hint: buyers talk to AI like humans, not like marketers)
• The content that actually drives pipeline: case studies, comparisons, guides that aren't gated, and content that answers buyer objections
• How to structure your website so AI can actually read it (spoiler: it doesn't index your site like Google—it reads it like a person)
• Why your biggest competitor isn't another vendor—it's buyers doing nothing
• The "cost of doing nothing" calculator that works better than ROI calculators
• Wikipedia pages, press releases, and whether "LLM poisoning" actually works (spoiler: don't do that)

Key takeaway: Inbound still works, but the volume is lower and the quality is higher. Buyers are coming in later in the journey, more informed, and ready to move faster. Your job is to make sure AI finds you when they ask "who's the best."

If you're a founder, CMO, or revenue leader trying to figure out what actually drives pipeline in 2025, this is the conversation you need to hear.

Featured Guests:

Sean Parnell – StoryBrand & Blue Ocean certified marketing strategist
Dave Lee – AI search optimization expert, former HubSpot agency owner
Gaurav Verma – Running zero-budget content experiments that beat traditional outbound

Mentioned in this episode:

• Otterly.ai (LLM search prompt monitoring)
• Bing Webmaster Tools (grounding queries for AI search)
• "They Ask You Answer" (book)
• BLUF framework (Bottom Line Up Front)
• G2, TrustPilot, Azure Marketplace (review platforms AI trusts)
• EIN Presswire (affordable press release distribution)

Want more insights on building predictable revenue without wasting money on strategies that don't fit your business?

Subscribe to Revenue Remix and follow Summer on LinkedIn for frameworks, hot takes, and the occasional spicy panel where marketers actually disagree.

Your B2B sales stack is bloated, outdated, and charging you $50K/year for capabilities built for 2019 playbooks. Meanwhile buyer behavior shifted, ChatGPT replaced Google, and your website became backend infrastructure for LLMs. Most growth-stage companies don't even know they have these problems yet.

These four GTM tool founders saw the gaps the big platforms aren't solving — and built something new.

What broke in your current stack: Your AI search visibility is broken — LLMs can't find you and you don't know it. Your CRM data decays the minute you upload it (ZoomInfo took 5 years to update one founder's job change). Your sales intelligence tool is analyzing transcripts while missing actual buying signals. Your sales enablement pages take weeks to spin up instead of minutes.

What actually works in 2026:

Steve Krull (Be Found Online / AIQ) — Why AI can't find you and how to fix your visibility in LLM search and conversational AI before your competitors do.

Toni Hopponen (LandingRabbit) — How to create brand-aligned sales enablement landing pages in minutes using voice notes and existing brand assets instead of copying outdated templates.

Saumya Bhatnagar (Involve.ai) — Why B2B data decays in real time, why ZoomInfo and legacy data tools can't keep up with 18-month job changes, and how AI agents fix data quality automatically.

Trent Ballard (SalesEQ) — Why Gong analyzes the wrong signals, what video and audio analysis reveals about buyer sentiment that transcript tools miss entirely, and why this changes your entire sales intelligence strategy.

The ecosystem reveal: These four tools stack together to create a modern GTM engine purpose-built for growth-stage B2B companies scaling from $5M to $20M ARR. Traditional enterprise software wasn't built for where you're going.

Who this is for: Founders, CROs, CMOs, and revenue leaders at growth-stage B2B SaaS, fintech, professional services, and consulting firms who are scaling past founder-led sales and need a GTM stack that doesn't slow them down.

Steve Krull
🔗 LinkedIn
🌐 Website

Toni Hopponen
🔗 LinkedIn
🌐 Website

Saumya Bhatnagar
🔗 LinkedIn
🌐 Website

Trent Ballard
🔗 LinkedIn
🌐 Website

If you're running GTM at a growth-stage company and something feels stuck—revenue plateaued, teams pointing fingers, tools not solving the actual problems—that's what Summer's diagnostic uncovers.

Linkedin

theriseofus.com

Your sales team says marketing's leads are garbage. Marketing says sales never uses what they build.

Meanwhile, everyone's working hard and nothing's landing.

Before you fix the KPIs or rebuild the org chart — have you considered that your D and your S just don't speak the same language?

In this bonus episode, Summer breaks down DISC — the communication and decision-making framework she brings to every client engagement — and explains why it's the missing piece in every alignment conversation she's been having lately on Revenue Remix.

This one connects directly to the alignment series. If you haven't listened yet, they're right below this bonus episode.

In this episode:

• What DISC actually is and why it matters for revenue teams
• Why sales and finance accidentally railroad each other (and nobody means to)
• How to spot communication styles in a room without a formal assessment
• The one thing Summer learned the hard way that changed how she works with clients

Your one stealable moment: When sales and marketing fight, it might not be a lead quality problem. It might be a D talking to an S with no translation layer between them.

→ Free assessments exist. Start there. If you need a coach to make sure your leadership team works through it — that's work Summer does inside her engagements. Start with a diagnostic here.

It's never just a sales problem. It's never just a marketing problem. It's a revenue architecture problem — and it starts with understanding how your people think.

Toxic Culture = Tanking Pipeline: What Finance & HR See That You Don't, Alignment Part 2.5

Your GTM strategy can be perfect on paper and still fail. Not because of your market. Not because of your product. Because of what's happening underneath — in the culture, in the budget conversations, and in the silence between your executive team.

This is Part 2.5 of the alignment series. If you missed Part 1, start there first, it's the episode right underneath this one.

Summer is joined again by Valerie Martin, financial operations expert who builds the systems that turn "we're aligned" into numbers you can actually see on your P&L, and Raven Page, change management consultant who works the people side — because culture is where your perfect alignment strategy goes to die.

In this episode:

• What a fear culture actually looks like (and why executives are usually the last to see it)
• Why budget conversations become territory battles instead of trade-off conversations
• What happens when visionary founders chase too many ideas — and who really pays for it
• Why change initiatives die after launch and what follow-through actually looks like
• What the individual contributor can do when leadership won't fix it

Connect with the guests:

• Raven Page
• Valerie Martin

If you're listening to this and recognizing your own organization — the infighting, the bloated pipeline, the teams that won't talk to each other — that's not a people problem. That's a revenue architecture problem, and it shows up in your numbers before most leaders are willing to admit it.

That's exactly what Summer's diagnostic uncovers. Not a generic deck. A custom diagnosis of why revenue is stuck and what leadership needs to own to fix it.

→ Curious if this is your problem? DM Summer on LinkedIn or visit theriseofus.com

Subscribe so you don't miss the insider "Too Spicy for Public" clip — your sales team is lying about pipeline, and it's not their fault.

What happens when your executives swear everything is aligned — but everyone else knows it’s not?

This is Part 2 of the Revenue Remix alignment series. In Part 1, we tackled go-to-market alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success — and pushed the conversation into back-office alignment with finance, HR, and service delivery. But when I was editing, I realized we hadn’t gone deep enough on what lives underneath alignment: the culture and the numbers that either make it real or expose it as theater.

So I brought back two people who see this mess up close.

Valerie Martin is a COO who builds the operational systems that turn “we’re totally aligned” into numbers you can actually track on a P&L.

Raven Page is a Change Management Consultant who deals with the people side — because culture is where your perfectly designed alignment strategy goes to die.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Where to actually look when leadership claims everything is fine (hint: first-line managers and people business partners)
• How the forecast call doubles as a diagnostic — and what it reveals about whether your org is truly aligned or just performing alignment
• Why sales and finance don’t speak the same language about pipeline — and the cost of that disconnect
• Why the biggest financial cost of misalignment isn’t missed targets — it’s trust
• How fear-based cultures kill accountability, and what that costs you in attrition and execution speed
• The difference between transparency that builds trust and transparency that causes chaos

Part 3 is already scheduled. There was too much to cover.

If you’ve been watching revenue plateau and can’t figure out if the problem is strategy, systems, or something else entirely — this is the episode for you.

Part 1: Your Revenue Plateau Isn’t Pipeline — It’s Misalignment Inside Your Go-To-Market Team

Connect with Valerie Martin on LinkedIn

Connect with Raven Page on LinkedIn

Summer Poletti is a Fractional CRO and the founder of Rise of Us. She works with growth-stage B2B SaaS and fintech companies ($2M–$30M ARR) whose revenue has stalled. Learn more at theriseofus.com.

Hiring the “right” salesperson is hard enough. Watching them flail through a vague onboarding, burn 3–6 months, and then wondering if you made a bad hire? That’s brutal.

In this solo episode of Revenue Remix, Summer breaks down why most sales onboarding quietly fails—and what to put in place instead so your next rep ramps faster, feels supported, and actually contributes to pipeline (without magical thinking about a 30-day close in a 6-month sales cycle).

You’ll hear:

• Why your anxiety about sales hiring is valid
  And why “they’re not closing yet, must be the wrong rep” is often an onboarding problem, not just a hiring problem.
• The hidden ways traditional onboarding sets reps up to fail
  • Company-centric training instead of customer-centric
  • Data dumps with no real-world practice
  • No clear ICP, messaging, or competitive positioning
  • Onboarding that stops after week one while the real selling hasn’t even started
• A practical, structured ramp-up plan (beyond ‘hit quota by month 3’)
  How to build realistic 30/60/90 (and beyond) milestones that reflect your actual B2B sales cycle—so you’re not expecting deals before it’s mathematically possible.
• Mentoring, shadowing & cross-training that actually help
  Why pairing new reps with top performers, letting them see good (and bad) calls, and having them shadow CS/implementation/marketing shortens the “WTF is going on here?” phase.
• How to use metrics without turning into a spreadsheet tyrant
  The small, activity-based success signals (meetings booked, pipeline built, deal stages hit) that tell you early if someone’s on track—long before full quota kicks in.
• Ongoing coaching vs. one-and-done training week
  What weekly deal reviews, 1:1s, and continuous learning should look like in the first 90–180 days so your rep isn’t quietly drowning while you assume they’re fine.
• Equipping reps with real sales enablement—not just a login
  How to align sales and marketing so your new hire knows what content exists, when to use it, and how to provide feedback when prospects consistently ask for something that doesn’t exist (yet).
• Teaching new reps to tap referrals & partners (beyond “use your network”)
  Simple, repeatable ways to build referral habits and partner motions into onboarding so they’re not relying on cold outbound alone.

If you’ve ever:

• Let go of a rep at 90 days and later wondered if they ever had a real shot
• Felt nervous hiring sales because the last one “didn’t work out”
• Or suspected your onboarding might just be “HR paperwork + product firehose”

…this episode will give you a clear, grounded blueprint for fixing it.

📌 Need help pressure-testing your current onboarding?
Check out Rise of Us to learn more.

If you’re still quietly running the 2021 GTM playbook, you’re probably already feeling it: inbound isn’t hitting like it used to, cold outbound is mostly noise, and AI-made content is flooding every channel.

In this “zombie tactics” panel, Summer sits down with fractional CMO Rachel Johnson and independent marketing consultant David Lee to ask a simple question:

If modern playbooks are stalling, which old-school moves are actually worth bringing back from the dead?

Together, they dig into why the 2021 demand gen machine is breaking down—and which “zombie” tactics still work in an AI-driven, low-trust world.

• Why the 2021 playbook is dead (or at least undead)
  How AI, bot traffic, ad fatigue, and search changes have quietly kneecapped classic inbound, content treadmills, and Apollo-style cold outbound.
• The end of churn-and-burn content
  Rachel breaks down why high-volume “just ship it” content stopped moving pipeline—especially for companies going upmarket—and what she funds instead.
• “Stop blogging” (kinda): what Dave actually means
  Dave explains why blogging for traffic is a losing game now, and how to repurpose thought leadership in ways that still get you discovered and recommended by AI tools and buyers.
• Zombie tactic #1: in-person networking & relationship selling
  Why relying on “lead gen” alone is a trap for smaller companies, and how to treat coffee chats, local events, and real-life networking as a core GTM channel again—not a nice-to-have.
• Zombie tactic #2: smart, ABM-style direct mail
  Rachel walks through modern direct mail that actually works:
  • Why you don’t blast 5,000 cheap trinkets
  • How to use small, high-intent account lists instead of spray-and-pray
  • Where in the funnel direct mail performs best (hint: not top-of-funnel)
  • How to pair it with SDR cadences, landing pages, and nurture—not random acts of gifting
• Zombie tactic #3: modern PR as narrative control (not vanity logos)
  How to think about PR as a way to shape the story in your category, build trust signals AI and buyers can see, and become a go-to source for journalists instead of begging for “features.”
• Why none of this works if sales and marketing are still operating on separate goals, separate metrics, and separate realities—and how these “zombie” tactics naturally force tighter alignment.

• You lead sales, marketing, revenue, or GTM and know your old demand gen channels are slowing down
• You’re tired of vanity metrics and want activity that ties directly to revenue and real opportunities
• You suspect “just do more content / more emails / more ads” is not the answer anymore
• You’re curious how to blend AI-era tactics with pre-2010 moves in a way that feels modern, not cringey

Guests

• Rachel Johnson – Fractional CMO helping early-stage companies go from no revenue to revenue with sharp, buyer-centric GTM.
• David Lee – Independent marketing consultant and former HubSpot agency owner who now helps teams adapt to the AI-driven buyer.

You’ll walk away with concrete ideas you can test immediately—and a permission slip to finally kill a few tactics that should’ve stayed buried.