The Sourcing Room

A cold email turned into one of Walden M&A’s larger closed transactions—but that was only the beginning. Maria sits down with CEO John S. Phillips to unpack what buyers are seeing in manufacturing, why PE remains central to lower-middle-market liquidity, and how owners can build businesses that are ready to sell before the right opportunity arrives.

In this episode of The Sourcing Room, Manoo Wali sits down with Murtaza Abbas, founder of Alif, a fractional leadership and go-to-market advisory for PE portfolio companies.

Drawing on 15 years at Oracle, including a decade helping integrate acquired companies, plus sales leadership experience at a Vista-backed company, Murtaza shares how private equity firms can create a common way to assess and improve go-to-market performance across decentralized portfolio companies.

They break down why GTM is more than sales or marketing: it includes creating demand, converting it to revenue, onboarding and retaining customers, and aligning the organization around those outcomes. Murtaza walks through his PE-focused GTM operating system, built around four workstreams—demand creation, revenue conversion, customer delivery, and organizational alignment—and three stages of maturity: visibility, scalable structure, and efficient growth.

The conversation also covers how to standardize GTM without forcing every portfolio company into the same model; how to evaluate AI readiness through data hygiene, process discipline, systems integration, and human oversight; and why the way a value-creation initiative is positioned can determine whether teams engage or resist.

For private equity operators, portfolio company leaders, and M&A professionals, this episode offers a practical look at the post-close work that turns an investment thesis into measurable value creation.

Manoo and Sheri take a closer look at Exxcelerate’s buy-side work with private equity firms, family offices, independent sponsors, and strategic acquirers. They break down how targeted mandates become qualified owner conversations: from defining a buyer’s strike zone and conducting direct outreach to screening for EBITDA, recurring revenue, industry fit, seller motivation, and cultural alignment. They also discuss why Exxcelerate is not replacing sell-side advisors: the team supports early-stage sourcing and matchmaking so buyers can focus on LOIs, diligence, and execution. For sellers, the conversation offers a practical reminder to be honest about financials, expectations, non-negotiables, and the legacy they want to protect before entering an M&A process. Target identification, outreach, and early fit-screening are core elements of buy-side M&A work

Manoo sits down with Christa Tuttle, former founder and CEO of Launch Marketing and now CEO of JOIFEL, to unpack what it really takes to scale and exit a services‑based business. Drawing on 23 years building and selling a B2B marketing agency, Christa shares how she used frameworks like EOS to move from founder‑led chaos to an operationally sound, scalable firm—and why clean financials, strong client contracts, recurring revenue, and reduced founder dependency are non‑negotiable for a successful M&A outcome. They dive into the realities of services businesses in an M&A context: building a team and culture that can run without the founder, designing client relationships and communication rhythms that support both retention and enterprise value, choosing the right successor with true culture and core values alignment, and planning the founder’s “what’s next” so the exit becomes a smooth transition rather than an identity shock.

In this episode of The Sourcing Room, Manoo sits down with Maria and Sheri to break down what’s actually working in direct email campaigns for M&A deal sourcing today.

They unpack why email health and deliverability are now your most important assets, how to think about high-quality data instead of regurgitated lists, and what real relevance looks like in a world of AI-generated spam.

The team walks through their layered approach—deliverability, data, messaging, and appointment setting—and explains how they’re using channels like texting for blue-collar sectors while preserving brand and sender reputation.

If you’re running outbound to source off-market deals, this episode gives you a clear operating system for sustainable, high-conversion campaigns.

In this first episode of The Sourcing Room by Exxcelerate, we give you a real, unfiltered look inside our world of boutique M&A deal sourcing. We talk about why we walked away from one chapter to build Exxcelerate, what it actually means to be a M&A sourcing partner, and how we think about finding quality deals in a noisy market.

We get into big questions like “Is cold email dead?” and how deal teams can use AI in M&A without losing the human touch. We also break down why everyone started saying cold email was dead in the first place, how outreach has evolved, and what still works when you are trying to source off‑market deals today.

And yes, we tell all the horror stories of trying to run a deal pipeline out of Excel as a CRM, and why a modern M&A tech stack matters if you care about follow‑through, data, and closed deals. If you are in private equity, corporate development, a family office, or just obsessed with how deals really get sourced, this episode is your starting point.