In this episode, Andy Mowat speaks with Paul Staelin, Fractional CCO at CornerstoneX and former CCO at Vercel, Trifacta, and Birst, about building customer success organizations that drove 40-point NDR improvements. Drawing from his Siebel Systems training and two decades scaling post-sales functions, Paul shares why CS teams fail without three distinct DNA profiles, his "time machine" question that exposes growth mindset, and how mental flexibility matters more than age when evaluating executives.

Topics discussed:

• Why every customer touchpoint must deliver tangible value through discovery questions, teaching moments, or solution guidance rather than conversations about kids and dogs, treating customer experience as a scalable product where each step must justify its existence.

• The customer advisory board scarcity exercise: give customers exactly 5 votes to distribute across a six-month roadmap in any combination, forcing authentic prioritization beyond reactive fire drills while making customers co-owners of tradeoff decisions.

• Why high-performing CS organizations require three DNA profiles like chili ingredients: implementation veterans with project structuring instincts, sales-trained professionals comfortable with "golden silence" instead of filling awkward pauses, and former customers who provide authentic empathy for buyer challenges.

• How professional services implementations at Birst drove 40 percentage points higher NDR, and why "forward deployed engineering" is brilliant PS rebranding that risks creating unsustainable 3,000-person field organizations without deliberate customer ownership transfer strategies.

• The "time machine" question that reveals growth mindset: "if I gave you the grace of a time machine and you could go back and do this project again, what would you do differently?" separates introspective leaders from those who don't examine their approach.

• Why ageism concerns miss the real criterion of mental flexibility: will executives be guided by experience or led by it? When Paul was 35-year-old co-founder at Birst, he needed assurance executives wouldn't just "run a play" regardless of unique company context.

• Vercel's AI support training discipline under Matthew Sweeney: 30 support team members grading 5 AI responses weekly drove resolution rates from 30% to 70% over nine months, freeing engineers from repetitive tickets to focus on complex technical investigations.

• The executive onboarding principle that jamming managers in over team objections never works, requiring team excitement about candidates and designing roles with enough "real estate" so executives aren't crippled by dependencies on other functions.

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Frida Ahrenby, three-time CMO at companies including Rillion, GetAccept, and Bambora, who built her foundation in sales before transitioning to marketing leadership. Frida reveals why the economics of scaleup marketing have fundamentally shifted in the past five years, forcing a move from 30-40 person departments to expert-driven teams of domain specialists. Her tactical approach to network cultivation and hiring for psychological safety offers a blueprint for building lean, high-performing marketing organizations in the AI era.

Topics discussed:

→ Why marketing teams have compressed from 30-40 people to lean structures of domain experts, driven first by the end of growth-at-all-costs economics, then accelerated by AI. This enables teams to make decisions together in one room without silos or production-line bottlenecks.

→ The give-and-take system for building trusted recruiter relationships: they bring Frida candidates for feedback on their searches, she sends them strong candidates she can't hire, creating mutual value that makes sourcing effortless when she needs to fill a role (without paying fees).

→ How Frida built a LinkedIn network that makes hiring feel "easy" by consistently sharing business failures and transparent personal stories. She emphasizes "it hasn't come for free" and requires ongoing investment in giving mentorship and honest content to nurture connections.

→ The three-part "bad day" question that catches senior candidates off guard: "What are you like when you're having a bad day? How would I notice that you're having a bad day? How would you like me to support you through that day?" This surfaces self-awareness while signaling that psychological safety exists even at C-level.

→ Why Frida provides psychological safety at the C-level despite market expectations that executives should handle bad days independently. Honest acknowledgment of being "a three or a two" on difficult days rather than demanding everyone be "a ten" creates healthier cultures.

→ How to evaluate whether marketers understand growth by listening for specific questions during interviews: Do they ask about sales objections, pipeline coverage ratios, and revenue targets? Or do they focus on MQLs and brand impressions? This reveals whether they grasp that sales and marketing share the same purpose: to grow the company.

→ The peer team exchange tactic: organizing bimonthly meetings where her entire marketing team and a peer CMO's team alternated presenting deep-dive playbooks on ABM, rebranding, and other functional areas, building cross-company relationships while accelerating learning.

→ How to proactively source candidates by identifying companies on parallel journeys. Since Rillion is betting on US expansion, Frida researches marketing teams at other companies making similar bets, then reaches out to people she doesn't yet know rather than waiting for posted roles.

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Brian Frank, Partner at Permanent Capital and former COO at Cameo, about his battle-tested approach to recruiting built over 10 years leading RevOps at LinkedIn. Brian reveals why most hiring managers fail by outsourcing critical recruiting decisions, and shares the systematic frameworks he's developed to identify, assess, and close exceptional GTM talent. His insights challenge conventional wisdom on referrals, candidate evaluation, and what separates recruiting as a transactional process from recruiting as a competitive advantage.

Topics discussed:

• The Jeff Weiner referral calibration standard: why Brian only accepts referrals from people who share his talent bar and would "hire the person themselves," eliminating the waste of vague "who do you know?" intros from "engineering's cousin's ex-wife" in favor of strategic sourcing where the referrer has conviction you'd be "a fool not to hire" this person.

• Why "there's never an excuse" for hiring managers to outsource recruiting: if you're not involved in planning, intake, sourcing, AND closing (not just interviews), "you're not doing your job" as a leader, regardless of recruiter quality or seniority of the role.

• The startup readiness interrogation for big company talent: ask directly "What's your plan given there's no enablement, RevOps, analytics, or sales systems?" then probe for examples of where they've actually done something scrappy before, because there's a "big difference between thinking and being good at speaking and answers versus actually doing."

• The two hiring archetypes and when to deploy each: "experienced, been doing it a long time" leaders versus "up and comer future stars," where Satya Nadella with 20 direct reports can't mentor and needs proven executives, while Series A companies often need "young and hungry" builders who want their biggest job ever.

• Why internal career progression signals more than titles: candidates who climbed from SD to Director within one company demonstrate perseverance and proven performance, while serial job hoppers who move companies every 18 months for title bumps are just "shopping their career" through self-promotion with no proof they can actually execute.

• The pre-outreach back-channel strategy: research candidates at their FORMER companies (never current to avoid creating issues) BEFORE initial contact to gather unbiased intel from people with "no incentive either way," learning if they were "exceptional" or "a monster" while giving candidates plausible deniability since they're not yet in process.

• Why great people "only have one speed" and can't shut it off even on weekends: this characteristic matters more than experience level or pedigree, and reveals itself through sustained performance and progression rather than episodic achievements.

• The candidate binding close technique: explicitly tell finalists "I want to take a chance on you, I believe in you" while immediately setting expectations with "my expectations are ridiculously high, I expect you to do your absolute best possible work that you've ever done in your life in this job," creating mutual commitment that earns you the right to push hard from day one.

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Josh Hanewinkel speaks with Whitney Littman, Vice President of Customer Success at ZoomInfo, about building high-velocity hiring systems for customer success organizations in AI-native GTM environments. Drawing from seven years scaling CX at DocuSign and her current role leading post-sales strategy at ZoomInfo, Whitney shares her framework for maintaining evergreen talent pipelines, her three-part candidate presentation evaluation system, and why unqualified work-life balance questions from senior candidates signal prioritization deficits. Her approach reveals how to maintain hiring velocity without compromising quality standards.

Topics discussed:

• How evergreen requisitions close the sourcing-to-seat gap for high-velocity IC roles by arming TA teams with precise filtering criteria: data expertise level, industry type experience, and market segment fluency. When hundreds of applications flood in, recruiters can disqualify quickly because they know exactly what matters.

• The three-part presentation framework that separates strategic thinkers from performers: running cycles with hiring managers to clarify prompts and validate data interpretation, taking defensible positions on incomplete information, and simplifying complex analysis without toggling between multiple spreadsheets.

• Why case studies are mutual evaluation tools: Whitney's leader invested 90+ minutes walking her through ZoomInfo's data model before her final presentation, revealing the company's commitment and her willingness to seek clarification rather than guess.

• The "two coffees per week" networking discipline for maintaining executive relationship capital with no agenda beyond understanding people on a personal level rather than transactional business reviews.

• Why Whitney's best hire wasn't the strongest individual performer but the talent magnet who attracted people she thought they had no business hiring and built multiple CS teams from scratch.

• The controversial read on unqualified work-life balance questions from director-plus candidates: if you can't qualify why you're asking, it signals an inability to self-manage competing demands. For senior leaders, it suggests you expect someone else to structure your day.

• Hiring from your customer ecosystem: navigating cease-and-desist risk while leveraging champions who understand your product and creating reciprocal talent intelligence when customers request referrals.

• Assessing AI fluency indirectly by asking about scalability challenges, then observing whether candidates default to legacy automation or proactively discuss AI-enabled approaches.

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Josh Hanewinkel is a startup builder and operator who thrives at the intersection of strategy, operations, and talent. As a two-time unicorn executive and advisor/GM at Whispered, Josh has spent his career helping fast-growing startups scale by building high-performing teams, creating customer-centric cultures, and leading through ambiguity. He’s held Chief Customer Officer and VP roles at companies including DataGrail, People.ai, and Mixpanel, where he’s rebuilt and scaled teams across customer success, talent acquisition, and revenue operations. From leading customer success teams to 150%+ NRR to transforming recruiting functions into high-velocity talent engines, Josh has seen firsthand how the right people in the right roles can change the trajectory of a business.

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Josh Hanewinkel speaks with Sanjay Kini, Chief Customer Strategy Officer at 6sense, about scaling a customer organization from 5 to 300+ people during 6sense's growth from $5M to $200M in revenue. Sanjay's approach challenges conventional hiring wisdom at every turn, from giving hiring managers final authority even when other interviewers disagree, to deliberately spending more time vetting "will" than "skill" because he believes drive and curiosity matter more than current capabilities. The results speak for themselves: 40 of his 58 managers were promoted from within, creating a self-sustaining leadership pipeline that freed him to focus on strategic transformation rather than constant external recruiting.

Topics discussed:

• The "Who" framework for defining exact organizational structure and role attributes before considering candidates, eliminating the chaos of building org charts around available talent.
• Why assessing "will" (curiosity, work ethic, ability to figure things out) deserves more interview time than validating "skill," since capability gaps close quickly when drive is present.
• The deliberate over-hiring strategy for senior leaders before immediate need, allowing them to build teams proactively as growth arrives rather than scrambling to backfill during hypergrowth phases.
• Giving hiring managers final decision authority instead of defaulting to consensus voting, creating clear accountability since they'll be judged on results regardless of committee opinions.
• Why sales leaders require the most rigorous vetting process because they excel at interviews and know exactly what you want to hear, making data-driven validation essential.
• Avoiding public job postings for VP+ roles to eliminate the 1,000-1,500 application flood of unqualified candidates, relying instead on board networks and systematic back-channeling for vetted referrals.
• The counterintuitive reference check approach: using candidate-provided contacts not to make hiring decisions, but to extract onboarding intelligence about strengths, weaknesses, and optimal working conditions after you've already committed.
• How promoting 40 of 58 managers internally (37 of them women) created a leadership bench that could scale customer success operations without external dependency.

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Josh Hanewinkel is a startup builder and operator who thrives at the intersection of strategy, operations, and talent. As a two-time unicorn executive and advisor/GM at Whispered, Josh has spent his career helping fast-growing startups scale by building high-performing teams, creating customer-centric cultures, and leading through ambiguity. He’s held Chief Customer Officer and VP roles at companies including DataGrail, People.ai, and Mixpanel, where he’s rebuilt and scaled teams across customer success, talent acquisition, and revenue operations. From leading customer success teams to 150%+ NRR to transforming recruiting functions into high-velocity talent engines, Josh has seen firsthand how the right people in the right roles can change the trajectory of a business.

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Over 13 years at Gainsight, Nick Mehta cycled through more CMOs than any other executive role. Not because the marketers weren't talented, but because he failed to define what was actually achievable before hiring them. That realization reshaped how he approaches executive hiring.

Nick breaks down the self-awareness framework that filters executive candidates, why he back-channels before meeting people, and how Gainsight's culture was designed to repel money-focused candidates who'd never thrive there. His tactical approach reveals the mistakes CEOs make when defining roles, the specific question sequence that surfaces how candidates handle detractors, and why executives who don't generate "wow" reactions from their teams within the first week rarely succeed.

From Mike Mannheimer drawing a circle proving they'd saturated their addressable market (which Nick ignored, leading to more failed CMO hires) to Chuck Ganapathi leading deep AI strategy discussions by day two of his first week, Nick shares the hard-won patterns from building leadership teams through hypergrowth and a Vista Private Equity acquisition. His frameworks include the three-round vulnerability exercise that transforms team alignment, the "org chart without names" forcing function, and the 25-company targeted networking protocol that actually generates opportunities.

Topics discussed:

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search 

Building a 57,000+ LinkedIn following eliminated Kristi Faltorusso's recruiter dependency. One post now generates hundreds of qualified CS applicants while her network delivers pre-vetted referrals through direct outreach. But the deeper insight is how she completely rewired her hiring methodology after repeatedly failing to replicate playbooks across companies. Customer success roles are never portable. What worked at Series A fails at Series C. Leaders who scaled at Salesforce often can't operate in startups. She now evaluates candidates against 24-36 month company trajectories, filtering for grittiness before considering experience or quota achievement.

Her interview process rejects stage gates and prescribed frameworks. She asks candidates to recall times they were "in over their head" and requests "a failure you're really proud of," separating those who own mistakes from those who point fingers. Before any offer, she dedicates a full session where candidates ask her anything. Their questions expose business acumen, reveal what broke at previous companies, and eliminate the assumption gaps that derail new hires within weeks. Post-hire, she meets daily with direct reports for the first 14 days, not for status updates, but to build trust and surface friction before it calcifies.

Topics discussed:

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Ghazi Masood, CRO at Replit, about building GTM organizations in product-led growth environments. With experience scaling Auth0 through hypergrowth and acquisition, plus leading revenue at Retool, Ghazi breaks down how PLG hiring differs by role, why he rarely posts senior positions, and the back-channel timing that saves months of wasted interviews. His frameworks reveal how to spot enterprise readiness in a PLG funnel and the specific red flag that predicts sales leader failure.

Topics discussed:

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Jessica Chiew, Head of GTM Strategy & Operations at Canva, about her rigorous approach to hiring builders in product-led growth environments. Drawing from her experience scaling GTM operations at Asana and Canva, Jessica shares tactical frameworks for testing whether candidates can truly execute versus simply tell polished stories, structuring ops teams that span product and enterprise motions, and designing onboarding that delivers impact in the first 90 days. Her insights reveal how calculated vulnerability and continuous team evolution drive both individual performance and organizational velocity.

Topics discussed:

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Heather Doshay, Founder of Waypoint Works and former VP of People at Webflow and Head of Talent at SignalFire, about identifying and developing high-slope talent. Heather introduces her PEAKS framework for spotting individuals whose growth rate matches or exceeds company trajectory, and challenges conventional hiring wisdom on everything from why charisma can be a trap to how pairing up-and-comers with advisors often outperforms hiring proven executives.

Topics discussed:

ABOUT YOUR HOST: 

Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. 

Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com

Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search