S2E6: Why the Best Sales Leaders Shake the Nest -- Lessons from Braze's Ed McDonnell

S2E6: Why the Best Sales Leaders Shake the Nest -- Lessons from Braze's Ed McDonnell

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.

S2E5: Why the Best Sales Leaders Know Hard Things Take Time -- Lessons from GoTo's Peter Mahoney

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

S2E4: Why the Best Sales Leaders Learn How to Forget -- Lessons from Braintrust's Bryan Cox

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.

S2E3: Why the Best Sales Leaders Can Tell Customers When They're Wrong -- Lessons from 8x8's Stephen Hamill

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.

S2E2: Why the Best Sales Leaders Know Exactly Who They Want to Be -- Lessons from JustWorks' John Belle

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.