How to scale a martech sales function w/ Tod Klubnik

How to scale a martech sales function w/ Tod Klubnik

We speak to Tod Klubnik, about how martech and ecommerce businesses can scale their sales teams at pace. Some of the key questions covered, included:  * What are the mistakes to avoid when hiring a large number of sales professionals early in your business’s journey? (2:00) * Who should own go to market - sales or marketing? (6:00) * And how do martech providers progress from serving SMBs to the enterprise market? (15:00)  About our guest Tod Klubnik has 25 years of software and SaaS sales & marketing experience, and has led the sales team in businesses such as BigCommerce and MessageOne.  He now provides board, advisory and part-time consulting services to early and mid-stage companies.  About The Martalks Podcast The Martalks Podcast features insight and comment from thought leaders in Martech and ecommerce sales. It is hosted by Darrell Rosenstein, the founder and managing partner of The Rosenstein Group.  About The Rosenstein Group The Rosenstein Group is your recruiting agency and executive search firm for matching critical revenue talent with innovative technology vendors in the e-commerce, martech and supply chain space. www.rosensteingroup.com [http://www.rosensteingroup.com]  https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosenstein-group [https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosenstein-group]  Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com [https://bit.ly/3QNVgg8] to find out more.

Technology Attorney George Brunt on AI IP Ownership, Embedded Legal Counsel, and the Legal Mistakes MarTech Founders Keep Making

Most founders know they need a lawyer. Almost none of them know they need one before the problem shows up. George Brunt wrote the first shrink-wrap software license in history. Managed 23,000 patents at Alcatel. Raised $83 million. He's been in the rooms most founders will never get near — and the pattern he keeps seeing is the same one. The CEO who waits until there's a contract dispute, a misclassification lawsuit, or a deceptive AI claims inquiry from the FTC is paying three times the price of prevention. And in a funding environment where VCs are doing legal health checks before they write the check, what's in your legal drawer has direct valuation consequences. George and I went deep on the questions most founders aren't being asked: Who actually owns the IP when your developer used AI to write the code? That question is not resolved. Not in case law, not in the patent office, not anywhere. What does a $330,000 annual savings look like when you swap outside counsel for an embedded legal team? He breaks down the math. And what are the five questions a VC should be asking every Series A and B founder in a legal health check that most of them aren't asking? If your legal strategy is "we'll deal with it when we need to" — this one's for you. Full episode link in the first comment. Tag a founder who needs to hear this. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com [https://bit.ly/3QNVgg8] to find out more.

She Cracked the Code on Why You Buy That Military Jacket. Online Retail Has No Idea Why Either.

Welcome back to MarTalks. This week Darrell sits down with Anabel Maldonado — CEO of PSYKHE AI, ShopTalk startup competition winner, former luxury product copywriter, and the person who has been screaming into the void that e-commerce has been solving the wrong problem for a decade. Here's the stat that should make every retailer put down their coffee: online conversion rates are still hovering around 1.5%. Billions of dollars. Endless A/B tests. Recommendation engines with Stanford pedigrees. And still — the vast majority of products a shopper would actually love never appear in front of them. Not once. Why? Because nobody put product intelligence in the stack. Nobody asked why you bought that military jacket. Not because it has Bellows pockets. Because it makes you feel gritty. It offsets the softness of the rest of your outfit. It aligns with your contrarian streak. You weren't conscious of it. And no algorithm ever tried to figure it out either. Anabel built Psyche to fix exactly that using 700+ psychographic dimensions to match products to people at a level that goes way beyond "you bought blue things, here are more blue things." The results? A 22% lift in conversion for mono brands. A $16 million revenue unlock without a single new SKU, dollar of ad spend, or new customer. Just showing people the right stuff. In this episode: why "personalization" is actually just optimization in a fancy hat, why grocery is the most underrated category for psychographic commerce, why agentic shopping is a discovery problem the entire industry forgot to prepare for, and what a $100M retailer should do in the next 90 days before they become invisible to the agents doing everyone's shopping. Also: the Jay Peterman reference lands perfectly. Obviously. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com [https://bit.ly/3QNVgg8] to find out more.

He Dropped Out at 15, Made $15K Flipping Pokémon Cards at 13, and Is Now Teaching AI Agents to Stalk the Entire Internet. Legally.

This week on MarTalks, Darrell sits down with Michael FanouS the co-founder of Nyne.ai, VC scout, part-time sleep deprivation case study, and quite possibly the only person whose career trajectory starts at a coin convention at age six, detours through Jake Paul's car channel, and lands squarely in the middle of Silicon Valley's AI arms race. Michael is 20-something, running on two hours of sleep, building a startup that deploys AI agents across hundreds of millions of websites to collect data points on... well, you, basically. Your posts, your forums, your niche subreddits where you complain about being a nurse in Texas. Nine knows. Nine always knows. In this episode: why LinkedIn is wildly overrated as a data source, why ChatGPT is the new MySpace, why Google's secret weapon is a chip you've never heard of, and why the best startup advice Michael ever gave was to a high schooler about a helicopter with five propellers. He also somehow finds time to scout for VC firms. The man does not sleep. We have receipts. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com [https://bit.ly/3QNVgg8] to find out more.

Dot-Com Crashes, Gold Coins & the Art of Not Panicking: Rich Lyons Has Seen It All

What do you get when you mix two dot-com survivors, a generator that still runs, and enough saltines to outlast the apocalypse? This episode of MarTalks. Rich Lyons rode the dinosaurs in digital commerce since before the word "e-commerce" even existed.  He's also been front row for every glorious crash that followed. Whitman Hart? Bankrupt. March First? Bankrupt. Divine? You guessed it. And yet somehow, Rich took "roll your Aeron chair out to the parking lot" as career advice and turned it into a 20+ year agency run. In this episode, Darrell and Rich riff on the predictable insanity of tech hype cycles, why mid-market is always the jilted prom date when enterprise walks in the room, how Y2K gold coins are holding their value just fine thank you, and why the antidote to AI noise might just be... being a decent human being who looks someone in the eye. Fair warning: these two go way back, and it shows. Press play before they schedule a Part 2 you'll also be unable to skip. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com [https://bit.ly/3QNVgg8] to find out more.