Revenue Mavericks

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.

S2E1: Why the Best Sales Leaders Never Surprise Their Teams -- Lessons from Teradata's Richard Petley

Richard Petley wasn't supposed to end up in enterprise software. He comes from a family of academics. Teachers, educational psychologists, people who built careers in classrooms and lecture halls. He was studying English literature at university, surrounded by classmates headed toward journalism, creative writing, and law. But Richard had a secret. The summer before university, he needed work. Through a chain of connections he hadn't planned, he landed in IBM's pre-university employment program, a gap year scheme that brought together a wildly diverse group of young people, most of whom would go on to do something completely different with their lives. Richard was one of the 20% for whom it stuck. He finished his gap year a day before starting his degree. He finished his degree and walked back into IBM the next day. No gap. No hesitation. He had found the thing that lit him up, and he wasn't going to let it cool off. That clarity of direction carried him from IBM to Oracle to his current role as Chief Revenue Officer at Teradata, one of the foundational platforms powering the infrastructure behind today's AI revolution. But what makes Richard compelling as a leader isn't just the trajectory. It's the operating philosophy underneath it. Early in his career at IBM, Richard spent a year as an executive assistant to Larry Hearst, the country leader who went on to become chairman of IBM EMEA. The role wasn't glamorous. He wrote briefings, assembled presentations, and handled logistics. But he watched. He studied how Larry engaged with people, how he prepared for high-stakes moments, and how he carried himself when the pressure was on. That experience taught Richard something he still operates by today: your career isn't shaped by a single breakthrough moment. It's shaped by a series of set piece moments that you identify, prepare for, and deliver on, one after another, over the course of years. He also carries a leadership framework he picked up from a former military leader at Oracle, built on three pillars: integrity, organization, and success. People follow leaders they can trust, leaders who show up prepared, and leaders who win. All three matter. None of them work alone. And when it comes to running a global sales organization, Richard believes in something deceptively simple: build a management system at the beginning of the year, define the KPIs and the scorecard, and then run it with total consistency. No surprises in forecast calls. No unfamiliar data. No distractions. Just a clean operating rhythm that lets people do their best work because they always know what's expected. In this episode: * How a gap year at IBM, taken completely by chance, set the course of Richard's entire career * What spending a year as an executive assistant taught him about leadership at the highest level * The three-pillar framework (integrity, organization, success) he's used for decades * Why "no surprises" is the operating philosophy behind the best enterprise sales teams * How to identify and prepare for the set piece moments that define your career trajectory * Why authenticity isn't optional, and why everyone can spot a fraud from a mile off Richard Petley is CRO of one of the most important data platforms in the world. This is a conversation about what it actually takes to lead at that level, and it starts with showing up the same way every single time.

S1E10: Why the Best Sales Leaders Stay Calm When the Room Won't -- Lessons from Uniphore's Carl Borsody

Carl Borsody was watching a doctor work under pressure when something clicked. The situation was tense. The stakes were real. And this doctor never flinched. Not because they didn't care, but because they understood something most people miss: the room was already filled with enough urgency. Adding more panic to it wouldn't help anyone. What the moment needed was someone steady enough to think clearly while everyone else was reacting. Carl carried that lesson into his career in enterprise sales, and it became the foundation for how he leads. His heart might be racing. His brain might be running through a dozen scenarios at once. But his team never sees that, because they don't need more pressure injected into the system. They need a leader who absorbs the tension in the room instead of amplifying it. That quiet intensity has carried Carl through more than two decades at Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks, where he led the U.S. Major and Strategic Accounts business. Today, as Chief Revenue Officer at Uniphore, he's rebuilding a GTM organization around a focused AI platform, and doing it with the same steadiness that's defined his entire career. What makes Carl's perspective unusual is the path that got him here. After eight years in management, he made the rare decision to step back into an individual contributor role. Most people would see that as a step backward. Carl saw it as an accelerator. Those years in leadership had given him what he calls "cheat notes," a deep library of patterns around deal strategy, executive engagement, and objection handling that most sellers spend an entire career building one deal at a time. When he eventually moved back into leadership, he brought a seller's instincts with a leader's peripheral vision. It's a combination that's hard to find in a CRO. Carl also shares his approach to procurement negotiations, where he disarms tension by simply naming it out loud, and explains why the best sellers never use product names or technical jargon in front of a business buyer. One CIO put it to his team bluntly: "I guarantee you're smarter than me. But if you want my business, talk to me like I'm in fifth grade." What we cover: * Why staying calm under pressure isn't passive, and why the best leaders never inject urgency into a room that already has enough * The "cheat notes" advantage: how moving from leadership to IC and back gave Carl a pattern library most CROs never build * His approach to procurement negotiations: name the dynamic, cut the posturing, and get to the real conversation * Why Carl hires for deal-finding capability over industry expertise, nine times out of ten * The language trap that kills executive conversations, and how to sell without ever saying a product name * How Uniphore's pivot to a focused AI stack is reshaping what Carl looks for in his team and how he builds repeatable process Carl Borsody is a leader who believes the best revenue organizations are built on steadiness, not volume. This conversation is for sales leaders who know that the loudest voice in the room is rarely the one people follow.

S1E9: Why the Best Sales Leaders Build Environments, Not Just Teams--Lessons from AlphaSense’s Kiva Kolstein

Kiva Kolstein was sitting across from his CEO on his very first day as Head of Sales. He had spent the entire week before building a 30-slide deck. Business journal quotes. Leadership frameworks. Case studies from sports icons and Fortune 500 executives. Every slide was polished. Every slide was smart. Every slide was borrowed from someone else. After the presentation, the room applauded. Then his CEO pulled him aside. "Those were some great stories from some great leaders. But we didn't hire any of the leaders you quoted. We hired you. I want to know who you are." It stung. But it was exactly right. Kiva had spent his first day as a leader hiding behind borrowed conviction, trying to sound like a leader instead of being one. That single conversation reset everything. It taught him that people don't follow slides. They don't follow quotes. They follow belief. Today, as President and Chief Revenue Officer at AlphaSense, a company he's helped scale from 50 people and $10M in ARR to over 2,000 employees and $500M in ARR, Kiva operates from a set of principles that are entirely his own. He calls the framework Four Ps: Purpose, Power, Precision, and Presence. And in this episode, he walks through exactly how that operating system drives durable, scalable growth. But the conversation goes much deeper than frameworks. Kiva also shares what step-parenting taught him about intentional leadership. Why he spent 18 months going back to making cold calls as the most junior person at a commercial real estate firm, and why he'd do it again. And the Rocky 3 scene that perfectly captures what happens when a leader "gets civilized" and loses touch with the grind. In this episode: Why great leaders build environments and then trust people to deliver results The Four Ps framework: how Purpose, Power, Precision, and Presence drive organizational scale What step-parenting taught Kiva about hyper-intentional leadership The "back to basics" chapter that regrounded him after years in leadership Why precision is the most underinvested lever in most sales organizations How AlphaSense has successfully integrated four acquisitions in four years, and what other CROs get wrong Kiva Kolstein is one of the most thoughtful voices in enterprise revenue leadership. This one is worth your full attention.