Topline

01:05:33

Turning AI Tokens Into ROI (That You Can Measure) |...

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2026/10/04

Manny Medina, Co-Founder and CEO of Paid, the monetization platform for AI agents, and the founder who took Outreach from nothing, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman in person on how to price AI agents once seats stop making sense. Topics include why every SaaS company needs its own agents before someone else's run on its MCP layer, why a token is the wrong unit of value, and the itemized phone bill every agent builder owes its buyers. Plus, why fixed-price deals win logos but stall

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20:23

SPOTLIGHT: The Problem With Your CRM Nobody Talks...

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2026/10/01

You have the CRM. You have the data. You have the sales team. You have the AI tools. So why does everything still feel broken? Ramin Heydari, CEO & President of XYZies, has spent more than 30 years building businesses across telecom, sales, distribution, and technology. In this episode of Topline Spotlight, he explains why fragmented systems can become one of the biggest obstacles to growth and why AI requires businesses to rethink how they operate, not simply add another tool. Sam Jacobs sits down

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01:08:48

If the AI Money Dries Up, Which Companies Burn?

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2026/09/27

Harvey's gross margin fell from roughly positive 50% at the start of 2026 to negative 50% by June, so every $1 of revenue cost $1.50 to deliver. Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, AJ Bruno, CEO of QuotaPath, and Asad Zaman, CEO of STA, go hosts-only on when AI growth justifies margins like that, why open weight models are no substitute for frontier intelligence, and what happens to the application layer if the exuberant market funding it goes away. Plus, AJ's 100x raise from 2021, a 68% jump in tech M&A

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01:06:40

CRM As A Business World Model: The Future For GTM...

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2026/09/20

Keith Peiris, Co-Founder and CEO of Lightfield, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to talk about building an agentic CRM that launched in November 2025, has been adopted by more than 5,000 customers, and just raised a $47 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Topics include why every system of record was really a forecasting tool, how to get reliable output from non-deterministic models, and the two reasons companies actually rip out Salesforce or HubSpot. Plus, a spirited debate on

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20:16

SPOTLIGHT: What It Takes to Step into the CEO Role |...

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2026/09/17

What happens when a seasoned GTM leader becomes CEO for the first time and steps into a founder-led company with a global team? In this episode, Eric Anderson, CEO of Walnut, shares what it's really like to take over a business built by someone else. He talks with AJ Bruno about building trust across time zones, rebuilding the go-to-market motion, and making bold decisions while honoring legacy culture. From listening tours to tough calls on pricing and segmentation, Eric opens up about the

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01:00:36

RevOps for Hypergrowth (Fireworks AI, Perplexity, Exa...

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2026/09/13

Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman. Her client roster is wild: Fireworks AI, Perplexity, Exa, and Wispr Flow, plus some of the biggest names in SaaS. Topics in today's episode include how the fastest-growing AI-native companies are growing in spite of their revenue operations (not because of them), the first project she runs when she wants to show ROI fast, and how she makes the case that RevOps is a support function and always was. Plus, whether the GTM

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30:02

SPOTLIGHT: Skipping the SMB Trap and Building for Big...

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2026/09/10

Matt Allison, CEO and Founder of Handraise, joins us to share why he's skipping the SMB trap and building an AI-powered media intelligence platform for enterprise from day one. Drawing on hard-won lessons from scaling TrendKite, Matt breaks down how Handraise is targeting $30K+ deals with brands like Walgreens and Hershey, the importance of patience in early go-to-market, and how AI is helping them build a more thoughtful, scalable, and enterprise-ready product from the start. Matt also talks about:

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01:11:54

Forget Growth. Your Valuation Depends On Your AI...

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2026/09/06

Forget Growth. Your Valuation Depends On Your AI Story | Tomasz Tunguz, GP @ Theory Ventures Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman with public software multiples sitting at 4 to 4.5 times forward revenue, down from the 100x ceiling of 2021. Topics include why the market now pays for an AI story rather than growth, the $10 billion AI companies committed in a single year to putting forward-deployed engineers inside customer orgs, and the 41 days

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25:03

SPOTLIGHT: Surviving the Inbox Apocalypse | Evan...

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2026/09/03

Evan Huck, CEO and co-founder of UserEvidence, opens up about the hard decision to shift from a tried-and-true outbound sales playbook to a long-term brand-building strategy. After eight straight quarters of flat pipeline growth, Evan had to trust the process, convince his board to stay the course, and rethink how UserEvidence reached its ideal customers. In this conversation, he shares what it takes to stay patient when results don't come fast, how to balance short-term pipeline needs with brand

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01:18:20

How To Make Your ARR 20% More Valuable To Investors |...

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2026/08/30

Keenan, founder and CEO of A Sales Growth Company and the bestselling author of Gap Selling, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to make the case that two companies with identical revenue can be valued 3 to 4 times apart, depending entirely on how that revenue got made. Topics include the four sales org archetypes (heroic, random, peacock, and compounding), the valuation discount investors quietly apply to revenue produced by heroics, why quota attainment fell from 60% to 23% while

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32:01

SPOTLIGHT: AI Isn't Just Faster Translation, It's a...

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2026/08/27

Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling, confronts a $40 billion industry stuck in the slow lane—the world of translation. Most companies still handle translations like it's 1999: manual, expensive, and painfully slow. Bryan saw AI as the game changer that could rewrite the rules, but integrating it wasn't a walk in the park. He shares how Smartling harnessed AI to not just cut costs and speed up translation but to finally boost quality close to human-level precision without losing control over brand voice

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01:13:42

The Unwritten Rules of CRO Survival | Rick Smolen,...

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2026/08/23

The Unwritten Rules of CRO Survival | Rick Smolen, CRO @ ShipHero Rick Smolen, CRO of ShipHero and sales advisor to Riverwood Capital's portfolio of more than 2 dozen enterprise software companies, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to argue that AI is leverage rather than a shortcut. Topics include why AI note-takers quietly degrade seller performance, why ShipHero has not raised a single quota despite real AI investment, and why the leading AI companies keep hiring classic enterprise CROs

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29:40

SPOTLIGHT: He Missed Quota 5 Times in 25 Years....

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2026/08/20

Mike Carpenter — CEO of Xfactor.io, former President of Global Sales at CrowdStrike — didn't win VP of the Year seven out of eight times by outworking everyone. He did it by finding cheat codes in the data everyone else was ignoring. In this episode, he walks through the X-Factor methodology: how he staffed ops teams that were abnormally large by industry standards, how he cut rep ramp time from 18 months to 90 days by warming territories before a new hire ever showed up, and why he thinks most

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01:10:39

Sales Millionaires Are Back… Wasn't AI Supposed to...

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2026/08/16

Enterprise account executives are now signing for $200,000 salaries, $200,000 variable comp plans, and up to half a million dollars in equity at sign-on. Meanwhile, offer acceptance at the top AI companies sits at 45% and half of the 38,000 startup sales reps in San Francisco and New York have taken a new job in the last two years. In this episode, Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman go hosts-only on why the sales talent market broke, what QuotaPath's compensation data across more than 1,400

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20:53

SPOTLIGHT: He Said No to Bad-Fit Customers. Growth...

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2026/08/13

In this episode of Topline Spotlight, Sam Jacobs sits down with Snehal Nimje, co-founder and CEO of Outdoo, to talk about one of the hardest calls an early-stage founder can make: narrowing focus when leads are coming in. Snehal breaks down how Outdoo went from trying to serve every mid-market and enterprise buyer to getting much more specific about where the product was truly essential. They get into why usage dropped, what customer conversations revealed, how the team handled the internal shift,

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01:14:03

The (Painful) Pivot To AI-Native: What They Don't...

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2026/08/09

Jaleh Rezaei, Co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to explain how she deprecated a thriving 8-figure SaaS business in November 2025, shipped a private preview in February, and GA'd an AI-native product in April that is now used by more than 3,500 organizations including Snowflake, Rippling, Uber, and GitLab. Topics include why running a scaled SaaS business and a zero-to-one AI bet at the same time proved impossible, how to price and defend AI credit consumption

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01:14:21

Meet The World's Most Advanced AI Sales Team | Amanda...

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2026/08/02

Amanda Kahlow, Founder & CEO of 1mind, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman to break down how an AI-powered solutions engineer named Nigel took 33% of the talk time in a two and a half hour enterprise meeting and produced a $278,000 deal. Topics include why AI aimed at efficiency gains misses real revenue impact, Amanda's prediction that marketing, sales, and customer success collapse into one function within 12 months, and why AI adoption has to be top-down instead of bottoms-up. Plus, the 15

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24:12

SPOTLIGHT: AI Is Making Sales Reps 60% Faster to...

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2026/07/28

AI isn't just changing sales. It's completely rewriting how revenue teams operate. In this episode of Topline Spotlight, Sam Jacobs sits down with Justin Shriber, CEO of Terret AI, to break down how modern revenue organizations are using AI to improve forecasting, shorten sales cycles, ramp reps faster, and operationalize winning sales behavior in real time. Justin shares: Why traditional sales enablement is broken How AI helped reduce rep ramp time by 40% The "answer-to-action" engine powering

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01:22:01

World's #1 Banking CMO: How AI Is Changing Billion...

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2026/07/26

Tim Rutten, CMO of Backbase, the €2.5 billion Amsterdam tech company whose AI-native Banking OS powers 120+ banks worldwide, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman with the clearest AI ROI numbers we have heard on the show: double the pipeline on 25% less budget. Topics include the custom go-to-market operating system his team built on the Vercel stack, why real bank deployments are 99% deterministic, the 90% cost reduction banks are finding in customer care, and why most enterprise workloads do

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21:41

SPOTLIGHT: Why 80% of B2B Buying Happens Without You...

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2026/07/24

Buyers stopped picking up the phone. They research on their own, ask their peers, and now they ask AI which vendors to consider before a single salesperson ever hears about it. So where does that leave marketers? Sam Jacobs sits down with Alexander Kesler, founder and CEO of Infuse, to break down the dark funnel and what it means for B2B demand gen right now. They get into why most of the buying journey happens before you're ever contacted, how AI tools are generating "day one" shortlists on the

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