Revenue Builders

Most companies think strategy is about finding the next big competitive advantage, but Chuck Bamford has learned through years advising Fortune 500 companies that half of strategy isn't about winning – it's about not losing. It's about nailing the fundamentals: your billing, your support, how fast you respond to customers. Yet most leadership teams skip right over this work to chase the shiny innovation. In this clip, Chuck walks through why companies get this backwards, why they obsess over innovation while customers leave over broken table stakes, and what it takes to get the fundamentals right. Because until you do, your competitive advantage doesn't matter.


Dr. Chuck Bamford is the Managing Partner at Bamford Associates and an adjunct professor of strategy at both Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. He's worked with more than 170 organizations to design and implement strategy that actually drives behavior, and he's the author of many books, including The Strategy Mindset 2.0.


Connect with Chuck:
LinkedIn
Website


Resources mentioned:
The Strategy Mindset 2.0: A Practical Guide to the Design and Implementation of Strategy


Listen to the full episode:
Strategy That Teams Actually Execute with Dr. Chuck Bamford

Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results.

This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale.

Connect with Us:
LinkedIn
YouTube
Force Management

Plenty of revenue leaders are watching good people walk out the door after a single bad quarter, left wondering whether it's the market or the culture. In this clip, Rob Potter, CEO of Oomnitza and a veteran sales leader from RSA, EMC, and Symantec, breaks down the line between transactional leadership, which runs on threats and quotas, and transformative leadership, which builds the kind of pride and belief that survives a missed number. Get this wrong, and you're rebuilding your team every time the market turns.


Rob Potter is CEO of Oomnitza, an enterprise technology management platform, and a venture partner at SYN Ventures. His path to the corner office ran through engineering and sales leadership roles at IBM, WRQ, Symantec, and RSA/EMC, where he worked alongside leaders including Art Coviello and Joe Tucci before running revenue organizations of his own.


Connect with Rob:
LinkedIn


Resources mentioned:
Force Management's Command of the Message®
Force Management's Conversation Guide


Listen to the full episode:
Reps Who Skip the Story Lose the Deal with Rob Potter

Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results.

This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale.

Connect with Us:
LinkedIn
YouTube
Force Management

Sales teams have never had more research at their fingertips, and buyers still say reps don’t understand their business. The prep docs look great right up until someone asks how the customer actually makes money. Matt Fermino calls it Seller Deficit Disorder. He joins John McMahon and John Kaplan to break down how AI turns information into a crutch, how his leaders use call recordings to coach tone and likability, and why coachability matters more in hiring than where a candidate is today.


Matt Fermino is the Chief Revenue Officer at Fable Security and previously held senior sales leadership roles at Astronomer, Starburst, and Cybereason.


Connect with Matt:
LinkedIn


Resources mentioned:
Fable Security
Gong


Key takeaways from this episode:
00:00 - Why one question from a Verizon executive turned an account handoff into a lesson that company never forgot
03:29 - Why many CROs mistake a polished prep doc for real understanding of the customer
08:43 - What leaders often overlook about the high-impact pain reps quietly steer away from in discovery
16:48 - Matt’s perspective on how the same AI prompts leave 50 reps sounding exactly alike
27:57 - A look inside the weekly call review habit that turned Matt’s reps into self-coachers
46:49 - Why coaching through questions gets reps further than handing them the answer
57:11 - The mistake many hiring managers make when they confuse taking feedback with being coachable

Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results.

This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale.

Connect with Us:
LinkedIn
YouTube
Force Management

The next leadership opportunity is rarely earned by chasing a title, compensation package, or predetermined timeline. Mark Thurmond explains how consistent execution, continuous learning, and the ability to attract trusted people create career momentum that compounds over time, giving revenue leaders a more durable way to evaluate their next move.


Mark Thurmond is Co-Chief Executive Officer of Tenable, where he oversees the company’s go-to-market functions across sales, marketing, customer success, professional services, and technical support. His career includes senior operating and sales leadership roles at EMC, RSA, Qlik, and Turbonomic.


Connect with Mark:
LinkedIn


Listen to the full episode:
The Hard Moments That Build a CEO with Mark Thurmond

Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results.

This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale.

Connect with Us:
LinkedIn
YouTube
Force Management

Enterprises have poured money into AI, and most of it is still doing research. The return comes when agents start taking action inside real systems, and that’s where most companies get stuck. If no one can say who authorized an agent to take a specific action, across specific systems, at a specific time, that agent never leaves the pilot. Arcade, fresh off a $60 million raise, was built to answer that question. Ben Sabrin, an open source pioneer who built early sales teams at JBoss and MongoDB, leads its go-to-market. He explains what it takes to sell a category this new, why repeatability has to come before scale, and how he runs his own sales team on AI.


Ben Sabrin is the GTM Lead at Arcade.dev and a former CRO at ngrok and ScaleFT who has spent more than 20 years building early sales teams at companies including JBoss, MongoDB, and Okta.


Connect with Ben:
LinkedIn
Arcade


Resources mentioned:
Wall Street Journal article on Arcade’s $60M to Secure AI Agents
The Sales Learning Curve, Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway, Harvard Business Review
SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
Reo.Dev
Sumble
Lemlist


Key takeaways from this episode:
00:00 - Why an AI agent has to be taught the shaky finger a human feels before pressing delete all.
03:19 - The one question every enterprise has to answer before an AI agent is trusted to act.
12:40 - What leaders often overlook about selling into a platform shift, and why asking buyers to rebuild their governance would have been dead on arrival.
23:00 - A look inside the week Arcade nearly launched a rival to MCP, and the promise OpenAI asked for first.
27:52 - What it really takes to hire sellers when your product does nothing until someone builds on top of it.
42:37 - Why scaling a sales team before repeatability quietly sets the CRO up to fail.
44:29 - Ben Sabrin’s perspective on letting AI coach his reps, and the pricing model he built with Claude in a single day.

Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results.

This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale.

Connect with Us:
LinkedIn
YouTube
Force Management