sales
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Rahul Alim Got His First Customer Before He Left the Parking Lot
The founder of Custom Creatives learned to sell before he learned to delegate. Two decades later, his work in agency coaching and voice AI keeps returning to the same question: who will actually get the job done?
Omri Shor and the art of letting go
He learned to sell at the doorstep, built a company with his brother, and moved his family across an ocean. For Medisafe co-founder Omri Shor, growth eventually meant learning when to step back.
Will Schwartz and the education of staying put
He joined UFP as a sales trainee in 1998. Twenty-six years later, Will Schwartz became CEO, carrying an education in customers, factories and the cost of getting things from one place to another.
Linda Rendle and the education of a quiet competitor
She grew up checking store shelves with her father. At Clorox, Linda Rendle turned that early education into a career spent learning how products move, how teams work and when a leader needs to speak plainly.
Oren Butansky and the art of starting at the bottom
After leading customer service at El Al, Oren Cohen Butansky joined AIG Israel as deputy CEO. His preferred introduction to a new industry involves the work its newest employees have to learn.
Brian Elias sold the business. He kept the building habit.
After turning $5,000 into 1-800-HANSONS, Brian Elias sold a majority stake and started again with his son. The second act puts a lifetime of sales lessons to work, one floor at a time.
Ryan Serhant and the art of making a listing impossible to ignore
A failed acting plan sent him into New York real estate in 2008. Now his brokerage treats a camera, a classroom and a sales desk as parts of the same business.
Anne Armistead and the Quiet Art of Doing the Small Things
At Workstream, Anne Armistead works in the measured language of account development. Away from the sales floor, a guitar, a Utah ranch and a preference for overlooked work reveal the more interesting rhythm underneath.
Rocket.Chat Wires HubSpot Straight Into the Chat Window
The open-source messaging platform's HubSpot CRM app pipes leads, deals and support tickets into the conversation - so sales and support teams stop tab-hopping between the CRM and the chat where the customer actually is.
Sam Blond
Sam Blond is a go-to-market operator turned founder who built his reputation scaling startup sales teams. He was VP of Sales at Zenefits and Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, where he helped drive revenue from near zero to roughly $400M ARR. After an 18-month run as a partner at Founders Fund, he decided investing was not his fit and went back to operating. In 2026 he co-founded and now leads Monaco, an AI-native sales platform for startups, alongside his brother Brian Blond.
The best creatives I know hate selling.
A manifesto for talented creatives who freeze the moment a client asks 'what do you charge?' Written to promote Natural Born Seller, a full-day sales workshop led by Emmy-winning designer and The Futur founder Chris Do, the piece reframes selling as an act of service rather than manipulation. It walks through the limiting beliefs that keep skilled creatives broke - money shame, conflict avoidance, scope creep, wavering confidence - and answers the three objections most likely to keep a creative agency owner on the fence about attending the August 6, 2026 event in Vancouver.
Inside Clay: What Is a Go-To-Market Engineer?
In this episode of 'Stories of Scale,' a host spends a full day inside Clay, the $5 billion New York startup that coined the term 'go-to-market engineer,' to figure out what this fast-growing role actually is. Shadowing Everett Berry, Clay's Head of GTM Engineering, along with teammates like Spencer, Varun (co-founder), and George, the video unpacks how GTM engineers blend engineering, marketing, and sales to build automated systems that find, understand, and reach customers. It also reveals Clay's two-team 'flywheel' — an internal pipeline team and a forward-deployed customer-facing team — that helped the company scale from five years of near-zero revenue to over $100 million and 16,000+ customers.
Anuj Jalan
Anuj Jalan is the Vice President of Sales Marketing at Microsoft, based in Chandigarh, India. He has built his career across major technology and services firms, moving from process development at Genpact and customer support at Dell to senior sales and marketing leadership at one of the world's largest technology companies. With an MBA from Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies and a background spanning recruitment, operations, and client engagement, Jalan represents the archetype of a career professional who climbed the ranks through diverse industry exposure in India's booming tech sector.
Scott Sackett
Scott Sackett is Chief Advisor to the CEO at Artifex Software, the San Francisco company behind Ghostscript, MuPDF, and PyMuPDF. He has been at Artifex since January 1998, spending more than two decades running sales and licensing before shifting into an advisory seat. Before software, he was a working musician in the Bay Area and then an airline pilot for Braniff. He lives in Krum, Texas, and sits on the Denton Record-Chronicle editorial board.
Octave
Octave is a San Francisco-based AI company building a generative go-to-market platform - an 'agentic GTM brain' that codifies a company's ICP, positioning and messaging, then feeds that context to sales agents, workflows and tools like Clay, Salesforce and HubSpot. Founded in 2022 by Zach Vidibor and Julian Tempelsman, it has raised $8.4M total and reports 2,500+ GTM teams on the platform.
Monday CRM
Monday.com is a publicly traded Israeli SaaS company (NASDAQ: MNDY) that builds a Work OS platform used by 245,000+ organizations globally. Its flagship products include Monday CRM, Monday Dev, and Monday WorkOS — a suite of customizable tools for sales, project management, and team collaboration. Founded in 2012, the company has grown from an internal Wix.com tool to a $1B+ ARR business with AI-powered agents, workflow automation, and deep integrations with 200+ enterprise tools.
Nimble CRM
Nimble CRM is a relationship-focused customer relationship management platform built for small businesses and teams. Founded by CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara — the co-founder of GoldMine Software — Nimble integrates deeply with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to automatically enrich contact records, manage sales pipelines, and enable AI-powered prospecting. With transparent single-plan pricing at $24.90/user/month, Nimble positions itself as the smart, simple alternative to complex enterprise CRM systems, serving 10,000+ customers worldwide.
Nutshell
Nutshell is an all-in-one CRM and growth platform built for B2B small and mid-sized businesses that are tired of overpaying for software they barely use. Founded in 2009 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Nutshell combines sales pipeline management, email marketing, and customer engagement tools into a single subscription — with free live support on every plan. Acquired by digital marketing agency WebFX in 2022, Nutshell now serves over 5,000 companies across 50 countries, competing against industry giants like Salesforce and HubSpot by doing less, but doing it better.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a sales-first CRM built by salespeople, for salespeople. Founded in 2010 in Tallinn, Estonia, and now headquartered in New York, Pipedrive gives small and mid-sized businesses a visual, activity-based pipeline that keeps deals moving. With over 100,000 companies across 179 countries using the platform, Pipedrive became a $1.5 billion unicorn in 2020 after a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners. Its philosophy is simple: salespeople should spend less time in software and more time selling.
Sage CRM
Sage CRM is a customer relationship management platform built by Sage Group plc, designed to help small and mid-sized businesses manage sales pipelines, marketing campaigns, and customer service from a single hub. Deeply integrated with Sage's accounting suite, it lets growing companies turn contact records into revenue without the complexity - or cost - of enterprise alternatives like Salesforce.
Salesforce
Salesforce is the world's leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, connecting companies and their customers across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. Founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff and co-founders in a San Francisco apartment, the company pioneered cloud-based enterprise software and has since expanded into a full AI-powered platform - Agentforce 360 - serving over 150,000 organizations worldwide, including 90% of the Fortune 500. With $41.5 billion in FY2026 revenue and a market-dominant 21% share of the global CRM industry, Salesforce is reshaping how companies deploy autonomous AI agents to run their operations.
Close CRM
Close is a bootstrapped, profitable sales CRM built for small and mid-sized teams that want to spend less time on admin and more time actually selling. Founded in 2013 out of a San Francisco sales agency, it combines pipeline management, built-in calling, email, and SMS into one platform - no integrations required. With $17M+ ARR and a fully remote team across 40+ countries, Close has grown almost entirely without venture capital, making it one of the more unusual success stories in SaaS.
Copper CRM
Copper is a CRM built for Google Workspace users - specifically teams of 5 to 100 people who live in Gmail and Google Calendar all day. Founded in 2013 as ProsperWorks and rebranded in 2018, Copper is the only CRM officially recommended by Google on the Workspace Marketplace. Rather than forcing sales reps to log every interaction manually, Copper pulls contact and activity data straight from Gmail, auto-populating records so nothing falls through the cracks. Used by over 30,000 businesses across 100+ countries - from creative agencies to consulting firms to real estate teams - Copper has raised $99.5 million and evolved from a sales tool into a full client management platform for professional services.
Alex Hormozi
Alex Hormozi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, and author who built and exited seven companies without outside capital before founding Acquisition.com, a holding company with 16+ portfolio businesses generating $200M+ in annual revenue. His $100M book series has sold over 5 million copies, including $100M Money Models which broke the Guinness World Record for fastest-selling non-fiction book in August 2025. He co-runs Acquisition.com with his wife and CEO Leila Hormozi and is a co-owner of Skool.com.
Jason Neubert
Jason Neubert is AVP Sales - Data & Insights at Adobe, based in Lehi, Utah, where he leads sales efforts around Adobe's analytics and data intelligence portfolio — including Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and the B2B Edition suite. With over 15 years at Adobe, he has climbed through account executive, senior manager, and regional VP roles, building a reputation for translating complex data products into measurable business outcomes for enterprise buyers. Off the clock, he's a championship-winning volleyball coach whose teams at Lone Peak High School and Utah Reign Volleyball Club claimed multiple state and regional titles.
Jennie Strobeck
Jennie Strobeck is AVP of State & Local Sales, Digital Media at Adobe, where she leads government sales strategy across city, county, and state agencies. With a career spanning enterprise tech sales at DLT Solutions, immixGroup, and Avaya Government Solutions, she has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and public sector transformation. At Adobe, she previously served as Chief of Staff and Channel Sales Manager before stepping into the AVP role in 2022. She is particularly focused on digital accessibility, helping governments meet DOJ WCAG compliance requirements and modernize document workflows at scale.
Joshua Christensen
Joshua Christensen is the AVP of Customer Growth at Adobe, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. With a career spanning nearly two decades in enterprise software sales and business development, he has grown from frontline sales roles at companies like Workfront to senior leadership at one of the world's largest digital media and marketing technology companies. He holds an MBA from Westminster College and a BASc from the University of Utah, combining formal business education with deep SaaS industry expertise. Colleagues describe him as a results-driven leader who genuinely invests in developing the people around him.
Michael Keister
Michael Keister is a technology sales executive and AVP of Media & Entertainment at Adobe, based in Portland, Oregon. With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and B2B SaaS sales, he has built and led high-performing revenue teams at companies including Zapproved (as CRO), Provana, Airship, Lytics, and Jive Software. Keister brings a track record of designing and executing revenue strategies in media, entertainment, retail, financial services, and technology sectors, and holds a BS in Finance from Oregon State University.
Peter Cray
Peter Cray is VP Strategy & Operations for AWS Sales, Marketing and Global Services at Amazon Web Services, where he oversees go-to-market strategy, business and sales operations, competitive strategy, and field marketing across 122 subsidiaries worldwide. With nearly three decades in enterprise technology, he spent 15 years at Microsoft in increasingly senior roles - including COO & Chief Business Officer for Microsoft China & Greater China Region - before joining AWS in 2022. He reports to Greg Pearson as part of AWS's integrated global sales organization alongside peers Dave Levy and Robert Chu.
Dan Lee
Dan Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nooks, an AI Sales Assistant Platform that automates the manual busywork of sales development reps so they can focus on the human side of selling. Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, Lee studied AI at Stanford (BS '21, MS '22), did ML stints at Scale AI and Cerebras Systems, and co-founded Nooks in 2020 with Stanford classmates Rohan Suri and Nikhil Cheerla. The company has raised $70 million in total funding, including a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins in October 2024, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 AI honoree in 2025.