Revenue Builders

AI adoption has changed the standard for go-to-market execution. Seong Park, SVP of Customer Support & Services at Cursor, explains why the old model of selling certainty is giving way to curiosity, experimentation, and workflow discovery. He breaks down why the real work starts after signature, why pilots only matter if they lead to business-critical adoption, and how revenue leaders can guide customers from AI exploration to measurable impact.

Seong Park is the Senior Vice President of Customer Support and Services at Cursor. His background spans pre-sales, customer success, and go-to-market leadership across companies including MongoDB, ThoughtSpot, and now Cursor.

Connect with Seong:

LinkedIn

Listen to the full episode:

The Real Sale Starts After Signature | Proving Value in AI and Consumption Models with Seong Park

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

Michelle Bove didn't start in enterprise software – she started as a soccer referee in seventh grade, hustling for an extra $10 per game, then moved into door-to-door sales at a three-person startup where she learned rejection quickly and loved it even more. That hunger never left. Today, as an AVP of East Sales at Wiz, she's built her career at some of the sharpest sales cultures in software history (PTC, AppDynamics, Zscaler), closed deals nobody else could get into, and turned around entire teams by replacing broken managers instead of blaming reps. In this conversation, she breaks down the real mechanics of winning: why likability is underrated, how to hire people better than you, why skip levels work when done transparently, and what it actually costs to prove yourself as a young female leader in cybersecurity. Her philosophy is simple: science plus art. Discipline and processes without human connection will only get you halfway there.

Michelle Bove is an AVP of East Sales at Wiz and has built her career at PTC, AppDynamics, and Zscaler – some of the sharpest sales cultures in enterprise software. She's known for closing deals nobody else could get into and turning underperforming teams into world-class organizations.

Connect with Michelle:

LinkedIn

Resources mentioned:

Profession Profiles International assessments

Key takeaways from this episode:

00:00 – Introduction and Michelle's origin story from soccer referee to enterprise sales leader

06:44 – Why likability is the most underrated sales competency and directly impacts your ability to build champions and close deals

20:00 – Why tailored coaching based on individual strengths and weaknesses beats cookie-cutter management

36:30 – How to run skip levels the right way: prep, conduct, document, share back with managers, and follow up without alienating people

47:50 – Operating rhythms in practice: daily prospecting, 15-question deal reviews, and deep customer research that actually moves deals

51:00 – Why in-person customer engagement beats remote-only selling for strategic accounts and mega-deals, even in the AI era

59:45 – The hardest part of her job: being a young female leader in a male-dominated space and proving herself every room she walks into

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

High-performing teams create the conditions for talent to succeed. In this Revenue Builders segment, Lindsay Shookus shares lessons from Saturday Night Live on cultural fit, team buy-in, trust, and performance under pressure. Drawing from examples of SNL talent who found success in different environments, Lindsay explains why fit often determines whether strong people can thrive inside a specific team rhythm. She also shares how leaders can create safety for risk-taking, give teams ownership in new hires, and reduce the pressure on individuals by helping them trust the room around them.

Lindsay Shookus spent 20 years at Saturday Night Live, including 10 years as a producer, where she led talent booking, worked with celebrity hosts and musical guests, and helped scout and recruit cast members. She is a four-time Emmy Award winner, a former producer on 30 Rock, and the co-founder of Women Work Hard, a community supporting female entrepreneurs and leaders.

Connect with Lindsay:

Website

Resources mentioned:

Women Work Hard on IG

Women Work Hard Website

Rethinking Success by J. Douglas Holladay

Listen to the full episode:

How Saturday Night Live Builds Teams That Perform Under Pressure with Lindsay Shookus

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

Most sales conversations still lean on product specs, and most leadership still gets reduced to quota math, until the market gets hard and both approaches break down. Rob Potter, CEO of Oomnitza, joins John Kaplan and John McMahon to argue that revenue and retention run on the same fuel: story, evidence, and belief rather than pressure. Shaped by three decades under RSA and EMC leaders like Art Coviello and Mark Thurman, Potter explains why technical credibility alone creates gaps in a sales motion, how staged delegation and reverse-timeline planning scale a team without inflating cost, and why transformative leaders keep people through a missed quarter while transactional leaders lose them the moment the number slips.

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

Key takeaways from this episode: 

04:06 - How a mentor redirected Potter from veterinary school to engineering, and how an IBM customer engagement pulled him out of coding and into sales.

14:15 - Why staged delegation, bringing team members in at the right sales-cycle phase rather than all at once, is what separates scalable sales leaders from expensive ones.

19:29 - The single metric Mark Thurman drilled into him: growth rate quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year matters more than revenue alone.

20:41 - What RSA and EMC's top leaders had in common: honesty, transparency, and empathy, especially when navigating layoffs.

27:48 - Why passion is contagious in an organization, and why it only exists downstream of belief built on evidence.

31:37 - The storytelling framework Potter coaches into every rep: journey, problem, outcome, not product spec.

38:22 - Why AI guardrails have to differ by function, and the hidden long-term cost of building AI in-house instead of buying it.

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

Enterprise sellers often lose deal quality by moving too quickly from customer pain to product answers. In this Revenue Builders minisode, Stuart Gwynn of MongoDB explains why the best sellers slow down in discovery, hold the line with the customer, and use disciplined qualification to determine whether a problem is real, urgent, and worth solving. Stuart shares how pipeline creates the courage to qualify out, why team preparation matters before strategic customer conversations, and how trust is built when sellers demonstrate that they understand the customer’s business before prescribing a solution.

Stuart Gwynn is an enterprise sales leader at MongoDB who has exceeded goal every year since joining the company in 2019. Before MongoDB, he spent seven years at Pure Storage, rising from SDR to named account rep and finishing as one of the company’s top performers before moving into strategic enterprise selling.

Connect with Stuart:

LinkedIn

Episodes mentioned:

The Discipline Behind Scaling from PLG to Enterprise with Sahir Azam

Why Sales Execution Wins in an AI-First World with Brian McCarthy, President of Global Revenue and Field Operations at Cursor

Listen to the full episode:

The Discipline Behind Nine-Figure Deals with Stuart Gwynn

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