Revenue Builders

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

Senior leaders are often judged in moments they could not plan for. Mark Thurmond’s path from sales rep to co-CEO of Tenable was built through consistent execution, difficult operating assignments, and crises that demanded calm before certainty. He explains what the RSA breach taught him about transparency and customer trust, how he and Steve Vintz kept Tenable moving after the death of CEO Amit Yoran, and why the strongest leaders build followership before they need it. The conversation also covers choosing learning over title, using AI to raise seller productivity, and leading a product-to-platform shift as a company-wide operating change.

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

Key takeaways from this episode: 

00:00 - What early international experience teaches leaders about operating across markets, cultures, and teams.

04:34 - Why transparency during a crisis can strengthen customer trust instead of weakening it.

10:19 - What leaders must control when uncertainty, emotion, and outside pressure start to take over.

12:22 - Why rigid career planning can distract high performers from the opportunities that actually move them forward.

15:05 - What a leader’s ability to attract former colleagues reveals about their credibility and influence.

17:04 - Why the most valuable career moves often create discomfort before they create advancement.

29:00 - A look inside what leadership demands when personal grief and business continuity collide.

34:08 - What executives often overlook about the connection between proactive health and decision-making capacity.

41:30 - Why a company’s approach to AI partnerships may determine whether it separates or falls behind.

53:00 - What many leaders underestimate about moving from a product business to a platform strategy.

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

In this clip, Alex Bilmes, CEO of Endgame, joins Revenue Builders to share what his team learned from analyzing more than 30,000 real AI workflows across go-to-market teams. The data shows AI gaining traction in account intelligence, conversation readiness, deal acceleration, pipeline inspection, and team enablement. But the larger lesson is that the strongest teams are not just using AI to generate decks, briefs, or follow-ups faster. They are using it to create shared understanding across reps, managers, executives, RevOps, and cross-functional teams. For revenue leaders, the opportunity is not simply more automation. It is connecting the organization around the same account context, methodology, and customer truth.

Alex Bilmes is the CEO and founder of Endgame, a revenue intelligence platform built for go-to-market teams. His work focuses on helping revenue organizations centralize customer, methodology, and account knowledge so both humans and AI agents can operate from a consistent foundation.

Connect with Alex:

LinkedIn

Listen to the full episode:

Revenue per Employee Is the New Endgame with Alex Bilmes

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

AI partnerships are no longer won by managing a channel or securing a marketplace listing. Leaders must understand how countries, power, cooling, chip fabrication, hyperscalers, model providers, software companies, and enterprise risk fit together before they can build an effective partner strategy. Returning to Revenue Builders, Alan Chhabra explains how Cerebras navigated the technical and political realities of working with AWS, why successful partner leaders need more than relationships, and how sovereignty is changing infrastructure, model selection, and cloud decisions. He also examines why software companies are moving aggressively on AI while traditional enterprises remain more cautious.

Alan Chhabra is the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebras Systems, where he leads global partner expansion across hyperscalers and the broader AI ecosystem. He previously spent nearly a decade building MongoDB’s global partner network and held senior leadership roles at BMC Software.

Connect with Alan:

LinkedIn

Other Revenue Builders episodes with Alan:

The Ideal Partnership with Alan Chhabra

Key takeaways from this episode: 

00:00 - Why the infrastructure behind AI may matter more than the applications built on top of it.

12:26 - What the shift from data to AI changes about how partner leaders map the market.

16:06 - Why understanding the full AI stack is a prerequisite for building the right partnerships.

27:48 - A look inside what it really takes to navigate the politics of a hyperscaler partnership.

36:00 - The four capabilities CEOs should test before hiring an AI partner leader.

48:34 - What leaders often overlook about the role of sovereignty in shaping AI infrastructure decisions.

56:25 - Why software companies and traditional enterprises are moving at very different speeds on AI adoption.

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