What builds great sales leaders?

In this episode of What Makes You Tick, Jennifer Nguyen breaks down how rejection, adversity, and resilience shaped her career in sales, account management, and revenue leadership.

From missing out on Junior Olympics competition to interviewing three times before landing a leadership role, Jennifer shares how mental toughness is developed — not learned — and why rejection is often the catalyst for long-term success.

This conversation dives deep into:

How rejection builds resilience in sales

Why account management is more complex than new business

The mindset required to build high-performing revenue teams

How to hire for coachability and mental toughness

Why great leaders take bets on people

The role of self-awareness in leadership development

How to raise the bar without burning out

If you’re a sales leader, CRO, account manager, or founder building a revenue team, this episode will challenge how you think about performance, rejection, and growth.

Topics Covered

Accomplishing big goals is a journey that requires persistence.

Mental toughness is developed through overcoming adversity.

Account management is a complex role that requires a consulting mindset.

Rejection can be a powerful teacher and motivator.

Celebrating team achievements fosters a positive culture.

Enablement for account managers is crucial for success.

Taking bets on people is essential for leadership growth.

Mapping accounts can streamline the sales process.

Self-awareness is key to being coachable.

Raising the bar continuously leads to personal and professional growth.

Who This Episode Is For

Sales leaders building high-performance teams

Account managers looking to grow into leadership

CROs scaling revenue functions

Founders transitioning from founder-led sales

Anyone navigating rejection in their career

About Jennifer Nguyen https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifertaussignguyen/

Jennifer Nguyen is a revenue leader with deep experience in SaaS and account management. She has built and led high-performing teams, developed leaders of leaders, and champions mental toughness as a core driver of sustainable performance.

👤 About Richard Washington

Richard Washington helps founders and boards build high-performing GTM leadership teams through Tick Talent, specialising in early-stage and scaling B2B startups. He hosts What Makes You Tick?, a podcast on leadership, growth, and the decisions that shape companies. Find out more.

https://www.tick-talent.com/

Follow Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richwash/

Read Growth Magnet:

https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7083793079794556928

#SalesLeadership,

#RevenueLeadership,

#MentalToughness,

#AccountManagement,

#HighPerformanceTeams,

sales leadership,

revenue leadership,

mental toughness in sales,

how to handle rejection,

account management strategy,

high performing sales teams,

sales career growth,

leadership development in sales,

coachability in hiring,

resilience in business,

how to build great sales leaders,

SaaS sales leadership,

sales mindset,

revenue team development,

handling churn as a leader,

sales management advice,

hiring for attitude not experience,

pivoting into SaaS sales,

women in sales leadership,

building mental toughness,

Most executives run sophisticated go-to-market strategies…

…but abandon that thinking when managing their own careers.

In this Best Bits segment, we break down the operator mindset behind career leverage — how top revenue leaders create opportunity, build optionality, and position themselves for roles that are rarely posted publicly.

This isn’t job search advice.

It’s career strategy.

What you’ll learn

• Why treating your career like a GTM motion changes everything

• The KPI that matters more than applications

• How conversations create clarity, influence, and opportunity

• Why the best executive roles are discovered, not advertised

• How to build optionality and negotiate from leverage

• Relationship habits that compound over decades

Senior operators understand this:

Careers don’t progress through luck.

They progress through positioning, relationships, and strategic intent.

If you lead revenue, build teams, or operate at the executive level, this conversation will challenge how you think about career growth and market positioning.

Who this is for

Revenue leaders (CRO, VP Sales, VP GTM)

Founders & scale-up executives

Senior operators navigating growth or transition

Leaders who want leverage, not just their next role

Key takeaway

Run your career like a market.

Opportunity stops being random when you create demand.

If this resonates, share it with a leader in your network who thinks strategically about growth, influence, and long-term career leverage.

Subscribe for more conversations on leadership, hiring, and building high-performance revenue organizations.

CONNECT + SUBSCRIBE

Connect with Richard Washington on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richwash

Subscribe to Execs & The City by Jacob: https://www.execsandthecity.com/subscribe

Get tech startup playbooks on Growth Magnet:

https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7083793079794556928

Try Jacob’s free LinkedIn review tool: https://freelinkedinreview.com/

About Jacob Warwick:

Jacob is the go-to career strategist for high-performing executives. With over 15 years of experience, he’s coached more than 3,500 leaders to win life-changing comp packages, de-risk their careers, and build influence in competitive markets. He’s also the creator of the Execs & The City newsletter and podcast.

Like if you’ve ever felt disposable in a job.

Comment if you’re feeling the pressure to evolve.

Subscribe so you don’t miss Part 3 (coming out soon) and more great mentors here to guide you.

Most companies attend events.

Very few dominate them.

In this masterclass, Itai Manor explains how founders, revenue leaders, and go-to-market teams can turn events and conferences from “nice-to-have networking” into a repeatable, scalable revenue engine.

Learn how to generate pipeline, close deals, and drive revenue from conferences with a proven B2B event strategy.

This isn’t about showing up.

This is about winning.

Why Events “Don’t Work” for Most Teams

Most teams:

• show up unprepared

• scan badges and have random conversations

• follow up poorly (or not at all)

• then wonder why nothing converts

Events fail not because of budget or attendance — but because of lack of strategy.

What You’ll Learn

Why Most Events Fail

The passive “show up and hope” mindset

Mistaking presence for impact

Why follow-ups rarely convert into revenue

Events as a Go-to-Market Engine

How events drive pipeline, partnerships, and trust

When events make sense — and when they don’t

Attending vs sponsoring vs hosting

Pre-Event Domination

How to prepare weeks before the event

Identifying the right attendees, speakers, and side events

Crafting a compelling reason for someone to meet you

In-Event Execution

How to run focused, intentional conversations

What to stop doing at events

Creating moments people remember

Post-Event Follow-Through

Turning conversations into meetings and revenue

Why most follow-ups fail

How to stand out after the event ends

Real Examples & Tactical Playbooks

Creative plays that break through the noise

Messaging, hooks, and positioning that work

What founders and sales teams can apply immediately

Who This Episode Is For

✔ Startup founders (early to mid-stage)

✔ CROs, VP Sales, and revenue leaders

✔ GTM & demand gen teams

✔ Anyone investing time or budget into events and expecting real ROI

What You’ll Walk Away With

✅ A new way of thinking about events

✅ The biggest mistakes to avoid

✅ Practical ideas to apply before your next conference

✅ A clear path to turning face-to-face moments into closed deals

Events aren’t dead.

Bad event strategy is.

If you want events to drive real revenue, start here.

Connect with Itai https://www.linkedin.com/in/itaimanor/

Follow Richard https://www.linkedin.com/in/richwash/

#B2BSales #EventMarketing #RevenueGrowth #GoToMarket #StartupGrowth #WMYT #TickTalent

In this Best Bits episode, Richard Washington shares the hiring framework that separates average hires from true revenue multipliers.

Full length episode on Do Hard Things with Gabe Lullo here: https://youtu.be/N2guh2HeO6c?si=Xyp5RMWFpLISYFoL

If you’re a founder, CRO, or sales leader scaling from early traction to repeatable growth, hiring the wrong sales talent can stall momentum, drain cash, and damage culture. This episode breaks down how to build a team that actually scales impact.

🚀 In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why hiring based on CVs and past quotas leads to costly mistakes

• The difference between adders, subtractors, and multipliers

• The CORE traits every high-impact hire must have

• How to identify ownership, resourcefulness, and execution in interviews

• Why “industry experience” can be a hiring trap

• How to build a collaborative culture that drives performance

• What founders must do to avoid momentum-killing hires

Richard explains how the best teams hire builders, not passengers — people who create leverage, take ownership, and accelerate growth.

If you’re scaling a startup, building a revenue team, or tired of hires that look great on paper but fail in reality, this is essential listening.

🎧 Watch the full episode here: [link]

📩 Subscribe for weekly leadership & revenue insights: [link]

About Richard Washington

Richard is a global revenue leader and founder helping early-stage tech companies scale from $1M to $25M by hiring entrepreneurial go-to-market talent that multiplies impact.

#SalesLeadership #StartupHiring #RevenueGrowth #SalesHiring #ScalingStartups #B2BSales #GoToMarket #Founders #RevenueOperations #Leadership

Here’s a question most companies get wrong: Who really owns growth in a scaling company?

Sales says, “We close it.”

Marketing says, “We generate it.”

Customer Success says, “We expand and retain it.”

They’re all right.

And that’s exactly the problem.

In this episode of What Makes You Tick, we host a live debate between senior revenue leaders across Sales, Marketing and Customer Success to answer one big question:

👉 Who actually owns growth — and why do most companies treat it like an individual sport?

Inside this conversation, we unpack:

Why growth breaks down in the handoffs between teams

Revenue ownership vs growth ownership

The tension between pipeline creation and pipeline conversion

Why Customer Success is still underestimated as a growth engine

What true GTM alignment actually looks like

The difference between individual performance and system performance

The highest leverage move founders can make to accelerate growth

If you’re scaling from $10M–$200M ARR, this conversation will feel very familiar.

Growth doesn’t live inside departments.

It lives in the system.

🎙️ Meet the Guests

Eric Hachmer

https://www.linkedin.com/in/erichachmer/

Fractional CRO and revenue strategist. Eric works with scaling B2B companies to build predictable revenue engines, align GTM teams, and turn strategy into execution. He specialises in enterprise sales leadership, revenue architecture, and building accountable growth systems.

Neil Gray

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilsgray/

Fractional CMO and B2B growth operator. Neil partners with founders and leadership teams to sharpen ICP clarity, drive demand generation, and build marketing engines that support sustainable revenue growth — not vanity metrics.

Andrea Bumstead

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreabumstead/

Fractional CCO and Customer Success leader. Andrea helps scaling SaaS companies turn retention, expansion, and customer experience into competitive advantage. She focuses on aligning CS to revenue outcomes and long-term customer value.

🎙️ About the Host – Richard Washington

Richard Washington is co-host of Making Revenue Tick, GTM recruiter, and trusted advisor to B2B SaaS companies scaling from $0M to $250M+ ARR.

He helps founders build revenue teams that actually perform — with strategy, talent, and execution that scales.

🔗 Follow Richard on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/richwash/

📩 Read his newsletter Growth Magnet → https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7083793079794556928

If you’re a Founder, CRO, CMO, VP Sales, Head of CS, or revenue leader trying to build a high-performing GTM system — this episode is for you.

Growth isn’t an individual sport.

It’s a relay race.

And if you’re arguing about who owns it… you might already have a gap.

Subscribe for more conversations on revenue leadership, hiring multipliers, GTM alignment, and building self-managing growth systems.

“What if your sales team only did the 1% of work that truly matters?”

Watch the full episode now https://youtu.be/pz8066MnkZo?si=9-a2m24B2LspKNYW

In this high-impact masterclass segment, James Smith (SVP EMEA at ThoughtSpot) breaks down the exact framework he’s using to redesign his sales process with AI — not for 10% efficiency gains… but for 10X productivity.

This isn’t about writing better emails with ChatGPT.

It’s about rebuilding your sales engine from first principles.

If you’re a founder, CRO, VP Sales, or scaling SaaS leader wondering:

Why reps only spend ~20% of time selling

Where AI actually fits in GTM

How to build agents without being technical

How to unlock real leverage instead of hiring more reps

This is your blueprint.

🚨 The Big Shift

Most teams use AI to make what they already do slightly faster.

James asks a different question:

“What if we mapped every task our reps do… and removed or automated the 99% that isn’t customer-facing?”

From there, he:

Lists every sales task across the process

Identifies manual, non-selling friction

Designs AI agents to remove it

Prioritises by impact vs. ease

Reimagines the rep’s role around high-value execution

This is how you move from incremental gains… to structural advantage.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

Why 10X productivity is about stacked multipliers (not one lever)

How to reverse-engineer your sales process with an AI lens

Why “efficiency gains” are the wrong goal

How non-technical leaders can build AI agents today

The difference between automation and true leverage

How AI-native teams reclaim massive selling time

Why the future rep spends dramatically more time with customers

🔥 Soundbites That Hit

“AI removes the value of 99% of what we do — and 100Xs the 1% that’s left.”

“If reps only did customer execution, productivity would step change.”

“10X isn’t one lever — it’s 3X here, 5X there, 2X somewhere else.”

🎙️ About the Guest – James Smith

James Smith is the SVP EMEA at ThoughtSpot, where he’s pioneering how AI can transform GTM productivity at scale.

With senior leadership experience at Tableau and Salesforce, James is known for challenging conventional thinking, building elite teams, and applying first-principles design to revenue growth.

At ThoughtSpot, he’s leading a 10X mindset shift — redesigning sales workflows, empowering reps with AI agents, and building human-centric, high-leverage systems.

🔗 Connect with James on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-smith-15627941/

🎙️ About the Host – Richard Washington

Richard Washington is co-host of Making Revenue Tick, GTM recruiter, and trusted advisor to B2B SaaS companies scaling from $0M to $250M+ ARR.

He helps founders build revenue teams that actually perform — with strategy, talent, and execution that scales.

🔗 Follow Richard on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/richwash/

📩 Read his newsletter Growth Magnet → https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7083793079794556928

If this sparked ideas for your own AI journey, drop a comment.

If you want the full conversation — including hiring, leadership, and 10X mindset — watch the complete episode on the channel.

Subscribe for more masterclass-level conversations with the people redefining modern revenue.

Hiring great SDRs and expecting them to perform without the right data, tools, or structure is like putting a Ferrari on cobbled streets, then blaming the car when it can’t go fast.

In this episode of Making Revenue Tick, Richard Washington sits down with Matt Caloras, enterprise SDR leader and NYC chapter lead for SDR Leaders of the USA, to unpack what actually separates high-performing SDR teams from the ones that burn out, miss targets, and churn talent.

This conversation isn’t about hustle, call volume, or working harder.

It’s about:

Building the right roads for your reps to succeed

Why bad data breaks even the best SDRs

How signal-based prospecting is replacing brute-force outbound

What team-based prospecting (AE + SDR pods) looks like in practice

How modern SDR orgs use data, intent, and timing to win

And where AI genuinely helps — and where it doesn’t

If you’re a sales or revenue leader scaling pipeline in today’s market, this episode will challenge some uncomfortable assumptions about SDR performance, enablement, and leadership accountability.

The takeaway is simple:

Great reps don’t fail. Bad systems do.

What you’ll learn in this episode

What “data-driven SDR” really means in modern sales teams

How top SDR orgs use signals and intent to prioritise accounts

Why brute-force outbound no longer works at scale

How to structure alignment between SDRs and AEs in enterprise sales

Why SDR burnout is often a leadership and infrastructure issue

The realistic future of SDR in an AI-enabled world

Who this episode is for

SDR Managers and Directors

Heads of Sales & Revenue

RevOps and GTM leaders

Founders moving beyond founder-led sales

Anyone responsible for pipeline quality, not just activity

About the guest

Matt Caloras is an enterprise SDR leader with experience scaling global SDR teams and building modern outbound engines inside complex organisations. He also leads the New York City chapter of SDR Leaders of the USA, supporting SDR leaders through mentorship, community, and shared best practices.

Join the conversation

If your SDR team is underperforming, ask yourself:

Are you asking for Ferrari results on cobbled streets?

What’s the biggest constraint in your SDR org right now?

Funnel 26’ Austin 3/5! go to thefunnelconference.com

Connect with Matt Caloras on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-caloras11/

Find your local SDR Leaders Chapter: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sdr-leaders-of-usa/

👤 About Richard Washington

Richard Washington helps founders and boards build high-performing GTM leadership teams through Tick Talent, specialising in early-stage and scaling B2B startups. He hosts What Makes You Tick?, a podcast on leadership, growth, and the decisions that shape companies. Find out more.

https://www.tick-talent.com/

Follow Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richwash/

Read Growth Magnet:

https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7083793079794556928

#sdr #salespipeline #salesdevelopment #saleshiring #salesleadership #saas #wmyt #ticktalent

Are you hiring Multipliers, or Dividers and Subtractors? Take the scorecard now: https://www.multiplierscorecard.com/

Most companies are trying to fix their hiring problems by adding more AI.

More automation.

More screening.

More tools.

And it’s making recruitment worse, not better.

In this episode, Richard Washington joins Heath Barnett on the Maxed Out podcast to unpack why AI is being applied to hiring in completely the wrong way — and how leaders should actually be thinking about talent, behaviour, and scale in an AI-driven world.

This isn’t an anti-AI conversation.

It’s a pro-leadership one.

We explore why:

AI is amplifying bad hiring decisions, not fixing them

Most recruitment failures come from behavioural misalignment, not lack of skill

“A Players” is a lazy label that hides real risk

Culture killers often look like top performers on paper

Multipliers scale teams — dividers quietly destroy them

Richard breaks down the Multiplier framework, explaining how high-growth companies should hire for collaboration, ownership, resourcefulness, and execution — and why these traits matter far more than CVs, years of experience, or AI-driven scoring systems.

If you’re a founder, revenue leader, or hiring manager:

frustrated by mis-hires

overwhelmed by AI hiring tools

or struggling to scale GTM teams without damaging culture

this episode will challenge how you think about recruitment — and probably save you from your next expensive mistake.

🔍 Topics Covered

AI in recruitment: what’s broken and why

Why automation doesn’t fix poor hiring strategy

Multipliers vs Adders, Subtractors, and Dividers

Behavioural hiring vs resume-based hiring

Leadership, culture, and scaling GTM teams

Why most companies misapply AI in talent acquisition

🎙️ Guest & Host

Richard Washington – Founder, Tick Talent

Heath Barnett – VP Revenue at Mixmax, Host of Maxed Out

💡 Key Insight

AI doesn’t replace judgment.

It magnifies it.

If your hiring strategy is weak, AI will scale the damage.

#hiring #saassales #revenuegrowth #saleshiring #wmyt #ticktalent