Inside The Pipeline: B2B Sales and GTM

Episod

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  18. Conor Hyland, RVP GTM EMEA at ComplyAdvantage - Why High-Performance Sales Teams Are Built on Trust 18.08.2026 39min

  Conor Hyland is RVP GTM EMEA at ComplyAdvantage, the AI company helping enterprises fight financial crime. He started his career selling on the shop floor at Ted Baker, worked across the Middle East, then moved into SaaS before joining GoCardless as an Enterprise Account Executive and progressing into sales leadership. He later joined ComplyAdvantage to help build its sales-led growth motion, hire the team and bring more process and rigor to how the business goes after larger accounts. Conor breaks down why the old idea of a high-performance sales culture, built on pressure, micromanagement and fear, gets performance wrong. For him, the foundation is trust: clear standards, psychological safety, shared goals and a team that is willing to challenge each other because everyone knows it is in service of getting better. He also explains the ICE framework he uses when hiring, prioritising intelligence, character, coachability and entrepreneurship over simply choosing the candidate with the most experience, and why "trajectory beats position" when assessing talent. He also gets into why ComplyAdvantage still invests heavily in cold calling despite the rise of automated outbound, how his team uses data to identify exactly where a rep's conversion is breaking down before coaching them, and why enterprise sellers need to arrive at an account with a genuine point of view before they ever make contact. Outside of sales, Conor talks about reading roughly a book a week for several years, learning to become more vulnerable as a leader, and how becoming a father changed his definition of hard work from always being available to being deliberate with his time. If you're building a sales team, hiring for potential rather than pedigree, trying to create a high-performance culture without falling back on pressure and micromanagement, or figuring out what great enterprise sales leadership looks like today, this one's worth your time.
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  17. Will Tomlins, RVP of Mid-Market & Enterprise at Wiz - Why "Pain and Champion" Still Wins Enterprise Sales 12.08.2026 33min

  Will Tomlins is Regional Vice President of Mid-Market and Enterprise Sales at Wiz, the cloud security platform Google acquired for roughly $32 billion in the its largest acquisition to date. He spent almost 11 years at Canon, then three years at AWS leading commercial and financial services sales teams. He joined Wiz in June 2025, weeks after the Google deal was announced, and was still there nine months later when it actually closed. Will breaks down why "pain and champion" remain the two things every deal lives or dies on, even inside a MEDDPICC, playbook-driven org like Wiz, and why deals that tick every box on paper still die without the EQ to find them. He talks about how buyer conversations have shifted from passive infrastructure security to visibility and governance as Wiz pushes into AI security, tracking developers who deploy code and adopt AI tools without anyone signing off. He also explains "clock speed," his own hiring bar for how fast someone learns something and puts it into practice the same day, over people who just show up with big numbers on their resume. He also gets into why he still sits in on economic-buyer meetings and no-go conversations as an RVP instead of stepping back, the two Wiz values, "win together" and "lead by example," that actually show up inside deals rather than on a slide, and the risk balance between company and employee he thinks is the real ingredient behind reps doing unbelievable things. If you're leading enterprise sales through long, multi-stakeholder cycles, trying to figure out what AI is actually doing to cybersecurity buying, or thinking about what's left for sales leaders to teach once the process is automated, this one's worth your time.
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  16. Jay Mirpuri, GTM Lead at Light - From a Failed AI Startup to Building an Outbound Sales Engine, Why Cold Calling Still Wins in B2B Sales 06.08.2026 29min

  Jay Mirpuri leads GTM at Light, an AI native finance platform, and he built its cold calling program from nothing into a team that books 30 to 35 meetings a week. Before that, his first startup failed. He built Alchemy, an AI marketing agency, moved to London to launch it, and struggled without local connections or a clear customer profile. So he cold messaged Jonathan Sanders, founder of Light, using a three pronged pitch built on his own founder story and a shared CFA Level 1. It worked, and he became Light's first sales hire. Light replaces the patchwork of Xero instances and 12 month NetSuite rollouts that scaling companies get stuck with, closing a $13M seed from Atomico and a $30M Series A in September 2025 out of its Copenhagen HQ. Jay breaks down why cold calling still beats email in B2B sales when most competitors have given up on it, how his eight BDRs earn the right to pitch inside the first ten seconds, and the thought leadership events that built his earliest pipeline. He also gets into why he changed his mind on hiring technical BDRs, how Light's Astra system catches financial anomalies without the hallucination risk of generative AI, and the story of Keyshot, a client that scaled from $5M to $30M ARR with one CFO and a part time bookkeeper. If you are building an outbound sales team from zero, wondering whether cold calling still works, or curious where AI in finance is heading, this one is worth your time.
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  15. Callum Matthews-Mackay, Head of Sales at Onetrace - Selling Compliance Software to Fire Safety's Hardest-to-Reach Buyers 28.07.2026 37min

  Callum Matthews-Mackay leads sales at Onetrace, the compliance software fire protection subcontractors use to prove installations were done right, turning what used to be a paperwork scramble into a one click report. Before Onetrace, he spent over a decade selling into industries nobody else wanted to touch: corporate partnerships at Macmillan Cancer Support (Nestlé, Morrisons, a four year Pizza Express deal, over £1m in new business), the £700bn interior design trade at eporta, and hospitality partnerships with Best Western, Macdonald Hotels and Searcy's at Bridebook. In this episode, Callum breaks down what it actually takes to build pipeline into an audience that's on scaffolding, not checking inboxes. He gets into why cold email dies in construction, how regulation like the Building Safety Act turns into a genuine sales trigger, and what it means to earn trust when your software is tied to life safety. He's candid about what hasn't worked, not just what has, and talks through building a sales team from scratch in a market this hard to sell into. We also get into where AI is actually pulling its weight in his go to market motion versus where it's just noise, and the one lesson from Bridebook that's reshaped how he leads a team today. If you're selling into trade, construction or any hard to reach frontline audience, this one's worth your time.
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  14. Max Greenbury, Startup GTM at OpenAI - Inside OpenAI's Sales Playbook 22.07.2026 27min

  Max Greenbury is part of OpenAI's go-to-market team, working the startup side with around 14 later-stage accounts from the UK to Israel and Lithuania. He didn't get there in a completely straight line (although it was quite straight): three years running his own subscription platform for secondhand clothing came first, three years on AWS's startup team, then Google selling into regulated enterprises. In this episode, Max opens up how OpenAI actually sells and why enterprise and startup deals are almost different jobs. Enterprise sales is a stakeholder maze, won by surfacing "unrealized pain" the buyer hasn't named yet. Startups are the opposite: founders are already pushing the models past their limits, so the job becomes optimizing for latency and cost, then routing what's missing straight back to OpenAI's research team. Max also breaks down OpenAI's AI-first culture, where tools like Codex handle data pulls and CRM updates before a human touches them, and why Generative Engine Optimization, showing up as the answer ChatGPT gives when someone asks for a recommendation, is becoming a real go-to-market priority. Five years out, Max thinks AI takes over the admin grind of selling. What it won't replace, he argues, is trust. If you sell into startups or enterprise, or you're figuring out where GEO fits your own GTM strategy, this one's for you.
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  13. Nick Taylor, Head of Customer Success at Granola - From Onfido to Synthesia, Building AI's Central Cortex for Business Context 08.07.2026 36min

  Nick Taylor has spent his career inside three of London's most important AI and fintech companies. He worked with high-growth neobanks like Monzo and Revolut during his time at Onfido, watching the company pivot from background checks into an identity verification leader. He then joined Synthesia through its hyper-growth phase, helping scale the team from 40 people to over 600 as the AI video platform went global. Now he leads customer success at Granola, the AI notetaker that's quickly becoming something bigger. In this episode, Nick explains why he sees customer success as a flexible role built around one goal: getting clients to value as fast as possible so renewals take care of themselves. He talks about Granola's real ambition, building a "central cortex" for business context by capturing what actually gets decided in internal and external meetings, and why LLMs only get useful once they're fed an organisation's specific context. He also shares his "landlord" analogy for handling unhappy customers: listening for the human frustration behind a technical complaint before jumping to a fix. Nick also gets into why he's changed his mind about needing deep technical expertise to build good products. In an AI-driven world, he argues, having more ideas matters more than having more code. If you're thinking about customer success, AI-native tools, or what it takes to scale through hyper-growth, this one's worth your time.
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  12. Sacha Vauclin, GTM at Scarlet - From BeReal's US Growth to Certifying AI Medical Devices 02.07.2026 42min

  Sacha Vauclin cold DM'd the founder of BeReal and talked his way into the French social app in its earliest days. He then ran the "underground" playbook that cracked the US market, campus ambassadors and frat party sponsorships, until the product hit product-market fit. From there he moved to London for Vauban, the platform that digitalised SPV creation and let angels back companies like SpaceX and Revolut with smaller tickets, before it was acquired by Carta. Now he's in a go-to-market role at Scarlet, a health tech company that certifies software and AI-based medical devices. In this episode Sacha explains why traditional notified bodies, some over a century old, are built to certify surgical gloves rather than AI that ships updates every week, and how Scarlet uses expert teams and technology to run fast, software-focused reviews instead. He makes the case that certified ambient scribes could claw back the 40% of a doctor's day lost to admin. He also shares the through-line behind every move: deep curiosity, and a habit of interviewing not just power users but the people who quit the product. If you care about GTM in regulated markets, or building things that matter, this one's worth your time.
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  11. Alex Padgette, EMEA Partnerships at Vanta - Shadow AI Is the New GDPR, Compliance Automation and Building Partnerships That Actually Deliver 17.06.2026 31min

  Shadow AI is already inside your company. Employees are plugging proprietary data into tools like ChatGPT without authorisation and most businesses have no visibility into it. Alex Padgette has seen this movie before. She was at OneTrust when GDPR landed and forced every company in Europe to take data privacy seriously. Now at Vanta, which just hit $300M ARR, she thinks AI governance is about to do the same thing. In this episode of Inside the Pipeline, Tris Tusa sits down with Alex Padgette, EMEA Partnerships at Vanta, to talk about what compliance automation actually looks like at scale, why the question has shifted from "Are we secure?" to "How are we governing our AI tools?", and what it means to be at the centre of that transition twice in a career. They also get into partnerships. Alex's take is that strategic alignment is overrated. What matters is measurable KPIs, tangible results, and having a real internal champion at the partner organisation. She explains how Vanta built its partner ecosystem across AWS and beyond, and what makes EMEA genuinely different from the US market when you're trying to scale internationally. And she talks about starting as an SDR. Why she thinks the hunting skills you build early are the foundation everything else sits on, and why she'd make the same choice again. If your business is using AI tools, thinking about SOC 2, or building a partnership motion in EMEA, this conversation has something for you.
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  10. Mitchell Powers, VP Commercial at Pleo - Scaling Go-to-Market Teams Across Fintech, from GoCardless to Pleo 10.06.2026 33min

  Mitchell Powers has spent the last decade building go-to-market teams inside some of fintech's most important companies. He started out coaching rowing at Oxford and trading physical commodities like coal and biofuels, then broke into tech sales by building the B2B function from scratch at Pact Coffee. At GoCardless he was the first head of SMB sales, ran the UK market top to bottom, and helped drive the company's move into enterprise, contributing around £100M in contract value. After leading enterprise and open banking sales at Trustly, he's now VP of Commercial at Pleo, running a 120-person team across account executives, SDRs, account management and partnerships. In this episode Mitchell breaks down how he scales sales teams as they grow, the "Why Now, Why Anything, Why Us" framework he's used to anchor enterprise deals at both GoCardless and Pleo, how he hires for character and resilience over polish, and where AI actually helps in sales versus where over-relying on it gets in the way. A practical look at what it takes to build and lead go-to-market teams in financial technology, and how the enterprise transition stretches every part of a business.
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  9. Sophia Arora, Founding Growth at Jack & Jill - McKinsey to AI Startup, Building a Consumer Product That's Coming for LinkedIn 03.06.2026 32min

  Sophia Arora did what most people from a consulting background talk about but never do. She left McKinsey, moved to New York for Oddity Tech, then came back to London and joined Jack & Jill as their Founding Growth hire - a seed-stage AI startup building an AI career agent for the next generation of workers. In this episode, Sophia talks about what it actually looks like to go from structured corporate environments into the chaos of an early-stage startup. She gets into how Jack & Jill is trying to flip the job search model on its head, why most people are making huge career decisions with almost no real visibility into the market, and what it takes to grow a consumer product when your competitor is basically LinkedIn. We also get into the harder stuff - what the job search felt like when she was doing it herself, the burnout, the compromises you nearly make, and why the best time to look for a job is when you don't need one. If you're thinking about making a career move, building a consumer brand from scratch, or just curious about what early-stage growth actually looks like, this one's worth your time.
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  8. Will Caplan, Co-Founder of Tano - Using AI to Flip the Influencer Marketing Model 29.04.2026 34min

  Will Caplan is the co-founder of Tano, an AI-native influencer agency that's automating everything agencies used to charge a fortune for - sourcing, contracts, payments, and rights management, end to end. In this episode, Will talks about how Tano landed some of the fastest-growing companies in tech as early customers (e.g. Lovable), why the traditional influencer model is broken and how he's using AI to build something that actually delivers real brand evangelism rather than just paid placements. If you're thinking about influencer marketing or just want to understand where the whole space is heading, this one's worth your time.
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  7. AJ Tennant, Founder at Tenacity Capital - From Building Slack's Sales Org to Scaling Glean to $100M ARR 11.03.2026 52min

  AJ Tennant was one of Facebook's early employees, built Slack's sales organisation from the ground up, and helped scale Glean to $100M ARR before it became one of the most talked-about AI companies around. Now he's running his own fund at Tenacity Capital, backing the next wave of B2B businesses. In this episode, AJ breaks down what the early days at Facebook actually looked like, how he thinks about building a sales org from scratch, and the go-to-market lessons from Slack that rarely get talked about. He also gets into his investing philosophy: what he looks for in a business, what makes a go-to-market motion actually defensible, and how he thinks about enterprise sales from the investor's chair. If you're building, scaling, or investing in SaaS, this one's worth your full attention.
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  6. Holly Allen, Founding AE at FullEnrich - Cold Calling, Contact Data, How To Get 50,000 Followers on LinkedIn 25.02.2026 32min

  Six months before this conversation, Holly Allen was ready to quit sales entirely. Today, she's the Founding Account Executive for UK&I at FullEnrich, a platform that helps sales, RevOps, and marketing teams enrich emails and mobile numbers through waterfall enrichment across 15+ data sources, and she's closing the biggest deals of her career. In this episode, Tristan and Holly get into what actually turned things around: the mindset shifts, the self-belief, and the unglamorous, practical stuff that moved the needle. They talk cold calling, growing a LinkedIn following and turning it into pipeline, why your data provider might be quietly killing your connect rates, and how Holly went from struggling to build pipeline to consistently hitting call-to-connect rates most sales teams only dream about. If you're in sales and wondering how to build a personal brand that actually helps you hit target, this one's for you.
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  5. Georgie Candy, Investor at PROfounders Capital - From Insurtech Lawyer at Allen & Overy to an Early Harvey AI Pilot That Led Her Into Venture 04.02.2026 14min

  Georgie Candy trained as a lawyer at Allen & Overy, working insurtech deals, before an early pilot of Harvey AI changed her mind about where she wanted to spend her career. She joined PROfounders Capital in 2024 and now invests in the kind of AI and legaltech companies she used to work alongside as outside counsel. In this episode, Georgie talks through what that Harvey AI pilot actually looked like from inside a law firm, why it pushed her toward venture rather than just toward using more AI tools, and what she's watching for in legaltech and AI in law right now. If you're curious about how AI is changing legal work from the inside, or how a lawyer ends up on the other side of the table as an investor, this one's worth your time.
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  4. Oscar Lanzendorf, GTM at ElevenLabs - Inside ElevenLabs' Run from Zero to $300M ARR and a $6.6BN Voice AI Valuation 07.01.2026 39min

  ElevenLabs went from zero to $300M ARR in three years and is now valued at $6.6BN, and Oscar Lanzendorf is inside the go-to-market team making that happen. Before ElevenLabs, he worked at Nico Rosberg Ventures, and he joined the voice AI company just under a year ago as it moved into hyper-growth. In this episode, Oscar talks through what hyper-growth actually looks like from the inside, how brutal ElevenLabs' hiring process is and why it's built that way, and what go-to-market in AI looks like heading into 2026. He's open about what's changed in how the team sells now versus a year ago, and where the playbook is still being written in real time. If you're building or selling inside a fast-scaling AI company, or just want to understand how a 400-person team keeps pace with $300M in ARR, this one's worth your time.
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  3. Christopher Mjelde, Kenobi Co-Founder - Building an AI Website Personalisation Tool After Two Years in Y Combinator Stealth Mode 19.12.2025 39min

  Christopher Mjelde spent two years building Kenobi in stealth mode after going through Y Combinator, and this episode lands right as the product finally comes out of hiding. Kenobi automatically personalises a website for every visitor based on who they are, no manual segmentation required. In this episode, Chris talks through what changed in his thinking after Y Combinator, why he chose to stay quiet on the build for so long, and what it actually took to launch website personalisation for the mass market rather than just enterprise. He also gets into the harder parts of running a company that don't show up in the pitch deck: getting rejected, pivoting the product, and letting people go. If you're thinking about building in stealth, pivoting a product that isn't working, or want to see where AI-driven web personalisation is heading, this one's worth your time.
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  2. Amelia Miller, Ivee Co-Founder - From Dragons' Den to Reskilling the Workforce for AI 05.12.2025 33min

  Amelia Miller walked onto Dragons' Den with her co-founder and sister, Lydia, and walked off with an investment from Steven Bartlett. What happened in the weeks after wasn't quite what she expected, and that's most of what this episode is actually about. Amelia and Lydia are the co-founders of Ivee, a company reskilling a crucial part of the workforce for an AI-driven job market. In this episode, Amelia breaks down how she used her Dragons' Den moment to grow her LinkedIn following and turn attention into real pipeline for Ivee, not just views. She also gets into what changed internally once the cameras stopped rolling and the offer had to actually close. If you're building a consumer brand off the back of a TV moment, or thinking about how AI is reshaping entry-level and mid-career jobs, this one's worth your time.
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  1. Will Bennett, Investor at Seedcamp - From Operator at $5bn Fuse Energy to Backing Revolut and Synthesia's Earliest Rounds 26.11.2025 32min

  Our first guest is Will Bennett from Seedcamp. Will’s background is rare. He was an operator at Fuse Energy ($5bn valuation), and now he’s investing at Seedcamp. The dual perspective of having been a builder and a backer gives him a lens most people don’t have. Seedcamp was an early backer of global fintech company Revolut, as well as the UK’s #1 AI company, Synthesia, so Will is perfectly placed for a perspective on the underlying trends in venture capital. We talked about where he sees growth right now (interesting conversations on deep tech), what patterns are consistent in successful founders and honestly, some stuff that went completely off on a tangent, in a good way. Enjoy!