In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay sits down with Maximilian Gartner, Head of Go-To-Market at Brightwave, to explore how GTM leaders can balance sustainable growth with predictable revenue, while staying rooted in authentic, founder-led perspectives.
Max shares his journey from inside sales “boiler rooms” to leading GTM teams at high-growth companies, and how lessons from cold-calling, enterprise deal cycles, and sales leadership shaped his philosophy on customer-first GTM.
They dive deep into:
- Why founder-led POVs are powerful in early stage, and how they must evolve as companies scale.
- The critical difference between predictable and sustainable revenue, and why ignoring sustainability leads to churn.
- Lessons from inside sales: why clarity and credibility in the first 10 seconds of a call are everything.
- A Brightwave GTM pivot that front-loaded product experience, shortened feedback loops, and tripled adoption.
- Why “knowing your customer” (KYC) at every level: user, manager, executive, is the ultimate GTM advantage.
- How doubt and imposter syndrome can be reframed as signals of growth.
If you’re leading sales, marketing, CS, or product, or simply curious about how GTM leaders scale customer-first strategies, this episode is packed with tactical insights and leadership lessons.
Connect with Max Gartner on LinkedIn
Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn
Listen To The Episode:
From Cold Calls to Customer-First GTM: Max Gartner’s Playbook to Scaling Revenue
The first and opening question, the prompt for you: how do you view and define go-to-market?
Million-dollar question,
Yep.
So I define go-to-market as operationalizing a founder-led point of view and product experience into:
Wildly successful customers.
Sustainable and predictable revenue.
Cool, I like all of those things you said,founder-led, you said, point of view, yeah, and then sustainable and predictable revenue. We can go in multiple directions just on those few keywords. So let’s start with the first point you mentioned: founder-led and point of view. Would you have changed that if your experience was more in more mature, larger companies?
Potentially. I think, take a step back. What I don’t want to communicate is that a point of view is set in time at the beginning of time, and it’s crystallized and frozen, and everybody then needs to fall behind and execute that moving forward. I view a point of view as, yes, it is sort of an original, unique insight at a certain point in time, but over time, it evolves as it makes contact with the market and with reality. It’s constantly being sharpened, as I like to say.
So I do think the context that I bring to bear is more of a kind of early-stage startup point of view. So yeah, I think that shifts a bit when you’re working at a larger organization. But I think why I use the word “founder” is because the founder is the one who’s closest to that original, unique insight that kind of bottled energy, if you will.
And so it doesn’t have to necessarily be the founder, but in my experience, what I always say: no one is a more effective evangelist than the founder, right? Nope. No one can just articulate but embody that point of view, that insight. And so that could be the founder. It could be other folks in the organization as well, but that’s just been my experience.
No, spot on. In fact, it aligns a lot with my belief, and it’s been almost validated several times over the last few years for me, which is because I’ve been having these conversations with early-stage founders like YC founders and so on.
Clearly, once a startup is conceived, it’s there in the founder’s mind. He or she and that team have a point of view and a belief in why they wanted to go down this path, right? The point of view around a market situation, why the existing solutions are not good enough.
It all starts with that, and then how their product or service ties to elevating the game for their buyers and users. Now, somewhere downstream, as the startup grows 500k, 1 million revenue, 10, 50, 100, but beyond 100 million ARR, and as we scale, as a company scales, somehow that whole focus on having a point of view gets diluted.
That’s what we have seen. It’s possible, likely, that now founders, for obvious reasons, are getting more hands-off from the go-to-market motion. But I know that the other founders still love to be in touch with their customers and market, but they’re hands-off from the go-to-market motion. And the go-to-market teams are the ones who are taking the message, all the tactics, the strategy to the market. Somehow, that focus on point of view emphasis is diluted, if you will.
I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that happen at smaller companies, and I’m sure you have as well. Where, look, you can’t replicate that. But I’m not the founder of Brightwave, right? I can translate and operationalize that point of view and embody it to the best of my ability, but there really is only one original source.
And so to the degree that you can infuse that in everything from message to culture to customer interaction, to really everything, you know, how you build your entire go-to-market system, I think you become much more effective, much more customer forward, and a much more dynamic organization.
As you know, people can smell BS from a million miles away when there isn’t that kind of authentic point of view that’s being brought to the table. They can smell when it’s just this kind of generic, something I could have taken out of ChatGPT or Claude.
Yeah, for sure. All right, we have spent enough time on the point of view. But there’s another thing that actually caught my attention, which is the predictable and scalable revenue.
Yes.
So why don’t you spend some more time on that? I mean, that’s super critical, especially in the early stage and even as you scale, for sure. So, I would love to get your thoughts on that.
Predictable, of course. Look, everybody wants predictable revenue. We need predictability, we have to report to boards, we have to grow the business, and we have to understand forecasting. That’s sort of everybody knows, everybody accepts that. That’s not controversial.
But I think sometimes what’s lost is the first part of that: sustainable. If your entire focus is just “as much revenue as soon as possible,” what might happen over time is you find leaky buckets, right?
So let’s say you sell a bunch of features that aren’t fully baked to customers, right, and they begin to churn. Or you create friction with your buyers as existing customers, and then that prevents you from growing faster than you could within those customer bases.
Or you throw a bunch of salespeople at the problem, and maybe you get a revenue bump, but then you get massive attrition, right? And it’s like, I’ve seen over the course of my career, and I’m very focused on sustainability being absolutely essential to that predictable revenue model as well.
Yeah, that actually aligns with something that I’m pushing and emphasizing with many of my clients as well, which is to let me take a step back. A lot of times when you talk about go-to-market motion, the majority of the teams focus on new logo and acquisition, versus: how about your existing customer base and expansion, and referral advocacy?
So you mentioned churn over there, which was music to my ears. So that’s the message that I’m pushing over to my market and my customers, which is yes, it’s great that you have your go-to-market teams focus on the new logo acquisition, but do not lose sight of your existing customer base.
100%. And look, new logos will always be the lifeblood of a business. But beyond that, how much time is your go-to-market team spending using all these new tools that we have access to, to understand how our customers are actually using the tool? Like looking at logs of actions they’re taking, frustration points that they’re hitting.
To the degree that you can really understand that, it changes everything. And by the way, you know, if you look at the most successful businesses that are hyper-scalers, largely that’s off the back of, in the B2B space, massive land-and-expand motions.
Yeah!
It’s getting in the door quickly. But then, because of the virality with the product, because you understand the customer so well, and you’ve iterated, and you continue to iterate so fast, you’re able to retain and expand customers at a massive scale.
So I’m a huge fan of, for example, paid power users, however you want to define power users, as a critical leading indicator of the health of our go-to-market motion system in general.
Excellent. That’s a great point that you called out over there. So let’s switch gears. Let’s take a step back, bigger picture, wider time horizon. Why don’t you walk our listeners through your career journey and what led you to what you’re doing today?
Yeah, for sure. So I’ve been fortunate to have been in a kind of B2B, VC-backed space for over a decade now. I started back in 2014, have worked at numerous Series B companies. I’ve worked at Series A, I’ve worked at the seed stage, and been a part of a couple of exits in the nine figures, one 10-figure exit, which is really exciting.
And you know, along the journey, I would say the through line has been taking on more interesting, larger upside opportunities. More risk, obviously, kind of with that. But yeah, finding challenges that whether it’s a more complex product, a more dynamic space, a bigger role and responsibility, that’s always been the driving force for me.
There have been numerous times in my career where I had success and could have chilled it out and coasted for a bit, but there was something in me that was just really hungry for that next growth opportunity. And I’d just sort of throw myself into these situations where I had no other choice but to figure it out, and it’s worked for me so far.
Yeah, very cool. I’m actually looking at your LinkedIn, and just to be fully transparent and also to show the vulnerable side of each of us, and to amplify that, so you started as a legal intern. So curious, moved away from the legal world into sales?
Yeah, that’s a good question. So in college, I studied politics, philosophy, economics, and law, kind of like a fusion degree. So my dad’s a lawyer. I thought that law was the career track for me.
I don’t like school. I don’t enjoy that model. I wanted something that was a bit more dynamic from the get-go, and so I stumbled into sales, as frankly most people do. But yeah, it’s been a journey so far.
Yeah. And then your first sales job was as a senior or inside sales rep at Main Street Hub. So talk to us about how you like it, what you enjoyed about sales and being in the inside sales world?
Yeah, the description I always like to use is, you know, everybody has obviously seen the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, right? It was like that, except for, like, nobody was making that money, obviously.
But no, it was just an environment where you picture like an old-school boiler room situation. You’ve got 100 sales reps on a sales floor, everybody cold-calling local small businesses trying to get $300–$400 a month subscriptions for a social media management system.
And these are small business owners, right? Like people who have a ton of responsibilities and pressure and stress, and you’re cold-calling them to try to sell them something. Like, if that doesn’t demand more out of you and force you to grow and build a set of skills, then I don’t know what does in the sales world.
And so I think what I just enjoyed about it was, number one, human psychology is really interesting to me. Like, I always find that, and I can talk at length about human psychology and why that’s sort of interesting to me.
But I think what it also scratched for me was the kind of competitive itch where it’s like, okay, if I do these things and I apply myself, I could do this really well. I could have success. And I could also have tangible success that, you know, relative to other people, like, this is something I could really do.
And so the competitiveness, the psychology aspect of it, you know, things are always changing. You’re meeting new people, you’re doing deals, you’re seeing the impact your solution is making on a customer, how it’s potentially getting them new customers or winning back existing customers, and seeing the degree to which it makes that impact too.
It’s all those elements combined that sparked something in me that said, you know, there might be something here. Let’s explore this further.
So inside sales is super hard, especially cold-calling, and that too to small businesses. It’s super hard, first of all, to get them on the phone. And if you do get them on the phone, it’s super hard for you to want them to take action towards your product or services.
So any secrets or any lessons that you want to share with our listeners for that?
It forces you to get crystal clear, back to the point of view, on what your value proposition is. And so I think some of the things that we see today, understandably, are a lot of people over-indexing on talking about product, talking about product capabilities and features.
And I think that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, it’s like, what’s in it for me? Who cares, right?
And so when you cold-call a small business, you have a few seconds to demonstrate really quickly: you’re credible, you’re clear, you’re compelling, and you’re conveying a message that says, “You have this pain point today. Here’s why that matters to you. Here’s how I can help make that go away. Here’s how fast I can do that.”
Nice, yeah. So spot on. A lot of folks in the go-to-market world try to boil the ocean, and they try to cram in as many things as they can, versus forgetting the first principle, which is: how do you want the person on the other side to take the next step with the smallest friction possible?
Exactly, exactly. It’s a game of inches. Like, I use the analogy in football, any given interaction, just get the first down. Yeah, don’t get a touchdown, just get the first step. Exactly, move the chain.
Yep, so spot on. Great. So, Max, you moved from inside sales to account executive. So talk to us about that journey and transition. How was that like?
Yeah, you know, realizing, okay, I liked sales. I wanted to get more into a bit more complex, more enterprise-oriented software sales. And so those were some of the steps that I took after Main Street Hub.
And that was an interesting experience in that, instead of more local small businesses, these were more complex enterprises that had multi-stakeholders in play. So in some instances, it’s a committee. There’s also a question of the evaluation process and running trials or POCs, and ensuring that you’re back to the kind of question about value and messaging and clarity. There are multiple levels of that once you get into complex B2B, right?
There’s that for the user, there’s that for the middle manager, there’s that for the executive. And so, how are you tying those threads together and delivering a compelling value proposition for those customers? So there were a lot of learnings there.
Yeah, definitely. That’s a big shift, right? Selling to small businesses is one thing, versus large accounts and enterprises. As you correctly said, it’s like a buying committee. Plus, you need to hone in on the champion on your behalf, your partner within that account.
Yeah, a lot of learning, a lot of challenges. That’s a big shift in itself. But then, somewhere along the line, and after that, clearly, you’d done that role and moved into a sales leadership role. So, how was that jump like, and how did your management team actually get the faith, or did they feel okay, Max is the person to lead and build a sales team?
Yeah. So I definitely subscribe to the idea of leading by example. Like, I always try to have the mindset of “do the job.” And imagine you have the title of the role that you want to be doing. What would that person do? Okay, do those things.
And then eventually people realize, “Oh, okay, this person, you know, seems to be pretty equipped and qualified to do this next level.”
And so I think the mentality that I had is and part of why I’ve been oriented more towards early-stage, earlier companies is, you know, being like the first or second salesperson early on, demonstrating that I have a grip and a handle on the business, on the sales process, but then can extrapolate and have a point of view on the actual go-to-market system: the competitive dynamics, how to build a team, positioning, how to coordinate with the marketing function, the product, engineering, how to orchestrate across all of that to back to our original point wildly successful customers, sustainable, predictable revenue, that is predicated on a clear and compelling founder-led point of view and product experience.
And so I think the kind of short answer to your question is: coming in early and showing receipts, and showing that not only could I do what I was entrusted to do, but I had a plan to do something bigger.
Yeah, for sure. But clearly, you would have had doubts, doubts about your own capability. So talk to us about what those doubts were, and how you actually overcame those as you grew in this career?
Well, I think that for me, the doubt is always, it needs to be there. Yeah, it’s healthy, it’s stimulating. I think in every phase of my career, I’ve had doubts, and I think to me that indicates that I’m going in the right direction.
Because if I had no doubts, that probably means I’m not growing. So a doubt is a leading indicator of, okay, there’s room to grow, there’s room to learn, there’s room to expand who you are.
And trying to first reframe it that way, that, yeah, you’re trying something new, of course, you have concerns. Yeah. But the only answer to responding to doubt, which never goes away, is just taking action. It’s only through jumping in the pool and swimming, not by reading a bunch of books about swimming or stepping back and analyzing the pool, that you’re gonna get rid of those doubts.
Yeah, for sure. In fact, the term I was looking for, I couldn’t quite get the term back then, it was imposter syndrome. Yeah, let’s call it that, right?
Am I the right person for this job? Am I faking my way? Yes. Will I succeed, or won’t I? Will I let people down? All these are questions that will keep popping up, especially if you are that go-getter and ambitious person who’s looking to go to the next level.
Exactly. And I think the other thing too is, once you realize that the most successful people that you ever knew have felt the same way and often still do, I think it’s also massively reassuring that, hey, doubt is just part of it. That’s just part of the price you pay.
Yeah, for sure. All right, now let’s get even more real. This was real enough, but even more real when it comes to the tactics and strategies when it comes to go-to-market.
Yeah, so I ask each and every one of my guests two questions, right? One is a go-to-market success story. Another is a go-to-market until recently, I was calling it a go-to-market failure story, but I’ve shifted, and I’m calling it a go-to-market pivot story.
So I’ll leave it up to you, Max, which one do you want to start with, either a go-to-market success or a go-to-market pivot story?
I think it might be interesting to combine the two, because I think there are elements of both in this story. And the thrust of it is, we were at a point at Brightwave where we had a go-to-market system that was largely running on a typical kind of enterprise sales playbook.
Where we would get in front of a customer, we would do, obviously, a thorough discovery. We would move into some kind of technical validation stage, a demo, then some kind of POC, and then onboard them as a customer, etc, etc, etc.
And while that was, you know, working to a degree, there were a lot of challenges we were experiencing, and it was based on what I think were assumptions that we held that maybe we hadn’t examined recently.
And I’ll make that more explicit. What the world of AI has done is it has accelerated development massively, as we all know. And what becomes, in my opinion, the number one moat or differentiator today is the feedback cycle rate, the ability to test, get information, and then adapt really quickly. Because everything else erodes.
And so one of the things that we encountered or realized was:
- We’re not getting enough information fast enough to make the product that we want to make and to acquire the set of customers we want to acquire.
- The way in which we’re building this product, there seemed to be some incongruencies between that and the go-to-market motion that we’d been executing on to date.
Meaning, the product itself is back to POV, founder-led vision. Our founders come from an engineering, technical, visionary background, and they are absolutely clear on the future of what our product really is.
Simply put, it is a system that is able to reason across a large number of documents, pull out the factors that are relevant to an investment professional, and then turn those into high-quality outputs orders of magnitude faster than they can do it manually or with ChatGPT. To get to a conviction faster. So it’s a massive time-saving productivity boost.
And the vision that they have is that not only should this be a powerful, comprehensive system for complex knowledge workers to reason across documents, but also that it should be delivered in a delightful customer experience. It should be a UI/UX that is effectively consumer-grade.
And so if we’re building that, and we’re executing on an enterprise sales process that traditionally gates the product, holding in reserve our biggest differentiator, that’s a mismatch.
And so we restructured our system to align with the incredible rate of development and shipping that our engineering team has been doing. Such that, you know, we say, okay, a product like this if your prior mental model for something like this is like ChatGPT, and I come in and say, “Okay, so Vijay, it’s gonna require a few weeks of onboarding and consulting,” and you’re like, “Dude, I can get ChatGPT in 30 seconds. What are you talking about?”
It’s got to be easy to get. It’s got to be easier to use.
And so now we’re redesigning our process where we’re front-loading the product experience, getting it into the hands of users faster. Because, by the way, we understand to a tee what workflows our users are using Brightwave for to drive productivity.
So it’s just a matter of getting to those people as fast as possible and letting them experience this as fast as possible.
And then what we’ve seen since we’ve made this pivot is, as you can imagine, 3x user adoption. Hearing stories like, for example, “Hey, this saved me days on this process that used to take me,” or someone literally showing us relative to ChatGPT or a competitor tool, “Here’s how it took a process that with one person plus all the consumer LLMs took me hours, and I brought that down to minutes.”
So it’s a tsunami of information that we’re getting to make the product even better and capitalize on our competitive differentiation, which is this consumer-grade UI/UX and our competitive wedge at the moment.
Yeah, that’s a great story for sure. Feedback, one thing that I took out, the keyword is feedback. Feedback from the customers, from the market, back to the product how to make it easier and front-load the onboarding and user experience.
So that’s one thing that I’ve heard, which translates to the KPIs around user adoption and maybe testimonials. So I’m just curious how that is helping in your sales, in your go-to-market? How is that playing out?
The result has been that when I say 3x usage, that’s obviously translating into revenue, right? And that’s translating into people who are now on the platform, who are using it, who are getting success.
We can repurpose those testimonials. The greatest sales asset that exists is a customer story. “Don’t take my word for it, listen to what your peer said.”
Maximizing that, maximizing early cohorts of super successful users who will go evangelize us, who will help build our product even better. It’s accelerating distribution, it’s getting into the hands of more customers, getting more sales, getting faster time to adoption, and then upgrading.
So to me, the go-to-market system is not just, “Okay, how many logos are we getting, and then what’s our revenue?” It’s like, hang on, let’s take a step back for a second. How many people are using the product? What are the usage measures? How successful are they in using it? How fast are they expanding?
How many sessions, or how often are they coming back? How quickly are they expanding? How quickly can we get in the door with some of these customers? So, really exciting stuff, and with the information that we’re getting.
Yeah, very cool. And then coming back to your title, you mentioned it’s Head of Go-To-Market. So what does that really encompass? Does it even include marketing aspects and customer success, or is it just different functions within sales?
Yeah, so we’re, you know, we’re a lean team here. And so it covers everything around customer success, marketing, and sales. And again, you know, I think sometimes those terms and those barriers are artificial and unnecessary and counterproductive.
It creates this sort of like, you know, marketing versus sales versus customer success, when in reality, it’s like different flavors of the same thing, right? It’s, how do we get this sustainable revenue model and wildly successful customers, and how do we figure out spheres of influence to maximize that?
Yeah, for sure. And that’s one thing the origin of this podcast was all around that central theme, which is: when you talk about go-to-market, it has to encompass marketing, sales, customer success, and product.
So for me, it’s all those four functions that are what go-to-market is. And so that’s my little pursuit, yes, through this podcast: to bubble up that message, amplify it, and spread that message.
You can ask my team. I don’t know if there’s anybody in my company who’s in Fireflies more than I am. Fireflies, full story meaning, you know, user sessions, and user log data. Like, I’m addicted. It’s like watching Netflix, you know, seeing… so I totally agree.
Great story, great go-to-market success, and a pivot story. So just curious want to extract. Clearly, you had a wealth of knowledge when it comes to sales and go-to-market. So if you can share one more, either from Cutover or Looker, that’ll be great. That’ll be more in the sales domain.
Just a general nugget, or general kind of I think, you know, how I try to be effective is I always come back to the acronym KYC, which is the financial, cybersecurity model.
But the bottom line is this: to the degree you know your customer, yeah, intimately.
What is their day-to-day? What are their KPIs? What gets them promoted? What gets them fired? Where do they sit in the organization? How would they use their product? What are their pain points? What are the stories you can bring that will resonate with them?
If, as a sales professional, you started at a new company and the only thing you did was just spend hours and hours interviewing your prospects, I guarantee that within a few weeks, a few months, a few quarters, you’d be the top person at whatever company you work for.
And understandably, there are so many forces that are conspiring to obfuscate that very simple truth, know your customer. Because when you know your customer, you know how to position. It sharpens your own point of view on the problem that you’re solving. It creates this virtuous feedback loop that makes everything much easier.
Yeah, for sure. I’m actually glad we took this conversation down this path. “Know your customer” is so super, super important.
Going back to the whole definition of go-to-market, yes, having a point of view is important, and having a predictable and scalable revenue path is important. But it all starts with your customer. It starts with who your customer is, what the challenges are, and what the struggles are with their existing solutions that are out there. That’s where it all begins.
So curious, if you can expand on maybe rituals or tactics, go about really knowing, like, pick one account as a hypothetical example. How do you go about knowing your customer?
What’s great with AI now is the rate at which it is actually now it’s like, there are no excuses. Before you step into a meeting with a potential customer, and you don’t know… now it depends, obviously. If they’re publicly traded or private, that limits the amount of information.
But what you can get with AI tools to understand:
- Who are the competitors?
- How do they make money?
- What’s the organizational hierarchy?
- What have been some recent events that they care about?
- What are some strategies or priorities that they’ve made public to the company?
- What is the background of the individuals at the organization?
- What’s their familiarity with different technologies, solutions, and problems?
And understanding: okay, so how do I then map that to stories, to solutions, to success stories that I can share with their peers are and what their peers are doing? Because that’s the first thing that people want to know: what are my peers doing? How do they see this?
And knowing that, and then mapping that to what their peers are doing, even if you don’t even talk about the product. Just show up, know who you’re talking to in great depth, and share, based on that, the success stories that are most relevant.
I’ve seen people do that basically, that’s all they do, and they’ve been wildly successful as sales professionals.
Yes, yeah, for sure. Let’s get even more tactical, at a five-foot level. How do you go about getting that first meeting, getting that attention?
Yeah, so I think it is massively contextual. Massively contextual.
Okay, if we’re selling something that is, let’s say, we’re selling to a large financial institution. Let’s say we’re selling to J.P. Morgan Chase, okay, and we’re selling a probably six-figure or seven-figure software item.
What’s probably most likely, and again, to go even more granular, the question is: is it something that’s more of a top-down sale? Is it more of a bottom-up sale? Is it a product that you can get into the hands of more executor-type workers and then work your way up?
So I would say it starts with: what’s the product I’m selling? What’s the value proposition for each person?
But the TL;DR is you develop a point of view on the problem space, what’s happening at your company, and your solution set, your success stories. Map that to the organization that you’re working on. So: what are they trying to optimize for? What are their pain points?
And you generally want to do that at the level of executive, middle management, and user.
And then from there it’s: okay, what’s the most effective way to get that person? For example, if it’s a developer, cold-calling might not be the most effective way. Maybe it’s Reddit forums. Or maybe it’s certain events. Or maybe it’s sending over a sample of your product, for example.
Whereas if it’s a managing director, probably more high-touch. Maybe a personalized outreach from somebody on your board who might be connected to them. Or maybe it’s trying to curate some kind of small dinner gathering where you invite them and you invite some of their peers who are your customers, right?
So, the short answer is: depends on the context.
Exactly, yeah, for sure. The way I’m looking at it is essentially: draw your account map, the people that you are trying to tap into, and the org structure. And then, depending on the level of seniority as well as the background, what is the right channel and engagement model? How is that going to happen?
Exactly.
Exactly, yeah, for sure. The way I’m looking at it is essentially: draw your account map, the people that you are trying to tap into, the org structure. And then, depending on the level of seniority as well as the background, what is the right channel and engagement model? How is that going to happen?
Exactly.
Yeah, for sure, very cool. So this has been great stuff overall, Max. Let’s take a step back what have been the resources or communities or books or podcasts that you’ve been leaning on heavily, that have really upped your game?
Yeah, so this is gonna sound maybe unusual, but I try to balance domain-specific resources with totally non-domain-specific.
I’m a big believer that there are patterns everywhere that very much transfer into domains that seemingly make no sense. Something that you might see in a biologist’s mentions might actually have something to do with sales. Something in some weird, obscure theory in physics applies to fitness.
Whatever the case, I read and study widely and broadly whether it’s podcasts, books, or conversations with people. I love learning about new areas, new domains, and new niches of knowledge.
Because if it’s good, it probably is a pattern that I can apply and test in my own domain, right? So that has been effective for me.
Because I think and I’m sure you know this, obviously, sometimes when we just stay in our own niche, our own echo chamber, we get stuck in these frozen mental models, yeah?
And frameworks and playbooks that we just sort of take as like capital-T truth. When in reality, those are artifacts of a time and a context and had use, but they’re not eternal truths, right?
So back to feedback cycle rate: finding new ways of thinking, new mental models, new frameworks, new playbooks, trying them out, seeing what happens. I think taking that broader approach has been really useful for me to avoid being rigid in my thinking.
Fantastic, yeah, always looking to learn, and looking at complementary (not complementary) topics that are outside of your regular day-to-day work. I think that’s super, super critical.
For sure. Again, very few people must have played a key role in your career growth played like a mentor, along the way. So any specific people who come to your mind who have shaped your career?
So I’m gonna cheat a little bit. One, I would fuse both my parents together as a first bedrock. Yeah, just immensely grateful for what they afforded me in so many ways growing up, and just as role models. More in what they did than anything else, right?
I think people, it’s more about leading by action and leading by example.
I think another, professionally: my first manager, my first boss at Main Street Hub. His name is Darren. Was somebody who, again, taught me a lot more by what he did and how he was than anything else. I continue to be he’s close friend to this day.
And somebody who, I think a lot of the time, is people who maybe see more in you than you see in yourself at a given time, or awaken something inside of you that maybe you hadn’t been acquainted with yet.
I think those are the interactions and the role models that helped most. So I think that was one as well.
And then, you know, I would say more recently, my current boss today, CEO of Brightwave, Mike, is somebody who obviously took a chance on me to lead the go-to-market organization of Brightwave. And has inspired me with a lot of confidence in my own ability to shoot further, you know, and be more.
And I think those types of figures throughout my career, throughout my life, have been absolutely critical to my own development.
Sure, yeah. Those are the critical components in our lives, right? People who have really touched you, actually invested their time and energy. And as you said, right who believed in you even before you believed in yourself at a certain stage.
Yes. Sure. Yes.
So what are those one or two skills that people really look up and say, “Hey, you know what? We are struggling in this specific skill set, maybe it’s go-to-market or sales or expansion, whatever it is, we need to go and talk to Max.” What are those one or two skills?
So I think there’s the micro and the macro.
At the micro level, over 10 years, I’ve seen almost every permutation of a B2B sales cycle. You know, getting a deal from point A to point B, call me. That’s something I’ve developed, and is obviously a strong suit.
I think the second, more macro, is what I’ll call “go-to-market system intervention.” Because I’ve been in a number of different environments, contexts, seen what’s worked, what hasn’t, I think I’ve developed a pretty sophisticated pattern recognition where I can get a sense, a feel, a taste for what are all the processes and flows in a go-to-market system that, to your point, include sales, marketing, customer success, product.
And identifying the highest-leverage intervention points, taking action, running experiments, and getting different results is also something that has developed over time. So there’s the micro, there’s the macro.
Fantastic, great. Final question to you, if you were to turn back the clock, what advice would you give to your younger self on day one of your go-to-market journey?
Yeah, good question. I would probably say a quote, which is some version of: reality is responsive. Reality is malleable. Action generates reality.
Right back to what I was talking about earlier, around the swimming pool example. Things are not fixed and final. Things are in flux, right? Who you are, what things are don’t discount or say, “That’s just the way it is,” or, “That’s just the way that I am.”
The only way you know limits is you have to taking action, running experiments, and bumping up against those limits. And we all know intuitively, we are operating at a fraction of the capacity that we could be operating.
We know we’ve seen other people, and we’ve experienced this ourselves. How we’ve taken action, we’ve made commitments, we’ve taken steps, and all of a sudden, reality is reconfigured in some way, right? Nobody else can tell you that. And no amount of thinking or strategizing or advice that anybody gives you is going to change that fact.
Yep, for sure. And that’s a great piece of advice. That’s something that I keep reminding myself it always boils down to: what is the smallest next step and action that you can take? You’ll be surprised so many times.
In my own experience, I’ve seen with others as well, I’m sure you can relate to those as well, Max, which is that you will actually surprise yourself, yes. And you’ll wipe out or rewire your belief that you had after you’ve taken that series of actions. Yeah, it’s incredible.