Dan Yeates has helped build sales teams at some of the fastest-growing software companies around. He started out selling £5k road bikes in his family's shop, dropped out of a maths master's with a UBS grad job lined up and made 100 cold calls a day in recruitment before moving into tech at AppDynamics. He was the first commercial rep in Europe at Harness, then helped ClickUp grow from $50M to $350M ARR. He's now Sales Director at Metaview, the AI recruiting platform that's just raised a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners.

In this episode Dan explains how he tests whether a champion can actually influence a deal, why a rep with two years in enterprise might have worked only 25 opportunities, and why cold calling works better the more senior the buyer. He also covers how ClickUp mixed product-led and sales-led growth, how Metaview's AI agents and Filmore (its recruiting coworker that lives in Slack) are changing hiring, and why the seller's job is moving from explaining the product to helping buyers build the business case.

We also talk about the hardest stretch of his life. Three months into his job at Harness, Dan was diagnosed with leukaemia. He worked through his treatment and had to give up on leading teams for a while before he found his way back.

If you're building a sales team, moving into enterprise or trying to get better at building champions, this one's worth your time.

Laura Bartkiewicz is a Senior Sales Manager at Ironclad, the contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform that passed $200 million in ARR in February 2026. She graduated in Boston as the housing market collapsed, started in recruitment, then used LinkedIn to find a visa sponsor and move to Sydney. There she joined LinkedIn's sales team in 2014, two years before the Microsoft acquisition, running outbound with Outlook mail merges, Salesforce and cold calls. She later moved to London with Beamery, took her first management role at Deputy, and joined Figma as one of its first 20 hires in London, where she built the mid-market team under Pierre Berlin and helped hire for the Berlin and Paris offices.

Laura breaks down what she hires for in a sales rep: self-awareness, ambition, drive, resilience, optimism, and enough emotional intelligence to read a room on a video call. She describes her management style as direct, blunt and friendly, with clear expectations and real accountability. She explains why selling is a team sport across solutions engineers, architects and executives, and why she trains reps to play chess, not checkers: plan several moves ahead and keep the client aligned with a long-term vision.

She also gets into what Ironclad does and why Salesforce chose it after trialling eight CLM platforms. Ironclad sits inside the CRM so reps never leave Salesforce to manage redlines, and it routinely cuts contract cycle times by more than half. Under CEO Dan Springer, formerly of DocuSign, the company has hired ex-Google CTO Sunita Verma and CPO Herman Man to ship new AI agents every quarter. On AI in sales, Laura's view is simple: trust and relationships still close deals, and AI is the velocity layer on top, handling follow-ups, tightening agendas and using tools like Gong to flag gaps in a deal cycle. Outside of work, she talks about investing her commissions every quarter into the tech companies she used daily, taking a sabbatical after her father passed, and why 20 nos will get you a yes.

If you're moving from SDR or AE into sales management, hiring your first reps, selling B2B SaaS into Salesforce customers, or working out where AI actually fits in an enterprise sales cycle, this one's worth your time.

Conor Hyland is Regional Vice President of GTM for 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.