Building Customer Value Management with Steven Lewandowski
In this episode of Built in EMEA, host Pavel Novak speaks with Steven Lewandowski, co-founder of Addressable Value and former Chief Customer Officer at SalesManago. Steven shares his unconventional path to tech leadership, reflecting on how his formative years as a sergeant in the German military shaped his human-centered management philosophy. He breaks down the key principles that drive his approach as a leader, including an emphasis on unearned trust, strict punctuality, and the influential business literature—such as Customer-Led Growth and Good to Great—that guided his transition into executive SaaS roles.

The conversation explores the origin story of Addressable Value and Steven's transition from freelance advisory work to building a dedicated software platform. Steven explains how working with high-growth SaaS companies revealed a major "blank spot" across modern tech stacks: while traditional CRMs handle lead generation and deal closing, they fail to measure or prove actual customer value realization after the sale. He candidly details the process of identifying this market gap, navigating the difficulty of pitching co-innovation pilot programs to early prospects, and the pivotal late-night Miro board session that convinced his co-founder, Stefan, to leave a 16-year career at SAP to build the company together.

Finally, Steven offers actionable advice on the operational realities of early-stage founder life. He highlights the necessity of ruthless prioritization, structured monthly OKR reviews, and driving pipeline through consistent community building rather than purely transactional outreach. Addressing the current industry shift toward automation, Steven makes a strong case for why B2B sales and Customer Success will always remain a "people business," arguing that even in an era of agentic AI, authentic human relationships and personal trust are irreplaceable.

Key Highlights:

• The Post-Sale Value Realization Gap: How Addressable Value sits on top of standard CRMs to bridge the gap between initial deal close, customer onboarding, and measurable ROI.
• The Founder Transition & Co-Innovation: Strategies for convincing busy revenue leaders to join early-stage pilot programs and co-design product solutions.
• The Human Element in the AI Era: Why personal presence, community evangelism, and genuine trust outshine pure automation in modern go-to-market strategies.

Product marketers are spending too much time overthinking AI and drowning in repetitive tasks. Instead of just listening to LinkedIn gurus promising 5-minute life-changing fixes, it is time to actually integrate automation into the workflow.

In this episode of Built in EMEA, host Pavel Novák sits down with Valery Mezencev to unpack how product marketing managers (PMMs) are realistically applying AI and automation. Leaving behind the clean slide-deck frameworks and theories, they discuss what it actually takes to build a modern product marketing workflow that balances automation with essential human intuition.

In this episode, we cover:

Stop overthinking AI: Why you should stop overthinking which tool to use, pick what feels natural, and just try it for yourself.

The irreplaceable human touch: Why the subtle intuition of understanding customer sentiment and messaging cannot be codified by AI, and why automation should be reserved for manual, repetitive tasks to make a PMM's job more enjoyable.

Moving beyond manual chatbots: While PMMs are already using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude daily, the real switch is automating those AI workflows to eliminate steps that add no unique product marketing value.

Start with a problem, map the process: Why simply having a clear definition of a problem is enough to get started with automation, but why you must explicitly map out the steps before automating any repeatable process.

If you are a GTM operator trying to build the right thing in the right order, this conversation will challenge how you approach your revenue organization.

Follow Built in EMEA wherever you listen to podcasts. Because the companies that scale well in EMEA aren't luckier. They're better architected.

Most companies scale their partner programs completely wrong by treating them like transactional sales. They focus on what they want (revenue) and sign hundreds of agreements without ever actually activating them.

In this episode of Built in EMEA, host Pavel Novák sits down with Martin Scholz to unpack the real architecture of successful GTM partnerships. Leaving behind the clean slide-deck frameworks and theories, they discuss what it actually takes to build a partnership that works and delivers mutual value.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why revenue should never be your goal when entering partnerships, but rather the result of focusing entirely on the partner's needs.
• The danger of vanity metrics: Why having 100 signed partner agreements often means you have fewer than 20 that are actually active, and why you must see partners deliver before constantly signing more.
• The ultimate health metric for partnerships: How to use a continuously updated mutual action plan—covering strategic vision, measurable KPIs, and 3-month project plans—to ensure true alignment.
• Sales vs. Partnerships: The fundamental difference between a transactional vendor relationship and a mutually beneficial partnership where integrating solutions makes the workflow easier for joint users.

If you are a GTM operator trying to build the right thing in the right order, this conversation will challenge how you approach your revenue organization.

Follow Built in EMEA wherever you listen to podcasts. Because the companies that scale well in EMEA aren't luckier. They're better architected

"We have a great product, why is it so hard to sell?"

If you’ve heard this in your leadership meetings—or felt the sting of a ghosted demo and a "Frankenstein" CRM—you know that scaling in EMEA often feels like an uphill battle. But the high turnover and missed targets aren't "natural attrition." They are the result of an architecture problem.

Welcome to Built in EMEA, the podcast for the people actually doing the work of scaling revenue organizations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

In this trailer, host Pavel Novák breaks down why most GTM strategies fail in the field:

• The Design Gap: Sales processes built by people who have never sold.
• The CRM Burden: Tools that create more work for sellers instead of removing it.
• The Support Void: Sellers standing in front of customers with zero context and no clear path to a decision.

What to expect from the show: We go beyond the clean frameworks that look great on a slide deck. Instead, we head straight for the messy, dirty building site where real companies are forged. Pavel sits down with go-to-market operators who have built something tangible in this region to discuss what broke, what worked, and what they would do differently.

This is your peer group if you are:

• A CEO wondering why growth feels more expensive than it should.
• An Operator (Enablement, RevOps, or Sales Leadership) trying to build the right thing in the right order.
• A Seller, CSM, or Engineer who has ever felt unsupported and wants to understand why.

Companies that scale well in EMEA aren't luckier—they’re just better architected.

Follow Built in EMEA wherever you listen to podcasts and join the conversation.