In Part 2 of our conversation with Max Elster, Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, we go deeper into how sales teams are actually operationalizing outcome-based selling; at scale.

Max shares how revenue teams at companies like Vanta are moving beyond founder-led, feature-centric narratives, and building scalable, repeatable playbooks rooted in customer outcomes, business impact, and data-backed storytelling.

Whether you’re leading a 10-person sales team or a 1,000-person GTM org, this conversation will help you reimagine enablement, coach for value, and build business cases that win over CFOs.

What You’ll Learn

• Vanta’s Transition from Features to Outcomes: How CRO Stevie Case transformed Vanta’s narrative, and drove shorter cycles, higher win rates, and stronger executive engagement by focusing the team on value-led discovery and storytelling.
• Why Business Cases Shouldn’t Be Optional: Hear how teams went from building 10 business cases per quarter to over 500, without hiring hundreds of SEs, and how that shift boosted win rates by up to 15 percentage points.
• Teaching Reps to Think Like CFOs: Max explains how the best sales teams equip champions to model ROI and outcomes with buyers, not for them, and why the strongest business cases are co-owned with the finance team.
• How AI Accelerates Discovery, Coaching, and Differentiation: From call summaries to intent signals to customer benchmarks, Max shows how LLMs and predictive tools are giving reps the context to build relevance at scale, without losing the human touch.

Key Topics

• From founder-led sales to repeatable revenue engines
• Vanta’s shift to value-led selling, and what it unlocked
• Building outcome plans that close deals faster
• Why the CRO’s best insights come from AEs
• Coaching for customer outcomes, not product demos
• How AI is reshaping forecasting, discovery, and enablement
• The real future of revenue leadership in an AI world

Guest Spotlight: Max Elster

Max Elster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, a revenue platform helping companies scale value-based sales across the deal cycle. With a decade of experience in AI and B2B SaaS, Max works with companies like Vanta, Cognite, and others to operationalize value intelligence, from discovery to renewal.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Company: Vanta
• Max Elster: LinkedIn | Email: max@minoa.io

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for next week’s episode!

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In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Max Elster, Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, joins co-hosts Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore what B2B revenue leaders often miss: a clear, consistent understanding of why they win.

Max introduces the concept of a Value Intelligence Layer, a data-driven framework that links discovery, business cases, and outcomes into a single narrative that everyone from SDRs to CROs can use.

Drawing from years of experience across SaaS and enterprise sales, Max shares how leading GTM teams are moving away from feature pitching and toward outcome-led selling, especially in a world where AI has made building software easier, and differentiation harder.

From strengthening discovery questions to creating scalable outcome playbooks, this episode is packed with tactical ideas for revenue leaders rethinking how they sell in the age of AI.

What You’ll Learn

• The “Why We Win” Blindspot: Why many sales orgs still can’t answer the most important question, and how that gap leads to poor qualification, forecasting, and deal execution.
• From Features to Outcomes: How modern buyers evaluate value, and why understanding customer priorities matters more than your internal product roadmap.
• Creating the Value Intelligence Layer: How to unify customer impact, product usage, sales stages, and discovery insights into a single GTM operating model.
• Scaling Outcome-Led Playbooks: What it takes to align SDRs, AEs, SEs, and CS teams around a shared value narrative from day zero to renewal.
• AI as a Differentiator (Not a Replacement): Why the best teams use AI to personalize engagement, not to automate it, and how AI helps surface deeper buyer context.

Key Topics

• Why most GTM teams don’t know why they win
• Building discovery questions that lead to business cases
• Embedding outcomes into CRM and sales stages
• Creating a “value intelligence” system across teams
• How AI and call data can power more relevant sales motions
• Turning post-sale value into pre-sale advantage
• Aligning playbooks across SDRs, AEs, SEs, and CSMs

Guest Spotlight: Max Elster

Max Elster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, a SaaS company helping revenue teams operationalize their value story. With a background in B2B software and product development, Max built Manoa to bridge the gap between feature-led selling and outcome-driven growth. His team helps sales orgs unify discovery, use cases, and customer impact into one connected system.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Company: Minoa.io
• Max’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maxelster

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for Part 2 with Max Elster, dropping next week!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Steve Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, we go deeper into how his team is scaling with both agility and authenticity—blending AI, community engagement, and a customer-first mindset to win in a highly commoditized telecom market.

Steve unpacks what it really means to lead with transparency, build a culture that thrives across residential and B2B markets, and design a sales engine that delivers personalized value at scale. From t-shirt cannons to AI-assisted prospecting, it’s clear: growth happens when you meet your customers where they are—and actually understand who they are.

What You’ll Learn

• Competing Beyond the Product: Why the best way to differentiate is not what you sell—but how you serve.
• Human + AI Prospecting: Steve shares how Live Oak’s team blends digital ads, field outreach, and AI signals to achieve 80%+ MQL conversion.
• Leveraging Customer Context: How insights like home square footage and pool size help personalize campaigns—and why trust starts before the first call.
• Net Promoter as a North Star: The cultural and operational moves that helped Live Oak achieve a 76 NPS score—higher than Apple.
• Culture-Driven Growth: Why hiring “athletes,” not just resumes, is key to building high-performance sales teams in uncertain markets.
• AI Without the Hype: How Steve’s team uses AI practically—from outage alerts to upgrade prompts—without losing the human connection.

Key Topics

• GTM in both residential and business segments
• Creating “shock & awe” customer experiences
• Mapping Day 0 strategies with local event engagement
• Designing growth systems that work across sales channels
• Using CRM, digital behavior, and AI for smarter targeting
• Balancing automation with local, white-glove service
• Operationalizing culture in sales teams and hiring practices

Guest Spotlight: Steve Smith

Steve Smith is the Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, where he leads a people-first, tech-enabled go-to-market strategy across residential, MDU, and commercial segments. With more than 25 years of experience in telecom, Steve is known for his bold talent bets, operational creativity, and unwavering customer obsession.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Book: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• Inspiration: The Savannah Bananas
• Sales Concept: “People don’t buy drill bits. They buy holes.”

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.