Michael Akinlé went from SDR to SDR manager almost overnight, and had to work out how to manage the people who used to be his peers with no training and no map. In this episode of The Outside Seat, Michael, now Head of EMEA at Orum, walks through what that transition actually taught him, why most performance improvement plans are used wrong, and what he would do differently building an SDR function from scratch today with AI in the mix. We also spend real time on the Michael May Football Academy, the youth football foundation he founded in Lagos in 2020 and has run for five years alongside his commercial career.

What's covered:

• The jump from SDR to SDR manager, and what nobody tells you about managing former peers
• Why performance improvement plans are usually used to manage people out, and why that is the wrong way round
• What Orum actually does, and how it differs from tools like Outreach and Salesloft
• How Michael would build an SDR function from scratch today, and where AI genuinely helps
• Why Michael founded the Michael May Football Academy in Lagos, and what running it for five years has taught him about leadership
• The Rapid Fire round: the tool he can't live without, the GTM myth he wants gone, and the book he keeps going back to

Michael Akinlé is Head of EMEA at Orum, an AI-powered sales engagement platform. His career runs from SDR at Dynamic Signal through Head of Growth EMEA and Sales Director at Clari, Country Manager and Head of Sales UKI at Qobra, and Head of Digital Sales at The Access Group. Alongside his commercial career, he founded and runs the Michael May Football Academy in Lagos, Nigeria, giving young people access to football, education, and life skills since December 2020.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open: the Nigeria homecoming
00:24 What The Outside Seat is
01:37 Welcome, and introducing Michael Akinlé
02:30 The jump from SDR to SDR manager
06:22 Coaching versus telling: the football analogy
08:46 Baptism of fire, and finding a mentor
13:30 Firing, and the performance improvement plan
15:55 "You're not managing them out, you're giving them a chance"
18:50 Sponsor break: Flourish
19:35 Getting hiring and firing right, and what Orum does
21:59 Orum's data layer, and where it fits in the stack
24:21 Orum vs Outreach and Salesloft
26:44 Building an SDR team with AI, from scratch
29:09 The Michael May Football Academy: the why
34:02 How to support the academy
36:30 The homecoming story, in full
38:55 Rapid Fire
43:35 Closing and outro

Check out our Sponsor: https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

New to the Outside Seat? Start Here - www.youtube.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theoutsideseat/

Connect with our Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tumalty/

Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Twitter: https://www.x.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoutsideseat

Check us out on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb

Check us out on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-outside-seat-podcast/id1896892470

So what is The Outside Seat?

Most revenue leaders have never sat where their buyers sit. The Outside Seat is the podcast that fixes that, bringing GTM leaders and the unsung heroes behind them into conversations they'd never normally have with each other. Real talk on sales, revenue operations and what actually works from the buyer's side of the table, not the vendor's.

Hosted by Mike Tumalty, 25 years into B2B SaaS GTM, from ServiceNow to founding InsideNow. New episodes every Tuesday.

Matt Webb has sent and received thousands of emails as CEO of MentorGroup. In three and a half years, he has had roughly 3,000 cold emails land in his inbox, and four phone calls. He took every one of the four. That single stat sets up a wider conversation about signals: the ones revenue leaders read correctly, and the ones they mistake for a repeatable motion when they were actually a one-off.

Mike sits down with Matt Webb, CEO of MentorGroup, for a conversation that runs from the World Cup semi-final and the Signal article through to the bluebird deal, the mirage pipeline, and why a falling close rate is so often misdiagnosed as a skills problem when the real issue is upstream in pipeline quality. Matt also talks through the genesis of his and James Barton's book, Infinite Selling, and where AI has genuinely changed his own working week.

What's covered:

• What MentorGroup does and why customer experience sits ahead of KPIs
• The World Cup, the Signal article, and what leadership teams miss when they mistake an outcome for a strategy
• The "bluebird" deal: what to ask before an unusually fast close gets baked into next year's forecast
• Why sales is a team sport, not a relay race, between BDR, AE and CS
• Forecasting a deal that hasn't landed yet, and the "mirage pipeline"
• Two signals leadership teams keep ignoring because it's inconvenient to look at them
• Why a falling close rate is not always a training problem
• Writing Infinite Selling with James Barton
• Rapid Fire: AI adoption, the cold-calling myth, and the most underrated person in Matt's network

About Matt Webb: Matt Webb is CEO of MentorGroup, a UK-based sales performance consultancy helping CROs and enablement leaders build sustainable selling motions and predictable revenue growth. He has spent close to 20 years at MentorGroup following 13 years at Vodafone in sales and sales leadership roles. He is co-author, with James Barton, of Infinite Selling.

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open: the outside seat, and today's show
01:15 Welcome and guest introduction
03:43 What MentorGroup does and why customer experience comes first
08:27 The World Cup, the Signal, and the Liverpool vs Man United thread
15:35 The bluebird deal: what a fast close is really telling you
22:43 Sales as a team sport, not a relay race
26:38 Forecasting the bluebird and the mirage pipeline
31:20 Two signals leadership teams keep misreading
33:41 When a falling close rate isn't a skills problem
36:10 Why nobody comes to work to fail: getting the North Star right
40:56 Writing Infinite Selling with James Barton
45:42 Rapid Fire
47:46 Close: sign-off and how to get involved

Check out our Sponsor: https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

New to the Outside Seat? Start Here - www.youtube.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theoutsideseat/

Connect with our Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tumalty/

Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Twitter: https://www.x.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoutsideseat

Check us out on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb

Check us out on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-outside-seat-podcast/id1896892470

So what is The Outside Seat?

Most revenue leaders have never sat where their buyers sit. The Outside Seat is the podcast that fixes that, bringing GTM leaders and the unsung heroes behind them into conversations they'd never normally have with each other. Real talk on sales, revenue operations and what actually works from the buyer's side of the table, not the vendor's.

Hosted by Mike Tumalty, 25 years into B2B SaaS GTM, from ServiceNow to founding InsideNow. New episodes every Tuesday.

England didn't lose their World Cup semi-final because they weren't good enough. They lost it to a decision made ten days earlier, in a different game, under completely different conditions.

In this special solo episode, Mike Tumalty breaks down a leadership mistake that shows up everywhere, not just football: a good result gets recorded, the conditions behind it get thrown away, and what's left gets promoted to strategy. He traces it from Sir Alex Ferguson's approach to winning, through England's misread signal against Argentina, into the exact same failure mode Mike sees constantly inside B2B revenue teams: the seven-week deal mistaken for a repeatable motion, the webinar mistaken for a channel strategy, the save mistaken for a playbook.

It closes with a simple three-question framework any GTM or sales leader can use before turning a result into a conclusion.

Chapters:
0:00 The cold open
0:21 Welcome to The Outside Seat
1:33 Why this topic wouldn't leave me alone
3:58 Sir Alex Ferguson: "I planned to win every game"
6:25 The misread signal that cost England the final
8:53 Hollywood makes the same mistake, plus a word from Flourish
10:58 The same failure, inside your revenue engine
13:26 The three-question framework
15:49 Applying it: Mexico vs. the seven-week deal
18:08 Outro

Drop your answer in the comments: what is the win your business is still taking the wrong lesson from?

GTM strategy, B2B sales strategy, revenue leadership, commercial due diligence, mystery shop, sales leadership lessons, Alex Ferguson leadership

Check out our Sponsor: https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

New to the Outside Seat? Start Here - www.youtube.com/@TheOutsideSeat

Follow us on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theoutsideseat/

Connect with our Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tumalty/

Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Twitter: https://www.x.com/@theoutsideseat

Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoutsideseat

Check us out on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb

Check us out on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-outside-seat-podcast/id1896892470

So what is The Outside Seat?

Most revenue leaders have never sat where their buyers sit. The Outside Seat is the podcast that fixes that, bringing GTM leaders and the unsung heroes behind them into conversations they'd never normally have with each other. Real talk on sales, revenue operations and what actually works from the buyer's side of the table, not the vendor's.

Hosted by Mike Tumalty, 25 years into B2B SaaS GTM, from ServiceNow to founding InsideNow. New episodes every Tuesday.

#gtm #fifa #england #tuchel #lesson

Simon Edmunds leads international sales development at BeyondTrust, the cybersecurity company specialising in privileged access and identity security. He manages 28 SDRs and BDRs across hubs in Manchester, Frankfurt, Dubai, and Singapore, covering every market outside the United States.

In this episode, Simon and Mike cover what separates the BDRs who progress into AE roles from those who plateau, why the hierarchy myth is one of the most damaging beliefs in B2B GTM, how to hire for will over skill at the top of the funnel, and what a well-designed BDR compensation plan actually looks like. They also get into AI use in the SDR workflow, partner BDRs, and why Simon's Monday morning metric is a Claude project pulling intent signals, not a CRM dashboard.

In this Episode:

• SDR versus BDR: the structural difference and why it matters
• Partner BDRs: using intent data to build brand inside strategic partner organisations
• Hiring for will over skill, and how coachability is tested without asking about it directly
• The 70/15/15 compensation framework and the short/medium/long logic behind it
• Incentives at scale: how to regionalise motivation across four continents
• Career progression: why your number opens the door but your brand with the AEs around you gets you through it
• AI in the SDR stack: ZoomInfo, Sixth Sense, Outreach, Gong, and Claude in practice
• Rapid Fire: Outreach, the hierarchy myth, a Claude intent project, The Multiplier Effect, Problem Prospecting, and Maury Haber

About Simon Edmunds

Simon Edmunds is Senior Manager, International Markets at BeyondTrust, leading a 28-person sales development function across four global hubs. He began his career in graduate recruitment before moving into sales development leadership and has spent over a decade building and coaching the next generation of B2B sales talent in the cybersecurity sector.

Links:

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOutsideSeat
Spotify Channel: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb?si=dcc0e644f79f4f77
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-outside-seat-podcast/id1896892470
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat
Simon's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-edmunds/

The Outside Seat is a B2B revenue leadership podcast hosted by Mike Tumalty. New episodes every week.

Episode 11 is supported by Flourish, an early-career B2B sales recruitment and training business. If you are hiring sales talent, look at what they do:
https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

InsideNow: GTM diagnostics and commercial due diligence for B2B SaaS. insidenow.io

William Taylor has been in Revenue Operations for nearly 15 years. He came from finance, not sales, which means he sees the commercial engine differently from most people in the function.

In this episode, Mike sits down with William to work through what RevOps actually is versus what most organisations think it is, what breaks first in a hyper-scale environment, and why the function is so consistently misunderstood, underfunded, and hired too late. They also get into the CRO and RevOps relationship, hiring for the function, AI in RevOps, and the question that follows every RevOps leader around: how do you know if it is working?

William's answer involves a toolbox. Nobody thinks about the toolbox when fixing a car. But you would not have your tools without it.

In this episode:

• Why RevOps is the toolbox, not the tool, and what that means for how you hire and resource the function
• Channel conflict: why marketing and sales will always disagree until someone reframes the objective
• What breaks first in a hyper-scale environment, and why outbound is always the first thing abandoned
• The CRO and RevOps relationship: what it looks like when it works and where it becomes dysfunctional
• Hiring for RevOps: why attitude and aptitude beat technical skills every time
• AI in RevOps: why rubbish in still means rubbish out, and why CRM remains the foundation most teams do not have right
• The cost of doing nothing, and why the CFO budget argument is easier to win than most people think
• Rapid Fire: the tool William cannot live without (not AI), the GTM myth he wants to kill, and why MEDDIC is not a methodology

About William Taylor
William Taylor is a Revenue Operations leader with nearly 15 years of experience scaling RevOps functions across high-growth B2B SaaS businesses. He came to RevOps from a finance background, giving him a cross-functional perspective on the commercial engine that most RevOps practitioners do not have.

Links

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOutsideSeat
Spotify Channel: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb?si=dcc0e644f79f4f77
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-outside-seat-podcast/id1896892470
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat
William's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamdavidtaylor/

The Outside Seat is a B2B revenue leadership podcast hosted by Mike Tumalty. New episodes every week.

Episode 10 is supported by Flourish, an early-career B2B sales recruitment and training business. If you are hiring sales talent, look at what they do:
https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

InsideNow: GTM diagnostics and commercial due diligence for B2B SaaS. insidenow.io

Daniel Gray has spent 25 years in localisation. He now leads the go-to-market function for North America at Acolad, one of the leading localisation, interpretation, and data services businesses in the market. This conversation is about what happens to a GTM motion when the category itself gets turned upside down by AI.

What we cover:

• How AI has flipped the human-to-machine ratio in localisation — and what that means for how you sell, price, and hire
• The stakeholder evolution: why the CFO and CTO are now in localisation deals that used to be managed entirely by programme managers
• Above and below the algo: the framework from *Reshuffle* that every GTM leader in a tech-adjacent category should understand
• Social selling and micro-events: what is actually working in North American outbound right now
• The tight localisation buyer community and why competitors share war stories across the dinner table
• Why the modern localisation sales rep needs to be as comfortable talking infrastructure as they are talking content
• Sales velocity as the Monday morning metric

About Daniel Gray:

Daniel Gray leads the go-to-market function for North America at ACLAD, a full-breadth localisation business offering translation, interpretation, multimedia, and data services. He has spent 25 years in the localisation industry and operates at the intersection of technology, commercial transformation, and AI-powered GTM.

Links

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOutsideSeat
Spotify Channel: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb?si=dcc0e644f79f4f77
Apple Channel: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-outside-seat-podcast/id1896892470
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat
Daniel's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgray/

The Outside Seat is a B2B revenue leadership podcast hosted by Mike Tumalty. New episodes every week.

Episode 9 is supported by Flourish, an early-career B2B sales recruitment and training business. If you are hiring sales talent, look at what they do:
https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

InsideNow: GTM diagnostics and commercial due diligence for B2B SaaS. insidenow.io

Ted Ruscitti is Chief Customer Officer at Movemedical, a SaaS platform serving the medical device and healthcare supply chain industry. After 25 years leading customer success across HR, pharma, hospitality and now medical devices, Ted has landed somewhere unusual: 20 accounts, each worth millions, where the job is almost unrecognisable from running CS for thousands of low-value customers.

In this episode, Mike Tumalty and Ted talk about what changes when every account is a board-level conversation, how Movemedical's FIM (Field Inventory Management) assessment quantifies a client's ROI before the contract is even signed, and why Ted believes the people who are best at fighting fires are often the same people lighting them.

What's covered:

• The difference between managing 20 high-value accounts and 2,000 lower-value ones
• The FIM assessment: quantifying ROI before the sale closes
• Why a single customer health score hides more than it reveals
• The five components of a genuinely useful health score
• Why "land and expand sells itself" is a myth
• What changes when you scale customer success internationally
• Why the goal of good CS is to be boring

Guest bio:

Ted Ruscitti is Chief Customer Officer at Movemedical, where he leads customer success for the company's enterprise medical device and healthcare supply chain clients. He brings over 25 years of experience building and scaling customer success and support organisations across multiple industries, including HR technology, pharmaceutical clinical trials, hospitality, and enterprise SaaS.

Links

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOutsideSeat
Spotify Channel: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb?si=dcc0e644f79f4f77
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat
Ted's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedrus/

The Outside Seat is a B2B revenue leadership podcast hosted by Mike Tumalty. New episodes every week.

Episode 8 is supported by Flourish, an early-career B2B sales recruitment and training business. If you are hiring sales talent, look at what they do: https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

InsideNow: GTM diagnostics and commercial due diligence for B2B SaaS. insidenow.io

Revital Guetta has spent more than 22 years in post-sale, customer-facing organisations, from support through to Chief Customer Officer. She now advises companies on CS strategy and growth as an independent consultant.

In this conversation, Mike and Revital go deep on what genuinely great Customer Success looks like when it is built as a revenue function rather than a support function, how the function has evolved from GRR to NRR accountability, and what the best CSMs do that no AI model can replicate.

What is covered:

• How CS evolved from reactive support to active revenue contributor, and what that means for hiring
• Why the CSM skill set is not a single profile, and how hiring strategy has to match the product and the customer
• The commercial cost of treating CS as a support function, and what it takes to shift leadership thinking
• Overselling as one of the most predictive indicators of churn, and how to catch it before it damages the relationship
• What AI genuinely adds to a CS operation, and what it cannot replace
• Why cutting CS headcount in exchange for AI tools is the wrong calculation
• The handoff between sales and CS, and why embedding a CSM in the late stages of an enterprise deal matters
• The pandemic licensing decision that cost nothing and returned revenue

About Revital Guetta

Revital Guetta is a Customer Success and Growth Advisor based in Israel, with over 22 years of experience in post-sale, customer-facing roles spanning support, CS, customer marketing, customer education, and CCO-level commercial leadership. She has worked across SMB and enterprise, in both early-stage and scaling businesses. She now works independently, advising organisations on CS strategy, growth, and the gap between commercial intent and operational execution.

Links

• YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOutsideSeat
• Spotify Channel: https://open.spotify.com/show/033ujY7VMYJiHa40HlycUb?si=dcc0e644f79f4f77
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoutsideseat
• Revital’s website: www.revitalguetta.com

The Outside Seat is a B2B revenue leadership podcast hosted by Mike Tumalty. New episodes every week.

Episode 7 is supported by Flourish, an early-career B2B sales recruitment and training business. If you are hiring sales talent, look at what they do: https://info.helloflourish.com/hire-a-sales-exec/

InsideNow: GTM diagnostics and commercial due diligence for B2B SaaS. insidenow.io