Michael Bogart, Founder and CEO of Revenue-Growth.AI, explains that the traditional playbook for generating pipeline (relying on predictable conversion rates from email, cold calls, and conferences) is “dead.” In response, the company focuses on maximizing the value of existing prospective and current customers by deploying specialized AI agents to predict and reduce churn, improve close rates, and reduce time-to-close.

The core value proposition is demonstrated through a simple deal inspection agent built on an automation platform (make.com), utilizing the Gemini large language model. This agent is trained to synthesize a plethora of information (call transcripts, emails, notes, next steps) for any deal. The agent can then automatically take action, such as updating a field in Salesforce (e.g., confirming competitive intelligence is present, citing the call ID as the source) and sending a critical, automated notification via Slack to the relevant team (CRO, rep, etc.) if key deal criteria are met. Crucially, Revenue-Growth.AI avoids the typical blockers to AI adoption, security review, and the build-versus-buy debate by building, deploying, and maintaining these custom agents natively within the customer’s existing tech stack and environment. This approach ensures a fast time-to-market, allowing customers to start with one agent and see results within the same quarter.

Takeaways:

• Audit Your Deal Data: Use the agent framework to immediately start inspecting deal quality. Train the first agent to output one of three conclusions on a critical deal stage component (e.g., Pain Identified: Met, Partially Met, Unmet) and require a source citation.

• Automate Business Cases: Leverage the agent’s ability to take action by setting up criteria to automatically generate a Version 1 business case or slide deck for any deal that hits a specific stage and close date. This saves high-value sales time.

• Bypass Security/IT Roadblocks: Given that the agents are built in your existing environment (bypassing the need for new software security reviews), identify one critical, high-impact revenue problem and allocate budget to pilot a single agent immediately.

• Prioritize Pipeline Efficiency over New Lead Volume: Focus AI investment on maximizing the conversion and retention rates of the existing pipeline and customer base, acknowledging that traditional pipeline generation math is no longer reliable.

• Special Offer: For members of the 100 Founders Network, the initial build and deployment of the first AI agent is offered for a one-time fee of $10,000 (a reduction from the typical $15,000 setup fee). Contact Michael Bogart at MD Bogart (LinkedIn) or revenue-growth.ai to initiate the conversation.

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdbogart/

• Website: https://www.revenue-growth.ai/

Omer Gotlieb of Salespeak AI joins Dave Rubinstein to discuss the “broken” B2B buying experience, arguing that buyer expectations have dramatically changed due to high-quality AI interactions (like ChatGPT and Waymo), while many B2B companies still use “legacy playbooks”. The current landscape is noisy, with an “improper use or wrong use of AI” leading to an overwhelming “spam cannon” of intelligent-sounding but poorly targeted emails and messages. Salespeak AI aims to fix this by enabling intelligent conversations across all digital touchpoints, including websites, email, and forms, to deliver the expert-level experience buyers now expect, which often feels like speaking directly to a founder or a chief product officer.

Salespeak’s platform first trains its AI on a company’s website, internal documents, battle cards, and call recordings, allowing marketers to control the knowledge base. Marketers then define goals and qualification criteria in plain English, allowing the AI to guide prospects toward scheduling a demo or watching a product video. Crucially, the platform provides deep intelligence for the company, generating gold nugget insights on what customers are asking, what content is missing, and which campaigns are bringing in the right questions. The entire platform is designed for marketers, requiring minimal engineering support, just a small code snippet for implementation, and a five-minute CRM integration.

Takeaways:

• Prioritize Intelligent Conversations: A positive B2B buying experience relies on having intelligent, expert-level conversations that quickly save the buyer time and help them make a decision.

• Treat the Buyer as a 2025 Customer: Traditional, static websites and legacy playbooks are no longer enough because AI (like ChatGPT) has educated buyers to expect instant, trustworthy, high-quality experiences.

• Unify Digital Touchpoints: Ensure the intelligent conversational experience is consistent across every channel—website, forms, email, etc.—to create a much better overall situation for the buyer.

• Leverage AI for Company Insights: Use conversational AI to generate “gold nuggets” of intelligence for your company, such as identifying content gaps, analyzing competitor questions, understanding messaging gaps, and seeing what questions specific marketing campaigns generate.

• Use Missing Information as a Training Tool: Pay attention to the AI’s dashboard feature that highlights questions the AI was asked but didn’t have enough training on. This is a crucial opportunity for marketers to train the AI on new or strategic information (like competitive details or pricing) that they may not want publicly on the website.

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omergotlieb/

• Website: https://salespeak.ai/

Noah Jacobs, co-founder of BirdDog, demonstrates how his platform helps sales teams cut through the noise of automated “spam your TAM” strategies to identify exactly which accounts to target. Jacobs explains that while salespeople can technically sell to many companies, the real challenge is identifying those with specific active pain points—such as training foundation models, hiring specific engineering roles, or opening new facilities—that align with a vendor’s value proposition.

BirdDog automates this manual research process by providing real-time “signals” directly into workflows like Slack and Teams, creating a transparent “signal floor” where leadership and AEs can collaborate on breaking news. The demo showcases how the platform not only alerts teams to these triggers but also acts as an analytical tool, comparing signals against past “Closed Won” and “Closed Lost” data to mathematically determine which behaviors are most predictive of actual revenue.

Takeaways:

• Move Beyond Basic Firmographics: Instead of just filtering by company size or industry, sales teams should look for specific behavioral triggers—like product launches or new facility openings—that indicate a genuine need for their specific solution.

• Create a “Signal Floor” for Transparency: Rather than siloing information, pipe real-time account alerts into a public Slack or Teams channel. This allows sales leaders to immediately tag AEs or offer executive introductions based on fresh news.

• Validate Your Signals Against Revenue: Don’t just guess which triggers matter. Analyze your past deals to see which signals appeared frequently in your “Closed Won” column compared to the “Closed Lost” column (e.g., BirdDog found specific signals made deals 2x more likely to close).

• Contextualize the “Why Now”: When reaching out, use specific data points found during research (like a job posting or SEC filing) to customize the “Why now/Why reach out” narrative, rather than using generic templates.

• Ideal Use Case for Deep Research: This level of signal-based selling is most effective for complex sales cycles (3+ months) with contract values over $30,000, where “spray and pray” tactics are ineffective.

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-jacobs/

• Website: https://www.getbirddog.ai/

This is the definitive guide to Founder Led Sales for B2B SaaS companies under ten million in revenue. Everything you are about to read comes from more than two hundred founder conversations across the United States, Europe, India, and other regions.

Founder Led Sales is not a phase to rush through.
Founder Led Sales is not something to outsource as quickly as possible.
Founder Led Sales is the blueprint for every go to market that eventually scales.

Across these conversations, the same patterns appear.
What works.
What fails.
Where momentum comes from.
Where founders get stuck.

This guide explains exactly how to move from messy Founder Led Sales to a motion that can scale without heroics.
This is the SPRINT Playbook.

Why Founder Led Sales Breaks Down

Every founder starts as the first seller. They have to. No one else can tell the story as clearly or as confidently. This is a superpower in the early days.

But early instincts do not scale.
Improvisation does not scale.
Speed without clarity does not scale.

Most founders hire too early. They believe an account executive or head of sales will fix the motion. But if the motion is unclear, every early hire will fail. The founder blames the hire. The hire blames the product. In reality, the motion was never repeatable.

Traction is not product market fit.
Traction is the beginning of learning.
Traction is not the finish line.

The First Big Question: What Changed?

Every founder can explain the problem they solve. The issue is that most problems have existed for years. Buyers already know the pain. They have built workarounds. They have learned to tolerate it.

The problem alone is not enough.
Buyers act when something in their world changes.

If you cannot answer What changed, your buyer will not feel urgency. They will be curious, but not ready to commit. This is the root cause of stalled pipeline.

Why Most Founders Sell Into Numb Markets

Buyers are numb. They have seen every pitch. They have been burned by tools that overpromised. They have lived through reorgs, leadership changes, and budget freezes.

Saying yes is risky.
Saying no is safe.

To break through numbness, a founder must show:

• Why this problem is accelerating

• What changed in the environment

• Why the old workaround is failing

• Why the cost of waiting is rising

Buyers do not act because the problem exists.
Buyers act because the problem is getting worse.

Curiosity Is Not Purchase Intent

Founders often mistake meetings for momentum.
A call does not equal intent.

When a buyer takes a meeting, it often means:

• They want to learn

• They need to evaluate the category

• They want to compare vendors

• They are curious about new trends

Curiosity creates meetings.
Intent creates deals.

Curiosity loves demos.
Intent wants outcomes.
Curiosity accepts pilots.
Intent pushes for implementation.

This confusion is why deals stall.

The Real Barriers Slowing Early Revenue

Across hundreds of conversations, the same barriers appear:

• No clear reason to act now

• Buyers already have workarounds

• Founders cannot explain what changed

• Messaging sounds like everyone else

• Early wins come from improv, not process

• Next steps are unclear

• The path to value is fuzzy

These barriers cannot be fixed by hiring.
They can only be fixed with clarity.

The Four Founder Archetypes

Across early stage companies, four patterns show up.

The Explainer

Clear on the problem. Cannot articulate urgency.

The Vision Seller

Inspires the buyer. Cannot map vision to next steps.

The Builder

Avoids selling until the product feels perfect.

The Hero

Wins deals through personality. Cannot teach the motion.

The goal is not perfection.
The goal is teachability.

The Problem Must Be Getting Worse

Buyers act when the problem accelerates.
This is why What changed is so important.
You are not describing pain.
You are describing acceleration.

When the cost of waiting rises faster than the cost of acting, buyers pull budget toward you.

Every scalable go to market is built around a problem that is getting worse.

The Trap of False Product Market Fit

Many founders believe they have product market fit because:

• Buyers take calls

• Buyers are excited

• Buyers run pilots

• Buyers give positive feedback

• Buyers compare tools

This is curiosity.
Not product market fit.

True product market fit shows up when:

• Buyers act on their own

• Buyers expand usage quickly

• Buyers bring budget forward

• Buyers move fast without being pushed

Pilots are not proof.
Expansion is proof.

The Role of Speed

Speed wins in early stage markets because speed reduces uncertainty. Speed builds trust. Speed creates energy. Speed makes progress simple.

Speed is not rushing.
Speed is clarity.

Speed is knowing the next step and making the path easy.

Founders who take buyers from meeting to value in a single afternoon win far more than founders who aim for the perfect pitch.

Repeatability Before Scale

Before you hire your first account executive, you need:

• A clear explanation of what changed

• A problem that is getting worse

• A simple value story

• Discovery questions that surface urgency

• A predictable deal pattern

• A defined next step after every call

• Three to five repeatable wins that came from process, not personality

Repeatability is the moment the motion holds even when the conversation shifts.
This is the moment you can hire.

The SPRINT Framework Explained

SPRINT is the operating system for moving from messy Founder Led Sales to scalable revenue.

S: Speed

How quickly the buyer sees clarity and value.

P: Problem

Not the problem itself. The acceleration of the problem. What changed. Why now.

R: Results

The business outcome that matters most. Results remove noise and justify purchase.

I: Implementation

How fast they can start. How easy the path to value is. Fast implementation is a competitive advantage.

N: Niche

Winning companies start narrow. A niche accelerates referrals, sharpens messaging, and increases repeatability.

T: Trust

Why they should choose you over ten identical vendors. Trust is clarity, competence, and simplicity.

SPRINT is not a script.
SPRINT is the system.

Solving a Problem That Is Getting Worse

Founders with momentum solve problems that are becoming more expensive, more visible, or more operationally dangerous.

When the problem accelerates, buyers move from curiosity to action because:

• Budget moves

• Leadership pays attention

• Risk rises

• Workarounds break

• Pressure increases

Acceleration creates intent.

The Trust Decision: If Ten Competitors Show Up

Buyers must protect their time, reputation, and team. If everyone looks the same, the buyer chooses the company that:

• Understands their world most clearly

• Explains what changed

• Shows why the problem is now urgent

• Demonstrates the path to value

• Speaks with simplicity

• Reduces risk

• Moves fast

Trust decides the deal.

The Path to Scalable Revenue

Scalable revenue comes from this sequence:

1. Clarify what changed

2. Show the acceleration of the problem

3. Pick a niche where urgency is highest

4. Tell a simple story

5. Deliver a fast win

6. Teach the motion

7. Validate repeatability

8. Then hire

Most companies do this backward.
The SPRINT Playbook puts the order in place.

How to Use This Playbook

To put SPRINT into practice:

• Rebuild your narrative around What changed

• Show why the cost of waiting is rising

• Validate urgency before offering a pilot

• Build speed into every step

• Make implementation simple

• Focus on results, not features

• Narrow your niche

• Use SPRINT to coach and calibrate

• Watch for patterns in questions and objections

• Teach the motion before hiring

Founder Led Sales is not something to survive.
It is something to master.

Final Word

You do not need more volume. You need more clarity.
You do not need a perfect product. You need a reason to act now.
You do not need a complex sales process. You need a fast path to value.

SPRINT gives founders a way to shorten the painful part of Founder Led Sales.
It gives you a path from chaos to repeatable revenue.

Founder Led Sales is the beginning.
Scalable revenue is the result.
SPRINT is the path.

Definition: Founder Led Sales

Founder Led Sales
A repeatable revenue motion where the founder is the primary seller, responsible for discovery, messaging, positioning, demos, value creation, and early pipeline. The goal is to find a simple and teachable process that another seller can follow to scale revenue beyond the founder.

About the Author

Dave Rubinstein has interviewed more than two hundred founders across twenty eight countries and has led high growth sales teams at Salesforce, Outreach, and Meta. Today he runs 100 Founders, a research driven advisory supporting early stage B2B companies transitioning from Founder Led Sales to scalable revenue.

Yoel Krupnik, co-founder of Quizit AI, demos a platform designed to address student engagement and the static nature of traditional assessments. The tool uses AI to “instantly transform learning with gamified assessments” by turning materials like prompts, videos, documents, and websites into interactive multiple-choice quizzes. While the primary focus is currently on the education system for teachers, Yoel also notes its high relevance for corporate use cases like employee onboarding, customer training, and fun team events.

The demo shows Yoel creating a specific quiz for ninth-grade students about percentages in under a minute. He highlights both the student and teacher views. Students get immediate feedback, including detailed explanations for how to arrive at the correct answer. Teachers get a comprehensive dashboard with class-wide statistics, including performance distribution and a per-question analysis to see which answers misled students. Yoel shares feedback that students are more engaged during the entire lesson because they anticipate a fun, five-minute quiz at the end.

Takeaways:

• Generate Quizzes from Diverse Content Sources: Quizit’s AI can create interactive quizzes not just from simple text prompts, but also from files, links, documents, and videos. A user can instruct the AI to combine sources, such as asking it to “take this topic from... this YouTube video and that topic from that PDF”.

• Create Highly Specific Assessments in Seconds: A teacher can create a quiz in 30 to 40 seconds. The prompt can be very specific, defining not only the topic (e.g., percentages) but also the target grade level (e.g., ninth grade) and context (e.g., real-world scenarios).

• Provide Immediate, Explanatory Feedback to Students: After a student answers a question, the platform immediately shows if they were correct or incorrect. Crucially, it also provides an explanation of how to get to the right answer. For math problems, this explanation shows the specific equation or method used to find the solution.

• Use Teacher Dashboards to Analyze Class Performance: Teachers get immediate statistics on class performance. The dashboard shows statistics for each question, a “per question analysis” detailing which options students selected, and data on individual student performance. This helps teachers identify common distractors or topics that need review.

• Boost Student Engagement Throughout the Lesson: According to feedback received by Quizit, knowing there will be a fun, five-minute quiz at the end of a lesson can change the entire dynamic. It makes students “much more concentrated and engaged from the very beginning” rather than just during the quiz itself.

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoelkrupnik/?originalSubdomain=il

• Website: https://quizit.ai/

• Email: Yoel@quizit.ai

Zach Wright, Co-Founder and CRO of Syft AI, demos his AI sales application designed to help B2B outbound sales teams find a pipeline they aren’t aware of. Syft.ai’s mission is to move sellers away from the “volume game” by solving the problem of random prospecting. Zach showcases a three-part workflow: first, “value matching,” which identifies companies actively showing signs of a problem you can solve; second, generating “perspective-driven messaging” with recommended contacts based on that value match; and third, pushing that messaging and contact data directly into a sales engagement platform like Outreach. The goal is to provide reps with the “answer before they ask” and make outbound prospecting relevant again.

Takeaways:

• Re-evaluate the “volume game”. If your “spray and pray” approach yields less than 1% results, doubling the volume won’t fix the core issue, as “two times zero is still zero”.

• Focus on “value matching”. Instead of random prospecting, identify companies that are actively showing signals of a problem or an initiative your product can solve.

• Craft “perspective-driven messaging”. Your outreach should reference the research you’ve done, identify the challenge this implies, explain how you can help, and ideally include a relevant win story.

• Go multi-threaded from the start. Use tools that recommend multiple contacts for a single account and add them all to your outreach sequence at the same time.

• Combine email outreach with a LinkedIn strategy. After pushing contacts into an email sequence, send LinkedIn connection requests to the same people.

• Follow up on new LinkedIn connections effectively. For the contacts who accept (Zach sees ~40% acceptance ), send a screenshot of your research (the “value match”) and reiterate your perspective on how you can help.

• Accelerate new rep onboarding. Providing new hires with AI-generated value matches and messaging allows them to “learn by doing” and get into the game quickly

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachwrightsyft/

• Website: https://www.syftai.com/

Follow Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daverubinstein/

I didn’t set out to turn this into a project (and more). But as the number of conversations grew, everyone kept asking: “Will you be sharing your learnings?”

I’m well past the goal of meeting 100 Founders and have no plans to stop.

Your guess is as good as mine where this goes from here.

I just know if you are a Founder, a Founding AE/Leader, a VC, a Recruiter, a Researcher, or even just a fan of technology, you’ll want to follow my journey.

Get the FULL Q3 2025 Report Here