David Farrell is a 25-year sales veteran and leader at Salesloft, an AI-powered revenue platform that helps sales teams build pipeline, close deals, and predict renewals. In this episode, David joins host John Golden to cut through the hype around artificial intelligence in sales and offer a grounded, practical view of where AI delivers real value — and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The three-legged stool framework for diagnosing any sales performance problem
• Why 78% of buyers complete most of their journey before engaging a salesperson — and what that means for your team
• How AI reduces pre-call research from five hours to fifteen minutes and what reps should do with that time
• The build-versus-buy decision facing enterprise organizations considering homegrown AI agents
• What the Salesloft and Clary merger means for unified revenue workflows
• Why smaller, nimble sales teams now hold a competitive advantage in the AI era

David brings sharp insight from decades in the field and shares a clear-eyed take on how sales organizations can adopt AI strategically rather than reactively. Connect with David and the Salesloft team at salesloft.com.

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Sid Bharath is the founder of Refound, an AI consultancy that helps mid-market companies become genuinely AI native. With a background spanning top-tier consulting, startup growth, and early-stage language model experimentation, Sid works hands-on with leadership teams to audit workflows, identify high-impact use cases, and deploy phased AI adoption strategies that deliver measurable results. In this episode, he joins John Golden to cut through the AI hype and explain exactly why so many company-wide initiatives fall flat — and what a successful transformation actually looks like.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why AI initiatives fail due to change management gaps, not technology failures
• The unbundling approach: how to break down and rebuild processes around AI
• Why does overlaying AI on a broken workflow just accelerate the problems
• The orchestrator mindset shift — letting AI act while you direct
• How to handle messy, uncleaned data without stalling your rollout
• Why AI transformation must be owned at the C-suite level to succeed

If your company is investing in AI or planning to do so, Sid’s practical framework will help you avoid the most common and costly mistakes. Visit refoundai.com to learn more and book a free AI audit consultation.

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Richard Broo is a project management turnaround specialist and founder of True North PMP Consulting, with more than four decades of experience helping Fortune 500 companies and mid-market organizations recover projects that are bleeding budget, sliding on timelines, or losing leadership alignment. In this episode, Richard breaks down the invisible forces that cause most projects to fail quietly — long before anyone at the top realizes what is happening.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why project failures almost always trace back to a specific three-way intersection of planning, execution, and people discipline
• How scope creep accumulates undetected, and what a proper scope statement must include to stop it
• Why assumptions and constraints function as “invisible assassins” that undermine even well-planned projects
• The hidden financial and emotional costs of executive sponsors who disengage mid-project
• The structured triage and root-cause corrective action process Richard uses to close critical bottlenecks within 60 days
• What small and mid-sized businesses can learn from General Electric’s project discipline model

If your organization is juggling multiple initiatives or struggling to keep a key project on track, Richard’s frameworks will give you a clear, actionable path forward. Visit truenorthpmpconsulting.com to book a free consultation.

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Shabnum Bi is the Founder and Director of Early Nurture Preschool in Birmingham — an Ofsted Outstanding setting that has attracted international delegates, earned a place in the Montessori International Awards finals, and brought Shabnum to a World Leaders Summit at the University of Oxford. In this episode, Shabnum shares how she rebuilt her early years’ setup from scratch after a forced liquidation, and why refusing to scale is her most deliberate business decision.

In this episode, Shabnum covers:

• How to balance daily hands-on leadership with a growing public profile and media presence
• Why she caps enrolment at 30 children — and how that ceiling creates competitive advantage
• The lessons from losing a 20-year business with half a day’s notice and launching again four weeks later
• How deep community roots translate into trust, referrals, and resilience
• Teaching three-year-olds lifelong skills: civic awareness, emotional regulation, and global empathy
• What international collaboration — from South Korea to the USA — looks like inside a small Birmingham preschool

Ready to transform how your community thinks about early education? Visit www.earlynurturepreschool.co.uk to learn more about Shabnum’s approach.

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Lisa Pagotto is the Founder & CEO of Crooked Compass, a multi-seven-figure immersive adventure travel company specializing in small group expeditions to the world’s most remote and extraordinary destinations. In this episode, she joins John Golden to share the leadership lessons forged in the aftermath of a Shark Tank episode that nearly cost her everything — and the pandemic pivot that rebuilt it stronger.

Topics covered:

• How chasing investor prestige caused her to lose sight of her founding purpose
• The moment a collapsed deal sent Crooked Compass into administration
• Rebuilding from first principles: the three pillars that guided her recovery
• Launching Crooked Compass by Air as a COVID pivot — using a pilot’s license she earned during lockdown
• Why alignment, radical transparency, and deep destination expertise drive her leadership today
• The community investment model that earns her access to the world’s most restricted travel destinations

Whether you’re navigating a business crisis or looking to sharpen your leadership philosophy, Lisa’s story is a masterclass in purposeful resilience. Explore her two adventure travel brands at crooked-compass.com.

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Sridhar Ravilla is a fractional transformation executive and author with more than 25 years of senior leadership experience at AT&T and Tech Mahindra, where he led enterprise-scale programmes spanning cloud, AI, and digital modernisation. He joins John Golden to diagnose a pattern he has seen across industries: well-funded, well-led transformations that collapse not at the strategy stage, but in the moments right after strategy is approved.

In this episode, Sridhar and John cover:

• Why accountability diffuses into committees and dashboards the moment a transformation moves from planning to execution
• How green dashboards hide unresolved trade-offs and what leaders should be asking instead
• The deferral committee trap — and why “let’s get more data” is a risk-relocation strategy in disguise
• Why AI delivers 270 degrees of visibility and what fills the critical remaining 90 degrees
• The resignation test: the single question every large-scale transformation needs to answer before launch
• How to structure named ownership so that the right person — not the AI, not the committee — carries the outcome

If accountability in transformation is something you wrestle with, Sridhar’s frameworks are immediately applicable. Connect with him directly at linkedin.com/in/sridharravilla/.

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Susan Friedman is the founder of Aviva Publishing & Marketing, a nonfiction book marketing specialist with over 30 years of experience and 18 published books — including one title that sold over 500,000 copies to a single corporate buyer. In this episode, she challenges the assumptions that sink most business authors and lays out a strategic framework for turning a book into a genuine revenue-generating asset.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why authors must stop thinking of their book as a product and start treating it as a business tool
• How niche and vertical market positioning drives bulk sales and long-term visibility
• The role of speaking, coaching, and corporate training as the real ROI of a business book
• How to overcome imposter syndrome before and after launch
• Why sustained, consistent marketing — not a big-publisher deal or Amazon listing — determines a book’s success
• Where AI genuinely helps authors and where it can damage credibility

Ready to give your book a real marketing strategy? Connect with Susan at avivapubs.com.

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Andy Hedrick is the Founder and CEO of Green Path Tech and author of the 2V2R Rapid Sales Growth System. With over 30 years of B2B sales experience and more than $500 million in revenue growth delivered, Andy joins Sales POP! to share a practical framework for growing faster, closing sooner, and spending less to do it.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The 2V2R formula — why Value and Verified Results must outweigh Risks and Resistors
• How to build buyer trust digitally before the first conversation ever happens
• Using proof-of-concept projects to compress multi-year close cycles into months
• The fractional staffing model that cuts cost of sales by 40–60%
• How to use AI in outreach without destroying your credibility
• Why leading your pitch with value — not your company history — changes everything

If your pipeline is big but your close rate is disappointing, this episode is for you. Learn more and connect with Andy at greenpathtech.com.

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