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The secret sauce to your sales success? It’s what happens before the sale. It’s the planning, the strategy, the leadership. And it’s more than demo automation. It’s the thoughtful work that connects people, processes, and performance. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, the pre-work—centered around the human—still makes the dream work. But you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what great sales leaders do best. Combining vision with execution. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to build and lead high-performing sales teams. You’re not just preparing for the sale—you’re unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales leaders who make a difference, their challenges, their wins, and the human connections that drive results, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene (00:00):
Welcome, welcome to V5, where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox with some of the hottest takes in all the B2B sales. This is going to be a fun one. I am joined today by CEO, co-founder Champify, one and only Mr. Todd Busler. Todd, how are you doing today?
Todd Busler (00:19):
Doing great. I spend my morning at the DMV. Aside from that, everything is awesome. That place is hell.
Jarod Greene (00:25):
Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. So let's get into it. I don't think DMV is a hot take, so let's get into it. You know the format, you know how to play the game. What grinds your gears, man? What is your take on the landscape of B2B sales and how we can all get better and level up?
Todd Busler (00:40):
I think this is mainly driven by social and what tends to get picked up and go viral, but people just talk in so many absolutes, right? This thing is dead, this thing doesn't work. And the reality is every business is different and there's so many dynamics that go into what makes go-to-market motion works. The competitors, how much capital is then poured into the category, the maturity of the category, is it a new category, ripping out old spend? There's so much that goes into it and I think anyone that just talks in absolutes, it's nonsense. I find myself sometimes tripping into that once in a while. I'm like, hold on. No, this is not the thing. That's the number one thing that grinds my gears.
Jarod Greene (01:18):
Yeah, no absolutes. Too many variables. Too many permutations. I see it a lot on LinkedIn. I saw one of my friends posted this about a week ago and sent something similar around the realms of how many times are you going to see the same posts from the same CEO that says, I had lunch with a $10 million so-and-so, and what they said was this, and what we agreed to is that this thing's dead or this thing is stupid. 560 some comments later, objective achieved. That's what you're talking about here. The notion to self-grandize and the absolute on a topic when there's just too many dig on variables.
Todd Busler (01:54):
I don't mind the people following like, Hey, here's a hook that works on social. You have to play the games to get people to see what your opinion is. I just think people so confidently say, this is dead. This is the only way to go about it. And it's like, look, most of us, even if you've had multiple jobs in tech, you haven't seen that many categories. So you really don't know what works or doesn't work in different parts, and it's changing so quickly. So people tend to have really high confidence in things they say, and I'm just like, this is not right.
Jarod Greene (02:24):
How do you fight the urge to respond?
Todd Busler (02:27):
I don't really get in any of it. I, I just started taking social kind of seriously like brand building two and a half, three years ago. I don't really engage with any of it. Once in a while, I'll catch myself being like, ugh. But there's no winning. There's no winner. I don't engage with any of it.
Jarod Greene (02:43):
I hear you. I hear you. You have massive following. You guys are doing great work. You don't have to give the kind of hot take on all things Champify and you're not going to declare anything dead or alive or not working anymore. But what are some of the things you're working on that you think the audience here should know about?
Todd Busler (02:59):
Yeah, it's really interesting timing of that question too. So basically, Jarod, my belief is that maybe not dead, but getting harder and harder every single day is accessing a lot of the same data that all of your competitors have and trying to get in touch with the same pool of people. We're just seeing every single day that passes the efficiency of that motion. How well people can do it repeatedly and predictably is getting harder and harder. So our whole philosophy at Champify is once you hit a certain critical mass of company size, and this could be around a couple hundred employees or it could be around a couple hundred or a thousand customers, you've collected a lot of first-party data across your sales and marketing organization, and I think most companies do a criminally bad job at utilizing that data.
(03:53):
So this could be, hey, we had former customers that are moving around. We have multiple users moving into accounts. We heard the same flavor on 10 different close lost opportunities about a loss reason. And no one reengages. I think every company, once again, you hit a certain critical scale. We don't sell to any really small companies. You have to get your first critical mass of customers on your own any way possible. Once you're there, there's just so much data that people don't tap into, and there's this hyper obsession on new account, new logo, new first conversation, and I just see the world going to...
(04:28):
Founder brand is going to keep getting more important. The stuff you're doing with me right now is going to get more important. Through content, good product, creative offers, you're going to draw more people into your sphere, and the companies that can deliver really good experiences and then build customers over 5, 8, 10-year spans are the ones that can win. And every day we see, Jarod, with our customers, we see adoption of our core product, which was really simple. You have advocates, know where they're changing jobs and make sure you're talking to them. And now we see our adoption of that going up month over month consistently. And the reason is the alternatives of what people can prospect with and what per unit of work they can spend their time on is getting less effective. So now people are starting to take this more and more seriously, which is an exciting time for us.
Jarod Greene (05:16):
That is exciting. That is awesome. And again, I think more people should tap to, you're right, AI should make all of this very easy, but it also creates an incredible amount of complexity. There's just more data there to sift through. I a hundred percent hear you and agree with you on the kind of economies and scale you can reach. And again, that cost of efficiency measure gets real, particularly for companies trying to navigate...
Todd Busler (05:37):
Hundred percent.
Jarod Greene (05:38):
New segments, new products, new geos, the whole bit. Todd, this goes quick! This is it. I feel like we got a lot done in a little bit of time. If people wanted to connect, I know that's really easy, where do they find you and how do they do that?
Todd Busler (05:50):
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. That's really the only thing I'm on consistently. My name's Todd Busler, send me a DM. Disagree with what I'm writing, challenge what I'm writing, questions on anything, all things go-to-market outbound. I'd love to think through problems, and it's all multiple different complex puzzles and I love nerding out about it. So DM me if I can help.
Jarod Greene (06:09):
That's awesome. You heard it. Well, thanks, Todd, for spending five minutes with us, man. I really appreciate it.
Todd Busler (06:13):
Appreciate it, Jarod. Have a good one.