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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 to V5 where we spent exactly five minutes or so getting on our soapbox with some of the hottest takes in all of B2B go to market. This is going to be a fun one. Ryan and I played the name game figured out. We got some fun mutuals, but that's here nor there. We're going to get into what is top of mind for Ryan Heinig, CRO of 2X. Ryan, how you doing today?
Ryan Heinig (00:24):
Great, man. Thanks for having me on.
Jarod Greene (00:26):
Great to see. Thanks for being on. We appreciate you. All right, so you know how to play the rules of engagement. What's top of mind for you?
Ryan Heinig (00:32):
I had an old mentor used to always talk about that selling is simple but not easy, and that has from 20 years ago, that have stuck in my head. Really, the idea behind that is there's four things that every great seller does. They do consistent pipeline generation. They qualify their deals, they do great discovery. They find the pay in all of that's in the qualification bucket. They build incredible champs that want the deal even more than they want the deal, and then they create momentum within the sales cycle. And if you do those four things, it's actually pretty simple to understand what to do as a great enterprise seller. It doesn't mean it's easy. Matter of fact, it's incredibly complicated, but there's a lot of professional jobs out there that are complicated as well, is really hard. Our jobs are hard, but they're really, really simple.
(01:19):
So the way to apply this is really think about time management in your calendars and whatever you're doing in that moment, if you're not doing one of those four things, pg qualified building champions or creating momentum within a sales cycle, you're not driving the ball forward. And it's super easy in this world with Slack blowing up all the time, emails, text messages, there's a million different ways to get distracted. If you're not doing one of those four things, you're not moving the ball forward. The only other thing is obviously the great sellers are consistent learners that's not within a sales cycle. Find time to learn, listen to podcasts like this, make sure you're in books. But outside of that, those four things is really what drives success in enterprise sales.
Jarod Greene (01:55):
Yeah, Ryan, when you think about the application of those four things, you look at something like AI and how it can help or sometimes hurt. What say you on the pragmatic, practical use of AI to help with any of those four stages?
Ryan Heinig (02:09):
Yeah, I think a lot of times in pipeline generation, so the prep needed, I'm always talking to my team. That pipeline generation, when you're doing prospecting, especially cold prospecting, if you're not relevant, you might as well not even do it. So you can leverage AI from researching earnings or researching the person's past, or, hey, maybe the person did an hour long podcast. I don't want to listen to the whole podcast. I'm going to throw it in. I'm going to get some key nuggets and then I'm going to prospect it back. If you're not relevant in your prospecting, cold prospecting is dead. But in my opinion, it's not dead and there's just too many people that are doing it not well. And the way to do it well is to be incredibly relevant. You can leverage AI to help you with that relevancy and speed down the prep time that we used to have to do 15 years ago when you were prepping your whole Monday to set up yourself the prospect on Tuesday.
Jarod Greene (02:59):
Yeah, totally. And then just don't want to shift gears a little bit, but I thought talked about in the pre-call was relevant. How do you see the role of enablement with regard to those really four simple things or rep has to do, and where have you seen enablement kind of fall down a little bit in terms of its org structure in place in a modern good market?
Ryan Heinig (03:18):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big believer it's a little bit of a hot take because it's not completely true, but I always say that sales enablement is not responsible for sales enablement. And what I mean by that is we as CROs or third or fourth line sales leaders, we have to make sure that we are instilling a culture of enablement and learning, especially at the first-line leader. First-line leader is the hardest job in any company in the world. You're closest to the rep, but you also have the pressure above you. But too many first-line leaders don't focus on enable and they think it's someone else's job. So the way we have it set up here are 2X is sales enablement is responsible for their content, they're responsible for the portal and the technology where they can find things. Everything's up to date, our slides, all of that. But the first-line leader is really the one that is carving out time in their day to do the coaching. We call it film session where once a week that first-line leader meets with one of the reps and they go over gong and the calls that they had this week. You have to be able to do that because your first-line leaders are typically also your best sellers within your organization. And if they're not the ones that are doing the coaching, balls are being dropped.
Jarod Greene (04:25):
I've seen it all too often from my enablement days and couldn't agree your assessment and clear, I think we can go for it, Ryan, because this just feels really good. You had a third take that I think is important. So again, I got my four steps. I see where enablement should fit in your worldview, but talk a little bit about the role and impact of community on a seller's ability to scale and be affected.
Ryan Heinig (04:46):
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And really this is something that I've always done throughout my career, but now shifting out of the enterprise software space, that's where I spent my entire career into the B2B marketing space. That's what 2X does. I've realized the importance of community, and we talk a lot about, and you hear probably people on this podcast before that talk about outbound is dead. It's not outbound dead, just people aren't going to respond if there's not some sort of sense of community around them. So if you look at what you're doing on this podcast or I talk about Todd Busler from Shopify, Carta puts out data around pre IPO stock. If you are not creating a place where you can keep people in your orbit because you want sell to people that are earned a buying decision timeframe, you want to sell to people that are in market ready to make a decision.
(05:30):
But the trick is how do I keep those people in my orbit so when they are ready to buy, they think of me. And you do that by fostering an incredible community. And I think too often, too many sales leaders and sales reps leave this solely up to marketing. It is sales and marketing's job together to build this community. And you have to kind of have a thought leadership process around your company to keep all of these buyers in whatever your solution offers, keep them warm to you. So when they are ready to buy, they raise their hand.
Jarod Greene (06:00):
Yeah, we plant these seeds, they're all going to grow at different times. You water, you nurture 'em, and next thing you know, got a beautiful garden. So we kind of use that analogy a lot here. Ryan, this has been a blast. I told you five minutes. We'll go quick, especially with us. We appreciate your time. Where can folks learn more about you and 2X and everything you guys got going on?
Ryan Heinig (06:18):
To your point of planning seed, let 'em grow. I'm a big believer. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll gladly accept it. Send me a message and definitely check out 2X. So what 2X does is a B2B marketing firm. We help CMOs and marketing leaders really think differently about their org structure so they can shift money of often fixed costs within an internal headcount and kind of redesign that headcount mix to be able to shift more into program spend, which obviously drives revenue impact and pipeline, and then most important metrics that a modern day CMO needs to drive. So connect with me on LinkedIn's pride the best way.
Jarod Greene (06:53):
Absolutely, Ryan, appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Ryan Heinig (06:56):
Cool. Hey, thanks man.
Jarod Greene (06:58):
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