Enabling Excellent B2B Sales Teams in the AI Era with Tom Murtaugh, Portfolio Operations Director at Nordic Capital - Ep 65

Even with all the newest, shiniest AI tools out there, successful, sustainable B2B sales growth is still built on nailing the basic sales skills.

To provide a refresher on those basic B2B sales skills and more, we’re thrilled to introduce Tom Murtaugh, the Portfolio Operations Director at Nordic Capital, a leading sector-specialist private equity firm. Tom joins co-hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson to discuss the importance of maintaining deal control, why revenue leaders need to understand the key activities that drive outcomes, and how to get your sales managers up to speed as they become more valuable with the implementation of AI.

Plus, Tom helps Craig and Matt perform an autopsy on the failure of the sales enablement movement.

Also, Craig once again references TOPO and Matt gets envious of a warm male embrace while also imparting the joys of parenthood.

Critical Takeaways

• What are the handful of activities that have a real impact on moving a deal forward for your company? While most organizations cannot empirically state which activities drive revenue, using modern data tools and call analysis, sales leaders can and should run correlation analyses to pinpoint and scale what top performers do.
• Sales leaders should be directly involved in late-stage enterprise deals, ensuring there is a clear, actionable joint execution plan for each opportunity. Top-down focus and hands-on deal reviews with sales leaders is critical to exceeding targets, even when the forecast looks grim. This level of engagement cannot be delegated or replaced by process alone.
• AI can accelerate analysis and experimentation, but it cannot define your core GTM motions or fix broken processes. If you haven’t figured out what works, AI will only amplify confusion. Go-To-Market leaders must first establish and validate the key behaviors and activities that move the needle before layering on automation or analytics. 
• Sustainable revenue growth comes from robust GTM infrastructure, such as processes, platforms, and RevOps, that persist beyond any single CRO or sales leader.
• Sales enablement programs often fail when led by people without quota-carrying experience, devolving into classroom-style training that sellers reject. Shift to “sales excellence” roles, where former sales leaders who coach reps in the field, ride along on calls, and provide practical, trusted guidance. 
• The most powerful enablement tools are those that let reps learn directly from top performers, such as reviewing Gong calls or shadowing high achievers. Tom shared that new reps who proactively sought out and emulated top sellers ramped faster and performed better. Make it easy for your team to access and learn from real sales conversations, not just static content.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

03:51 - Introducing Tom Murtaugh, Portfolio Operations Director at Nordic Capital

10:09 - How Improving Deal Control Turned Around a Terrible Quarter for Collibra

21:02 - Understanding the Key Activities that Really Drive Outcomes in B2B Sales

28:21 - Why Training First Line Sales Managers Needs to be a Priority for B2B GTM Leaders

42:29 - Why the Sales Enablement Movement Ultimately Failed in Improving B2B Sales Orgs

51:21 - The Role of RevOps in Building a Sustainable Infrastructure for the Revenue Organization

Sign up for our Newsletter: https://thetransaction.substack.com/

Epic Quotes

• “Any type of conversational analytics tool is the most powerful enablement tool that's out there right now, and people just need to use it.” - Tom Murtaugh
• “ Your sales manager is be going to become incredibly, even more important than they are today, because they're going to be the ones that even with a little bit of change, are going to have a lot of leverage over a lot of people.” - Tom Murtaugh

Connect with Tom

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-murtaugh-1729b09/ 
• Nordic Capital Website: https://www.nordiccapital.com/ 

Shoutouts

• Amanda Murtaugh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandabuck143/ 
• Ralph Barsi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbarsi/ 
• Philip Cardi
• Neil Harrington: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neildharrington/  
• Scott Albro: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottalbro/  
• Jeff Goree: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgoree/ 
• Andy Byrne: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byrneandy/ 
• Michael Hargis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhargis/ 
• Pablo Dominguez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pabtexas/ 
• Echo Valley on Apple TV+ Starring Sydney Sweeney & Julianne Moore (Only rated a 6.3/10 on IMDb)

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!