Scaling Sales, Not Sacrificing Quality – The AI-Driven Secret to Billion-Dollar Growth | Mike Latch & Gregg Murphy

 

---

Beyond Top Performers – Unlocking the Hidden Potential in Your Sales Team

Gregg Murphy and Mike Latch reveal how they grew a company from $50M to a billion-dollar run rate using AI-driven sales enablement, strategic scripting, and thought leadership—transforming mid-level reps into top performers.

Can you scale sales without sacrificing quality?

Gregg Murphy and Mike Latch have done it—taking a company from $50 million to a billion-dollar run rate. The secret? A fusion of technology, strategic sales processes, and thought leadership that turns even mid-level sales reps into top performers.

Now, they’re sharing their insights in their book “Sales Sucks…But It Doesn’t Have To: Transform New Reps into Top Performers and Scale Your Sales Org from Millions to Billions” and their AI-driven platform, Patter AI. In this episode, they reveal how they built a system that trained 250 new sales reps a month, slashed onboarding time, and transformed how complex sales are executed.

We explore the power of scripting—not as a robotic sales pitch, but as a framework for high-value conversations. Gregg and Mike break down the tech-human synergy that accelerates performance and how their approach challenges the way organizations think about sales training.

If you’re looking to scale your team, optimize performance, and create a sales culture that thrives—this episode is a must-listen.

Three Key Takeaways

Sales Scaling Requires Strategy & Tech – Growing from $50M to $1B wasn’t luck; it was a mix of AI-driven enablement, structured scripting, and a clear sales process that rapidly trained new reps.

Mid-Level Reps Are the Untapped Opportunity – Instead of focusing only on top performers, optimizing mid-tier sales reps can create massive gains with the right tools and training.

Scripting Isn’t a Crutch—It’s a Superpower – When done right, scripting doesn’t make sales robotic; it empowers reps to have high-value conversations that drive better decisions and results.

If you are struggling to accelerate your sales or are in need of an updated strategy reach out to the team at Thought Leadership Leverage to book a session to discuss how we can help you.

---

Transcript

Bill Sherman What’s the key to scaling sales without sacrificing quality? Gregg Murphy and Mike Latch tapped that problem while growing a business from 50 million to $1 billion run rate. Along the way, they discovered how technology, strategic sales processes and thought leadership can dry high performance even among mid-level sales reps. Now they’re sharing those insights through their book Sales Sucks and their AI driven platform.  I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Mike. Gregg, welcome to the show.

Gregg Murphy Bill, it’s great to be here. We’re excited to be a part of the podcast today.

Mike Latch Yeah. Bill, thank you very much for having us. We really appreciate it.

Bill Sherman So several things I want to talk to you about. Flow from the connection between sales thought leadership conversations that an organization’s sales team has with front of house, as well as then going to clients and customers. Right. So I want to begin with a simple question, and that is you’re running a startup business, but you’ve also written a book called Sales Sucks. Those are two equally complex projects. How do they fit together?

Gregg Murphy It’s a great connection. First of all, the sales suck side of it is we wanted to share our journey of how we built a company from. We had, gosh, approximately 30 million in sales to about $1 billion in sales in and Mike and I did some of that in a matter of a few years. And so we like to share the story of how we did that, and then also to deconstruct the challenges we face, the pain points we face in that. And that’s how we walk, folks through the book of how to scale sales and how to do that. And then how does it connect to Pat or I is it’s really the tech enablement that allowed us to train, gosh, develop 250 new sales reps a month, bringing them up through the organization to quickly get them to a point where they’re competent and confident. And boy, we just couldn’t have done that without, you know, the work that Mike did in building that tech.

Bill Sherman So, Mike, how do you see the two connected?

Mike Latch I see the I, I see a lot of connections between the two things, because I was the I was the one that wanted to write the book. And what happened was when Gregg and I were at that company where we grew. Yeah, sales from around 50 million to an over $1 billion run rate, and it was over a little over five years. Just giving some more precise numbers to what Gregg was saying. Over the course of that, we a lot of that was driven because we’d built a lot of custom tech, and we had a lot of innovation at that company. And I would explain oftentimes to other folks how we were able to be so performance. And in doing that, we would explain what we what we built on the tax AI and how we did it and why and how that help reps get so good so quickly. And we had that explanation so many times with people that we work with and, you know, vendors and new exacts and things like that. I was like, someday just write a book so you like people can understand all this stuff, right? I’m a pretty, like, open. I have a very technical background, pretty like scientist type engineering, problem solving where I am my problem sort of person. And then when we sold that company, I thought I was gonna retire, and I sort of did, but then decided to start other tech company to build. Every time we were building, we were building Innovative Tech Act company and I was doing it the previous companies, I always had to hire the engineers building from scratch. And it shouldn’t have been that way. Somebody should have built a platform that I could just take and rapidly configure for our organization. And, and so we decided to start a company to build that platform so other people could have, like what we built without having to hire their own engineers and product managers and build things from scratch and all that kind of said.

Bill Sherman Thank you both. Now I want to go back to the company that was experiencing rapid growth. You were onboarding, like you said, 250 salespeople a month. Right. And often organizations look at the hiring of a salesperson as a bet. Right. Of the can we get them productive and creating the revenue needed in a reasonable time? And if not, we need to know, right? Right. How soon can we get them productive? So what I’m hearing from the two of you is a very real world problem. We’re growing. We need more effective salespeople, but we don’t have time to wait and just make, you know, that’s. And take a wait and see attitude for 3 or 6 months to see. Can they hit target and quota? Right. So first off, do I have that understanding correct from that problem statement. And then I want to start connecting it to thought leadership. Like, am I dialing in and sort of on the problem correctly?

Mike Latch Yes. I mean, unsurprisingly, you have a lot of experience in this realm, so it makes sense that you’re drilling in on a key aspect of what we were attacking before there. There were other there were other advantages and benefits from the tech that we built. But one of the perhaps one of the most important benefits is that we could take a sales rep that was coachable and rapidly get them through all the learning curves. You know, we were in strategic sales. You know this at Louis. So roofing residential solar energy efficiency. So things that that it really benefited the customer to like take the time to explain things and configure things the way they wanted present them options. And so, you know, they weren’t transactional sales. So whenever you have strategic sales, like you said, 3 or 6 months to figure out if the sales rep is going to have a chance of getting to go to. And oftentimes it’s a year, year and a half for strategic sales reps that, you know, kind of become veteran reps and known product and sales reps. And we could just the technology would do so much of the heavy lifting and a bunch of the edge cases associated with strategic sales that you could take a brand new sales rep, teach them sales reps, and understand why. And in a lot of tricky topics and a lot of challenging objections, the software was there to heavily facilitate a great job of explaining that topic or navigating the customers through a decision. And they could get that. They could get there in, you know, weeks. Because so many of the topics and objections were optimized by the tech.

Gregg Murphy And from that point, we didn’t have a choice. We had to get there within weeks. So we had to identify who those performers are quite quickly. And so we would put some key metrics in to measure that to see that. And it was quite obvious early on. It’s an incredible thing when the tech really enables a sales rep who might not even know much about the industry. But back to Mike’s point there. Coachable. And they have a little competitive edge. They want to be better. They want new opportunities and let man, you can mold people and help them succeed so quickly. The way that we talked about the process was we have all these scripts and these sales process successes, and then walking people through all the decision points we wanted. If a sales rep had a bad night the night before, right. Tough night. They’re maybe not feeling good that they like you go, okay, what do I do? And they could open up their laptop and go, oh, I just talk about these key points and then I help a customer make a decision. And that’s really essentially what we did. That could make a low performing sales rep perform like a top tier rep and in a pretty short period of time. And if they weren’t within your process, versatile, they just weren’t a good fit. And that’s okay.

Bill Sherman So Gregg, staying there for a moment, one of the things that I also hear and I want to call out is because of the feel this was in solar, right? That it wasn’t like you had a pool of potential hires as salespeople who were fully fluent in this, right? And so that onboarding and training process, it wasn’t like you had people just changing and going from wearing a red shirt to a blue shirt. You had to teach them the underlying ideas and content as well. Do I have that correct?

Gregg Murphy Not that. Absolutely correct. And so we’ve learned through scripting. And so for some folks scripting is a bad word there. They don’t maybe understand it.

Bill Sherman And we’ll get to the several S words here in a moment. But yeah go ahead.

Gregg Murphy And so we look at it as a standpoint of our we want to communicate complex ideas in a really simple manner that just about anybody could understand it. And so that’s what our scripting has done. We’ve really broke it and broke it down. And we explain how to do that, how to properly break complex topics down, that people can understand it and deliver those key decision points throughout the sales process. And so go ahead.

Bill Sherman This is the piece that I want to drill and underline on, because I see this disconnect in many organizations that are practicing thought leadership where there are good ideas within the organization, whether they’re in product team or research team or at the senior executive level, but they don’t know how to communicate it to the front-line salesperson. And that insight never gets to the client or the customer. And that can happen in a transactional sale. That can happen in a relation sale or a complex sales environment. And it falls apart because you miss that interface between the organization and the customer, client or person.

Gregg Murphy I’d say one of the one of the key elements in Mike and I have now worked together for nearly 15 years. And I would say one of the key levels to my success is Mike. And what we’ve done is you when you can bring in a sales leader, that’s what I am. And then you bring in a guy like Mike, a great tech guy who can help tell. Hey, how am I going to communicate that? Or what people understand through tech? And you can like more meld those two together. We both have this commitment. We’re not going to put anything out on the field, and unless that makes sense, is really going to help that customer make a decision or then help them understand why this is a better option or an opportunity for the customer. And that melding together just created a synergy that is incredible. And that’s, I think, a pretty big miss. And a lot of orgs, you have guys building these super techie things and they think it’s so cool. The engineers are like, look at it spin and it’s all this cool. And the sales reps go, I don’t even know how I’m going to talk about that. I don’t see the value it creates and they spend thousands of dollars on it.

Bill Sherman Well, and I want to go to you, Mike, because we’ve identified a problem of how do you scale for rapid growth to get a sales team out that led to a home brew Solution inside that organization that has also that same idea has led to the book. It has led to a new business that focuses on the tech solution. But what Gregg was talking about is this interplay between someone like him who has a relational sales mindset, and someone like you, who has a technical and engineering mindset. And I think are needed to both identify and work on solving the problem. And in some ways, you might think the two mindsets are oil and water. But in your case, you’ve turned it in more into the Reese’s chocolate and peanut butter in the same cup, right? How did you guys come together, Mike, and how did you leverage each other’s strengths?

Mike Latch So the Gregg and I met because I was introduced to the owners of a residential solar company where I was going to grad school and are going the part of my grad school in Hawaii, and they said, we don’t need any engineer like you are, Mike, but you could go into sales. And I said, sales. What about me is bad that you think I would be good at sales? Write sales like a bad word in my family. So long story short, I did end up working in sales and I worked for great. It was a commission only in living room sales position. And Gregg said, you know, Mike, don’t talk about how solar panels work for 45 minutes. You know, I have a good process. It works, and I’m pretty coachable. So I was very lucky that that was my first experience in sales was that he had evolved a very ethical sales process that just brought up topics, made sure they were understood, and then you’d move on to the next topic and make sure that people understood the, you know, the ramifications of any decision that they would make as they go along. So that that is an algorithm, right? That’s a step-by-step process. And it also was very it was very aligned with just the way that I was raised. You know, I had a happy childhood. I had a lot of unconditional love for my parents. I’m a respectful person. If I’m in someone’s home, like, that’s the way I was raised. And so it was just that was all a good fit. So I wasn’t experiencing any like dissonance or discord as I was sitting in living rooms helping people make a decision whether they bought or sold. At the same time, I have a kind of a scaling mindset. I’m kind of a process type guy, like, okay, if we need 100 or 1000 or 10,000 people to do this, what’s the right level of process or bureaucracy? Like how often can this not how often can this fail? Or, you know, like if you’re building software for space shuttle, you know, it can’t fail. So how do humans do things when it when it absolutely cannot fail And how to humans do things when a little bit of failure is okay. And we’d rather have some growth. And so that’s how I ended up with this pretty deep understanding of what it’s like to be a salesperson and what actually helps. And then I had a different just by coincidence, I had a different expectation of how much software should help that interaction. A lot of things that I could do, you know, I could redesign systems from scratch. I could explain somebody to, you know, and detail the incentives, and I could just deal with a lot of edge cases in front of somebody. That’s just my personality type. You know, I was a physics to write. I taught, you know, complicated concepts to people that didn’t understand it. So, so a lot of what we did at the, at the next company where we went from, you know, 50 or 50 millions in sales to $1 billion run rate on in a bootstrap company had to do with had to do with just a different expectation on what tech should. How much tech should help our salespeople? And a lot of what we innovated, a lot of what we built just came from that different expectation. You know, 90 I make out the number on almost all the sales enablement and sales leadership folks that I would meet, their expectation of how much software can help in strategic sales, where it’s like complicated topics like is it, you know, is limited to, you know, will it get a rat? Will it get a design that’s buildable? You know, how quickly can it do that. You know, or that the operations will allow how quickly, you know, can I get the right collateral? The marketing team create something, make sure they use the right version. Almost none of them. The expectation is, hey, I’m a I’m a chief revenue officer. I’m a sales VP. I got a thousand reps and they’re in living room. So they’re in there on sales appointments. And a really common thing that comes up is, boy, that scene is pretty expensive, right? Why are you building me features that incredibly facilitate that conversation. Right. You know, it’s more expensive. What do you mean? Well, you know, I got this other quote, or I got this other thing, and it was less expensive. Oh, well, let me push the magic button and I’ll we it’ll reconfigure to something similar to that and it’ll be a similar price and it’ll, it will clearly call out what, what your product or service no longer has. And I and I’ll help you explain what that what you just what you’ll be missing out on it. And is that worth it to you or not. Nobody that I interact with expects software to absolutely guarantee that interaction is excellent. But I do expect that. And so does Gregg. Instead of people that work with us. There’s been this diaspora people from this organization that, like, have this totally different expectation on how much software should help and those interactions. That’s kind of how we came together. And, and a little bit about the mix and why we’re not oil and water.

Bill Sherman Fantastic.

If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Now, Gregg, I want to turn to you. You mentioned the scripting word earlier and I want to come back to that. We’ve had a conversation previously around the ethics of scripting and why scripting isn’t necessarily a bad word. I’d love to hear your perspective on that.

Gregg Murphy Yeah, I’ll start it off. First of all, buy a story and then and then and then end it with how we so like to so with aloha, as we call it in. It’s really if you think about a script in, in effective use of it. Every movie that we see has a script. Right. And so we, we look at a Top Gun, for instance, the first Top Gun. And if you were to ask somebody about that movie, they’d be able to tell you key components of that movie because they remembered it impacted them. And that in Tom cruise put his personality into it to make that script just come alive and dance and to be remembered, it evokes some sort of an emotional response to it. But if I was to ask you to tell me about some facts about the Civil War, certain dates, you probably wouldn’t remember those key things, right? And so that’s the power of scripting. So a script should take a homeowner and a sales representatives through an ethical way of communicating value points to them in a story base, in a way that they can understand it. It’s based out of respect of the homeowner, of their decision. We want to create autonomy for them to help make their own decisions. And in order to do that, you have to help them then make decisions once they see the value points. And a little walks people through that process to where the customer feels like they’ve been heard or seen and understood. That’s what we mean by selling with aloha. And so the scripting, if it feels like we always say somebody like push rocks uphill, I have to say these words, it’s not mine. It’s probably not a good script. And where you feel like you’re having, like, pushed the envelope in certain areas. Maybe there’s another way you can communicate that that can allow like a mid-performing sales rep, which is usually the biggest part of a sales org to comfortably and confidently say it without feeling cringed out.

Bill Sherman And what I love on that Gregg, is you’re leaning into the lessons that we’ve learned over hundreds of generations and storytelling. And rather than going and grabbing people who are gregarious and social, throwing them in to the deep end of the pool and saying, go figure this out. You have almost a technological sales enablement tool for relational selling and complex sales, right? So, you’re not taking the human element out. You’re not simplifying the cognitive load so they can focus on the relationship. Mike, I want to turn to you and ask you a question about the book. The two of you have worked together. But then somewhere along the way, you said, let’s write this book. The, you know, of sales sucks. What was the experience of writing together like, and what did you learn from the process?

Mike Latch The experience was pretty good. If you imagine two people that like to work together, that are relatively competent in an area that’s useful for a lot of companies and were team oriented. So a lot of the process was remembering, right, like all the things that works and the things that didn’t and trying to put it together in a coherent manner so that future people can get similar results and don’t have to take as many lives as we did. Right. We’re both, like I said, we’re pretty team oriented. So what we learned and we continue to learn that pattern is every time you can figure out a more succinct way to deliver the same message, you’re really helping other humans, right? Like, if I don’t have to spend as many milliseconds understanding a concept as I used to, I’ve got more milliseconds to spend on something else. Fundamentally, a human only has so many seconds which we exist. And so. And there’s only so many seconds that humanity spends on important topics, right? You know, the more time available, the faster cancer gets cured. All that kind of good stuff. So that’s you know, that’s what I remember was it was fun trying to put all these messages in one place, string them together in a way that it’ll be easier for somebody else to get, you know, similar results. And it also helped us refine ideas and concepts that we had so that it’ll be easier to for somebody else to leverage those concepts.

Bill Sherman Gregg, anything you would add about the experience in writing a book?

Gregg Murphy It was fun. We locked ourselves into the upper room, as we called it, and had a big post-it notes all over the place. And, you know, the first day it was a little arduous. We’re like, yeah, I’m thinking, you know, we’re just trying to like, really dial it in. And it seemed like on our second or third day, the creative juices started to flow. And back to Mike’s point, where we’re able to draw up and draw out a lot of really incredible experiences that we had and how we really those key shifts we made them back in 2010, 2012. Working together. Like some key things that we. I had actually forgotten about, but they really were the foundation of what created where we are today with the sales socks and in powder. And so we just had a blast in and it really helped me is, is, is with the color of my hair. I’m kind of we were in the twilight of my career that I wanted to be able to make an impact, to, like, how can we make sales better? How can we make the world a better place? And I feel like this is a pretty straightforward contribution to that, and that we can help other people’s leverage and scale their businesses ethically and help a bunch of people, you know, that maybe have not been those top performer reps to, like, earn a great income. They can like buy a home and they could do the things that they always wanted to do. And so I think about the customer, but I also think about the salespeople out there that have never really been given that opportunity to really grow and excel. And that’s probably the part I’m even more excited about.

Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask each of you a question. And that is you’ve talked about patter and the solution it provides. You’ve talked about the book and the experience. How are you using thought leadership to support patter and the goals you’re trying to achieve there? Gregg, we’ll start with you.

Gregg Murphy I would say we focus on most sales organizations, focus on their top performers, you know, which is usually a pretty small group of the team, right. It might only be about 5% of a sales team. And then the bottom like usually 20%, there is usually the people that just aren’t working well. And but your biggest guess is that mid performers, it could be up to 80% of your sales organization. And so, we’ve put a lot of focus into if I can just get one more sale out of my middle class, my mid performing reps. It’s going to have such a significant impact to the bottom line. In a way you do that is through ethical practices, helping people make decisions, and selling with aloha and bringing in the tech to enable them to then make those decisions. I’ve seen most organizations focus on that top performing reps, and they’re trying to make everybody like them. Well, a lot of those top performing reps walk with the confidence in a swagger. That boy, that’s tough to replicate, you know. And they’re just good. They’re just wired that way. And then or they’ll create all these practices and policies off these super low performers that are just creating a lot of problems. And what we say is like, put your focus, transition those people at the optimal speed. And because they’re taking up space for somebody else, that needs to be that. That’s going to become that mid before performers coachable and you can change the bottom line of a company quickly. If we just adjust our focus on to that mid-tier route.

Bill Sherman Mike, let me turn to you and ask the same question. How are you using thought leadership to support patter and get your message out?

Mike Latch So one way is the book. We started working on the book before Potter even came into existence, knowing that we were going to be starting another tech company to solve this. And a lot of the concepts are complicated and have nuance with leveraging technology the way that we did So over those five years of growth of the last company, I would often experience when dealing with other vendors that we’re trying to sell as sales software. I became their CIO after that company bought my software company, and I would meet with other exacts and other, you know, roofing organizations and residential solar and things like that. And I would often experience the sensation of, why aren’t you doing what we’re doing with tech? Once you’ve been exposed to the concepts, it’s so obvious that it’s better and it helps. And what I found was in often having conversations with people, that I’m a relatively articulate person and have a lot more experience than most people breaking down complicated topics to teach them to other people, and I still was never really able to get somebody to appreciate how much better they could be performing and how much more performant they their sales team could be if they were channeling their dollars and tech effort in a just a different way than they were. And so the only way we ever really got people to really understand it was when they would they be a part of our organization. We would pretend to sell them something the way we sold to our clients, and they would really see this tight, tight coupling between tag and what the rats were saying and the questions they were asking. And so the idea was that, okay, these are just genuinely difficult concepts and different enough from the status quo that people aren’t going to get it unless they see it. And so the book was an attempt to help people like, okay, I’m admitting that this is complicated stuff. You just hear us talk, and it isn’t enough to get you to act and do things differently. Hopefully the book provides enough evidence, enough nuance that details where it does make sense. And because we genuinely believe that this is the beginning of a significant change in the way strategic sales done is done, and it’s really probably just taking a bunch of things from transactional sales where it’s easier to get the behavior that you want, push it out into more complicated sales, which is strategic sales. So hopefully the book helps with that. And hopefully there’s lots and lots of other companies like patter that come in really that really help to really help a lot more than how tech currently helps in strategic sales and sales appointments.

Bill Sherman So as we wrap up, what I’m taking away from this conversation is asking a question that others haven’t asked in your area, which is, for example, how do we accelerate growth and sales and enable our middle level salespeople to perform at a higher level? And to find the answer to that solution and not stop until you find a way that works. And then from there, that willingness to ask that question and create an answer has led to not only the success of that organization and growth of sales, but even more from that, the willingness on your part to share those insights in book form, as well as then create a tool that others can use to apply. I want to thank both of you, Mike, Gregg, for joining us today to talk about the journey of thought leadership, as well as sharing your journey along the way.

Gregg Murphy Thank you. Bill. Really appreciate you having us.

Mike Latch Yeah. Thank you very much, Bill. Thanks for your time. And thanks for having us here.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out second. Subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.