The Sales Company He Built to Get Into Tech | Carrying Fire

Mark Kosoglow didn’t wait to get hired into tech. He built his own sales team and pitched his way in. Before he was Chief Revenue Officer at Docebo, he helped scale sales at Outreach from zero to roughly $250 million. Long before any of that, he was selling paper planners and cookie dough fundraisers to schools in small-town Pennsylvania, three and a half hours from Philadelphia. Practically a lifetime away from Silicon Valley. This episode is part of the Carrying Fire series, where I sit down with leaders and innovators to explore how they use continuous learning to navigate massive change and come out stronger on the other side. Jump into the action: (00:00) Intro (01:29) Meet Mark Kosoglow (04:20) The college notes business and the recruiter who found him (06:49) His first sales leadership job and the layoff that never had a plan (09:21) The startup podcasts he listened to on the road for years (11:15) Incorporating Mercenary Sales out of pure desperation (17:43) Bench Coach: the app that got him a mention in the New York Times (19:19) Selling Outreach out of his son's gymnastics parking lot (21:23) Manny Medina, the raise nobody saw coming, and asking to be VP of Sales (25:24) The cabin in Pennsylvania and the existential crisis (26:30) Pamela Matson's three things that define an executive (30:33) What was missing at his last job (33:21) Why Mark thinks AI isn't the differentiator Connect with Kyle Lacy:   / kylelacy   Subscribe to Revenue Diaries: https://www.therevenuediaries.com/sub... Find Mark Kosoglow on LinkedIn:   / mkosoglow   Check out Docebo: https://www.docebo.com/ Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/