Stay ConnectedMeet Gabe Lullo.
Gabe Lullo is the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency working with industry giants such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft, and Adobe.
He has trained over 8,000 salespeople across diverse businesses and, during his tenure in Alleyoop, he has personally hired and managed more than 1,500 SDRs.
With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and executive recruitment, his strategies have significantly driven Alleyoop’s growth.
"Stop talking about AI. Start talking about value. This is our product, this is the value we drive, and if you want to understand how we do it, we'll show you.” - Jeremy Levine
Jeremy's career didn't start in sales, it started in art school, which teaches you everything except how to make money as an artist.
He waited tables, moved to Israel, and worked call centers just to survive before finally breaking into tech.
At 41, he applied to every SDR, AE, and CSM role he could find and got exactly one callback: WalkMe.
Even that turned into a rejection email, "looking for somebody a little more junior."
He wrote back one line, signed off "forever young at heart" with a winky emoji.
Ten minutes later, he had a contract.
That decision kicked off five years at WalkMe during hypergrowth and an IPO, where he built outbound motions that landed logos like United Airlines, Walmart, and Home Depot.
He was eventually named one of Sales Hacker’s Top 50 sales professionals in the world.
Now, as CRO at an AI marketing technology company, he's blunt about the noise in his own category: every SaaS company has bolted AI onto its pitch, and almost none of them sound different because of it.
His answer isn't to out-hype the market, it's to stop competing on the buzzword and talk about what the product actually does.
He's candid that most AI messaging is aimed at investors, not customers, and confusing the two is exactly how companies end up sounding like everyone else.
"Nobody's cutting through by out-AI-ing the next guy. You cut through by going back to the product and the value."
"You cannot lead someone beyond the parts of yourself you refuse to look at." - Josh Gratsch
Josh joined Ascend Innovations in 2016 as a data scientist, no leadership training, no formal path.
When the company's original business model failed within its first two years, he stepped into strategy and operations simply because he was willing to take initiative.
Six years later, he was CEO, promoted by leaders who saw a capability in him he hadn't yet connected to himself.
Then reality hit.
He'd spent his whole 20s chasing the title, achieved it, and felt nothing.
Within the first six months, a spinout company he chaired collapsed and a business development process he'd trusted without accountability measures turned into a cash flow crisis that cost three leadership team members their jobs.
"I told myself the most effective leaders are optimistic. What I quickly understood was I didn't balance the equation. Hope is not a strategy."
The real shift came from turning the lens inward, tracing his default reactions, defensiveness, control dressed up as ownership, back to where they actually came from.
He noticed the gap first at home, wondering why he could stay curious with his team but lose patience with his own kids.
That work reshaped how he leads now.
Setting direction but actively inviting his team to tell him when he's wrong, because a team that can't have honest conflict can't truly commit to anything together.
"You cannot lead someone beyond the parts of yourself you refuse to look at." - Josh Gratsch
Josh joined Ascend Innovations in 2016 as a data scientist, no leadership training, no formal path.
When the company's original business model failed within its first two years, he stepped into strategy and operations simply because he was willing to take initiative.
Six years later, he was CEO, promoted by leaders who saw a capability in him he hadn't yet connected to himself.
Then reality hit.
He'd spent his whole 20s chasing the title, achieved it, and felt nothing.
Within the first six months, a spinout company he chaired collapsed and a business development process he'd trusted without accountability measures turned into a cash flow crisis that cost three leadership team members their jobs.
"I told myself the most effective leaders are optimistic. What I quickly understood was I didn't balance the equation. Hope is not a strategy."
The real shift came from turning the lens inward, tracing his default reactions, defensiveness, control dressed up as ownership, back to where they actually came from.
He noticed the gap first at home, wondering why he could stay curious with his team but lose patience with his own kids.
That work reshaped how he leads now.
Setting direction but actively inviting his team to tell him when he's wrong, because a team that can't have honest conflict can't truly commit to anything together.
"When you know to do better, you do better." - Vel Johnson
Vel grew up an Army brat, moving every two to three years, unpacking just long enough to start making friends before her father's next assignment came through.
Her late father earned a Bronze Star across two tours in Vietnam, and the discipline he ran the household with became the discipline she'd later run a business with.
What could have been destabilizing instead taught her to build community fast, wherever she landed, a skill that turned out to be the whole job once she got into PR.
She left a stable career in Florida's legislative arena, sold her house, and started Vasaj Communications in a city where she knew no one, at the start of the Great Recession.
No plan B. Within two years, Black Enterprise magazine profiled her as "The Small Business Catalyst," unpaid, unsolicited, just a phone call she almost mistook for a prank.
Two decades later, she led statewide bicentennial celebrations with over 200 events and got authors flown overseas off a single press release.
But the hardest thing she's done wasn't a campaign.
In 2024, while running the Tallahassee-Leon County Bicentennial for 300,000 residents, her mother passed away.
She buried her, drove five hours back, and was at work the next Monday.
Months later, she had hip replacement surgery and kept working through recovery, because the mission wasn't done.
"I had to put the grief on hold. But we all have to decide whether we're going to keep showing up. That's what I decided to do."
"When you know to do better, you do better." - Vel Johnson
Vel grew up an Army brat, moving every two to three years, unpacking just long enough to start making friends before her father's next assignment came through.
Her late father earned a Bronze Star across two tours in Vietnam, and the discipline he ran the household with became the discipline she'd later run a business with.
What could have been destabilizing instead taught her to build community fast, wherever she landed, a skill that turned out to be the whole job once she got into PR.
She left a stable career in Florida's legislative arena, sold her house, and started Vasaj Communications in a city where she knew no one, at the start of the Great Recession.
No plan B. Within two years, Black Enterprise magazine profiled her as "The Small Business Catalyst," unpaid, unsolicited, just a phone call she almost mistook for a prank.
Two decades later, she led statewide bicentennial celebrations with over 200 events and got authors flown overseas off a single press release.
But the hardest thing she's done wasn't a campaign.
In 2024, while running the Tallahassee-Leon County Bicentennial for 300,000 residents, her mother passed away.
She buried her, drove five hours back, and was at work the next Monday.
Months later, she had hip replacement surgery and kept working through recovery, because the mission wasn't done.
"I had to put the grief on hold. But we all have to decide whether we're going to keep showing up. That's what I decided to do."
"AI will make good salespeople better and bad salespeople worse. It just accelerates every trend." - Michael Hanson, CEO and Founder of Cosmic Growth
Michael studied politics, not sales, cutting his teeth on an election campaign in South Africa before drifting into an account manager role at a London tech company.
He never chased sales for the money.
What pulled him in was the communication itself, and the version of himself it forced him to become: a better listener.
He later ran growth for an outsourced BDR company with 300 reps in Colombia, watching sales teams book meetings his clients still couldn't close.
That gap is why he started training salespeople in 2019.
His research keeps landing on the same number: only 18% of buyers trust salespeople, and most of what looks like a skills gap is really a lack of curiosity about the other person, whether that shows up as a copy-paste demo, a generic cold email, or a script read the same way to everyone.
His framework opens with a lesson from Superman comics: sales dropped in the '70s once he became too invincible to relate to, and picked back up once writers gave him kryptonite.
Michael tells sales teams the same applies to them.
Being upfront about what you're not good at builds trust; pretending you're the best at everything doesn't.
"Most sellers don't have a skills problem. They have a spiritual problem."
He uses AI for research and editing, never for writing the whole pitch, because a fully AI-written post always ends up sounding like everyone else's.
"AI will make good salespeople better and bad salespeople worse. It just accelerates every trend." - Michael Hanson, CEO and Founder of Cosmic Growth
Michael studied politics, not sales, cutting his teeth on an election campaign in South Africa before drifting into an account manager role at a London tech company.
He never chased sales for the money.
What pulled him in was the communication itself, and the version of himself it forced him to become: a better listener.
He later ran growth for an outsourced BDR company with 300 reps in Colombia, watching sales teams book meetings his clients still couldn't close.
That gap is why he started training salespeople in 2019.
His research keeps landing on the same number: only 18% of buyers trust salespeople, and most of what looks like a skills gap is really a lack of curiosity about the other person, whether that shows up as a copy-paste demo, a generic cold email, or a script read the same way to everyone.
His framework opens with a lesson from Superman comics: sales dropped in the '70s once he became too invincible to relate to, and picked back up once writers gave him kryptonite.
Michael tells sales teams the same applies to them.
Being upfront about what you're not good at builds trust; pretending you're the best at everything doesn't.
"Most sellers don't have a skills problem. They have a spiritual problem."
He uses AI for research and editing, never for writing the whole pitch, because a fully AI-written post always ends up sounding like everyone else's.
"Everybody wants to be the hero. Nobody wants to walk the hero's journey." - Marc Anthony Longwith, Founder of Evolved Entrepreneur
Marc grew up surrounded by addiction, the only person in his immediate family to graduate high school.
What pulled him out was martial arts, starting at 12, taking two buses and walking a mile to the gym on his own, becoming a black belt and coaching other fighters by 14.
That discipline became the identity everything else was built on.
He worked his way from busboy to sommelier through some of the toughest kitchens in Las Vegas, then co-founded a brewpub that became one of downtown Vegas's top spots, backed in part by Tony Hsieh.
Then 2020 hit.
In a compressed window, he lost both parents, a relationship he thought would end in marriage, and the business, nearly all at once.
He calls what followed "the sacred collapse," not a motivational turnaround, just survival, day by day, for the better part of a year.
What came out the other side was two seven-figure brands built and exited, real sobriety, and a coaching philosophy built on subtraction instead of addition: most people aren't missing a framework, they're carrying old patterns that block the skills they already have.
"Some of us are just built a little different. But resilience isn't something you're born fully loaded with, it's built in layers, little by little, or you crush people before they're ready."
"Everybody wants to be the hero. Nobody wants to walk the hero's journey." - Marc Anthony Longwith, Founder of Evolved Entrepreneur
Marc grew up surrounded by addiction, the only person in his immediate family to graduate high school.
What pulled him out was martial arts, starting at 12, taking two buses and walking a mile to the gym on his own, becoming a black belt and coaching other fighters by 14.
That discipline became the identity everything else was built on.
He worked his way from busboy to sommelier through some of the toughest kitchens in Las Vegas, then co-founded a brewpub that became one of downtown Vegas's top spots, backed in part by Tony Hsieh.
Then 2020 hit.
In a compressed window, he lost both parents, a relationship he thought would end in marriage, and the business, nearly all at once.
He calls what followed "the sacred collapse," not a motivational turnaround, just survival, day by day, for the better part of a year.
What came out the other side was two seven-figure brands built and exited, real sobriety, and a coaching philosophy built on subtraction instead of addition: most people aren't missing a framework, they're carrying old patterns that block the skills they already have.
"Some of us are just built a little different. But resilience isn't something you're born fully loaded with, it's built in layers, little by little, or you crush people before they're ready."
"The worst thing you could do is go look at what your competitors are doing and try to replicate what they just said on your website. You're just going to look like everybody else.” - Ryan O'Hara
Ryan started as a video production intern at Dyn, hoping to make ads before pivoting into cold prospecting instead, becoming the company's first BDR.
He helped scale the sales team from three reps to over a hundred before Oracle acquired the company for north of $600 million.
He carried the same instinct through LeadIQ: business messaging didn't have to be boring.
While the sales tech space drowned in "hit your number" energy, Ryan sent music videos to prospects and made 90s-style jingle ads for target accounts like Zoom and Logitech, then watched those videos rack up thousands of organic views from inside the exact companies he was trying to reach.
His first Pitchfire venture nearly ended when his sole investor passed away from cancer mid-round.
He rebuilt it into a new company, investment infrastructure for VC firms still running deal flow through Typeform and Google Docs instead of anything built for it.
His read on outreach in the AI era hasn't changed: reply rates have crashed, AI-written pitches all sound the same, and what still breaks through is a real detail two humans actually have in common, not a value prop.
"Be yourself the whole time. If you're an SDR who makes music, put music into your prospecting. Life doesn't have to be one octave lower just because you're at work."
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
