# Sam Jacobs

Sam Jacobs hosts Topline and teaches revenue leaders about CRO leadership, sales, and executive compensation through Pavilion.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/sam-jacobs/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs
- Median of last 8 posts: 55 reactions, 30 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, leadership, sales
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Sam Jacobs is most useful for teaching revenue leaders about CRO readiness, financial planning, forecasting, and executive compensation.

- Best for: It fits a B2B software or services company pilot workshop on CRO readiness and executive compensation.
- Not for: It does not fit paid exclusive product endorsements at scale or campaigns aimed outside sales and revenue buyers.
- Check first: Confirm audience job roles, seniority, and comparable campaign results before choosing a pilot.

### Takeaways

- A CRO School curriculum covers P&L fluency, forecasting, board work, and management team building.
- A CRO offer's definition of cause was broad enough to include missing quarterly revenue.
- Rewriting cause and adding role-change protection raised severance from three to nine months.

## Main ideas

- **Build around the result buyers want, not the old workflow**: Jacobs argues that AI should prompt a rethink of how work gets done, not just add automation to existing steps. For GTM software, he says the goal is not to enrich data or warm up email; it is to help sellers get meetings with buyers.
- **Revenue leadership means understanding the whole business**: Jacobs distinguishes a VP of Sales, whose job he describes as hitting the number, from a CRO, who must understand and run the broader business. His advice emphasizes financial fluency, forecasting, team leadership, and coordination across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success.
- **Protect the structure of an executive offer, not just its headline pay**: Jacobs argues that compensation negotiations should examine the clauses and conditions that determine what happens when a role changes. A high salary or target compensation figure does not by itself protect an executive from a substantial change in responsibilities.
- **Make the case in the buyer’s language**: Jacobs says sellers need to understand how decision-makers receive a proposal, especially when asking a CFO to approve spending. His approach is to frame the case around the buyer’s concerns and make the reasoning concrete.
- **AI may increase the value of strong sellers and distinctive human qualities**: Jacobs argues that automation does not make enterprise sales irrelevant. He expects commercial judgment, storytelling, charisma, and individuality to stand out as routine execution becomes easier to automate. In a separate cultural argument, he says people should not try to sound uniformly professional when technology can produce that same polish.
- **Prepare for uncertainty with specific operating choices**: Jacobs favors planning that keeps options open: track cash, set decision triggers in advance, focus on customers and segments the company can serve well, and account for slower buying. The prediction that a bubble will pop belongs to Topline guest Geoffrey Moore; Jacobs presents the planning list as a response to that possibility.

## Work to read

- [The difference between a VP of Sales and a CRO](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_biggest-difference-between-being-a-vp-of-activity-7513617903913607168-rxNu)
- [A $225,000 clause: negotiating the definition of "cause"](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_in-2023-i-got-a-call-from-an-old-friend-activity-7512951945964265472-pjzQ)
- [The 16-step plan Sam Jacobs would follow to reach VP or the C-suite](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_im49years-oldbut-if-i-was-in-my-late-activity-7521563228632506368-zNG_)
- [Planning for a correction: ten moves after "this bubble doesn't pop"](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_there-is-zero-chance-that-this-bubble-doesn-activity-7523048423982354432-0hoH)
- [Making the case to the economic buyer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_i-first-met-jaleh-rezaei-when-she-was-a-guest-activity-7519144444844048384-EQeC)
- [People are building GTM software the wrong way](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_people-are-building-gtm-software-the-wrong-activity-7520125858863546368-JkIW)
- [The CRM stops being a human-maintained database](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_attiopartner-activity-7521224673448214528-mLyy)
- [Why great sellers get paid like capital](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_great-sellers-will-make-10x-anyone-else-in-activity-7522256187468218368-LvZ3)

## Brand relationships

- **Pavilion** (employment)
- **Mutiny** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Attio** (mention)

## Partnerships

No published sponsor policy, rate card, or partnership inquiry route appears in the material reviewed, so paid partnership terms cannot be confirmed from it. The collaborations the posts do show are content and teaching engagements with specific companies: Sam Jacobs contributed a chapter to Mutiny's Buyer Experience Guide, and published commentary about Attio's approach to CRM carrying a partner tag. Those establish that brand collaborations happen, but not that a standard, purchasable sponsorship package exists. The most concrete engagement routes visible are content contribution to a partner's guide and live cohort teaching through Pavilion's courses.

## Alternatives

- Nick Knutzen: Choose Nick Knutzen when the pilot's real goal is AI adoption inside a revenue team rather than career progression. The two posts are practitioner accounts of exactly that. One reports finishing Pavilion's AI in GTM school, working through hands-on exercises alongside peers, and building 35 projects for personal and business use, listing a master context document that can be attached to any prompt, a marketing campaign setup, a website, automated mileage tracking, a time dashboard, and travel planning. The other reports themes from a session with SaaS CROs: preparation, follow-up and CRM hygiene standards are now unforgivable to miss, AI-assisted preparation is the minimum expectation, forecasts can be pressure-tested for risk and opportunity, automatic call scoring can coach account executives and managers, and vendors should be made to prove their tools interoperate with the buyer's data platform and go-to-market motion. A 90-minute workshop on how a revenue team actually uses AI week to week, from prep to forecast review to coaching off call data, can be built from these posts directly, with each participant producing one working artifact and sharing it back.
- Greg Portnoy: Choose Greg Portnoy when the workshop is about partner and channel revenue rather than the CRO seat. One post says they are returning to Pavilion's GTM Conference to present an agentic playbook for making partner revenue predictable, arguing that partner-led deals carry better unit economics through higher win rates, lower customer acquisition cost and better retention, and that most companies never build the channel seriously because no CFO will fund something that cannot be modeled. The other reports asking dozens of CEOs, CROs and CMOs at a conference what would make them invest more in partnerships, finding that most believe partnerships can work but hold back because they do not know what good looks like, and concluding that partnerships trails other go-to-market functions on ROI, framework, performance and benchmarking data. The practical ask in that post is specific: track win rate, sales cycle, average contract value and cost per dollar sourced. For a sponsor whose pilot is building a partner program or defending partnership spend to a finance lead, that is closer to the brief than CRO-readiness teaching.
- Eric Lent: Choose Eric Lent when the underlying problem turns out to be hiring or structuring a revenue operations function rather than training existing leaders. One post is a job description for a Director of Revenue Operations at Blue Heron, a luxury homebuilder, reporting to the chief marketing officer and spanning alignment across Sales, Marketing and Client Experience, with scope covering process optimization, forecasting accuracy, pipeline analytics, enablement strategy and revenue technology stack performance. The other is a referral for a colleague moving from customer experience, customer success and product support into product work. If the buyer's real difficulty is that nobody owns revenue operations, or that sales, marketing and customer experience are pulling apart, these posts speak to that problem more directly than a course would.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/