Ep. 98 – Driving Symbiotic Outcomes in High-Stakes Sales with Josh Hoffman – Part 2
Ep. 98 – Driving Symbiotic Outcomes in High-Stakes Sales with Josh Hoffman – Part 2  
Podcast: Selling the Cloud
Published On: Tue Oct 21 2025
Description: In Part 2 of our conversation with Josh Hoffman, we explore the leadership mindset required to thrive in moments of high-pressure change, like mergers, long enterprise cycles, and AI-driven disruption.Josh shares how sales teams can stay grounded in customer value, build trust through co-created plans, and lead with consistency; regardless of who owns the company or what the logo says.We also talk about the real-world impact of AI on sales effectiveness, onboarding, and go-to-market readiness.What You’ll Learn:Leading Through Change: How to stabilize culture and focus teams during M&A, leadership transitions, or high-stakes GTM shiftsMutual Action Plans that Work: Why aligning around a co-created calendar is a simple but powerful tool for accountability and momentumConsistency Over Chaos: How sticking to your core value proposition helps drown out internal and external noiseReal AI Use Cases: How Josh and his team use AI for onboarding, writing, analysis, and market research—without replacing human judgmentLeadership in Modern Sales Orgs: The behavioral traits that inspire performance, loyalty, and resilienceKey Topics:Sales leadership in high-pressure, transitional environmentsUsing backward-planning and mutual calendars for deal velocityStaying aligned on value across long sales cyclesCultural consistency across internal and client-facing teamsAI for productivity, market intelligence, and GTM strategyEmbracing humility and continuous learning as a CROGuest Spotlight: Josh HoffmanJosh is Chief Revenue Officer at Totus Rx and a long-time leader in B2B revenue organizations. He’s built and led sales teams across tech, telecom, and compliance industries, with a focus on building high-trust teams and delivering real value to customers. Josh is known for his practical, human-centered leadership style, especially in complex, high-stakes environments.Resources & Mentions:Book: The Challenger SaleBook: SPIN SellingLeaders Mentioned: Mark Anderson, Russ Reeder, Todd Abbott, Mike Jenner, Joe BurtonFollow Josh Hoffman on LinkedIn for more insights on sales leadership and culture.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud to hear more from enterprise GTM leaders shaping the future of sales.KK Anderson (00:31)our third topic is around leading teams in a time of change. And so where I wanna take us. All the pressure of a change. You know, it can be a pressure cooker. All the accountability, which we know sales is famous for. The behaviors and the mindsets and the relationship and the building trust. All the things, right, that go into being an exceptional salesperson. Like when you're...going through like some of these acquisitions or mergers or whatnot, people are under the microscope, like how do you get your reps to believe and act the right way on the same side of the table in these high pressure environments?Joshua Hoffman (01:07)It comes back to me to the word consistency. You have to maintain a consistent value based approach on what you're delivering to your partners and clients. That shouldn't change. Even in times of mergers, acquisitions, whatever they might be. I don't know that I've been through any of those situations where the value proposition of the company changed at all. There might have been something added to it.There might have been something taken away from it based on that. But the general value proposition, if you believe in the organization that you're a part of, who owns it doesn't really matter. If the value of what you're delivering to your client or partner has remained the same, the rest of it is noise. And you have to remain focused on the outcomes. I really can't think of a time that I've been forced to say, oh my gosh, the value of our organization or the value of what we'rewhat we're providing to our clients has changed so dramatically that we've got to make a shift in who we are with them. Now, there may be other shifts that take place inside the organization. There's changes in leadership, there's changes in locations, there's changes in potentially having another strategy that has to come into the business because two things are coming together. But what doesn't have to change is that your approach with your clients and partners, it's still the same.you're still there to be a part of a team that's driving an outcome. And if you can remain consistent in that approach, you can help people remove the noise from the system and say, you know what? I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to worry about whether our company name changed. I don't have to worry about whether headquarters is in Dallas or Michigan. ⁓ It doesn't matter because I'm still doing the same thing every day. Now that's a lot easier, I think, for salespeople.than it may be for others in other parts of the organization. I don't want to paint it that it always works the same way, but for the pieces of the business that I've been the most part of over the years, sales, sales operations, marketing, very much consistency is an opportunity to make things a lot smoother and a lot better for people and to make sure that culture remains a consistent, strong, positive force in people's lives.Mark Petruzzi (03:11)Very cool. so let's talk a little more process here for a few minutes. What kind of role does a mutual account plan or an action plan that you may create with your team, what did they play in making sure both seller and customer are aligned and accountable? How much do you use them? What kind of value do you get out of them? And are there times thatthings like that are a distraction and not really productive.Joshua Hoffman (03:37)so first of all, I'm a little nervous answering this question with you because you've literally written the book on some of these things. I feel I might be a little bit on my heels, but let me try and answer the question as best I can. First of all, the idea that you're sitting on the same table with a client, with a partner, with both of them simultaneously, by default, that should mean that you have a mutual action plan. It should mean that you have a mutual calendar that you're working off of.It should mean that the outcome that you're trying to drive is identical because you've coordinated that you've co-created it. You've, but you know, back to my co words, right? You have co decided what those things should be. Now, whether you're a value selling person, a challenger salesperson, maybe even a spin selling person, there's all of these different models that are sitting out there. there are some attributes that those things have that are in common.And I always like to quote one of my favorite people. So I had this person in my life for a long time named Marcel Brunel. And Marcel was at this organization that did great work when it came to helping people work through the process of selling. And one of the focus areas that Marcel brought to me, it was a learning for me at the time, and that I've carried with me throughout these years, is about having that calendar in place. And for me, when I talk to aclient or partner, it's about having a backwards-facing calendar. And so let's start at the end. Where is the end here? What is the date? What is the outcome? What is the goal that we share in? And let's work our way backwards and establish goals and milestones that are going to help us achieve that. And then let's hold ourselves accountable to that. And as soon as we have alignment on the end of the line,it becomes much easier to fill in everything that works backwards. And if you miss a date, you need to catch up and you need to come up with a co-created action plan to do that. And that kind of collaboration, it really solves not everything, but it solves an awful lot. And it's not that things don't go wrong, things do. But if you build the action plan the right way, if you build the outcome the right way, you also try and provide yourself with the opportunity.for things to potentially not go the way you expect. You build in a potential buffer. Maybe there's an extra day or two here. Maybe, depending on how complex it is, there's an extra week that's baked into that that allows you to still achieve the outcome. And so that kind of planning is something that I talk about consistently, whether it's with a person on our team, whether it's with somebody that's working inside of an organization that's actually delivering the product or service or with a partner or client.Let's start at the end and let's work our way backwards and make sure we're in alignment.KK Anderson (06:16)it occurs to me as well, especially if you're in any kind of a, you know, complex sale where, or a longer sales cycle, right? Where you may have different people coming in and out of the sales process. If you have a mutual action plan or mutual account plan, whatever you want to call it, you can always lead with that outcome, lead the conversation with that value that everyone is synthesized there together to accomplish. And whoever's new to the call just falls right in place.Right?Joshua Hoffman (06:42)That's right. You get onto a call of you. If you had that co-created action plan and you've decided on the outcomes and the dates and you're having, you know, let's pretend it's a longer sales cycle, so to speak for that. And maybe it's a two month sales cycle when you're having that series of meetings to get there. The first slide should be that calendar. What have we agreed to already? Are we on track or are we not on track?and let's make sure that we're in this together. And that way, when new people do enter the conversation, they walk right into a framework that allows you to be successful, that allows you to introduce other people into the process.KK Anderson (07:18)What allows them to have the confidence that the conversation has been effective and aligned so that when you're at the wire and procurement comes in and starts asking questions, you've built the value. So you don't need to worry about getting slashed in negotiations and whatnot.Joshua Hoffman (07:30)That's right.Well, and partof it is even is making procurement legal, whoever else needs to be engaged in that process. Part of it is making them part of the team. If they're part of the team that's creating the outcomes and the decisions, then you don't have those surprises. Now, candidly speaking, look, there's always a surprise. A lot of times there's still a surprise.But the more you engage in that model and the more you broaden the team that you're working with, the easier this becomes because everybody's in alignment. I know what the outcome is. I know what needs to happen to get to that.Mark Petruzzi (08:08)Perfect. Well, so I guess we're even now. You made me blush with your last comment and KK made you blush. So we gotta get KK to blush at some point here. You got anything?Joshua Hoffman (08:19)Well, the blushing trifecta. Look, I tried to do it at the beginning of the conversation because I have seen KK's work. I have seen the impact that that you have had on people's lives by helping to make them better. I've seen the modeling that you've done. I've seen the outcomes of the not only the analytics associated with it, but the coaching that comes along with it. And I've seen the relationships that you've built and and that kind.of thing goes a long way because you not only bring your shining personality to this conversation, you bring credibility to the conversation. And so if that doesn't make you blush, kick it. don't know what I'm So ⁓KK Anderson (08:55)You got me.Mark Petruzzi (08:56)Now, let me tellyou, that was beautiful. I have seen it all firsthand as well. So I echo everything you say. But yeah, that'll make you blush too. Okay, so last question within kind of topic three that I have at least is, so what leadership practices have you found? Do all these things that we're describing, like,KK Anderson (08:59)You made my day! Even it's Friday!Thank you.Mark Petruzzi (09:24)build that trust, that loyalty, that long-term performance inside a sales team, and again, with the clients that you work with and prospects that you work with as well.Joshua Hoffman (09:35)so the things that I've brought up already sort of round some of those things out. Look, you have to care. You have to have compassion. You have to want other people to succeed. You have to have humility inside of this. You have to own up when you make a mistake. And gosh knows I make enough of them. And so I do my best to own up to them every step of the way. You've got to make sure that hierarchy is not really a part ofthe culture, at least for me, it's not. I would rather be viewed as a teammate than be viewed as a CRO. We're, the same way that I portrayed the company-client-partner conversation of being on the same side of the table. I like to view myself as being on the same side of the table with all the people that are part of the internal organization, too. Look, it doesn't always feel that way. I know I'm not perfect at it, but I do my best. AndIf I don't make it happen again, I try and own up to it and say, look, there's a chance for me to be better. And I talk about behavioral change in the context of not just people on the team, but about myself and being humble about that and being sort of true to myself that I'm still learning after, you know, I hate to call it the number of years, but after this many years that I'm still learning every day, I want the same for everybody that's in the organization. I want the same for our customers.We learn together, we grow together. It's a constant force.KK Anderson (10:52)try to remind myself whenever I'm in any kind of a conflict or a difficult situation that it's okay because I'm going to be better on the other side of it. Right? It's gonna, we're gonna get stronger.Joshua Hoffman (11:01)Yeah.Yeah, it does. ⁓I don't want it to, yeah, that old phrase, if it doesn't kill you, you know, makes you stronger. don't necessarily want anything that painful, but I've tried to make it work to my advantage.KK Anderson (11:15)So let's go to our last topic, which is the audience favorite always. And this is the future of go-to-market in the age of AI. so you have said that your mission is clearly helping others find careers that they love. You're very passionate about that, about caring for the individuals and helping them achieve things that they once thought were aspirational. Just like how you started out in the manufacturing floor at and look at you now.Right? So how do you see AI supporting that mission of yours for the next generation of sellers? What's going to happen in our world?Joshua Hoffman (11:47)look, AI is a game changer in so many ways. And look, I don't know that there's such a thing as an AI expert right now. And, Mark, you might be as close as the one that I know of. So again, you've written the book. And so I'm to be careful about how I how I answered these questions. Everybody's still learning right now. And I am part of an AI driven organization right now. We use AI.in how we deliver our services to our clients. AI reads evidence, AI scores evidence, and we still have to have people because we're an audit and compliance company and there's still people engaged. But we do use AI as part of what we do. And I get to see that every single day, the power of what it can do to save time, save money, save stress. I've also seen that you have to use caution because AI is not always right. The concept of hallucination is real.And you have to be careful and you have to make sure that you're using other sources to validate what you're getting out of AI. Now, I've also seen it in sales and marketing where you have the capability of not only getting information in a faster way than you did before, but having that information be more complete and having that information help guide you through a process. Using AI to learn about yourclients, your partners, the industries that they're a part of, understanding the relevance of what's important to their outcomes is a very powerful thing. And it's not cheating. I think some people have viewed it almost like, oh man, if I use AI to give me the answer, I'm not being true to my own creative self. Well, the reality is that you should use it to make you better. You should use it to make you more complete. You should use it to validate the other work that you're doing.It does come down to one thing that's, well not one thing, there's many things, but a thing that's really important is your ability to write the prompt. And your ability to ask the right questions of AI is what will deliver an outcome that's going to help everybody be more successful in that. I watched my wife's business use it. She's actually far better at AI than Igive her great credit. I don't think there's a night that goes by that she's not watching or learning something about AI. And we have had many conversations in our organization about how to use it effectively. But it does come back to prompt writing when I'm using AI, where I'm trying to teach myself is what's the right prompt? Not am I getting the right information all the time? And the better I get at that, the more useful it becomes.And it does help us solve problems. AI will come back with answers that I haven't thought of. I love to think of myself as being super brilliant, but the reality is I'm not as brilliant as what AI can go uncover in not only the universe of information, but the universe of context. And I find it to be incredibly valuable.Mark Petruzzi (14:31)and I kind of look at it like Josh is if you're going to go play some golf or play some tennis and do you want to go out there with the old tools, a tennis racket from 20 years ago or do you want to go out there and find something that is using all the state of the art technology? It's kind of what AI means to me at the end of the day. every we're kind of sick or at least I'll speak for myself.I get really touchy on acronyms and things like that, maybe because I've been in a number of the largest consulting firms and everything's an acronym and, everything's an acronym kind of built to get clients to spend more money. And so I look at those things and I say, OK, yeah, I'm not loving that side of the old eco AI ecosystem that we live in now. However, Ineed to shake that off and I do shake that off because at the end of the day, it's incredible. The things you can do and the productivity improvement you can bring in is just incredible. And we can't miss the opportunity to grab that and leverage it every step that you can. So with that being said, kind of share your perspective on that. how are you using AI today?Joshua Hoffman (15:37)That's right.Mark Petruzzi (15:43)How are your teams using it? I'd love to see what you're taking advantage of.Joshua Hoffman (15:47)Yeah, so let me use a couple of examples. You know, one of the examples is in trying to understand ⁓ value proposition and understanding what else is going on in the marketplace and getting context for the kinds of problems that people are trying to solve and how you go about solving that problem. And so from that, you can actually get great information about how you can best position something so that it's heard the way that you want it to be. You can get guidance along the way.If I'm in a situation where there's a new client that's coming in or a new partner, the ability to use AI to understand not only the data about those folks, but also about contextually how it fits into their vertical marketplace, what problems they're trying to solve, what problems are they most often faced with? What are the typical solutions that they use to do this? What are the pitfalls of those? These are things that you can work with AI to understand at a better level than you could before.And you can consistently figure out how to synthesize that information. so being able to bring that, boil that information down is another value of AI. doesn't have to be 20 pages long. You can figure out how to get that information into a much more concise manner, and you can help use it to teach you how to communicate it effectively. And I think that there's so much opportunity there.Now I do use AI for things like analytics and so I absolutely try and use it to help grade my work so to speak. Am I looking at this problem the right way? Am I using the information the right way? I certainly use AI every day on my writing. So I am not the best writer and giving it an opportunity to help hone in on the message that I'm trying to deliver is a constant force for me. As a matter of fact, I think that I use grimm really at times.And so every week I get my message that, no, no, I think I'm in the top 3 % of Grammarly users. Part of that is because I'm terrible. The other part of it is because I actually believe in the power that ⁓ there is this thing that knows more than I do. And I'm willing to listen and learn. It's changed the way that I write, being candid. It's literally changed how I go about things. And so there's other pieces of process that are important to me.Look, I happen to work in a very complex environment right now. The environment of compliance, audit and security, these are three things that require an enormous amount of technical capability. I'm in awe of our delivery team and what they're able to do. Sometimes the best way for me to understand it is to actually use AI to help explain it to me because I'm not an engineering level technical person. Even though I've been in tech for 30 plus years.There's so much that I don't know. And so it does give me the opportunity to learn more on the fly.Mark Petruzzi (18:28)Very, very cool. All right, let's do some real quick rapid fire questions and I'll just pop off. So what was the first product or service you ever sold?Joshua Hoffman (18:34)Sure.carpet cleaning a boiler room environment with a guy literally throwing phone book pages at me. Things that shape you, I romanticize it now, but it was awful at the time. And I know exactly how not to be.Mark Petruzzi (18:38)I love it.So were you the wolf of carpet instead of the wolf of Wall Street?Joshua Hoffman (18:57)I was terrible. By the way, I was a miserable failure with a miserable attitude. It was, it couldn't have been worse. And you know, my next two sales jobs were just as bad. I sold copiers and I, well, actually I should say I didn't sell And I sold, I tried to sell copiers. I don't even think I, I don't even think I'd ever sold one. And I sold insurance door to door.Mark Petruzzi (19:14)You tried to sell copiers, right?Joshua Hoffman (19:22)And you talk about three experiences in a row, it's no wonder I went into manufacturing. But it didn't help that I failed either. So I didn't make any money on top of being miserable.Mark Petruzzi (19:32)Hey, again, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So that's cool. Do you have a favorite CRO or CEO that you like to follow or read about?Joshua Hoffman (19:36)That's right.I do my best to stay up on what people are doing, learning and providing using things like LinkedIn, using things like Forbes, and reading as often as I find the time to do so. And so I don't necessarily have one favorite, but we talked about some of those leaders before that I've had the chance to be around, whether it's Mark Anderson or Russ Reader or Todd Abbott orMike Jenner my current CEO Joe Burton who was the CEO at Polly for most of my time there I love reading what he writesMark Petruzzi (20:13)Josh, again, thanks so much and we appreciated you taking the time with us today.Joshua Hoffman (20:18)I really enjoyed it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.