How The Best Salespeople Are Building Agents in GTM w/ Roy Mathew, Head of Sales @ Gumloop
The Crew PodcastShow Notes
Roy’s Background
Roy Mathew is the Head of Sales at Gumloop, one of the leading AI agent builders helping companies automate workflows across sales, marketing, and IT. Before Gumloop, Roy spent several years at Airtable where he started as a growth lead, pitched the CEO to let him carry a bag, and helped build the sales playbook from scratch. After Airtable he followed his former head of sales to Recurrency, an ERP-adjacent platform selling into distributors and wholesalers. Before all of that, Roy was a special situations options trader, worked on the marketing team at Box, co-founded an automotive technology company called UQuote, and did a stint at Elastic. He's a Harvard undergrad, Wharton MBA, and has one of the more unconventional paths into sales leadership you'll hear.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro & The Sell-Grill-Sell Sandwich: Why Hiring Managers Kill Their Own Pipeline (02:39) Roy's First Call Horror Story: Getting Deal-Reviewed for a VP Role (04:55) From Options Trader to Box to Founding a Company: Roy's Roundabout Path Into Sales (09:47) Joining Airtable as Employee 25: How a Guy Looking Over His Shoulder Changed Everything (11:04) Pitching the CEO: "Let Me Carry the Bag or I'm Just the Spreadsheet Person" (14:46) How to Evaluate an Early-Stage Company: Beyond the Investor Logos (17:58) Why He Chose Gumloop: The Two-Week Interview That Threw His Framework Out the Window (20:17) MCP, Co-Work, and the Agent Era: A Non-Technical Explainer (26:06) The Blank Page Problem: How Gumloop Thinks About Personas vs. Use Cases vs. Industry (31:00) The Pre-Call Agent Stack: Email, Slack, Gong, Granola, and Web Scrapers in One Brief (35:34) The Post-Call Agent Stack: Recap Emails, CRM Updates, Linear Tickets, and Product Feedback (38:03) The Self-Improvement Loop: An Agent That Watches What You Actually Send (42:30) Agents for Sales Leaders: Process Adherence, Pipeline Inspection, and SPICED Monitoring (50:40) GTM Mafias: Why the Slack Mafia Might Be Overhyped (52:21) Blue-Chip-Only Resumes Are a Red Flag: "You Want Someone Dangerous at a Bad Company" (57:15) The Outbound Play That Actually Works: Gumball Machines and Speaking Like a Human (59:35) What Roy Looks For When Hiring at Gumloop Right Now
About The Crew Podcast The Crew podcast interviews GTM leaders and investors at top AI startups and early-stage companies. Every week, host Chris Balestras, partner @ Crew (an advisory, recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series C AI-natives) sits down with GTM operators from the fastest-growing AI natives and SaaS companies to break down what's actually working in go-to-market today. No fluff, no theory - just honest, tactical insights from people in the trenches building the next generation of AI breakouts.
About Crew Crew is an advisory, recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series C AI-natives & fast-growing SaaS startups.
Where to Find Crew LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vibescaling/https://www.linkedin.com/company/crewgtm YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thecrewgtm Newsletter: https://www.withcrew.blog/
Website: https://www.withcrew.ai/
This episode is brought to you by Salesgraph.
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