Fireside chats
Iain Humphries - Databricks
Iain Humphries shares how his finance roots and FP&A experience laid the groundwork for his approach to value consulting—storytelling with numbers for external audiences. At Databricks, he’s scaled value consulting through a period of hypergrowth, prioritizing a lean global team to support a broad and complex use case landscape. Yan emphasizes the “three Cs” of value consulting—
Dudley Nostrand - Grafana Labs
In this engaging conversation, Dudley shares his journey from IT buyer at Fidelity Investments to seasoned business value consultant at BMC, AppDynamics, and now MinIO. Drawing on his unique perspective from both sides of the table, he highlights the importance of buyer enablement, building trust through relatability, and embedding value early in the sales cycle—not just as a closing tool.
Mark Goldstein - Palo Alto Networks
Marc shares an insightful journey across SAP, VMware, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto Networks, reflecting on the evolution of value engineering from large transformational deals to complex, multi-stakeholder SaaS environments. He emphasizes the role of the value function in enabling buyer confidence, especially when customers are navigating unfamiliar or first-time purchases.
Bill Liebler - Netsuite, Oracle
Bill Liebler, Global Head of Value Management at NetSuite, shared his journey into the value management domain, beginning with his early days at IBM where he helped found the global value assessment team. His experience has spanned geographies and business models, with key differences between enterprise technology sales and the high-volume ERP sales model at NetSuite. He emphasized that while the foundational skills of value professionals—consultative selling, business acumen, and customer engagement—are constant, their application must be tailored to the complexity of the customer and the deal size.
James Peckham - Splunk
In this engaging and intellectually expansive conversation, James shares how over two decades of designing, delivering, and selling change—from consulting roles at KPMG to value leadership at Oracle, Salesforce, and now Splunk—have shaped his philosophy of business value. James views value sellers as
Toby Baker - Highspot
In this rich and tactical interview, Toby draws on two decades in solution consulting—spanning roles at Oracle, Hootsuite, and more—to dissect the evolving world of value and pre-sales. He breaks down the nuanced differences between solution consultants, solution architects, and value consultants, and explains how every solution consultant today must be fluent in both product and business value.
David Koppe - Sysdig
In this wide-ranging conversation, David shares his journey through BladeLogic, BMC, MongoDB, and his current role leading value at a growing cybersecurity company. Drawing from over two decades of experience across pre-sales and value leadership, he explores the evolution from traditional value consulting to a broader, more scalable vision of value engineering—one that influences not just sales, but marketing, product, and customer success.
Lorenzo Laurelli
In this insightful conversation, Lorenzo reflects on his journey from management consulting at IBM to value consulting roles in SaaS organizations like Splunk. He outlines two dominant archetypes in value consulting—those from consulting backgrounds and those from value selling—highlighting how these shape go-to-market strategies. Lorenzo shares how value consultants can either be strategic partners in co-building business cases with customers or tactical enablers in deal closure, depending on the organization’s culture and product complexity. He emphasizes the importance of aligning value propositions with pricing, discusses how trust, curiosity, and business context drive meaningful value engagements, and explains how value selling can turn small accounts into enterprise-level partnerships.
Mark Nethercott - Rubrik
In this deep and thoughtful interview, Mark shares insights from his journey through BMC, AppDynamics, and other enterprise sales environments, charting the evolution of value selling over the past two decades. He reflects on how foundational methodologies like MEDDIC and discovery frameworks transitioned from complex pyramids to more actionable tools like the "Three Whys"—Why do anything, Why now, Why us.
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