In a high-velocity motion, time kills your deals for you. The month ends. The candidate takes another job. Urgency is built into the calendar and nobody has to manufacture it.

In enterprise, nothing dies on its own — and Tim Yandel says that is exactly the trap. When your sales cycle runs eight to eighteen months, the proposal you didn't send Friday goes out Tuesday and the deal isn't going anywhere. The team gets comfortable. Comfort is how a quarter turns into a year.

Tim is the Chief Revenue Officer at Imubit, where he sells closed-loop AI process optimization into refineries and chemical plants at half a million to over a million dollars a year in license alone. He started as a technical recruiter in Chicago, ran global sales at Sama in computer vision, carried the CRO seat at Regrow selling carbon verification into Nestlé and Unilever, and closed a $29.4M contract that started life as a $20,000 pilot. In this conversation with LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico, he takes apart what actually moves an enterprise deal — the personal consequence hiding behind every compelling event, why more urgency and more ROI usually backfire, how to forecast honestly when your buyer has never signed anything this big, and why the highest-leverage RevOps metric in an enterprise motion has nothing to do with the buyer at all.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

Why recruiting hands you a critical event for free — and software never does

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Cold open + intro

01:59 — Recruiting to software: the perishable asset

04:18 — The $20K pilot that became a $30M deal

06:07 — It's not FOMO, it's FOMU — deals lost to no decision

08:19 — Revenue athletes vs. chess players

17:06 — Diagnosis, not prescription — why urgency backfires

19:22 — Stage three is where deals stall

30:03 — Forecasting when every deal slips

32:30 — What actually counts as a critical event

33:17 — "Have you approved a deal this size before?" — how to ask it

42:29 — More internal selling than external selling

46:16 — RevOps as a force multiplier: the Slack deal desk

48:31 — Measuring internal SLAs and building revenue athletes inside

1:11:56 — The TGI Fridays menu and why less is more

1:17:55 — Wrap

ABOUT THE GUEST

Tim Yandel is the Chief Revenue Officer at Imubit, the leading provider of closed-loop AI process optimization for refiners and chemical operators, where deals run from half a million to over a million dollars a year in license alone. He has spent more than twenty years building revenue teams, starting as a technical recruiter in Chicago before moving into software — running global sales at Sama in computer vision and data labeling, and carrying the CRO seat at Regrow selling carbon verification into Nestlé and Unilever. Along the way he closed a $29.4M contract that began as a $20,000 pilot. He is a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate and a Pavilion executive member.

ABOUT THE LEANSCALE PODCAST

The LeanScale Podcast is the show for GTM operators building the next generation of revenue infrastructure. Hosted by Anthony Enrico, co-founder of LeanScale, we go deep with the operators, founders, and executives shaping how modern go-to-market teams are designed, scaled, and transformed.

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KEYWORDS / TAGS

RevOps, Enterprise Sales, Enterprise Sales Cycle, GTM, Sales Forecasting, Forecast Accuracy, Deal Desk, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, Compelling Event, Critical Event, Multi-threading, Land and Expand, Pilot to Production, Sales Cycle Compression, Sales Operations, Sales Enablement, CRO, Board Reporting, AI, AI Agents, AI in Sales, Industrial AI, Imubit, Regrow, Pavilion, B2B SaaS, Salesforce, LeanScale, Anthony Enrico, Tim Yandel

HASHTAGS

#RevOps #GTM #EnterpriseSales #RevenueOperations #SalesForecasting #CRO #DealDesk #B2BSaaS #SalesOperations #AI #AIinSales #IndustrialAI #LeanScale #LeanScalePodcast

How a $20K Pilot Became a $30M Deal | Tim Yandel on Enterprise Sales, Forecasting & RevOps

The LeanScale Podcast with Anthony Enrico

How a $20K Pilot Became a $30M Deal | Tim Yandel on Enterprise Sales, Forecasting & RevOps