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About this episode
What does it take to go from knowing little about sales, to building one of Australia’s most successful B2B SaaS companies – and then doing it all over again?
In the first episode of B2B Sales Blueprint, Firmable co-founder and Co-CEO Paul Perrett sits down with fellow co-founder Leigh Jasper. Leigh co-founded Aconex in 2000, grew it to over 1,000 people and $250M in revenue, and saw it acquired by Oracle in 2018. He then co-founded Firmable, APAC’s leading B2B sales intelligence platform.
This is a conversation about the real journey – the six months Leigh spent figuring out how to sell, the hiring mistakes that cost him, what AI actually means for salespeople, and why he believes sales deserves more than ever to be treated as a profession.
What we cover in this episode
- 00:00 – Why Paul started the B2B Sales Blueprint podcast
- 03:15 – Leigh’s personal sales journey and the toughest six months of his career
- 08:40 – Transitioning from founder-seller to building a sales function
- 14:20 – The biggest hiring mistakes in sales and how to avoid them
- 21:05 – Why Firmable exists and the data problem it was built to solve
- 28:30 – Product-led growth vs. sales-led: how Firmable thinks about both
- 35:10 – What signals are and why they’re the next frontier in B2B sales
- 41:45 – Will AI replace salespeople? Leigh’s honest take
- 47:20 – The future of go-to-market and what sales leaders should be watching
- 52:00 – Rapid fire: the most influential person in Leigh’s sales journey, common mistakes, and what he’d tell his younger self
Three things that stuck with us
“That was probably the toughest six months professionally for me in my career. Just trying to work out how to sell.”
“Your sales intelligence tool is the first step of a sales process. So if you get that wrong, you pretty much get the whole rest of your process wrong.”
“Does AI replace a salesperson? I don’t think so. Most people want to buy from a person.”
About Leigh Jasper
Leigh Jasper is co-founder of Firmable and was co-founder of Aconex, one of Australia’s first B2B SaaS businesses. Aconex grew to over 1,000 employees and $250M in revenue before being acquired by Oracle in 2018. Since then, Leigh has been an active contributor to the Australian tech ecosystem as an investor, board member, and chair of LaunchVic, the start up agency of the Australian state of Victoria. He co-founded Firmable in 2023 to solve the data quality problem he saw holding back Australian B2B sales teams. Connect with Leigh on LinkedIn.
About Paul Perrett
Paul Perrett is co-founder and Co-CEO of Firmable, Australia’s leading B2B sales intelligence platform. He has spent the last decade working across sales and go-to-market functions in the Australian technology ecosystem and hosts B2B Sales Blueprint to bring more of the ANZ community’s best sales stories into the open. Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.
Want to go deeper?
We’ve pulled Leigh’s five biggest lessons from this conversation into a full breakdown.
[Read: How to build a B2B sales function that scales – lessons from Aconex to Firmable →]
