Making Sales Simple: The Art and Science of Human Connection | Hannah Ajikawo

In this episode of RevOps Champions, host Brendon Dennewill sits down with Hannah Ajikawo, founder and CEO of Revenue Funnel, HubSpot modern sales leader, and LinkedIn top voice in B2B sales. With 17 years of experience leading sales and go-to-market teams, Hannah shares her philosophy on making sales simple by stripping away the over-engineered complexity that holds revenue teams back.

Hannah challenges conventional wisdom about sales methodologies, arguing that companies often lose sight of fundamentals by trying to turn salespeople into formula-following robots. She reveals how misalignment across revenue teams—from unclear ownership to missing expectations—costs companies millions and explains why being "data-informed" beats being "data-driven" every time. The conversation explores practical frameworks for building alignment, leveraging AI effectively, and finishing Q4 strong while setting up for success in 2026.

This episode is essential listening for RevOps professionals, CROs, sales leaders, and founders who want to cut through the noise, realign their revenue engine around what actually works, and scale growth without adding unnecessary complexity or headcount.

Read the full transcript.

What You'll Learn

• Why sales becomes unnecessarily complicated
• The true meaning of revenue alignment
• The 72.9% Ronaldo Principle for launching initiatives
• Data-informed vs. data-driven strategy
• How AI is reshaping buying and selling
• Sales velocity as the CRO's north star metric
• Practical Q4 advice for hitting targets

Resources Mentioned

• The Go-Giver by Bob Berg
• Revenue Funnel Go-to-Market Health Check 
• HubSpot Academy
• EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)
• Denamico Growth Readiness Score

Listen

About the Guest

Episode transcript

Why Sales Has Become More Complicated Than It Needs to Be

Brendon Dennewill: Welcome to the Brendon Dennewill podcast. I'm very happy to be joined today by Hannah Ajikawo. She is the founder and CEO of Revenue Funnel, a HubSpot modern sales leader, and a LinkedIn Top Voice in B2B sales. With 17 years of experience leading sales and go-to-market teams, Hannah is known for making sales simple. We'll be digging more into that, by aligning revenue teams, leveraging AI, and replacing outdated playbooks with strategies that actually scale.

She's helped SaaS and service companies generate four times more pipeline in just 10 weeks without additional spend or headcount. Hannah's approach blends human connection, data-driven strategy, and modern technology to help companies sell the way buyers actually want to buy. Hannah, welcome to the Brendon Dennewill podcast.

Hannah Ajikawo: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

Brendon Dennewill: Hannah, let's dive in. One of the first things I wanted to ask you is: you often talk about how sales should be simple. What do you think makes sales more complicated than it should be, and how can leaders start making it simple again?

Hannah Ajikawo: I think the biggest thing that makes sales appear complicated is that, for some reason, we tried to create robots so that we could generate more predictable revenue. I get why, but the reason sales becomes complicated is because we strip people of their humanity and individuality. We need them to follow a particular formula that we know works. What happens is people lose sight of what makes them human because they need to sound like these very specific things they must say, must hear, must do.

Then what happens is they come full circle again, get back to just being themselves, and all of a sudden performance improves. So at an individual level, it becomes complicated when you do that. In aggregate, it's just this big system of people forgetting some real core fundamentals simply because we're trying to train them to follow a formula. There's a happy medium that can take place. What we also do is over-architect the systems and processes that support them. We want to measure everything; we don't want anyone doing anything we can't measure. So we create this spider web of systems and tools that we often don't need.

What Making Sales Simple Actually Looks Like in Practice

Brendon Dennewill: I want to unpack more of this. You've built a philosophy around clarity and alignment in revenue teams. What does making sales simple really look like in practice for high-growth companies?

Hannah Ajikawo: For me, it's about getting right down to the baseline fundamentals. We can't sell without someone buying. It's not an activity that can happen on its own. Selling involves the exchange of something, often money, and we can't do that unless someone buys. So we take that as a baseline fundamental: how do we make someone want to buy?

If you go back historically to the initial meaning of the word "sell," it comes from the Old English word sellan, which means "to give." We kind of got rid of that and just focused on what we could throw at people and hope they grab it. The big shift is focusing back on how we help people to buy.

All of a sudden you realize: the only way I can help someone is if I figure out what's really important to them. What we ideally want to do is make people see that we are responding to something that is evidently in need, take them out of their status quo, and then help them navigate from that status quo to a place where they're motivated to take action.

The reason I've focused so much on simplifying things is that I had to look at myself when I stepped into consulting eight years ago and ask: what did I do when I was really successful? Why was I, as a junior rep, punching way above my weight? The first thing I did was get comfortable with myself. I set aside the training, not because it wasn't great, but I stopped pretending to be someone I wasn't. I used a bit of common sense and wove the training into that. When I did, I thought: that's the cheat code. And I've baked and extrapolated what I learned from there into everything I do today.

Brendon Dennewill: As you were explaining the simplicity and basics of why someone buys something, you reminded me of one of my favorite books from last year: The Go-Giver. Are you familiar with it?

Hannah Ajikawo: I've got the whole series. I love those books.

Brendon Dennewill: Especially if you've grown up in a competitive, capitalist society, the more ambitious you are and the closer you are to sales, people typically want to be known as a go-getter, not a go-giver. For the folks listening, if you haven't read The Go-Giver by Bob Burg, I highly recommend it.

Hannah Ajikawo: It's great. There's the Go-Giver, and then I think there's a whole series. I've got them all. They're very much centered around giving, understanding what people need, and what's important to them. It's such a wonderful mindset shift.

Brendon Dennewill: Which also reminds me: you and I were both at Inbound last month in San Francisco, though we unfortunately didn't connect. The amazing people at HubSpot have a very similar philosophy: help, educate, provide valuable content to the buyer so that when the timing is right, they can reach out having made an informed decision. But we won't get distracted by all the announcements made there. Hannah, for the last couple of years, you've been doing something called a go-to-market health check. Tell us about that.

The Go-to-Market Health Check and What the Data Reveals

Hannah Ajikawo: I try to practice what I preach, and I can't work with everyone. We typically work with companies that are around one to two million into ARR, B2B SaaS or services, that have reached a point where they don't yet have the sophistication in their go-to-market model and are saying: we just need to figure out what to do now before we run out of time.

I developed quite a large audience of people I can't sell to, which is always useful, but I like being useful. When I was speaking to people and navigating a lot of those circles, I realized a lot of people aren't thinking about their overall strategy. They're just really tactical. How can I help them look at their business and find quick-win opportunities? I spun up the first version of the quiz around the beginning of 2023. The whole purpose was to give people enough information to see where there are broken areas and get some real, actionable advice on what to do next.

I think I gave away too much. People came back every quarter to track their score improvements. But the data that came out was fascinating: 72% of respondents said they did not have a documented go-to-market strategy. 64% said they lacked consistent qualification and buyer engagement practices. I was like, wow, this is serious.

The health check takes about five minutes now. It used to be much longer. One hundred questions was probably not the best way in. We've shortened it, and it gives you a handbook on the three to five actions you should take to fix areas in your go-to-market strategy.

Brendon Dennewill: It's funny you say that, because we learned the hard way too. We created a tool called the RevOps Score a few years ago and wondered why no one was completing it. It was just far too complicated. We recently shortened it and changed the name. It's now called the Growth Readiness Score. We've really condensed it so it takes 10 to 15 minutes, and we're getting a lot more value from it.

Hannah Ajikawo: Exactly. People take it, and lots of them never speak to me again. Some put in fake details, not realizing that if you put in real ones, you get a 10-page handbook of very accurate, actionable data. They figure that out afterwards.

The 72.9% Principle: Launching Before Perfection

Brendon Dennewill: As you were sharing those statistics, the first number you mentioned was 72%. Is that related to your 72.9% Ronaldo principle at all?

Hannah Ajikawo: It's not directly, but I could make the connection. That came from some random research I was doing. Every time Ronaldo steps on the pitch, there's a 72.9% chance he'll score. I was like, this is actually a great way to think about how we go live with things. I love that I have the luxury of working with companies that are happy to lean into that 72% mindset, because otherwise you just wait for perfection. You're waiting for the perfect setup. Just put it out there, get the data, learn, and iterate fast. Launch when it's good enough and you're highly likely to be successful. Have the plans in place, and once the foundations are up, you can keep building.

Brendon Dennewill: Are you familiar with Roger Federer's statistic? He gave a commencement speech at a university in the US where he asked the graduating class: how many points do you think I won in my career? The answer was 54%. He only won 54% of all the points he ever played as a professional, which was only about 0.3% more than the other top players.

In EOS, which a lot of our clients use, they talk about goals should be set at 80%, never 100%, because if you're setting 100% goals, you're probably not pushing yourself far enough. If you achieve 80% of a goal, you've made great progress. Just do it again. Whether it's Ronaldo on the football pitch or Federer on the court, they're winning a much lower percentage than you'd think. It's all about showing up, doing the thing, and focusing on the future, not the past.

Hannah Ajikawo: Think about it: if a typical B2B business won 54% of their at-bats, they'd be very happy. So would their investors. At 72%, you're going out for drinks every day. It's an interesting concept. It actually came out of me accepting that in the beginning, I was a starter of many things and a finisher of nothing. I had that feedback once: you start a lot, but you don't really finish it. And I thought: what if I can start things and get them to a point where they're close enough to finished that I can actually execute, rather than letting them disappear into another Google folder? Getting better.

Brendon Dennewill: That's something I know well. I'm also in that category of starting a lot and needing to collaborate with people who are better at finishing things. It's all about partnering and collaboration.

What Misalignment Really Means Across a Business

Brendon Dennewill: In your experience and career, you've seen how misalignment can cost companies hundreds of thousands or millions. What's an example that comes to mind where alignment, or the lack of it, completely changed a company's growth path?

Hannah Ajikawo: I think the whole misalignment conversation is one where people don't really work out what alignment even means for their company. It's something that feels natural to say because sales and marketing don't get along. But alignment is like a group of people climbing Mount Everest making sure they have the same rope between them, with all the clips in place, so no one falls and disappears. That's alignment to me. It goes through the entire business. It's not just sales and marketing.

Once people accept that, they can start to look at the problem properly. And then you realize there's a lot of disconnect from people not trusting their peers as leaders to actually execute and take them where they need to go. Imagine you've got a leader whose boss doesn't believe in them or their plan. You're already misaligned from there. Due to politics, you leave them in place to continue executing a broken system.

Then you think about all the other pieces: KPIs, targets, how you view your customer, what the journey looks like. When you start connecting the dots and accept what alignment actually means, you can start identifying the things that are broken but can't be changed right now, and figure out a workaround.

Then you make sure there's a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities. I've seen that convert into revenue simply because people realize: oh, that's what I'm in charge of. I didn't know that. That was never made clear to me. Clear responsibilities is one thing. And then of course you get into how things are handed off, how you treat different prospects and customers. But we often get so into the tactical weeds that we see a few wins and forget that someone isn't actually owning that number or that function. Ownership is where I see most things get broken.

Brendon Dennewill: Ownership as in who owns the number or the business?

Hannah Ajikawo: Who owns a part of this revenue process from where the lead comes in to where it converts into cash. There are parts where it's like: we didn't know we were responsible for checking how that specific thing was going. I also think a lot of people don't set really clear expectations. Ask two questions: What's your role? Are you 100% clear on your responsibilities? Most people will say no. And when they share their understanding, the people around them will say: oh, we'd also expect you to do this. I encourage everyone listening to ask those questions to a few people around the business. It's going to make you nauseous.

Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. That's one of the reasons we work so well with EOS companies. EOS is all about clarity of communication, clarity of role and responsibility, accountability. And you're right, even with EOS in place, you're still going to have those issues because they're human issues. Roles change, and the faster a business is growing, the more true that is. The communication and clarity have to be reframed constantly.

When Do Growing Companies Start Thinking About RevOps?

Brendon Dennewill: I know you're familiar with revenue operations as a framework. But your ideal clients, those one to two million ARR SaaS and services businesses, are they already thinking about RevOps at that stage as a model to overcome the things you're talking about?

Hannah Ajikawo: The bracket I work in is actually closer to one million to about 20 million. The ones at the early stage are just trying to get things set up. They're transitioning from Excel or a broken CRM they downloaded and threw crappy data into. The larger ones have sometimes already started to over-architect things, because you throw in a field because it's convenient for a campaign and years later you're asking why it's still there and how the reporting ever got repurposed.

They are thinking about RevOps to address some of the alignment issues and remove ambiguity. It gives you a black-and-white objective picture: what do we do with what we're seeing and learning?

Being Data-Informed vs. Being Data-Driven

Brendon Dennewill: We're talking a lot about data here. You've made a sharp distinction between using data and running on data. How can leaders build a data culture that empowers smart decisions instead of blind ones?

Hannah Ajikawo: A few years ago I realized that the whole idea of being "data-driven" was a bit flawed, and "data-informed" made more sense.

Here's a metaphor. I've run two half marathons and have no desire to run another. I was actually training for a full marathon, and then a half came up and I thought: there you go. In my first half marathon, I was heavier and I finished faster. The second one, I hadn't trained and I'd just spent two weeks in Florida. I arrived the day before and had cramps throughout the race.

If you just look at the raw data from those two races, you might say: her average pace is seven minutes per kilometer. That's her speed. But if you're data-informed, you look at all the elements and realize: in race two, she starts at eight minutes per kilometer, speeds up to six on the downhills, then settles back at around seven and a half. What you're doing there is being informed by the data to understand how different conditions affect different outcomes.

What we tend to do in business is say: our average is X, without considering the context. We had a huge event that quarter. We had twice as many reps. We had more budget. So we copy-paste assumptions. That's why when companies say they'll hire 10 more reps to get 10x revenue, they quickly realize it doesn't work like that. If we're data-informed and treating seven as an average but drilling into the detail, we can see that in rough conditions, like a ramping period, things start slow. We have to shift how we think about data in order to use it better.

How AI Is Actually Changing the Way People Buy and Sell

Brendon Dennewill: There's no way we were going to make it through a conversation without talking about AI. One of the most critical things any regular AI user knows today is that the better the context, the better the results. AI is clearly reshaping the sales landscape. What's the most exciting or surprising way you've seen AI actually change how people sell and buy today?

Hannah Ajikawo: I love that you can go to an LLM today as a buyer and really specify your needs. It's not just "show me the best sales engagement tools." It's: I need a sales engagement tool. I'm a small company based in this country. I'd really prefer something with a certain level of security because my legal team is going to care about that, and my finance team has a low budget. Can you give me free options to look at? A traditional search engine can't handle that. It takes you to a blog post written in 2007 that you don't trust.

I also love that as a buyer, I can now go to companies' websites where they've integrated AI and just get answers to my questions. If I want to do a specific thing, can this platform do it? Yes. Without ever having to speak to anyone. I don't know why more people don't realize that this is exactly what buyers want. They don't want to talk to you yet. They just want to search and get information.

On the seller side, the thing that excites me most isn't AI writing emails. It's the amount of data AI can analyze at once. You can put in dozens of data sources, a token window of hundreds of thousands, and the time savings are incredible. My caveat is: I don't think we've yet adjusted to how fast we can get responses. It's actually given us more work. Normally you'd get something and it would take weeks to build a plan. Now it takes five minutes, and you think: I've got to actually use this. We haven't caught up with how fast we can act on the insights AI generates. People probably have billion-dollar ideas sitting on their desktop that they just can't get to yet.

Brendon Dennewill: That's interesting, and it touches on something we've been discussing a lot lately. The word "workflow," in our context as a HubSpot partner, means the automations we build in a CRM. But what you're alluding to is getting back to the true meaning of the word. Our literal workflow as humans, how we spend our days in business, is changing so fundamentally that we haven't yet figured out what that looks like.

Hannah Ajikawo: Not at all. I love that you mentioned the true definition of workflow. We just haven't caught up with how fast we can now react to things. It's a bit like when someone says they want to win the lottery, but they haven't thought about what they'd do with the money. We ask for things, we get them, and then we think: that seems exciting, but when can I act on it? That's the challenge right now.

Selling to Buyers Who Are Already Three Steps Ahead

Brendon Dennewill: Something else I want to touch on. As a HubSpot partner, when we start a conversation with a prospective client, they're often already three steps further down the line from where they should be for us to help them effectively. They're coming in thinking the goal is to build a CRM. We're like: yes, that is the ultimate goal, but we need to go a few steps further upstream first. You mentioned approaching things the way a CRO would. Can you share your perspective on that?

Hannah Ajikawo: Yes, because at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the CRM, the infrastructure, serves the revenue strategy. Not the other way around.

Brendon Dennewill: Exactly. Who is this CRM going to benefit? It's the entire business, because we're building the revenue engine. But coming back to the accountability piece: who is accountable for making sure the revenue team meets their metrics and objectives? That's typically the CRO. And the CRO, together with the leadership team, tracks a specific set of metrics. What would you say, in your experience, are the three most important metrics a CRO should be tracking?

Hannah Ajikawo: I've believed for about four years now that we should simply be looking at sales velocity. The number of opportunities, average contract value, win rate, and sales cycle length. When you look at all those things collectively, you can see how quickly opportunities are flowing through to money. How quickly are you going from assumed value to perceived value with a customer, where they can finally sign on the dotted line?

For most fast-moving SaaS companies, you go through a sales process, let's say at the 20k to 30k mark. You don't do a trial; you just get into it. They're perceiving that you can provide value, and that's what you've sold them. Sales velocity is a nice collective metric for CROs to focus on. And I think RevOps goes hand in hand with it.

Brendon Dennewill: What about for larger SaaS companies? Because we deal a lot with lower mid-market companies, typically 50 to 2,000 people and 100 million to 1.5 billion in revenue. At a certain point, pipeline is a very common metric. But then it flips to NRR at some point. And LTV always stands out to me, for both SaaS and services, because the best customers are often the ones you already have.

Hannah Ajikawo: Absolutely. When we talk about KPIs, they transition depending on objectives. You start by just needing meetings. Then you need pipeline. Then you realize the pipeline is really expensive, so you need revenue. LTV is the point where you finally have enough data to determine what the lifetime value of a customer actually is. And once you have that, the goal is to grow it and recoup your investment as fast as possible. It's hard to answer definitively because it changes depending on what the objectives are.

Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. And the maturity of the business as well. So then, at what point does RevOps become a real play? And what is a CRO looking for from their RevOps team, whether it's a team of one, two, three, or a combination of internal and outsourced?

Hannah Ajikawo: At the earliest stage, say sub-one million, someone on your team should learn the basics: how to get started on HubSpot, how to capture data. Then you realize you're capturing data but not doing anything with it.

Once you get past that and start seeing repetition in behaviors from your market and your sales process, you want to add more sophistication. A sales-driven CEO will do this from day one; that's just how they think. A technical founder often won't.

In the next phase, you've got customer data and you realize: these people already pay us. How do we create systems to monitor signals and reach out? Then you get more sophisticated at the top of funnel, connecting the dots to capture intent and demand signals.

Then it becomes a question of maintenance and scale: where do we put money to go faster? That's when you really need someone in to do this properly, because the numbers start to get scary. Your cost per lead is how many hundreds? I didn't know it was that high. You need the numbers so you know where to put your next penny.

Brendon Dennewill: Right. For really sophisticated businesses, once they start tracking LTV, the second metric they track is CAC, because you want LTV to increase and cost of customer acquisition to continuously decrease. Unless of course something specific is happening, which for a lot of companies right now means they may actually need to increase CAC again to ensure they continue growing LTV.

Hannah Ajikawo: We just need to get the business in. It fluctuates. You want to get to the magic number and make sure you're not obliterating anything. And now AI is in the mix and everyone's throwing money at it.

Q4 Advice: Clean Your Pipeline and Create Urgency for Q1

Brendon Dennewill: As we wrap up, we're in Q4 2025. It's always an important quarter for anyone who is sales or revenue focused. What advice do you have for the folks listening who are trying to finish 2025 strong and set themselves up for success in 2026?

Hannah Ajikawo: I'll give you the same advice I gave a client this week.

First, know your sales cycle. Getting anything over the line in a free month's notice is going to be tough, and anyone coming in wanting to buy right now should raise some flags. But there are two things you need to do. One is look at the middle of funnel. Look at what is happening right now. Go and look at your pipeline and get rid of the crap so you can focus on what's real. This is not the time to inflate the pipeline. If you need to leave certain deals in the system for optics, fine. But as a leader, you know what's real. Focus on that. Optimize whatever you can in there. That's what we specialize in.

The other side is looking at Q1, because most of your reps have put a Q1 close date in there just for optics. Go and ask: what kind of value can we create for those Q1 opportunities that will motivate them to make a decision in December? You'll be surprised what the right kind of structured conversation can accomplish.

I said to a client this week: are you asking about the close date or the go-live date? Just that one distinction gave them eight weeks back. They realized they actually needed to close in December, not go live then. They hadn't even checked. Sometimes we just haven't sanity-checked our deals in those ways. It's about extreme rigor right now.

Brendon Dennewill: Really good advice. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us on the Brendon Dennewill podcast. I look forward to sharing all your insights and perspectives as soon as this episode goes live. Thanks again.

Hannah Ajikawo: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. 

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