In this episode of RevOps Champions, host Brendon Dennewill sits down with Rob Triggs, founder of RTR and creator of the CALM Sales Program, to share his journey and unpack what it really takes to scale revenue and build predictable, high-performing engines without chaos.
Rob details his unconventional path, from Xerox service technician to top-performing sales leader, which fundamentally shaped his belief that selling is an act of service, not pressure, a concept he argues is universally applicable.
This episode is a must-listen for founders, revenue leaders, and operators who want aligned teams, calmer sales motions, and scalable systems built for the future.
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Rob Triggs | Founder of RTR
Rob Triggs is a sales strategist and growth architect known for turning sales operations into predictable revenue engines. He began his career at Xerox, where he mastered the fundamentals of selling through disciplined execution, thousands of cold calls, rigorous call prep, boardroom negotiations, and structured win–loss reviews.
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Brendon Dennewill: Welcome to the Brendon Dennewill podcast, or welcome back if this is not your first episode. Today's guest is Rob Triggs, founder of RTR. RTR does B2B sales and sales transformation coaching with more than 25 years of experience helping companies scale with clarity and confidence.
Rob began his career at Xerox, where he earned Rookie of the Year and multiple President's Club Awards. He later helped grow a Microsoft partner into one of the top firms in Canada before a successful acquisition. Today, Rob works with founders and revenue leaders to align teams, use data effectively, and build sales systems that scale without chaos. He is also the creator of the CALM Sales Program, which helps sellers unlock limiting beliefs and win more often without pressure or burnout. Rob, welcome to the podcast.
Rob Triggs: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Brendon Dennewill: Rob, I'm going to dive right in. You started your career on a technical path before moving into sales. What led to that shift and how did it change your perspective on growth and leadership?
Rob Triggs: That's a great question. I started my career as a service technician. Like many of your listeners, we all have a story of how we started. Mine was that quiet young boy taking things apart, trying to figure out how they worked. I figured I would always work with my hands and be a technician. It made sense that that was the path I would go down
I ended up working for Xerox as a service technician, then was promoted to a technical trainer. Someone in the department said, 'You should go into sales.' And I said, 'No way. I don't know how to tell jokes.' But I listened and jumped in. I struggled for quite some time, but then I figured it out and flourished from there.
That was 27 years ago. I know that because my son was born my second month in sales and he's 27. But what it shaped for me is a fundamental belief that pretty much anybody can be in sales, because we all are. We're all selling something at some point: selling yourself to a college, selling yourself to your life partner, selling your house, your car. We're selling something all the time. But as soon as you tell someone, 'I want you to be a salesperson,' they lock up and panic.
Selling is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's an act of service, and that's what I fundamentally believe.
Brendon Dennewill: That's a familiar story. I'm guessing a lot of salespeople didn't start off saying, 'I'm going to be in sales.' Thanks for sharing that.
Brendon Dennewill: Misalignment seems to be a recurring challenge for growing companies. Can you share a moment where misalignment stalled progress and what you learned from it?
Rob Triggs: As companies grow and scale, misalignment is one of the key barriers to growth. There are tiers companies reach that are well documented in a lot of business books. One of them is that $50 million mark. There's something about $50 million that companies struggle to get past, and some never get there.
When you have a company with different departments, each one has their lane they're responsible for. But if you can get each department to work together collaboratively, to really care about what each other's function is and respect it, because not one is better than the other, even though all the salespeople will think theirs is the most important. It's an ecosystem that has to work.
It begins with the founder, owner, and executive team empowering the next level below them and letting them succeed or fail. Put some guidelines in place and let them do that.
The other part is having the right systems. We live in a day where AI and technology make systems absolutely critical. Some companies are being formed today with the systems first. My son started a company where many of the functions are being done by AI. We're living in a world where systems and technology almost come before the people. Then for the roles where you can't get technology to do it, you have people. Getting things working together is the name of the game.
Brendon Dennewill: Anyone who's been part of a successful team that has scaled knows that teamwork is central to every single one of them. And it is interesting that shift you mentioned: before, there was always a vision, then you found the people to get behind that vision, then you'd figure out the systems. But to your point, systems almost become part of the vision today.
Rob Triggs: Yes. I was part of a group called the CIO Summit in Canada. These were CIOs helping other CIOs get a seat at the executive table. In many organizations, the CIO was a cost center. But now the CIO is sitting at the executive table, meeting with the board, creating strategy that used to be enabled by technology. Now the technology is actually creating the business model in many cases, which is really interesting.
Brendon Dennewill: It's become a very strategic role. Similar to how some companies have a CFO and then others have a strategic CFO, the CIO has gone from being a cost center to being a strategic differentiator.
Rob Triggs: Absolutely. And in some organizations, they're still hanging on to that old model, that old framework.
Brendon Dennewill: As companies scale, structure becomes necessary. You already talked about one example being that $50 million mark. But too much structure can slow momentum. How do you strike that balance in practice?
Rob Triggs: One word: empowerment. Especially with the different generations we're dealing with in the workforce today. Each generation doesn't necessarily work the same way. What I see in companies that are flourishing is they really empower their people to be who they are. They value who they are. The executives are removing barriers. They're not dictating much anymore. They're removing barriers for very smart, motivated, and driven people to push the company forward.
Organizations set up that way are the ones flourishing. There isn't a boss double-checking emails before they go out. They empower people, hire smart people, reward them properly, train them properly, and they see them flourish. When things don't go properly, they communicate that clearly. When things do go properly, they reward that behavior tremendously. That captures all the generations, because all of us as humans want to work that way.
I don't think there's one person who ever wanted a micromanager. When you're starting out, you need some guide rails. But if you can run your organization with an empowered mindset, that's the key.
Brendon Dennewill: The four pillars we talk about on this show for revenue operations are people, process, data, and technology. What you're describing around empowerment is really in that people category, and it's a sign of leadership. Good leaders have that culture of empowerment so their job becomes, to your point, just removing obstacles so smart people can do what they do best.
Rob Triggs: Absolutely. Years ago, I participated in an empowered work group training exercise. We were all given a survey to answer individually. Not one person got a perfect score. Then they broke the room into groups of no more than six and gave them the same assignment. Guess how many groups got a perfect score? All of them.
It was eye-opening. Have you ever heard the term 'the power of the mastermind'? Six seems to be the magic number. When you get a group of six people together, everyone treated as an equal, given a task or challenge, and everyone has an equal voice, they will make the right decision almost every time. Better than any individual could alone.
Brendon Dennewill: That's really interesting. Are you familiar with Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius?
Rob Triggs: I know Patrick Lencioni's books, but not that one.
Brendon Dennewill: It's something he developed and launched a few years ago, based on decades of work studying successful leadership teams. The Working Genius assessment takes less than 10 minutes and ranks six different areas: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. Every person has two that are their working genius, two in the middle that can eventually deplete your battery, and two that will frustrate you.
The idea is that with five to six people, you're likely to cover all six geniuses, and you need all six present to be successful. So I'm glad you shared that mastermind example.
Rob Triggs: Very powerful stuff.
Brendon Dennewill: And it's foundational for us, because a lot of companies come to us thinking they need a technology solution. But really, technology is there to support their people, their processes, and the flow of their data. We have to ensure that the people piece, including leadership structure and values, is in place first. Because if it's not, the technology implementation is not going to succeed.
Brendon Dennewill: You're also big on data-driven decision-making. What separates companies that truly run on data from those that simply collect it?
Rob Triggs: The biggest difference is that the company not using data to make decisions has a lot of waste: wasted time, their most valuable resources focused on the wrong things. Sometimes they'll launch into an initiative with half-truths because they haven't examined the data properly. Organizations leveraging data to make decisions do much better.
One of the challenges historically is that companies have all these different systems they use to run. On the sales side, there's a CRM. Marketing has a marketing automation platform. Customer care has ticketing systems. Accounting has its own software. If you could open all those systems and look at them at once, the data tells the story of your company. The problem historically is those systems don't talk to each other.
So what we would do is pull information out, print those big reports, and then have people spend enormous amounts of time putting it all into a spreadsheet, running pivot tables, trying to make sense of it. That takes a lot of time, and when something takes a lot of talented resource, it doesn't get done unless it's truly necessary. So we'd make decisions on half-truths because we didn't have the time to do the investigative reporting.
Now, with the different systems we have access to, we can get at all the data and ask it to tell us the story. I think of Satya Nadella during the early stages of COVID, when everything was moving fast. His direct reports were creating presentations to brief him, which could take two or three days. He said, 'I might be looking at information that's three days old. That's too old.' So the story goes, he asked his team to create a BI dashboard with six key metrics. He could pull it up on his phone and immediately see what needed attention. That's a simple but powerful example of leveraging data to make better decisions.
Brendon Dennewill: What's frustrating for people like you and me, who know these systems exist, is why so many leadership teams still don't believe they can tie all those systems together. But I guess if it's a big enough problem, leadership teams eventually find the solution.
Rob Triggs: There are a lot of companies that have invested heavily in IT and tech and haven't received the business results they were looking for, which unfortunately seems to be something of an epidemic in the tech space. There are a lot of really good partners out there that will deliver the value you're looking for. It's just a matter of finding the right one.
Brendon Dennewill: What we see a lot in the HubSpot ecosystem is that the company coming to us still believes technology is going to solve their business problems, and of course it's not. That's why our process requires them to map their marketing, sales, and customer service processes manually, without any technology. Because in many cases, companies aren't able to do that yet. And if you can't do it manually, no technology is going to make it work.
Rob Triggs: We got that a lot. Customers would say, 'We're buying a CRM system to solve all of our sales problems.' And I'd say, 'What are the sales problems? Let's talk about that first, and then I'll let you know whether or not the CRM will solve them.'
Brendon Dennewill: Exactly. It's a very human thing. Shiny object syndrome is real. I suffer from it myself.
Rob Triggs: Have you heard of Alex Hormozi? He talks about this in one of his books. He started by helping gyms be more profitable. He said most people who join the gym, especially for a New Year's resolution, want to lose weight. If you tell someone they need to come to the gym two or three times a week for six months, or they can take a pill to lose weight, you know what they're going to choose. We want fast gratification.
Brendon Dennewill: Which is why that pill, the GLP-1s, is now the hottest thing going. So I guess there's no such thing as a quick fix. Rob, you have strong views on marketing automation and CRM. You've been in the trenches for a long time. What lessons have you learned from implementing these tools correctly and incorrectly?
Rob Triggs: The most common mistake with a CRM is not involving the people who are required to use it in the design of what it's going to be. Too often companies go off and create the CRM system, then release it to the sales team and sales managers who had no input at all.
The second thing is how management uses the system after it's in place. Once you put a CRM or any other system in, manage that part of the business by using what the system says. Because if you have workarounds, if you come out of the system and dump data into spreadsheets to do your work there and then go back in, you break the integrity of the system. It will never become that pervasive cultural tool it could be.
Even if it's not working perfectly, use the system to manage the business while you work on making it do what you need. Those two things alone put you ahead of most companies implementing systems like that.
Brendon Dennewill: The good news is we're seeing fewer examples of that first problem. Most leadership teams now understand you can't expect a CRM to do things you haven't told it to do. It seems to be less and less of an issue over the last five or six years.
Rob Triggs: That's great. I think overall we're all evolving. There was a period when the technology we used at home was better than what we used at work. I don't think that's true for most companies anymore. Moving to the cloud helped, because we're always working with software that's always updating, whether we like it or not. It's forcing us to accept that this is the new paradigm: not 'I've got software that will work the same way for five years,' but software that's always evolving.
We're now used to that constant change in a way we weren't at the start of our careers. The time between changes used to be much, much longer. For those of us who've adopted this new paradigm, it's completely normal. The change is the norm.
Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. I was at a conference this week where someone doing large Oracle ERP implementations said matter-of-factly that technology will always change. We moved from the stone age to the iron age not because we ran out of stone.
When we were naming our business 16 or 17 years ago, we started Denamico in Spain. The strategist helping us with naming kept asking, 'What are you really helping your clients navigate?' We said we were helping them navigate the changes that will occur as long as technology continues to evolve. The Spanish word 'dinámico' floated to the top and was the clear winner. We've been testing it for 16 or 17 years, and it's absolutely still consistent: technology will continue to evolve, and businesses need to continue to adapt.
Rob Triggs: That reminds me of the movie Other People's Money with Danny DeVito. His character, Larry the Liquidator, goes into a company that's struggling, and there's a scene where he says: if your company was making buggy whips, there was a point you could have made the best buggy whip in the world, but nobody needs buggy whips anymore. You have to reinvent yourself.
Technology is such a great enabler of that reinvention. It's so important to have good technology partners on speed dial so you can use them as trusted advisors to help you decide which technologies to invest in and which ones to ignore for now.
AI in Sales and Revenue Operations: Embracing the Next Evolution
Brendon Dennewill: So here we are, maybe 30 minutes into this conversation and we haven't mentioned AI yet. With the evolution currently underway reshaping how teams operate, how are you preparing the leaders who go through your training to extract real business value rather than chasing hype?
Rob Triggs: Great question, because right now it's hard to know what is hype and what is real. AI is here to stay. It is absolutely the next evolution of technology. I remember when I worked for Xerox, we had statistics showing that the amount of information was doubling every three years or so, and that has continued to accelerate. As human beings, we can't possibly comprehend all that data.
As AI comes in and is able to look at all of that data, apply different models, and act as little virtual employees to do our thinking and research, it's a great tool. And now it's crossing over into actually performing functions for us.
I was at a marketing conference in Las Vegas called DigiMarCon before Christmas. Every presentation was on AI. What I learned there was that many companies have already created digital AI employees. And what they found was that AI agents can't do six or seven things very well; they can do one thing really, really well. So what they did was have each person in the marketing department become responsible for managing a half-dozen of these agents. They became agent managers.
So what I would say to executives is: ensure you are leveraging AI technology to make the jobs of your existing employees easier. When it first came out, a lot of companies locked down their IT infrastructure so no one could use it. There's still some of that, but it's less common now.
It's important to embrace it. Remember when websites first appeared and if you didn't have one you didn't look like a legitimate business? This is the same thing. If you don't have an AI strategy, you should have one. Even if it's very basic, just have one. Hire people who aren't afraid of AI, bring them in, and, back to empowerment, let them infect the rest of the company with the best use cases for how they're using AI to perform their roles better. We shouldn't be afraid of it. We should embrace it.
Brendon Dennewill: The example you gave from the conference is consistent with what we're hearing. The best people to manage AI agents are the people currently in those roles doing those functions. They now have technology helping them do the things that are either mundane or, as you mentioned earlier, things that companies stopped doing because it wasn't worth the time. Putting together reports that took three days just stopped getting done because by the time you got them, the information was already old.
Now you have agents who can do those things in seconds or minutes. Suddenly you have the value to make better decisions, faster, and move faster to provide more of the value the business was created to provide. I think it's very exciting.
Rob Triggs: It is. And what we've talked about so far are mostly lag indicators: what are the numbers telling us based on what has happened? Now we can actually start predicting what's going to happen by looking at lead indicators. That opens up a whole different type of dashboard for executives.
Think about sales pipeline. Predicting early in the month whether you're on track to achieve the number: you can trust your sales leader, sure, but what is the data actually telling us? Using predictive analytics to show what's happening in the sales pipeline, with customer satisfaction, with all these areas, we can get ahead of it before the lag indicator tells us something went wrong when it's almost too late to correct. The lead indicators of success: I love that.
Brendon Dennewill: It comes back to what we talked about earlier: the critical importance of people and leadership, then data, then technology making it all better. When you look at it through the lens of what we've been discussing, it almost seems like nirvana. We'll continue to have other challenges, but this is genuinely very exciting.
Rob Triggs: It is. And whenever we're ripped out of our paradigm, we feel fear. A lot of people do have fear right now. There are jobs that have been eliminated and will be eliminated, just as with every other technology shift. There's retraining, relearning, pivoting. But this is such an exciting time, especially for small companies starting up now, building from day one with these tools. And for the rest of us, we need to pivot to be just as efficient.
Brendon Dennewill: Before we wrap up, I'm intrigued by your CALM Sales Program. Can you tell us what it is and does?
Rob Triggs: I'd love to. I've been in sales a long time, 27 years to be exact. I started as a service technician at Xerox and went into sales reluctantly, intrigued by the possibility of providing more for my family. I didn't consider myself a joke teller or a schmoozer, all those words you'd associate with a stereotypical salesperson.
I took the Xerox training, which was phenomenal. I had a territory and six months in I was going to quit. Then I ended up not quitting. I did a lot of work in positive mindset: what we now call manifestation, which is a polarizing word, but it's really mindset work and neuroscience. I applied that and I flourished. Here was this shy, quiet service technician working in a very extroverted career, and I became a top seller and top manager consistently for years.
I left Xerox and tried the same approach in other companies and other industries. The same thing kept happening: successful, successful, successful.
So I left corporate life because I had spent so much time learning the art of creating what you want to achieve in life through mindset. I decided to take the mindset piece, the sales skills I've battle-tested in the field, and create a simple curriculum for anyone who wants to sell for a living, whether they're a salesperson or an entrepreneur. The goal is to balance the mindset you need to succeed with the real sales skills and tools to be successful.
I called it CALM. It stands for Clear Authentic Learning Methodology. The word 'calm' is exactly what I love about it, because so many salespeople and entrepreneurs are stressed out trying to get the next deal. There's no reason to be. Sales is a process; it's part art, part science. It's all about people, even with AI, it's still about people. You can use tools to make it easier. Marketing automation and CRM together? That's liquid gold. If you don't have that, you should. My whole purpose now is to help sellers, entrepreneurs, and companies sell with a lot less stress.
Brendon Dennewill: That's awesome. And thank you for doing it. Even though there's a lot of training and coaching out there, the demand is even greater than the supply. So Rob, I'll wrap up with one last question. For founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders listening today: what is one mindset or action they can adopt right away to align their teams and accelerate growth?
Rob Triggs: The one mindset a leader needs is total belief in the company's mission. Even if there are times a leader is doubting, because that happens to all of us, when you are in front of your people and leading the team, that is not something they should ever see. Having that total belief in what you're doing is what gets people to follow a leader.
Now, if you genuinely believe your strategy is wrong, that's a different thing: change it, believe in it, and off you go again. But the leader needs to believe, and that cascades down. That is the cornerstone of a manifestation mindset: you use your imagination to create a vision of what you want to happen, and then there are techniques after that to make it happen.
The movie The Founder, if you haven't watched it, watch it. It's on Netflix. You'll see this milkshake machine salesman, Ray Kroc, recognize the brilliance in the McDonald brothers' process and see the opportunity to franchise it. And throughout the film, he's in his hotel room listening to records about persistence, mindset, and belief. Near the end, when McDonald's is already a huge success, he's getting ready to address a conference, standing in front of the mirror, still repeating the things he used to hear on those records.
Controlling what your mind thinks about is the name of the game. And as a leader, that is absolutely critical. That's my advice.
Brendon Dennewill: That's really good advice. I was just in Toronto for a two-day session with about 50 other entrepreneurs. Our coach asked a question I'd never been asked before, and I thought it was incredibly valuable. One of the reasons we were there was to reflect on past achievements and successes, because as entrepreneurs, we tend to always think about what we haven't done yet. We don't think enough about what we've already achieved, which is what gives us the confidence to keep going.
The question was: why do you love your company? It's such a powerful question because it's so foundationally human. As people went around the room sharing their answers, there were common threads, but also deeply personal ones. A lot of it came back to creating value, creating opportunities for people. It's something we need to remind ourselves of: why we're doing what we're doing and the potential value we can create if we do it the right way.
Rob Triggs: That's awesome. There are very few entrepreneurs who didn't start with some form of passion for something and then turned it into a business. It'd be interesting to see if their answers go back to that original passion.
Brendon Dennewill: Rob, thank you so much for joining me today. There are a lot of good insights here. We'll put a link to your website in the show notes, and I'm guessing everything around your CALM program would be there too. Is that a good place for people to find you?
Rob Triggs: Yes, perfect. Or LinkedIn. Look me up on LinkedIn.
Brendon Dennewill: Rob Triggs on LinkedIn. Rob, thanks again.
Rob Triggs: Thank you.