How B2B Sales Actually Works and What Breaks When You Try to Scale It

Charles Talbot is Founding Partner at Closing Foundry, where he helps founder-led B2B software teams move from founder-led sales to a repeatable sales motion, and sales leaders professionalise their approach through strategic sales enablement. His work focuses on underlying sales infrastructure; stage exits, qualification, deal control, guided selling and the weekly operating cadence behind pipeline quality and forecast accuracy. Charles has built GTM programmes, AI & CRM-based playbooks and sales & buyer enablement systems for early-stage and scaling teams, and has worked across CX//CCAS/Martech/Fintech/AI-tech/Compliance/Adtech in the UK, EMEA and US. He is particularly focused on helping founders and early commercial teams turn messy sales activity into a system the team can actually run. At Climb, Charles is most relevant for sessions on AI’s use in sales, founder-led sales, repeatable revenue, first hires, enterprise deals, sales process design and practical ways to improve pipeline quality, cycle time and forecast confidence.

Douglas Mancini is an enterprise GTM turnaround operator who helps leaders rebuild teams, tighten pipeline-to-forecast rigour and win must-win deals across the UKI and EMEA. His experience spans large-enterprise sales leadership, start-up go-to-market design and key-account growth across software, cloud and infrastructure. Douglas is one of the few global elite sellers to have closed several 9 figure deals, has rebuilt enterprise sales teams and installed operating rhythm from pipe-gen to forecasting, delivering results including 85% forecast accuracy, major lifts in pipeline generation and close rates. He has also designed go-to-market functions for start-ups, scale-up and enterprise helping build sales, marketing and partnerships to secure first significant revenues. At Climb, Douglas is well suited to sessions on building a repeatable sales engine, enterprise selling, account planning, forecast discipline, sales leadership and how growing teams can move from reactive selling to a more structured commercial system.