In this episode of Full Throttle Leaders, host Michael Falato interviews Jared Wexler, Manager of Sales Strategy at Common Room. Jared explains Common Room’s role as a modern go‑to‑market (GTM) platform that captures and enriches sales signals, acting as a second source of truth alongside CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot via bilateral syncs, a Chrome extension, and its own UI. He describes the company’s current headcount (about 100 employees), sales organization (10‑15 SDRs, ~20 AEs, 5 solutions staff), and growth plans focused on AI‑driven “GTM command center” capabilities that aim to boost rep productivity without requiring dedicated prompt‑engineering teams. Jared outlines the competitive landscape, positioning Common Room between traditional enrichment providers (e.g., ZoomInfo), ABM platforms, and point‑signal solutions, and notes migrations from tools like Clay. The pricing model is annual recurring revenue with a contact‑centric approach that avoids double‑charging for the same person across tools. He emphasizes a consultative selling methodology, training reps to provide strategic POVs and AI‑enabled recommendations rather than just demoing a product. Jared shares his personal background—from being the first SDR at Chili Piper to solutions consulting at Tapcart—and how he now leads solutions and sales strategy at Common Room. Finally, he provides contact information (LinkedIn, email) and notes the target personas (sales, marketing, RevOps) for outreach.
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All right everybody, another episode of Full Throttle Leaders. We have Jared Wexler from, from Common Room. He's the manager of sales strategy. Jared, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, excited to be here.
Tell me a little bit about Common Room and what you do there.
So I like to think of Common Room almost as the new age of GTM. You think of classic outbound, people are opening different tabs, they're going to Salesforce, they're trying to teach an SDR how to read it. Common Room can help capture all that signal, enrich it, and become a shared starting point for SDRs, for sales leaders, ops, you name it. It's really just a more intelligent way to think about going to market where you're not just, uh, shooting fish in the ocean like we all used to in the old days.
Yeah. It's a, it's a, what do you call it, a direct route to going after really account-based marketing, ABM, right?
Exactly. Account-based marketing, account-based selling. How do you actually codify and standardize what your top reps do by instinct? So when you have a new rep starting next week, you're trying to decrease the delta from the top rep and the rest. Common Room becomes that place where you can just be a little bit more targeted and intentional with who they reach out to.
So is this something that is like a widget inside of Salesforce or pulls from Salesforce or, or HubSpot, or tell us how it works with a CRM.
So we pull from both. So we do have a bilateral sync with both Salesforce and HubSpot. We have a Chrome extension, so you can access it from within both platforms. And on top of that, um, we do have our own UI. We also just came out with an MCP server as well. So a lot of how we're thinking about Common Room is meeting reps where they are. But also becoming that solidified, I'll call it a second source of truth because the CRM is always a source of truth, but the second source of truth where they can work their days without having to tab switch as much as they're all used to in current state.
And tell us a little bit about your background.
Absolutely. So I got my start in SaaS roughly, geez, almost 8 years ago now at Chili Piper. I joined right up right after college. I was SDR number 1. Employed 10 or so. I was there for just around 3 years with a little boomerang in between. Got to experience the journey from bootstrap to Series B. After that, I did a 2-year detour, I'll call it, in the e-commerce space where I was a manager of solutions consulting at a company called Tapcart. We were in the Shopify ecosystem, built on top of Shopify, invested in my Shopify. So that was a fun journey of learning how to co-sell with a true enterprise. And then I've been at Commonerm for the last year and a half, ranging from a founding solutions role to my current role where I'm managing the solutions team and then helping out a bit with our sales strategy and how we execute in deals. So a lot of my career, the last, I call it 6, 7 years or so, has been in solutions world, but I've been almost a Swiss Army knife of toying around with anything from product to enablement and pretty much just making myself as valuable within every company. As I can.
And tell me about your team at— how big is your team? How many people are in sales or SDRs? Um, you know, what's the goal for the company in the next 3 to 5 years?
Absolutely. So right now we have an SDR team, I'd say in the low tens, so like, uh, 10 to 15. We're growing that team. Account Executives, we have around 20. My Solutions team, we have 5 in seat, and we're growing that team a little bit as well. So we're in a pretty exciting state as we continue to grow. As I think about Common Room in the next 3 to 5 years, we are investing more and more in what we call AI that just works. If you think about AI in the market, it's a buzzword. Everyone's trying to incorporate it. We are taking the ethos of how do we create and deploy AI that creates leverage? How do you get 3x output of one rep versus dependency? There's a lot of powerful tools in the market, but with dependency, you're having to hire a team of people that are prompt engineers. You're having to hire agencies to manage that full-time. So our ethos and what we want to do is have AI that just works. So right now we're really leaning heavily into becoming, I'll call it that GTM command center that reps and teams are living out of. We'll start to shift our focus more and more into ripping and replacing some more parts of the tech stack. If you will, but it's something where we have been working with quite a few go-to-market teams across sales-led, product-led, and commercial open-source motions and really helping them start to modernize the way that they're going to market.
And so you're basically like a little bit under 200 right now employees?
We're around 100, just, just above, uh, 100 employees or so. Company's been around 4 years, but the pivot to go-to-market has been, uh, just around 2 years. So we're quite— it's— there's been quite a bit of traction since transitioning from the original use case of community over to go-to-market.
And then tell us a little bit about who you guys compete with that you see.
It's really interesting. I almost see Commonroom like a Venn diagram. So if we're in the middle here, you have your enrichment providers, a lot of the legacy players, ZoomInfo being obviously the incumbent at a lot of companies. We're seeing a lot of companies starting to replace or significantly decrease their spend in ZoomInfo. In the other bucket, you have the ABM platforms. A lot of times we're starting to displace them, particularly the sales use case of the ABM platforms. And then you have your point signal solutions, things like JobChangers, companies that just do website visits, AI SDRs. And then I'd say we're an indirect competitor of Clay. There's companies that are migrating from Clay to Commonroom. There's some companies that use both of us in tandem. I think the way to think about Commonroom is a way to consolidate a lot of legacy incumbents that we all see within our tech stacks, as well as one of the category creators of the new way companies are going to market.
And how do you charge for your company? What's your, what's your ideal customer and is it a monthly seat Is it a monthly retainer, SaaS approach? I mean, what, how do you charge?
Great question. So annual recurring revenue is the name of the game. So we do annuals. That said, I'd say our sweet spot are companies, I'd say that are starting, are not necessarily just starting to go outbound, but I'd say once companies are starting to invest more heavily in either a hybrid sales motion or sales-led motion, that's our sweet spot. We do serve a wide variety of verticals. B2B SaaS, of course, tends to be the sweet spot of a lot of GTM tooling. And I'd say any company that has more than a handful of sellers is where we can really start to provide some value. And then something unique about Commonroom's model is that we, we like to talk about it like we treat a contact as a person. So what I mean by that is if you have Jared at Chili Pepper, if you have Jared at Commonroom, a lot of tools, that's two different contacts, they're charging you twice, and there's no way to know I'm the same person. Commonroom has that under one contact. We're capturing signal and enriching it in perpetuity all at one contact. So every quarter you're not spending another credit, every year you're not having to refresh it. So it's just a different philosophical approach where we do have enrichment in our tool. It's quite powerful, but we see enrichment as a way to drive value, not a way for us to extrapolate more and more dollars from our customer base.
And what's something that either really worked well in the last 6 to 12 months that you're like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I wanna pass this knowledge along, or something where you're like, I tried this strategy or tech and it bombed and I just wanna tell people, yeah, probably maybe skip that.
Absolutely. So I think in the new age of AI, the way that I talk about tools, especially GTM tooling, it's been very cyclical over time. You think about one tool that does it all, then there's a disruptor, then there's one tool that does it all again, then there's a disruptor. And AI has kind of thrown that out the window. We're now in a world where companies and teams and software is innovating at an incredible pace. And the thing with AI, it's very malleable. A lot of tools we used to sell were very point solution by nature. I think about my days at Chili Piper, it's scheduling and routing. Or scheduling behind a form. And it was a lot more straightforward of a conversation where if you think about deployment of AI or deployment of tools that do have more of a complex nature behind them, you need to be more consultative. So something that we learned and a way that we differentiate in the way we go to market is actually coming in with a POV and being able to consult our customers and our prospects how we think they should use Commonroom. And we've seen that deem quite successful results. And I think that's what differentiates you from being a tool where, oh, this sounds cool, I have no idea how I'm gonna use it, to I need this yesterday and I'm gonna make the case today. And I think that's where we see the, I'll call it like a new age of the consultative seller and a different trend with solutions. 'Cause old solutions, a lot of times they're just giving canned demos. In the new world, you need to be able to ask great questions. You need to be able to, Bob and weave, dip and dive, if you will. And I think that's where what I've learned is you can't put it on customers to connect the dots when you're a category creator. And this category being AI and GTM, they're looking at us as the vendor to make recommendations, to be the thought leader, to be the expert. And I think the two things that I'm trying to train my team, and I've always believed myself, one is if you go to a networking event, and you don't have a name tag, you should be able to talk shop to the extent they think you're one of them. And B, if you were to be asked to advise and you couldn't sell your own tool, you should still be able to provide value by being able to talk shop and advise around your tool in that nature. So I think by ingraining that consultative idea of selling into our sellers and our solutions team, we've really been transforming the way that we're going to market.
How do people get ahold of you? Like who's the best person to get ahold of you? Like what persona and how do your email, your LinkedIn or your phone number?
Absolutely. So I'd say from a company perspective, we tend to sell primarily like sales, marketing, RevOps, like you name it, like across the whole go-to-market motion. We— our website tends to be a quite great way to request a demo and all that fun stuff. But myself personally, huge LinkedIn user, I try to answer my LinkedIn inbox as much as seemingly possible. My email is jared@commonroom.io as well, and always happy to talk shop not only about Common Room but this new, new world and new age we are in GTM.
Well, thanks for coming today. Appreciate you and look forward to hopefully coming to one of the roundtables. Um, once again, my name is Michael Falato. I'm the basic CEO of Full Throttle Falato Leads. And the reason why we do this is basically to get deeper, you know, with, with a leader. The roundtables are more about passing ideas back and forth. And basically, if you guys want, um, roundtables, masterminds, uh, LinkedIn automation, email automation, please feel free to reach out to me. Michael at fullthrottlepilatoleads.com. Have a great day, everybody.
