In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, host Michael Falato interviews sales veteran and GTM consultant Jason Blais. Blais recounts his career, beginning with a part‑time credit‑card sales role at MBNA in the early 1990s, where rigorous training in discovery, objection handling, and value‑based selling laid his foundation. After a stint in youth counseling, he returned to sales, climbing through startups that were acquired and eventually leading a $100 M+ revenue organization as CRO. Drawing on that experience, Blais now runs Active GTM, a consulting practice that helps growth‑stage, VC‑ or PE‑backed companies build repeatable go‑to‑market operating systems. He emphasizes the importance of systematic sales methodologies—SPIN Selling, Challenger Sale, Dale Carnegie, and Sandler—arguing that execution, not the specific framework, drives results. Blais shares recent experiments with AI tools (Highspot, Salesloft, Gong, custom GPTs) and notes the limited lift they delivered, prompting him to study agentic AI through Harvard’s Data Science program. He positions himself as a guide for companies struggling to extract value from AI and to achieve forecast‑accurate, scalable sales processes. The episode concludes with Blais describing his ideal client profile (Series A companies scaling from 3‑10 sellers) and providing contact details (activegtm.com, LinkedIn, jason@activegtm.com).
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All right, everybody. Michael Filato here again from Full Throttle Filato, and my show is called Full Throttle Leaders Company up there. GTM Full Throttle, and we have Jason Blaze from Active GTM as our special guest today, who I've actually run into. over the last, I don't know, like 20 years in the same space of HR. So welcome, Jason. How you doing?
I'm doing great. Having a good start to the day today. How's your day starting, Michael?
Good, good. Tell me about your journey to start your own shingle here.
Yeah, um, you know, I, I recently kind of hung out my shingle here to kind of start my own business in the advising and consulting world and, uh, spun up some software, you know, in the whole new world that we live in with vibe coding. But yeah, I think it's really been a lifelong journey, honestly. I mean, I got my first sales job at 19 in college, part-time job. I like to say the mid to early '90s, but I think the kids call it the late 1900s now. And my first job ever was selling credit cards, telemarketing, and for a company called MBNA that was later acquired by Bank of America for over $35 billion in the late '90s. I mean, it was a big acquisition.
It was a billion dollars in the '90s.
Billion. Over $30 billion.
In the '90s. Well, that's, that's like a lot.
It was massive.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a massive acquisition. They were the largest credit card provider for affiliate market credit cards. So, hey, I'm calling on behalf of the USC Alumni Association regarding the USC Alumni Association credit card. 2% of all your purchases go back to the Alumni Association. Do you want to support your alumni association?
So what, what, what 2 companies bought each other?
Bank of America bought MBNA.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
And so, yeah, so that was my very first job. It was after, after classes, uh, in the University of Southern Maine up in Maine, and it was fantastic. I gotta be honest with you, the amount of training and preparation and enablement, um, you know, understanding value and benefits, under uncovering needs, you know, connecting pain to value controlling conversations, overcoming objections. And we were scored every couple weeks from enablement team. If you didn't overcome 3 objections on a call, then you weren't trying hard enough. And, you know, those objections back then were like, I'm in the middle of dinner right now. And you had to kind of learn to sell through it. But I think they did a great job of training and development and teaching people how to understand, you know, I'm not just selling you a credit card. Do you travel? You know, do you ever rent a car? Do you need rental insurance? Do you need travel insurance? You know, all the different benefits and learning how to, you know, run discovery and needs analysis and then leaning in on that need development and creating pain and then getting them over the hump to, you know, build confidence in taking the credit card. And it was really just a great first job and I found out I was really good at it. Out of 300 sellers, I was top 15. I was really well recognized. I was selling at one point, I hate to say this out loud, but you know, 22%, 23% loans to people with 16% credit card debt, uh, and convincing them it was a better way to go. Uh, I felt terrible about my career. I was like, man, sales is a 4-letter word. I can't, can't do this. Um, got out of sales for a couple years, went to youth services. I was a youth counselor and an ed tech, and I was like, I'm gonna make the world a better place. Uh, and, you know, dealt with, you know, a crisis unit. I dealt with kids, teenagers who have been taken out of their homes due to, you know, incarceration of their parents or other situations. It was great work, um, learned to handle very chaotic situations, but ultimately, you know, you don't, you don't get to make a lot of money in that world. And I wanted to have a family and raise my kids, and, and I realized I was good at sales. So I got back into sales and, um, had a great journey along the way. And, you know, I got really lucky. I worked for some amazing startups, uh, that got acquired early in my career, went through the acquisition process So what are you doing now?
What are you doing? Yeah, what's—
so all of that led me to like this place of, you know, 25 years of building a career, um, and having seen startups, having worked for global companies, uh, having worked for $100 million CRO at a $100 million plus revenue company. And I really decided, you know, I love working on the work, I love the change, I love working on installation of the systems. So, um, decided to get into the advising and consulting world. Um, actually had a conversation with some fractional work the other day But really trying to help people build their go-to-market operating system. I think my first sales mentor had a degree in mechanical engineering, and that was the first time I learned about thinking about sales as a system.
And what system did you like as a sales process?
Yeah, I've gone through all of them. You know, I would— my first one, that first one was SPIN Selling. He trained all of us. We had to go through training on SPIN Selling in that first situation. I've later pushed out the Challenger Sale to my teams. I think that was a great way of like building authority and value in the relationship, I think is important. I've done Dale Carnegie sales training. I've done Sandler. I think what I've really learned is they all work if you execute them. They work if you execute them. And that's really where I built my career is building systems that people actually execute and they actually follow the process. And they actually, then you can identify where the gaps are, where there's friction or leakage in your funnel. And so I think I'm still a SPIN guy. I think everything's based on SPIN at the end of the day. What's your situation? What's your problem? What's your, the implication of that and what's the needs payoff, right? Like, what are you doing? How do we get better? What's the implication of not changing and what's the payoff if we actually fix this? And I think that's the core of everything we do. I think that starts at the top of the marketing funnel and goes all the way down, right? How you communicate, how you message, identifying people who are looking for the solutions that you have.
So what strategy or tactic in the last 6 months have you found like, well, that's a great idea, or that was a bad idea, but I learned from it?
Yeah, I think, you know, when I left my last organization, you know, we were a pretty well-scaled organization, 20-plus years, you know, 9 figures. in revenue. And I think we were doing the AI thing, AI everywhere. We were using AI in our tech stack, in Highspot and Salesloft and in Gong. You know, we had all the AI everywhere and we really weren't seeing a ton of change. We weren't seeing a lot of like lift from all this AI.
Mm-hmm.
And we built our own GPTs to help do pre-call prep. We built like, you just put in a name and a title and a company name, it would do all the right research, spit out a brief. that told you all the things you needed to know prior to a call. But we struggled with getting lift out of it. And I think that's really what led me to most recently going through the Harvard Data Science program for agentic AI, which I highly recommend to anybody. But I think people are investing everywhere in AI. I think that's where I've had my greatest learnings recently is like everyone's using AI and we're not getting value. And there's really important reasons why we're not. And I want to help people get value out of it. There's been so many new tools. You've been doing this a long time. There's new tools. Good people always take advantage of them. They always figure out how to exploit them, leverage them, and make them better. But the companies, the systems don't always get better. And I think that's where I'm trying to drive value.
What's your ideal customer profile that you want to work with at your company?
I think my favorite companies to work with are, you know, that growth stage. You know, they've identified some level of product-market fit. They've made that first jump out of founder-driven sales and built their very first sales team. They hired a couple of A-players, top guns to come in, and now they're trying to— they got that Series A and they're going from 3 to 5 sellers to 10. And now they need a process to make sure that there's enough leads for 10 people, that there's enough flow-through for those 10 people, that there's enough consistency and throughput and reliability. And I think you know, these PE or VC-backed companies, forecast accuracy matters a lot. And I think it matters more than a lot of people realize. And when you have broken systems, it's really hard to forecast. And I think you can fix that early by putting those systems in place that get more predictability out of the system. So I think that's really where I enjoy the work the most.
What is a great way to get a hold of you as we close this out?
Yeah, I mean, obviously you can go to my website, activegtm.com. I'm on LinkedIn as well. You know, I think that's the best way to reach out to me there, jason@activegtm.com.
