In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Luis Brito, a seasoned Chief Revenue Officer with roughly 30 years of experience across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America. Brito outlines his career trajectory—from early roles at Vodafone Portugal, through product and channel leadership in Japan, to a 15‑year tenure at PTC covering professional services, customer success, cloud operations, and global commercial leadership. He then discusses his recent CRO role at Alplan (MHA Group), where he managed a 240‑person go‑to‑market organization encompassing sales, customer success, revenue operations, SDRs, professional services, and technical support. Brito emphasizes the importance of "commercial architecture," a holistic alignment of strategy, go‑to‑market, people, processes, and data governance around the customer journey to deliver a seamless, consistent experience that drives growth. He argues that product differentiation is eroding due to rapid convergence and democratized AI‑driven information, making execution quality across the customer lifecycle the new competitive advantage. A key initiative at Alplan was the creation of a dedicated SDR team and the specialization of sales reps into acquisition and account‑growth roles. SDRs were tasked with scheduling roughly 50 meetings per week, freeing salespeople to focus on closing deals. Brito also shares top‑of‑funnel tactics that proved effective: face‑to‑face live events with pre‑arranged meetings, tailored messaging for specific audiences, and leveraging regional nuances (e.g., high importance of physical presence in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East). When asked about future opportunities, Britto states he seeks to help companies—particularly in software, telecom, industrial software, and the architecture‑engineering‑construction (AECO) sector—by applying his global, end‑to‑end commercial expertise to drive sustainable revenue engines. He invites connections via email or LinkedIn and is open to phone calls. Overall, the conversation provides practical insights into building integrated commercial systems, structuring SDR functions, and maximizing live‑event impact in modern B2B environments.
Chapters
Hello everybody, Michael Falato here again from Full Throttle, Full Auto Leads, and GTM Full Throttle. This is Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, and we got Luis Brito, who is a CRO and has been has a storied background of— what is— how many years is it, Luis?
Around 30.
30. Tell us kind of what grabbed your attention to want to come on the podcast today and a little bit about your journey to get to CRO.
Yeah, so thank you. Thank you for having me, Michael. So very, very happy to be here. Um, my, my journey started, you know, around 30 years ago. I'm from Portugal originally. And I've been leading companies across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America. Started a long time ago at Vodafone in Portugal, where I was involved in marketing in the beginning, then some channel leadership, then I became product manager, then I led a product management team. I ended up relocating to Japan with Vodafone. Then in Japan, I moved to PTC. Boston-based company where I live now. And I spent the next roughly 15 years at PTC working also across a number of customer-facing roles. So professional services, customer success, I led cloud business operations at PTC, commercial leadership around the world, really. So I spent around 10 years in Asia, so 5 in Japan, 5 in China, working across the regions of Taiwan, Korea, Then I moved to the Americas, first in Latin America, working in Brazil, running the Latin American business for— with PTC, a lot of emphasis on services and large PLM deployments, and then ended up in North America, in the US.
So tell us about a tip or tactic or strategy that you learned over the last year that is either AI-driven services, intelligence, BI, or just complete strategy and operations that you've learned that you're like, this is— this worked really well, or this did not work very well, so I want to kind of educate your audience?
Yeah, so I think it's not one single strategy for me. I think, you know, my perspective from working, you know, across all these different customer-facing functions lately at Alplan— I'll talk a little bit about that, which is my latest this experience as CRO. I think what really makes the difference is commercial architecture rather than one single strategy, right? I think the main change today, I mean, not just today, from the last 5 to 10 years that I've experienced is the concept of commercial architecture that essentially is the alignment of strategy, go-to-market, people, processes, data governance around the customer journey so that they work as one integrated commercial system, right? And that's really what drives growth, is seamless execution that delivers a common customer experience, a consistent, right, customer experience, so that customers essentially experience your company and not just one department in the company or different departments that have different experiences overall, right? And that's really the key thing. Why is this important?
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, why is this important, right? When you look at it, so products are converging faster than ever, right? So it's really hard to, you know, achieve product differentiation and sustain it, right? Even when you achieve it, somebody comes in, competitors, and they copy you, they do what you do, and sometimes they do it better. On the other hand, customers have unlimited access to information, right? So it's harder to buy. I mean, there's buying committees that are larger, there's more decisions to be made. And now with AI at the tip of the hand, you can have very, very fast access to knowledge. So it's essentially democratized. And so there's a lot more scrutiny over everything that gets purchased, right? So B2B, and I think that's something that most most people in the industry see is decisions are taking longer. People take longer to make decisions because they have all these committees vetting things and they have much more knowledge and it's harder to make decisions. So competitive advantage really is moving from products, you know, individual products, to the quality of execution across the customer lifecycle, right? So customers really experience the way they interact with the company, and some companies are really good at doing this.
I mean, you know, and what, what type of companies did you find that you're very comfortable in? Is it— are they large companies? And how big are the sales teams that you— in the revenue— in the revenue teams that you're managing or you have managed?
Well, when— maybe 2, 2 aspects to your, to your question, right? I think it doesn't have to be, um, large companies that deliver a good, uh, or, uh, you know, an excellent customer experience. There's all sizes of companies that do that when they focus on it. My specific experience at Alplan, for example, I'll take that where I was the CRO for the last 2 and a half years, and first with the MHA Group. I was managing a go-to-market team of around 240 people.
Wow.
And that included sales, customer success, revenue operations, account management, you know, SDRs, professional services, and technical support.
Were you finding that SDRs are going away and AI was kind of— or go-to-market strategists were kind of fitting the bill? Or did you feel like SDRs are still kind of a needed solution for companies?
We created SDRs at Alplan. Right? I think that answers your question. They didn't exist. So when I came in, the way the sales team was organized was around the kind of the multifaceted sales rep. So a sales rep would do everything, would acquire new customers, would qualify pipeline, would manage existing customers, right? Would do a lot of that. And we did 2 things, right? We created an SDR team to go to build pipeline, qualify pipeline, and take that away from sales so that we could focus on driving the deals forward and closing. And we also specialized the sales team and built and organized the team so that, you know, a portion of the team was focused on new customer acquisition and another one was focused on account management and account growth, right? Growing existing customers.
And how many meetings would you say that the SDRs were Scheduling per month per person?
Well, it really changed versus, you know, based on the different, you know, geos that we were working towards. But we were asking, you know, folks to go out and do around 50 meetings per week. That's what we were looking for.
Wow.
That's what we were They were reaching that? That's what we were trying to get to. And we had instances of people achieving that in places where they were still not there, but we were making good progress towards it.
Yeah. Okay. And so you've left Alplan and you're looking for your next venture, right?
Yes, I left Alplan and yeah, I took some time to rethink and looking for my next venture.
So tell us how, if somebody's watching this, like, how can they help you, right? I mean, the whole thing here is to, to talk about what you learn, what, what works, what doesn't. But also, you know, we, we might know someone that knows somebody that knows somebody that you would be a good fit for. So who, who could we introduce you to?
Look, I'm, I'm, I'm really looking to help companies, right? It's not so much about helping me, but how can I help others? And I think what I bring to the table is years of experience, you know, across the world, really having first-line experience in managing pretty much all the different customer-facing elements and functions in a company. And I think most importantly is experience in and lining them all together to drive growth, right, through this commercial alignment and building a revenue engine that really drives that consistently and sustainably across the world, right? That's what I do. That's what I, that's what I like to do. And whoever is interested in, you know, whatever company is interested in doing that and going through that transformation, that's what I would be interested in.
Is there a particular industry that you'd like to stay in?
I mean, I'm, I'm in software. Um, I'm, you know, lately, I mean, I've— my main experience, I worked in telco, I worked in industrial software, PTC, for many years, then, um, AECO, so architecture, engineering, construction, with Alplan. Um, I would like to keep, you know, either in these industries or adjacent, but I'm open to others, of course.
I mean, what have you found that— I mean, obviously I do the whole lead generation, top of funnel, GTM approach. What have you found in your last couple of companies? What type of messaging works or what type of strategies work? Like for me, I was using LinkedIn, email, roundtables, masterminds, podcasts, scraping other events, partnering up with people that have big LinkedIn presence and then teaming up with them and using their LinkedIn to kind of grow a joint venture roundtable. either at an event or on a Zoom. So have you found certain things that worked really well for you to kind of drive revenue, especially on the top of funnel?
I mean, we did a lot of that. All that's important. I would say, you know, things that you didn't say that we still found very powerful are, you know, face-to-face events.
Oh yeah.
You know, being in—
That was that whole thing of setting meetings before you go to an event.
That was—
yeah, I meant to mention that because that's important. Live events, but having people already set up to go meet with you.
Yes, that's really good.
People go to these events and they're like standing behind a booth. Hey, what do you do? Hey, what do you do? You got no clue what they do and you're standing behind a booth. That's not strategic, you know. So live events is kind of one of the Live events, you know, industry events, when—
where you show up with, you know, with a tailored message to that audience, right? And you really focus on the, you know, the value drivers and the business drivers of them, and you have people that can speak to the attendees and, you know, bring credibility. They are really, really good, especially for new customers, right? Because you're showcasing what you do in an environment where People are there to learn, right? They're interested, they want to know about it, and it's a place where you can show credibility and add a lot of value, and it starts the journey, right? It's, for some customers, is the way they interact with us. It's the way they first start to know us. This is also something that it's different from geo to geo. In Europe, it's tremendously important. I think in Asia, Middle East, also tremendously important showing up And being there, having that physical presence is really, really— it made a difference for us.
And what's the best way to reach you? We have your email on this, on your name here, on your tile, your video tile. Is there any other ways that people should reach out to you and either network with you or talk about opportunities?
Email and LinkedIn, right? I think those are the easiest ones. I can always take a phone call as well. My contacts are on LinkedIn, and that's the, that's the easiest way. Cool.
Well, I appreciate you being on the show today. And I look forward to having you on some of my roundtables. Hopefully you're joining one today.
Thank you. Thank you for being here. And I'll certainly join. Yeah.
