Don't miss the quick guides: "Discovery and demo talk tracks" and "30-60-90 day sales manager onboarding plan"
Amanda Zhu is a force to be reckoned with. As co-founder and COO of Recall.ai she personally closed more than $7M in enterprise deals while building the sales organization that drove 4x year-over-year growth.
Her story is a reminder that the COO role done right isn’t a template—rather, it’s a response to a company’s evolving needs. In the beginning, some companies need to scale customer operations. Others need to build a sales machine. Recall.ai needed someone to own go-to-market end-to-end, and Amanda took the helm. In doing so, she not only helped bring in some of the company’s foundational customers but also built a consistent enterprise inbound motion and team that ultimately supported a $250M valuation.
Recall.ai is the API for meeting recording. The API captures recordings, transcripts and metadata from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, in-person meetings, phone calls, and more. Recall.ai offers a Meeting Bot API to send meeting bots to calls and a Desktop Recording SDK to build a desktop app that can record meetings.
Many founders act as the company’s first sales rep. But the real challenge is what comes next: systematizing that intuition, scaling hard-won insights, and building an organization that can execute the GTM motion without the founder in the room. Amanda’s experience demonstrates how AI-native founders can close seven-figure deals through rigorous discovery, strategic personalization, and disciplined execution—and then successfully systematize their learnings into a playbook that can be handed off to an independently led sales team. Here, we collected nine of Amanda’s best strategies for AI business to achieve success throughout the sales cycle and the journey of scaling a sales organization.
Founders are often told that when it comes to sales, there is no real playbook. “It’s true, there’s no script, formula, or guaranteed sequencing for enterprise deals,” writes Amanda. “But there is a scaffold.”
While every deal eventually hits the same checkpoints—from discovery call to demo to final sign-off—the moments of real importance are harder to define. “It’s what you do when you’re stuck between checkpoints,” Amanda says.
Below is a list of tactics she’s used to move deals forward:
While none of these moves look like “selling” and may not follow a prescribed sequence, these tactics all nurture relationships and cultivate trust within the process. Amanda emphasizes the importance of lateral thinking to problem solve is what’s necessary to get past thorny sales obstacles.
In the early days of founder-led sales, Amanda tried to compress discovery and demo into a single 30-minute call, jumping straight into feature walkthroughs before knowing whether a prospect was even a fit. Needless to say, this approach didn’t work.
“I didn’t start with great talk tracks,” admits Amanda. “I started by doing everything wrong.”
After hundreds of calls, Amanda noticed that prospects didn’t need a slicker talk track or a more seamless demo. What they actually needed was structure so they wouldn’t get lost in the call and a powerful narrative arc that situated use cases in real-life workflows.
Amanda has now crystallized her approach into four main things prospects need from her:
1. A clear sequence so the conversation doesn’t jump around
2. Incisive questions that get to the heart of the prospect's problem
3. A moment of honest qualification where you openly tell the prospect if they are a fit or not
4. A compelling narrative, not just a simple product tour
Amanda kept refining her talk tracks around those principles until they became codified.
“If you’re doing founder-led sales, use the structure until it becomes instinct,” says Amanda.
Sometimes in sales, it’s unclear why you’ve hit a roadblock. For Amanda, these moments are often a clear signal it’s worth hopping on a plane. Though she never point-blank asks prospects if she can fly out to meet them.
Instead, she says something like: “I’m going to be in Atlanta on Friday from 2–7pm. Could we connect for dinner?” Amands likes this approach because the clarity of the ask signals effort without desperation, while the tight time window reduces back-and-forth and makes it easier for a busy executive to agree.
Once she’s in a prospect’s city, Amanda focuses on uncovering hidden information, not pitching. In one stalled deal, she learned that a decision-maker was quietly leaning toward an internal solution—something that never surfaced on Zoom. Meeting in person created the space for candor, which let Amanda respond by walking the exec through the edge cases, ceilings, and tradeoffs the team would have to deal with. “By meeting the exec on their turf, you have their full attention and don’t have to simultaneously perform in front of their team,” she writes.
Amanda is also deliberate about where these conversations happen, depending on her desired outcome. She finds that offices are ideal for aligning multiple stakeholders, while meeting outside of a company’s HQ is best for eliciting honesty. As Amanda puts it, “The room shapes what people feel safe saying.”
In-person visits have been an incredibly effective way for Amanda to unblock deals, but she has one important caveat: “Flying out isn’t about pushing the deal forward,” says Amanda. “It’s about finding out what’s actually blocking it.”
Last year, Amanda spent $25K on a dinner that brought in $4M in revenue. This was no accident—every single element of the evening was meticulously designed to generate quality conversations that would spur deals forward.
At large conferences, where dozens of sponsored dinners happen every night, the promise of delicious food alone isn’t enough to get the right people in the room. So Amanda booked notable speakers two months in advance, and intentionally name-dropped them in the invites. She was aiming to entice 40 attendees, but was pleasantly surprised with overwhelming demand—pushing the capacity to 90 attendees.
At the dinner, Amanda didn’t leave conversations to chance. A sales rep was assigned to every table with a single goal: get customers and prospects sitting together. That way, prospects heard answers directly from happy customers—not the sales team—and could see firsthand how much customers trusted the team and product.
Even the follow-up was designed with intention. Instead of a generic follow-up email, reps introduced prospects directly to customers in the email, referencing specific conversation topics from their chats at dinner. Reps still requested meetings, but the follow-up led with value instead of a pitch.
In Amanda’s words, “If you want meetings after a dinner, design the dinner for the follow-up.”
When a deal stalls in the middle, Amanda doesn’t push harder. Instead, she rewinds the deal to the last checkpoint where everyone was aligned. “In enterprise sales, a ‘no’ isn’t necessarily a rejection,” she says. “It’s often a signal you’re missing context.” In her experience, being given a ‘no’ usually boils down to one of three factors that can each be systematically addressed:
1. Technical objection
For example, “We need X, and you don’t have it.”
Amanda finds that this is almost never about the feature. Instead, she focuses on the question behind the question, and asks, “What is the reason you need X?” By understanding the true underlying constraint, it’s often possible to offer a better solution to solve the actual problem.
2. Financial objection
For example, “How much should something cost?”
It’s common for early stage startups to experience prospects pushing back on pricing. When exploring willingness-to-pay, it's recommended that founders ask thoughtful questions, such as what the prospect is using to anchor the comparison and where the budget is actually coming from. Perhaps most importantly, pricing can be an entry point to discuss the cost of doing nothing—which is often much higher than prospects realize. If the champion can’t answer these questions, there’s a clear discovery gap to address.
3. Risk objection
For example, “It doesn’t meet our security requirements.”
When hit with this type of objection, Amanda has had consistent success getting everyone who’s concerned on a live call. Live conversations surface missing context, incorrect assumptions, and what actually needs to change. “Vague risk objections don’t survive real-time discussion,” she says.
As Recall.ai has grown, Amanda knew it was time to delegate the sales function to a dedicated leader. At the executive level, nearly every resume was tightly polished, and most candidates could pull off an excellent interview, so Amanda needed an alternative way to suss out the right VP of Sales for the team.
Amanda cut to the chase in interviews, asking candidates to dissect and analyze their misses more than highlight their wins.
“I cared less about whether targets were hit and more curious about why they thought they missed their targets,” she explains. “Did they blame the product, the market, or other people? Or did they truly understand what broke and own their role in it?” Amanda was looking for three qualities she couldn’t do without— intellectual honesty, critical thinking, and a growth mindset.
She also relied heavily on backchannel references, specifically from a candidate’s direct reports. She would ask them about where the candidate needed to improve and how they would react when things didn’t go according to plan. One very revealing question she always asked: “Tell me about a time you disagreed with them.”
Amanda would also assess whether or not the candidate could still be an effective seller themselves, versus just waxing poetic about sales. She’d use take-home assignments to clearly evaluate their sales capabilities. She had candidates sell to her and put together a sales plan as part of the hiring process. Finally, Amanda would weigh personality and a gut sense of trust heavily in her decision.
When Justin Bullock joined as VP of Sales, Amanda’s goal wasn’t for him to ‘run sales.’ “The goal was to make sure deals didn’t slow down because every hard call still flowed through me,” she says.
For the first 60 days, Amanda made sure Justin got maximum exposure to the reasoning behind her decision-making. She had him shadow every sales call, daily standup, pipeline review, and deal debate. She even had Justin selling like an AE to understand the team’s thinking and non-negotiables. “Because that context matters once deals get complex,” says Amanda.
Around the 90-day mark, she started shifting ownership off her plate. Justin took over 1:1s with reps, including coaching and feedback, deal judgment, and recruiting workflows. He also handled billing and collections conversations, materials for board meetings, and investor updates on sales. “A lot of that work doesn’t look like ‘sales,’” says Amanda. “But it’s the work that keeps seven-figure deals moving without the founder in every loop.”
Through this rigorous onboarding process, Amanda could hand off her responsibilities to Justin—freeing her up to tackle the next priority areas as COO. “The moment I consider an exec fully onboarded is when I trust their decisions when I’m not in the room,” she says. “And that trust only comes from shared context.”
“Opening self-serve was one of the scariest decisions I’ve made as a co-founder,” recalls Amanda. “Our MRR stalled for a month after launching.” Before self-serve, every prospect had to speak with the team. These conversations provided crystal clear visibility into why people were buying and how they planned to use the product. If MRR slowed, Amanda usually knew why within a day.
But when the team opened self-serve, people could sign up, build, and use the product without ever talking to the team. Usage took off immediately, but for a month, MRR went flat. Amanda and her team had traded immediate visibility for scale.
Amanda was deeply relieved when, with time, the system caught up. Self-serve customers started raising their hands to talk to the team—not for initial discovery, but to get more out of the product. At the same time, larger companies started reaching out after they’d already seen the product work.
This led to more conversations—“just later, at higher volume, and with bigger customers,” says Amanda. This was when growth really accelerated, and her initial risk paid off beautifully. Since opening self-serve, the team’s MRR has grown 5x.
The year 2025 was an eventful one for the Recall.ai team. They tripled their revenue, raised a Series B, expanded beyond the meeting bots with the launch of a new product, and launched self-serve. And yet, from the inside, the year was full of change and growing pains. “This was a rewiring year,” reflects Amanda.
A combination of three inflection points in three major areas of the business was hit at once: the product, the GTM motion, and the sales motion. A new product meant major adjustments to how the team pitched the product, allocated engineering time, and elevator-pitched the company. The self-serve motion forced the team to rebuild the funnel. Established work on everything from pricing to onboarding to support had to be rethought.
And as the team attracted upmarket customers, the sales motion had to be drastically altered. Typical deals went from single to multi-stakeholder deals. Simple technical validation became multi-threaded reviews, and one product fit became cross-product conversations. Amanda’s team had to learn a new type of selling.
Amanda learned firsthand that every new product, every new customer segment, and every new GTM motion changes the operating model. While the team is much stronger for it, Amanda feels it’s worth acknowledging the importance of upheaval.
“It’s a good reminder that companies don’t grow in straight lines,” says Amanda.
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