Jack Bartlett

The Journey

Jack joined Listen Labs as the founding sales hire when the company had five people and roughly ten customers. Nine months later the team had grown past 40, the customer base had crossed 100, and revenue had moved from six figures to eight. The kind of compressed timeline that forces you to figure things out quickly or get left behind.

A lot of that momentum came from the product itself. Listen Labs helps companies run customer research at speed, and with names like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and P&G already on board, the value proposition carried real weight. Jack's focus was on building a repeatable go-to-market motion that could keep pace with the product's traction.

The Exact Tools

Nooks powers the outbound engine. The parallel dialer lets a single rep cover five times the volume of a traditional setup, with AI handling voicemails and dead air. It turned outbound calling into something the team could genuinely optimise around rather than just grind through.

Rox provides pipeline visibility without needing a dedicated RevOps function to build and maintain dashboards. It connects to the data warehouse and surfaces where deals are getting stuck. At the pace Listen Labs was growing, waiting even a week to spot a bottleneck could mean losing the deal entirely.

Granola transformed how Jack handles follow-ups. Back-to-back calls used to mean choosing between poor notes and not being fully present. Granola transcribes and structures every conversation automatically, making it easy to pull exact quotes from a discussion and weave them into the next touchpoint. The result is follow-up that feels considered rather than generic.

What Channels Work For Them

The foundation is AE-led conversations where the person having the initial discussion is the same one who'll work with the customer throughout. There's no handoff, no lost context. It means the first conversation is already substantive because the rep understands what a good fit looks like.

The second layer is investing in community. Jack and the team host small, curated dinners that bring together the people who are genuinely thinking about the same problems Listen Labs solves. Two or three decision-makers around a table, good food, and an honest conversation about what they're dealing with. No pitch deck, no product demo.

Those evenings build relationships in a way that digital touchpoints can't replicate. They create a space where people can be candid about their challenges, and the trust that comes from that tends to carry forward long after the dinner is over. The two approaches complement each other well: direct conversations identify where there's genuine interest, and the community events deepen the relationship.

What To Look For in the Age of AI

When Jack evaluates candidates, three things stand out: work ethic, initiative, and speed of learning.

The people who thrive at Listen Labs tend to be the ones who solve problems before anyone flags them, and who can pick up a new tool or enter a new market vertical and be productive within days. AI amplifies that kind of person enormously. A driven rep with the right tooling can now handle the research, outreach and follow-up that used to require a small team.

What AI can't replicate is the judgement to know when a conversation matters, or the willingness to put in extra preparation because a relationship is worth investing in. Jack consistently favours relentless energy and a steep learning curve over a polished CV.