Episode 19 of Inside The Pipeline is live now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. This one's with Laura Bartkiewicz, Senior Sales Manager at Ironclad, the contract lifecycle management platform that just passed $200 million in ARR and beat out eight other CLM tools to win Salesforce as a customer and partner.
CEO Dan Springer ran DocuSign before this. Since taking over Ironclad he's brought on ex-Google CTO Sunita Verma and CPO Herman Man and the team ships new AI agents every quarter.
Laura's own path here wasn't planned out. She graduated in Boston right as the housing market collapsed, took a job in recruitment because it was the one that would have her, then used LinkedIn to land a visa sponsor and move to Sydney. Once there she joined LinkedIn's own sales team in 2014, two years before Microsoft bought the company, running outbound the old way: Outlook mail merges, Salesforce, cold calls. London came next with Beamery, then her first management role at Deputy, then Figma, where she was one of the first 20 hires in London and built the mid market team under Pierre Berlin. Ironclad is where all of that led.
What we talked about
On hiring, she's specific. Self-awareness, ambition, drive, resilience, optimism, and enough emotional intelligence to read a room on a video call. Her management style is the same: direct, blunt, friendly, with real accountability behind it. No guessing where you stand.
The line she keeps coming back to is chess, not checkers. Most reps play one move at a time and react to whatever's in front of them. Laura trains hers to think several moves out and keep the client anchored to where the deal's actually going, not just the next call. She's also clear that selling B2B SaaS isn't a one person job. Solutions engineers, architects, executives all touch the deal, and treating it otherwise is how deals stall.
On the product side, Ironclad sits inside Salesforce itself, so reps redline contracts without ever leaving the CRM. That alone is why cycle times drop by more than half for customers. On AI, Laura's take is more grounded than most of what gets posted about it. She doesn't think it replaces the relationship work that actually closes deals. What it does is speed up everything sitting around that work: drafting follow-ups, tightening agendas, flagging where a deal's gone quiet using tools like Gong.
Key takeaways
Laura Bartkiewicz is Senior Sales Manager at Ironclad, the CLM platform that passed $200 million ARR in February 2026
Career path: LinkedIn (Sydney, 2014) to Beamery to Deputy to Figma to Ironclad
Hires for self-awareness, ambition, drive, resilience, optimism and emotional intelligence
Sells like chess, not checkers: plan several moves ahead instead of reacting deal by deal
Sees AI as a speed layer for follow-ups and deal risk, not a replacement for relationships
Episode 19 of Inside The Pipeline, released Wednesday the 2nd of September 2026
Why you should listen
She's lived the advice she gives. A sabbatical after losing her father. Commissions invested every quarter into the tech she actually uses. And the line that sums up how she thinks about persistence: twenty nos will get you a yes.
If you're stepping into sales management for the first time, hiring your first reps, or selling B2B SaaS into Salesforce shops, this is a working playbook. Not theory.
Where to listen
Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube, links below. Got thoughts? Drop a comment, we read them all.
