MarTech Interview with Bill Dwoinen, Chief Revenue Officer, Mural

Refining the sales process through strategic grit and integrated GTM workflows to accelerate revenue growth and team performance.

Bill, with more than two decades of leading sales organizations at companies like Salesforce and LinkedIn, how has your career journey shaped your perspective on building high-performing sales teams today?

There are so many lessons and experiences from my 20-year journey that are at the center of how I think about building high-performing teams. It all started with my father, who was a college baseball coach for 40 years. I saw both the culture he created and the impact he made on people’s lives beyond the baseball field, which is something I keep close to me on a daily basis. Shifting to my corporate experience, I always say that CareerBuilder taught me grit and the sales process, LinkedIn taught me how to be more strategic and thoughtful while being centered on core values, and Salesforce was a mix of those, plus execution at a whole other level. At Mural, I am not trying to replicate any of those cultures; instead, it’s taking the things that can be scaled and taking ownership of them as we look to accelerate the next chapter of growth. The last thing I will share is that I have had several leaders who have made a lasting impact on my career, and I bring things I learned from them, and try to avoid the things from leaders who had the opposite impact on me.

Prospecting often sets the tone for the entire sales cycle. What are some of the unproductive prospecting habits you frequently see, and how do you recommend teams break them?

One of the most unproductive habits is a one-size-fits-all approach to prospecting. This non-personalized method treats potential clients as just another name on a list, which leads to low engagement and wasted resources. It is a symptom of a “quantity over quality” mindset that prioritizes the volume of messages sent rather than creating a connection that addresses specific problems and unmet needs.

To break this habit, sales teams should shift their focus from an assembly-line model to a more collaborative and personalized one. This involves working with marketing and product teams to identify the ideal customer profile (ICP) to intimately understand the unique needs of the target audience.

Instead of working in silos and across myriad documents and notebooks, a shared workspace can help go-to-market (GTM) teams stay on the same page when researching key accounts, mapping out the prospect’s journey, and creating personalized pitches that directly address pain points. This level of alignment can ultimately close more sales.

Collaboration between sales, marketing, and product is notoriously difficult. How do you ensure these groups stay aligned toward a shared revenue goal rather than working in silos?

Recent Mural research shows that most GTM teams feel good about the way they work together. But they also frequently experience misalignment. That’s often due to teams working in silos, with their own tools, processes, and goals.

There are three steps GTM teams should take together to fix this problem:

1. Build the ICP together: Align GTM around a shared ICP, which includes the traits of customers most likely to buy, succeed, and stay. This should go far beyond surface-level and identify pain points, buying behaviors, decision-maker roles, and buying triggers. Use recent wins and losses to co-create a simple customer journey map that shows what works and what doesn’t.
2. Agree on goals and metrics together: Align on revenue targets, lead volume and quality, conversion rates, and priority segments. Document these in a scorecard that outlines KPIs, owners, and review cadences to keep teams focused and accountable.
3. Map out the plan: This is the most important step: Make the GTM plan visible. Use shared visual tools like boards or timelines to lay out tasks, owners, and deadlines. Visual collaboration keeps work on track, reduces miscommunication, boosts accountability, and prevents last-minute scrambles.

In your experience, what elements separate an effective sales training program from one that fails to deliver real impact?

Ineffective sales programs are often disconnected from a sales rep’s day-to-day reality. These programs simply deliver information without a clear tie to the tools, processes, and customer pain points that actually drive deals.

Effective sales training programs move beyond a single, one-off event and are more connected to the company’s overall sales enablement strategy. For example, instead of a single, week-long boot camp, an effective program would tie specific training modules and coaching directly to each stage of the sales process.

Sales training should integrate three critical elements:

1. Skills: Training should teach reps what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. This includes not just product knowledge, but also hands-on, practical training like effective questioning, handling objections, and consultative selling – all designed to build muscle memory and confidence.
2. Tools: Reps need more than just information – they also need the right resources to support their work. The best sales training programs ensure reps know how to use their sales enablement tools (like CRM systems, decks, and messaging frameworks), allowing them to quickly access and use content to support their sales process.
3. Timing: Training should be an always-on effort. It should also align with specific stages of the sales process so that reps can receive the right information at the right time to move the prospect along. This continuous learning model, combined with frequent coaching and reinforcement, can help reps close more deals faster.

Many organizations struggle with the transition from prospecting to nurturing. What practical steps help sales teams avoid losing momentum at this stage?

Unclear prospect journeys are the primary culprit for lost momentum. The best way to maintain momentum is to work together on a personalized buying journey for the individual prospect. After the initial discovery call (and assuming the prospect is a good fit), GTM teams should map out all of the steps, roles, responsibilities, and deadlines needed to close a deal.

Handoffs between teams are often a hidden source of lost opportunities. What best practices do you consider essential to make handoffs smooth and productive?

Handoffs are common break points in the customer journey when teams operate in silos. Leads get lost, customers are frustrated because they need to repeat themselves, and promises made in one stage aren’t kept in the next.

Teams can prevent that with three best practices: shared visibility, consistent messaging, and customer-centered KPIs.

Shared dashboards, journey maps, and visual collaboration tools ensure that information doesn’t slip through the cracks and every team has the same context. Consistent messaging across marketing, sales, product, and support builds trust and makes the experience feel seamless rather than fragmented.

Equally important, teams should be measured on outcomes that matter to customers, like satisfaction, retention, or time-to-value, rather than just departmental wins. Regular cross-functional check-ins and feedback loops help spot and resolve friction early. When everyone is aligned around the customer journey instead of local targets, handoffs stop being drop-offs and instead feel like smooth transitions.

The payoff is not just efficiency — it’s a unified experience that drives loyalty and revenue.

Sales is as much about process as it is about people. How do you balance equipping teams with structure while still giving them room for creativity and individuality?

Sales teams are at their best when there’s a balance between structure and creativity. A well-defined process helps teams qualify leads, map customer journeys, and stay aligned across GTM teams. But if the process is too rigid, it can stifle the personal style and adaptability that make sales conversations genuine and effective.

That’s where visual tools like process maps and shared boards come in. They provide a clear framework for how deals should progress while leaving space for reps to tailor their approach to the customer’s unique needs. For example, a visual sales journey can standardize handoffs and milestones, but each rep can still choose how they engage and build relationships at each stage. Making workflows visible also creates more accountability and reduces the friction caused by siloed communication. At the same time, it invites collaboration so reps can share what’s working and adapt the process together. In other words, structure provides the guardrails, while creativity keeps the human element front and center. The most successful teams know how to use both in tandem to drive results.

At Mural, you’re driving revenue growth in a space that thrives on collaboration. How does Mural’s culture influence the way your sales strategy is executed?

One of the biggest eye-opening moments at Mural was the impact visual collaboration can have on driving alignment across a sales process. We have moved to a more collaborative selling approach using the visual components of Mural to surface action, which has created better alignment. This also allows for easier transitions when new team members jump into a deal or if an account were to move. At the end of the day, it’s about a more pleasant employee and customer experience. This is at the center of what we are developing for GTM teams. We are getting great feedback from our first 10 pilot customers and are looking forward to bringing this to market at GA later this year.

Given the constant evolution of buyer behavior, what skills or mindsets do you believe modern sales professionals must prioritize to stay ahead?

I am a bit more old-fashioned when it comes to the sales process. I learned how to sell using “The Sales V,” which was hyper-focused on earning the right, doing deep discovery and research, and ensuring we focus as much on the close as we do the front end of the sales process. With all that being said, what remains critical is the ability to do deep discovery outside of how a company uses a product and being able to connect what you learn about their priorities to a solution you are offering. There was a moment in time that changed the way everyone works and drove demand for software products. Now, we have to go back to the basics, but sellers also need to embrace AI. Whether it is within their customers’ business or weaving it into the sales motions, staying on top of trends is key, and the pace of innovation is at a pace we have never seen.

Looking to the future, what changes in sales strategy or technology excite you most, and how are you preparing your teams to adapt?

I am very excited about the early learnings from AI, both within our existing processes and within our product. We are seeing the value our employees and customers are getting, and I believe we are still in the early stages. I think it is really about being flexible, being open-minded, and being curious while being thoughtful. Nothing could have prepared us for the shift to remote work in 2020 or the AI tidal wave, so it’s all about demonstrating qualities that allow you to pivot when needed without overanchoring or not being thoughtful.

Quote –

Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.