Everyone Still Prospects: A Conversation with Jonathan Chemouny

Jonathan Chemouny leads go-to-market for Europe at ElevenLabs, one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world, which crossed 200 million in ARR in roughly two years. He has spent nearly two decades building and scaling sales organizations, including over five years at Intercom and a run at Lattice, leading teams across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise. He is also a two-time founder, having co-founded Botnation AI, a chatbot platform used by hundreds of companies. He runs the sales development team at ElevenLabs from Dublin.

What makes Jonathan's perspective valuable is that he sits at the intersection of founder and operator, inside a company that is rewriting its own ICP every few months. This conversation is about what it actually takes to build go-to-market at a rocketship: the builder mentality, why meeting people in person is a competitive advantage even for an AI audio company, how signals-based outbound and land-and-expand work in practice, and why everyone at ElevenLabs, up to the CEO, still prospects.

Build the playbook, don't execute it

What founding companies taught Jonathan, and what he sees across ElevenLabs, is comfort in chaos. You are not executing a playbook, you are building one. Early on you have no brand, so you build everything from the ground up, which is why outbound has always fascinated him. You also have to be extremely agile. ElevenLabs was known for text-to-speech about eighteen months before this conversation, and is now the leading solution for voice agents, with something like 90 percent of the world's AI audio agents powered by its voices. That kind of shift forces you to change your ICP and the way you sell, fast.

Two things underpin it. There is no safety net, so ownership and accountability are total, and you cannot blame anyone else. And there is a low ego attachment to ideas, because the company experiments constantly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, and being unattached to your own ideas is what lets you keep moving. Even after announcing a Series D at a roughly 11 billion valuation, they celebrated for a day and went back to work, because anything that works well tends to last two or three months before you have to find the next idea. That, he says, is what makes the job so interesting.

Make the boring job matter

Jonathan has a strong opinion on sales development, the role most people treat as a stepping stone to get out of. For most companies the job is so boring, spray and pray, annoying emails, terrible cold calling, that reps just want to escape it. His answer is to make the job genuinely interesting by making it about understanding why you are reaching out, not just sending emails. He was one of the first to send SDRs to travel, meet prospects where they are, attend conferences, and run workshops. When people ask why an SDR is traveling to meet prospects, his answer is: why shouldn't they?

The logic is that a passionate SDR who talks to companies and understands the problem being solved does an incredible job, stays motivated, and becomes a far better future account executive. It is the same faith argument that runs through good sales cultures. Give people the power to be real ambassadors and they operate with more comfort, passion, and energy. His own rule as a manager was that an SDR who cannot run a demo is not really an SDR, because there is no esoteric skill an AE has that an SDR cannot learn.

Meet them where they are

ElevenLabs' competitive advantage, in Jonathan's telling, is almost counterintuitive for an AI audio company: meeting prospects in person. After COVID many companies stayed slow to get back onsite, and going to the prospect is a real edge. It sounds strange coming from a leader in AI audio, where the assumption is that everything can be automated, but that is exactly the point. They have to educate prospects on what is possible, and AI raises real questions about regulation and safety, so meeting people to build trust matters more, not less.

That trust feeds a land-and-expand motion. At Intercom his job was to capture all the revenue immediately. At ElevenLabs the play is to build trust, start with a small slice of revenue, do fantastic work alongside the CSMs, and expand from there. The channel mix follows the same instinct toward real relationships. WhatsApp has become his new inbox in Europe, which works remarkably well if you have built the relationship first and earned the right to move there, and he is experimenting with Teams and Google Chat too.

Context is everything

The outbound that works now, Jonathan says, is signals-based, and the whole thing comes down to context. Old prospecting failed because someone contacted you out of nowhere about something you did not want, or wanted but not at that moment. When you contact the right person at the right moment with the right message, it works, and if you have a genuine reason to reach out, it makes total sense to the recipient. ElevenLabs uses tools to detect signals, like someone commenting on a company LinkedIn post, and engages off that.

His favorite example is almost embarrassingly simple. He runs a basic sequence engaging every relevant prospect who follows ElevenLabs on LinkedIn, and it generates enormous pipeline, precisely because following the company gives him a legitimate reason to reach out. It is more tactic than strategy, but the underlying principle, that a real reason to make contact changes everything, is the whole game.

Everyone prospects, even the CEO

The most distinctive thing about ElevenLabs' culture is that leaders are in the trenches. There are no titles in the traditional sense and no separate HR-style functions dividing people. If you are in sales you are GTM, and even at VP level everyone shares the same central title, which removes the friction of "can I do that, should I do that, can I message this person." Because everyone is the same, everyone does the work. Jonathan replies to leads and prospects himself. The CRO prospects constantly, and even the CEO shows up on the Salesforce report.

He is honest that at Intercom, in a different era, he was not prospecting much as a leader, and the risk of that is becoming disconnected from what is actually going on. Today, when the platform has a problem, he knows immediately, and when something works or fails, he feels it directly. He and the other leaders carry their own quota alongside the reps, and he finds it genuinely refreshing after years spent mostly on strategy. Given how fast AI is moving, he argues, if you are not experiencing the tools yourself you are disconnected, and a disconnected leader is a terrible salesperson and a terrible manager.

The AI SDR is for inbound, not cold calls

ElevenLabs built an AI SDR, but Jonathan is clear-eyed about where it belongs. They do not believe an AI SDR should be doing cold calling, because cold calling is hard even for your best humans. Where it shines is inbound, and the reason is that buyers have changed. They do their homework and know exactly what they want before they ever contact you. In the old world, a prospect filled out a contact form on a Friday night, and with the back-and-forth of scheduling, the meeting might not happen until the following Wednesday, if the email even arrived. That friction is terrible.

Now they can detect interest, start a conversation in the buyer's own language, whether German or Swedish, qualify in real time, and schedule the call immediately. The AI holds context, provides a better experience, and, by the numbers, it works. He cites an average of six to seven minutes spent in conversation and a CSAT around 8.2. He is careful to frame this as helping the GTM team, not replacing it, because it frees humans to focus on the inbound relationships and the onsite meetings where the real value is.

Distribution beats product and brand

Asked what he would optimize for first if he built a SaaS from scratch again, Jonathan does not hesitate: distribution. Building a product in 2026 has had many barriers removed, so while product is not exactly easy, it is easier than it was. Brand matters too. But you can have the best product in the world and the best brand in the world, and without distribution, neither works. ElevenLabs itself is his proof point for what distribution can do.

He is equally direct about the go-to-market advice he thinks is overrated: pure PLG. A couple of years ago everything was "adopt PLG and the product sells itself." PLG is great, but relying on it alone is not the right option, because to accelerate you need humans to activate the buying committee. He does not believe ElevenLabs would have the same growth without a sales-led motion layered on top.

Scaling breaks messaging first

ElevenLabs was founded in Europe and became global very quickly, which is unusual, and Jonathan has clear views on what breaks under that speed. Messaging breaks first. What works in the UK differs from France or Italy, and the old US-SaaS habit of building in San Francisco and copy-pasting to London simply does not work. After messaging, the accountability structure shifts as teams need their own territories, and tooling and processes diverge, since a team in India will not use the same tools as a team in Brazil.

His answer is a hybrid model. Centralization is good for strategy, playbooks, and tooling, but to expand quickly you have to localize, with regional GMs who actually understand São Paulo or the Middle East in ways someone in New York or London never could. He is also firm that you should only add headcount when you need it, never in advance, because adding salespeople to a broken motion just amplifies the dysfunction. The hardest part of scaling fast is maintaining the high standard and protecting the culture, which is why they recruit selectively even with a flood of applicants.

Good leader versus great leader

Jonathan's take on leadership starts with intellectual honesty. He has made many mistakes and believes you have to learn from them rather than falling in love with your own playbook. When he arrived at ElevenLabs he had to relearn everything, because every company is different, and a great leader at one company can be terrible at another. The related skill is knowing when to change the play, not just how to execute it.

The rest is people and performance. He is obsessed with speed and numbers, and with building an environment where talented people do their best, which sometimes means intense stretches and sometimes means the whole GTM team spending real time together. And the underrated leadership work, he adds, is knowing how to retain, develop, and recruit people, because none of the performance happens without that foundation.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

Build the playbook, don't execute one. At a fast-moving company you have no template. Comfort in chaos, total ownership, and low ego attachment to ideas are what let you keep shifting.

Meeting people in person is an edge. Even for an AI audio company, going onsite builds the trust that closes deals, especially when buyers have real questions about safety and regulation.

Context makes outbound work. Signals-based sequences, like engaging people who follow your company, succeed because you have a genuine reason to reach out. The right message at the right moment to the right person is the whole game.

Everyone should prospect. When leaders stay in the trenches, up to the CEO, they feel what is working in real time. A disconnected leader is a worse salesperson and manager.

Distribution beats product and brand. With building easier than ever, distribution is the priority. Pure PLG is overrated, because accelerating still needs humans to activate the buying committee.

Frameworks worth stealing

Make the SDR role matter

Fight the spray-and-pray default by making sales development about understanding the customer's problem, not just sending emails. Send SDRs to conferences, workshops, and onsite meetings so they build passion and product knowledge, which keeps them motivated and turns them into far stronger future AEs.

Signals-based outbound

Earn the right to reach out. Build sequences off genuine signals, like people who follow your company or comment on its posts, so every message has a real reason behind it. Context, the right person at the right moment with the right message, is what separates outbound that works from spray and pray.

Leaders in the trenches

Remove titles and functional friction so everyone in GTM does the work, and have leaders carry real quota and prospect alongside reps. It keeps leadership connected to what is actually happening with the product and the market, which is essential when the technology shifts every few months.

Hybrid regional scaling

Centralize strategy, playbooks, and tooling, but localize execution with regional GMs who understand their markets. Do not copy-paste messaging across geographies, and add headcount only when the motion is working, since scaling a broken motion just amplifies the dysfunction.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

You don't execute playbooks, you build playbooks.

When you contact the right person at the right moment with the right message, it works. It's all about the context.

You can have the best product and the best AI models, but without pipeline it's useless.

And the one every operator considering a new role should sit with.

A great leader can be great in one company and terrible in another.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Jonathan handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Don't let people push you in one direction. Decide by yourself.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? The same advice, really. He wishes he applied it more.

What would you tell your younger self? More confidence. So many things you think are impossible you can actually do, and he says the same to his own daughter. It sounds cheesy, but trusting yourself works.

Favorite spot? A two-Michelin-star restaurant in Blackrock, just outside Dublin. Beautiful room, great people, and food that keeps getting better in Dublin.

Tool you can't live without? Granola, the AI note taker. It is fast, and taking it off his plate lets him focus on the conversation.

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Jonathan Chemouny leads go-to-market for Europe at ElevenLabs, where he runs sales development and helped scale outbound into a major share of pipeline. He was previously at Intercom and Lattice and co-founded Botnation AI. Find him on LinkedIn.