The Caliber Show

Hosted by Chris Orlob, CEO, Caliber

Business Careers

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Episodes

121

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

The Caliber Show is where revenue professionals come to build the skills, capabilities, and standards required to perform at the highest level. Hosted by Chris Orlob, CEO of Caliber (formerly pclub.io). In a world obsessed with tools, shortcuts, and the AI flavor of the week, we focus on what actually moves the number: human performance. New episodes every Monday and Friday.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 7, 202645 min

LIVE Insider Deal Strategy On An Eight Figure SaaS Deal

Listen to Chris Orlob advise and strategize on an 8-figure SaaS deal - live coaching call!

July 31, 202642 min

Three Non Negotiable to Become So Good They Can't Ignore You

What do you do when your buyer's economic buyer alignment is rock solid but one gatekeeper has quietly torpedoed three prior deals? On this episode of The Caliber Show, Chris Orlob works live through real rep deals: managing scope creep when a prospect's vision suddenly expands using the PAPR framework to map stakeholder resistance, and knowing when "enough discovery" becomes overkill. A masterclass in reading the room and asking the uncomfortable question before it costs you the deal.

June 22, 20261 hr 34 min

The Discovery System That Doubled 1,000+ Sellers' Income

Only 9% of executives say a sales call was worth their time and yet 70% of B2B sellers believe they're better than average. In this episode, we break down the DEPTH Enterprise-Grade Discovery System: a five-part framework for generating real urgency, surfacing business pain that money follows, and closing bigger deals faster. We cover how to read a buyer's psychological stage in the first minutes of a call, the "Go Back in Time" technique for handling inbound buyers who want to skip straight to a demo, and why the difference between a $20K deal and a $433K deal almost always comes down to the depth of your discovery, not your pitch. The system is grounded in operator experience from scaling Gong from $200K to $200M in revenue, and illustrated with real case studies of sellers who doubled their income, broke company records, and hit quota in seven months on a seven-figure number.

June 8, 202622 min

Skill Debt: We Analyzed the Skills of 1,592 Sellers. Here's What We Learned.

New research from Caliber analyzed 1,500+ B2B sellers and found something that should stop every revenue leader cold: weak sales teams don't plateau, they get worse. In this episode, CEO Chris Orlob breaks down the concept of "skill debt," why neglecting to upskill your team compounds like financial debt, and what the data says about the cost of waiting.

June 5, 202615 min

The $10M Wake-Up Call: Why AI Tailwinds Are Creating the Next Revenue Skills Crisis

A VP of sales at one of the hottest AI companies on the planet did $400M last quarter with 100 reps. Then a $5M account walked, because the rep who closed it couldn't name a single champion or the economic buyer. Chris Orlob unpacks "skill debt": the liability that compounds quietly while tailwinds blow, then gets exposed the moment the market stops selling for you. We saw it in 2021. AI is setting up the same trap now, bigger. The music always stops. The best time to close the gap is now, while the pressure's off.

June 1, 20269 min

The Path to Power™: How to Get Access to the Economic Buyer In 5 Steps

You've done the work, built the champion, run a great demo — and then the deal dies at the finish line when a boss you never met says no. This episode breaks down a repeatable, engineered path from champion to economic buyer: a five-step motion for getting to power on purpose instead of hoping it happens. You'll get the framework for teaching your champion how to actually evaluate (and why you never say the words "economic buyer" to a buyer), the word-for-word "double upfront agreement" that sets the purpose of your next call before it ever happens, and how to negotiate the sequence of steps so you pull power forward instead of saving it for the end. The throughline: establish value first, qualify second and know when to draw the line rather than burn weeks on a deal that was never going to close. If you've ever watched a deal blow up late, this one's a map.

May 29, 202629 min

How to Create Champions That Sell For You When You're Not There | Nate Nasralla, CEO at Fluint

Chris Orlob sits down with Nate Nasralla, CEO of Fluent and one of the most-followed voices on enterprise champion development, to dig into the skill that separates reps who close complex deals from those who perpetually await verdicts. They unpack what actually makes someone a champion, Nate's three I's framework (Incentive, Intel, Influence) and why most sellers are fooling themselves by mistaking advocates for champions. The conversation gets tactical fast: how to run valid champion tests without triggering false negatives, why co-creating a business case is the champion-building act, how to seed awareness with other stakeholders before you even need access to them, and why if your champion isn't looking forward to your next call, something is fundamentally broken in the relationship. Nate has authored some of PClub's most popular training courses, including Selling with Champions and Bulletproof Business Cases: browse his full course catalog here .

May 26, 20261 hr 27 min

The Economic Buyer Selling System™: How to Access Power, Align Executives, and Close Bigger Deals

Chris Orlob unveils PClub's newest flagship framework, the Economic Buyer Selling System, in its first-ever public debut. This isn't a collection of tips; it's a four-stage repeatable system (Activate, Access, Align, Approve) built for AEs and account managers who are tired of running long sales cycles only to watch deals disintegrate at the end because they never had real executive alignment. Chris opens with a sobering benchmark: according to Gartner, 93% of C-suite executives report that their interactions with salespeople are a waste of time — which means most reps, statistically, are in the 7% problem and not the 7% solution. He then walks through exactly how elite sellers invert that, covering the psychology of champion activation, a five-step engineered "Path to Power" with word-for-word talk tracks, and the seven non-negotiables you must align on the moment you get in the room with an economic buyer, before you pitch a single thing. Chris also makes the case that economic buyer access isn't just good selling; it's the single highest-leverage activity a revenue professional can pursue, with data showing 130% win rate improvement on $50K+ deals when done right.

May 22, 202647 min

How to Hire A+ Sellers That Grow Your Revenue | Kevin Gaither, Fmr SVP Sales at Ziprecruiter

Chris Orlob sits down with Kevin Gaither (known in the industry as KG) an eight-time startup operator with three successful exits, including a run as one of ZipRecruiter's first 50 employees as the company scaled to $400M in revenue. Over 25+ years, KG has built sales teams ranging from zero to 550 people across inside sales, SDR/BDR, account management, and enterprise and he'll be the first to tell you he made a lot of mistakes along the way. The conversation centers on what he considers the most underrated and highest-stakes skill in sales leadership: hiring. KG shares why most sales leaders are operating at a 30–50% hiring success rate without even knowing it, the simple acid test question that exposes it, and the full three-step framework he used to take his own rate from 30% to 80%. They dig into why behavioral questions beat hypotheticals every time, why cloning your top rep is a trap, and why "hiring sales athletes" might be the most expensive bias a sales leader carries. Resources from Kevin Gaither: 🎯 Sales Leaders Hiring Bundle (19 documents): insidesalesexpert.com 💼 No-BS Job Seeker Toolkit: insidesalesexpert.com

May 18, 202610 min

How to Reframe the Budget Narrative (And 3x Your Deal Size)

In this solo episode, Chris Orlob breaks down one of the highest-leverage moves a revenue professional can make: reframing the budget narrative before it gets anchored to the wrong problem. He walks through a real deal where his AE expanded a $15,000 SKO speaking inquiry into a $50,000 platform partnership in two calls, not through negotiation, but through deliberately reframing the conversation from vendor selection to revenue outcome. Chris unpacks the exact Socratic framework his AE used, the moment where great sellers separate themselves from average ones, and how to coach your champions to carry that reframe internally when you're not in the room.