Misha Jessel-Kenyon

The Journey

Misha started in management consulting before moving into B2B sales in digital publishing. He was mostly selling to SaaS companies, which is where he discovered the tech industry and made the move into SaaS sales. He then joined SalesLoft, where he became their highest performing account executive globally. After that came a Major Account Director role at Zscaler, running large enterprise cycles.

Mistral AI brought a different kind of challenge. They needed their first UK go-to-market hire to open the market from scratch for what is arguably Europe's most important AI company. Every piece of enterprise sales knowledge Misha had built up got tested immediately, and still does daily.

Separately, he co-founded Revenue Syndicate, an investment community for experienced GTM operators across Europe. The thesis is straightforward: the people who've built and scaled sales functions have a sharp eye for which B2B companies will work and which won't.

The Exact Tools

Granola handles meeting notes. Complex enterprise deals live and die on the quality of follow-up, and Granola captures every conversation, structures the output, and makes it actionable straight away. No more reconstructing what was said an hour after the call.

Kernel resolves entity identities, builds corporate hierarchies, and enriches CRM data. For RevOps and sales, it provides the trusted foundation for territory design and reliable account information at scale. Misha uses it to ensure the data underpinning every account strategy is clean and accurate before any outreach begins.

Clay enriches the data layer. Mapping org charts, finding angles, understanding reporting lines. Enterprise sales requires knowing the landscape before walking in, and Clay surfaces that without the manual dig.

Salesloft orchestrates the sequencing. Having been their highest performing AE globally, Misha knows the platform inside out. He maintains that it still handles multi-touch enterprise cadences better than anything else available.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is table stakes for enterprise. Champion identification, tracking job changes, staying warm with key accounts over long cycles.

Reachdesk opens doors that digital touchpoints alone can't. A well-timed, thoughtful gesture to a senior buyer demonstrates that the homework has been done. It cuts through in a way that another email simply doesn't.

What Channels Work For Them

Referrals convert at the highest rate. A warm introduction from someone the buyer already trusts compresses every stage of the cycle. Misha looks for that path first on every engagement.

The second approach that works well is executive-to-executive engagement. In enterprise, the level at which a conversation starts matters more than how quickly it starts. Having leadership reach out to their counterparts opens doors that would otherwise take months of persistence through other channels.

Neither of these approaches scales in the way that mass outreach does, which is exactly the point. Enterprise relationships are built on precision and trust, not volume.

What To Look For in the Age of AI

Misha ranks candidates on ICCE: intelligence, character, coachability, experience. That ordering is deliberate. Intelligence and character are nearly impossible to develop in someone. Coachability and experience can be built over time.

Within character, he looks for high-agency people with real grit. The kind of person who owns outcomes rather than activities. At Mistral's pace, that means someone who runs through problems without waiting for permission.

Coachability matters more now than it did two years ago. The AI market shifts constantly, and a tactic that worked well in Q1 might be irrelevant by Q3. Misha looks for people with genuine curiosity who teach themselves without being prompted.

The technical bar keeps rising too. Selling AI to technical buyers without understanding APIs, model capabilities, or how the product actually works is a non-starter. He looks for people who tinker on the side, who've built something, who can hold their own in a room full of engineers.