Aurélien Mottier on Transforming Businesses Through Sales Culture

What does a global sales acceleration company really sell? Visit memoryBlue’s website or LinkedIn page and you’ll read about the end-to-end services that the business offers for revenue leaders, from sales strategy through to demand generation and pipeline management. Talk to memoryBlue’s President though, and you’ll quickly get a sense that behind these solutions is another type of product – and one that he’s particularly passionate about. In many respects, memoryBlue is a people production machine, and Aurélien Mottier knows the value of that better than anyone. 

“Our strength lies in the fact that so many of our leaders have grown from the ground up within the business,” he explains. “Every one of them started in the trenches—as Business Development Reps. My Head of Marketing? Former BDR. My Head of Sales? Same path. That shared journey fuels an unshakable, high-performance culture. As a professional services firm, our people are our greatest asset. Building elite teams isn’t just what we do—it’s our core differentiator. It defined us at Operatix, and it defines us now at memoryBlue.” 

Building the sales teams that help businesses transform 

Aurélien is referring to the merger of memoryBlue and Operatix, the business he founded in 2012 and then sold to memoryBlue at the start of 2023. That move has created the world’s largest sales acceleration consultancy, and a distinctive high-performing culture is central to its proposition. As Aurélien explains, it doesn’t just deliver revenue for clients. It enables those businesses to import the talent, skills and value that they need to transform.

One of the striking things about memoryBlue’s model is the frequency with which teams created by the company to deliver outsourced sales services for clients, end up being recruited by the clients themselves – and helping to evolve their businesses. 

“Clients see memoryBlue as a talent engine,” says Aurélien. “They know that we have a really strong talent acquisition and development processes, and a huge part of the value that we create for them comes from building a revenue operation that’s tailored to their business. We help them write a playbook for selling, and they can then internalize the team that we’ve put together to execute on that blueprint. As a result of this, there are over 2,500 alumni from our business out there in the market, often in C-level and VP roles. We’re extremely proud of that.” 

 When your product is the development of revenue-generating talent, cultures and processes, it influences your own growth strategy and your perspective on leadership. “I love the complexity of working with a lot of very different human beings,” says Aurélien. “That’s a big part of the challenge of running a business. When you first start out, that challenge is about making payroll. Then you get into the issues of building a team, building customer relationships and building a culture. And then, when you reach the stage of mergers and acquisitions, you put all of that in a box, jiggle it around and start working at it all over again.” 

Preserving culture and talent when businesses merge 

The experience of merging businesses to build global enterprises is an essential element in the growth journey, Aurélien believes. It’s one that requires entrepreneurs and founders like himself to undergo a mental journey of their own – and find clarity about what really motivates them. 

“As a founder, it’s important not to get mesmerized by the financial side of the deal. Instead, you should focus on what your experience will be if you stay with the business,” he says. “People feel deal remorse if they haven’t anticipated what it will be like to no longer be the boss. You can’t just make decisions based on your gut instinct anymore. You have to prepare yourself to operate differently, to influence others for collective decision-making. Above all, in a people business like ours, you have to think long and hard about the cultural fit.” 

Building top-performing sales teams with AI 

Finding the right fit is a watchword for Aurélien’s approach to recruitment as well. He’s focused on finding the right personalities to develop into top-performing salespeople. That means identifying human skills and potential, and deploying technology in imaginative ways, to enhance your ability to do so. 

 “We don’t necessarily want people with a ton of experience, because it’s actually more difficult to fix bad habits than it is to teach new ones,” he says. “We’re looking for curiosity and resilience, coachability, and street smarts, by which I mean adaptability to different people and environments. We’re using AI tools to help replicate the experience of dealing with reluctant buyers, training our buyers on the most challenging situations. We do psychometric testing to look at whether people have the personalities we’re looking for, and how they could work together on a team. We’ve even worked with Professor Bitty Balducci at the University of Seattle, to run AI analysis of over 20,000 sales conversations – and identify the techniques that make the biggest difference to outcomes.” 

 At a time when almost every business is asking itself how best to translate technology into revenue and growth, memoryBlue has a clear vision to offer.

Technology’s greatest value comes through empowering the right people with the right skills to build trust, deal with challenge and close deals. In the age of AI, when any fact can be checked and credibility comes under scrutiny, those capabilities matter more than ever. Building a pipeline of salespeople who excel at them is the mission that Aurélien is on.