On this episode of Revenue Mavericks, Justin Shriber sat down with Sandeep Mahapatra, Chief Revenue Officer at Jade Global. Sandeep has spent decades building his career across some of the largest systems integrators in the world, and he brought that experience to a conversation about resilience, the AI transformation reshaping the services industry, and why doubling a company's revenue starts with changing how your team thinks.

1. A Black Belt in Going Against the Obvious

About 20 years ago, Sandeep stepped onto a cricket pitch in Dallas for the first time in years. He was a fast bowler in college, and he tried to replicate that form. Before he could finish his approach, he felt a crack in his right knee and collapsed. The diagnosis was devastating: ruptured ACL, MCL, and cartilage. Everything that held the knee together was gone.

He went through reconstruction surgery and six months of therapy. The surgery was successful, but something lingered. He started limping everywhere, on stairs, walking around the house. It wasn't the knee anymore. It was the belief that the knee couldn't hold. He lost confidence. He lost motivation. He was too young, he thought, to live the rest of his life this way.

The turning point came while he was sitting on the sidelines watching his kids do Taekwondo. The instructor walked over and asked why he wasn't participating. Sandeep explained the knee. The instructor told him something he still carries: "It's all in your mind. Physically, you are perfectly fine."

Three years later, Sandeep earned a black belt. Not only did the discipline rebuild his knee, it erased the mental barrier entirely. He forgot he had ever been injured. The lesson he took from it applies directly to how he leads today: when something is your biggest weakness, going against it is the most counterintuitive choice you can make, and often the most transformative.

2. An Industry and a Career at the Same Inflection Point

Sandeep sees two forces converging right now. The first is industry-wide. The traditional services model, staffing people, charging a rate, growing revenue by growing headcount, is a simple linear equation. AI is breaking that equation. What used to require a team of 50 can now be delivered with five or ten, with agents handling much of the work. Revenue erosion from productivity gains is real, and every SI, from the largest to the mid-market, is grappling with how to stay relevant.

The second force is personal. After years at tier-one firms shaping deals worth $50 million, $100 million, and more, Sandeep joined Jade Global, a 23-year-old, high-growth, mid-sized company with a clear mandate from CEO and founder Karan Yarramada: double the size of the business.

What drew him was the foundation already in place. Jade has employees who have been there 10 or 15 years, some since the beginning. There is ownership and pride baked into the company's DNA. His job is not to overhaul that culture but to build on it, bringing an outside-in perspective while preserving what makes Jade work. The AI wave and a growth mandate at a company with deep roots: for Sandeep, this is the inflection point.

3. Pipeline Quality, Flat Organizations, and Value Minus

Sandeep's approach to doubling Jade's revenue rests on three pillars.

The first is pipeline quality over quantity. He changed the ICP to focus on a bigger segment of the market, companies in the $500 million to $5 billion range where Jade has strong case studies and competitive positioning. No more blind RFP responses. No more chasing deals based on hope. "Hope is not a strategy," he said. The measure of whether it is working is the conversion ratio: if conversions are improving, the pipeline quality is improving.

The second is organizational structure. His belief is straightforward: salespeople do not need to be managed. They need to be enabled and incentivized. When he arrived at Jade, he flattened the sales organization so that every sales executive reports directly to him. He drew clear geographic boundaries and separated hunters from farmers, with a deliberate emphasis on new logo acquisition. Hunters who hold onto accounts too long become farmers and lose their edge, so the system is designed to keep them moving. But the balance matters. If nobody is hunting, there is nothing to farm. If everybody is hunting, the existing accounts starve.

The third is what he calls "value minus," a framework for how services companies need to rethink pricing in an AI world. The old model is cost plus: count your people, add a margin, bill the client. That math collapses when agents replace headcount. Value minus starts from the other direction. If you can accelerate a pharmaceutical company's drug trial timeline by 10%, the gain to that company is enormous. You claim a percentage of that measurable outcome as your fee. It is not easy to operationalize, but Sandeep sees it as the only sustainable path forward for services businesses navigating AI.

He sums up his operating philosophy with a quote he attributes to Morgan Freeman: "You don't need to drink the entire ocean to realize it's salty." Look for early signals. Act on problems at the source. Do not wait until the end of the quarter to find out what could have been fixed weeks ago.

Why This Matters

Sandeep is doing something rare: taking decades of experience at the largest companies in the services industry and applying it with precision at a high-growth mid-market firm, right at the moment when AI is rewriting the rules of that entire industry. His willingness to go against the obvious, whether that means doing Taekwondo on a reconstructed knee or flattening a sales org to remove layers of management, is what makes his approach worth studying.

Listen to the full conversation on the Revenue Mavericks podcast.