Started my career with dirt under my fingernails. Now I sell the future.

Travis Mathews · Strategic Enterprise AE · AI-native seller · relentless builder

// open the windows. earn XP. find the easter eggs.

about-me.txt

Hello, I'm Travis

Started my career as a gardener. Now I sell agentic ITSM to some of the largest enterprises in the world.

I'm a builder. Always have been.

Give me a problem, and my first instinct isn't to wait for someone else to solve it. It's to go build the fix myself.

That's shaped just about everything I've done.

I built AI-powered sales workflows that changed the way my team at Salesforce went to market. (More on that in receipts.png and fit.cfg.)

I wrote and published a hip hop children's book because I wanted to rap bedtime stories to my kids, and somehow nobody had made one. (jawzeezy.com)

I built an entire ITIL certification course because the existing prep courses felt overpriced and painfully boring. So I made one people actually wanted to take, then gave it away for free to thousands of aspiring IT professionals. (passthefoundation.com)

The point isn't the projects. It's that I genuinely love building things that make people's lives easier.

That same mindset carries into sales. I go deep into my customers' worlds so I can speak their language, understand their business, and become the kind of partner they actually want in the room.

One more thing. I'm a dad of four boys.

Nothing motivates me more than being a great husband, father, and provider. Every day, I want my boys to see someone who shows up, works hard, stays curious, and builds things that matter.

// Start with fit.cfg, or skip straight to the side quests. They pop for a reason.

fit.cfg

Why I'm a Fit

Enterprise Credibility

At Salesforce, I cover strategic enterprise accounts across manufacturing, automotive, and energy: Honeywell, GM, Ford, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and a few others in that range.
Before that, I ran a GEO territory at DocuSign covering $1B–$25B customers. My best year I hit 198% of quota, ahead of reps with a decade more SaaS tenure than me.
Both moves landed me on brand-new product lines with no playbook and no reference customers. That's kind of become the pattern.
And before software: I grew a commercial landscape business from $21M to $30M+ in under a year, including a multi-year contract on Qualcomm's corporate campus. Different industry, same job: earn trust with people who've been burned before.

Learn more

Every stop put me in front of buyers who had every reason to be skeptical: legacy procurement processes, entrenched incumbents, and budget owners who'd seen vendors overpromise before. Master-association HOA boards, then CIOs. The lesson was the same both places: trust gets built through specificity, not enthusiasm. That's the instinct I bring to AI adoption conversations now.

AI-Native Workflow Mastery

I rebuilt my sales workflow around Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and MCP integrations I wrote myself. It runs my account prep now.

CRM data, Slack context, and live research all flow through MCP into one workflow. I built the integrations. No engineering team handed them to me.
The output is account-specific: microsites, exec briefings, tailored account plans. Not decks with the customer's logo swapped in. See ai-stack.yaml on this desktop.
The whole thing runs from the command line in Claude Code. A handful of prompts, a few minutes of prep per account. Version-controlled in GitHub like any other piece of software.
I use ChatGPT Enterprise for deep research when it's the right tool, and I'll pick up whatever's next. The stack isn't the point, being fluent enough to build with it is.

Learn more

Most "AI-native sellers" mean they use a chatbot to draft emails. Mine is a working system: MCP servers pulling live CRM and Slack context, prompt frameworks I iterated on for months in version control, and an output layer that produces account-specific artifacts a prospect can actually use in their evaluation. Open ai-stack.yaml for the full architecture.

Technical & Consultative Selling

Comfortable opening my laptop mid-meeting and just showing customers the answer.

I got ITIL® v5 certified so I could think the way my buyers think, not just sell to them.
On calls, I'll open the product, answer the question live, or walk through a custom workflow I built, like a ServiceNow-to-our-platform data migration I put together for a specific customer.
I don't wait for a solutions engineer to be free. If a prospect has a question, they get an answer that day.
Then I translate all of it back into something an exec sponsor will actually read. Both sides of that translation matter.

Learn more

A year of building this workflow taught me that the hard part is never the model. It's deciding what's worth feeding it, what context actually changes a buyer's decision, and when a human needs to step back in. That's a consultative skill wearing a technical costume, and it's the same skill that makes a discovery call good.

The Enablement Builder

I joined a startup inside Salesforce selling ITSM with zero ITSM experience. So did most of the team. So I built the ramp.

I vibe-coded gamified learning courses covering the technical guts of the product: CMDB, CI discovery, relationship mapping, compliance, first for me, then for the rest of the team.
The point was to actually understand what we were selling, not just memorize talking points. It worked: I stopped needing an SE on my calls.
I also helped teammates spin up their own demo orgs and keep them current using Claude Code, so they could run demos themselves instead of waiting in the queue.
Same pattern every time: see the gap, build the thing, teach everyone else how to use it.

Learn more

Enablement isn't a side interest for me, it's how I operate. The ITIL course in the side quests, the gamified ITSM ramp tools, the AI workflow enablement sessions that reached 1,000+ AEs: all the same move. When a team needs to learn something fast, I'd rather build the learning tool than wait for one to show up.

ai-stack.yaml

The System I Built

My AI Stack

Not a prompting habit. A system with inputs, processing, and outputs, like any other piece of infrastructure.

account-intelligence.flow

Not a marketing graphic. The actual system behind every account I touch.

ai-stack.yaml

Inputs

Salesforce
Slack
Customer documents
Earnings calls
Websites
Internal notes

Processing
MCP
LLM
Agentic coding tools
GitHub repos
Prompt frameworks
Context management

Outputs

Account plans
Executive briefings
Customer microsites
ROI calculators
Recorded demos
Competitive positioning

How it actually runs

Before a call, I run a small set of prompts that pull live account context through MCP: open opportunities and history from Salesforce, recent conversations from Slack, and whatever public research is relevant (earnings calls, news, the prospect's own website). The LLM assembles that into a working account brief, and from there I generate the customer-facing assets below. Everything lives in GitHub repos and runs from the command line with agentic coding tools, like any other piece of software. Total prep time: a few minutes, not a few hours.

What customers actually get

I sell an agentic ITSM solution to global service delivery managers and CIOs, against entrenched legacy platforms like ServiceNow. That audience doesn't take a vendor's word for anything, and they shouldn't. So instead of a deck, I build them a vision: an account-specific experience where they can see exactly how the solution lands in their business. Toggleable ROI calculators tied to their own business outcomes. Short videos and demos I record myself, specific to their solutioning. The point is confidence, immediately, and validation on their terms: they can pressure-test the whole thing before they ever have a conversation with us.

adoption.log

The Adoption Story

The most interesting thing wasn't the workflow. It was the adoption.

Anyone can build a personal AI workflow. The part worth paying attention to is what happened after.

Joined with zero ITSM experience

New product, new category, a team full of first-timers inside a startup inside Salesforce. So I built gamified education tools that made the ramp fast and fun, and got us speaking the customer's language.

Made the team demo-ready

Trained teammates to run their own demos and sell technically without solutions engineers. We needed to be capable and fast, so we became both.

Built first AI workflow

A personal system to speed up account prep. No one asked for it.

Built first customer microsite

Turned the workflow's output into something a prospect could actually use in an evaluation.

Shared internally

Showed a few colleagues what the prep looked like. Reactions were less "neat tool" and more "how do I get this."

Ran enablement sessions

Walked other sellers through using AI to build customer-facing assets, across multiple teams inside the EBOU and the broader Enterprise Core org. The sales leader's note from right after one of them is in receipts.png on this desktop.

Other reps adopted

A Service AE picked up the documented version and started running it independently. People started calling it "doing the Travis," which is a strange and pretty good sign.

Leaders promoted it

Sales leadership started amplifying it past the original group, with follow-up sessions planned to extend it further. From there, adoption kept compounding.

Workflow spread without me

It's now reached over 1,000 AEs and is reshaping how Salesforce goes to market.

The workflow survived contact with a thousand people who weren't me. That's the part worth paying attention to.

receipts.png

Proof, Not Promises

Straight from Slack.

Straight from the horse's mouth.

Slack message from Jenn Junkin thanking Travis for leading an enablement session on using AI to build customer-facing assets

Slack thread from Hal Bennick describing teaching a colleague the workflow and writing it down as a reusable template

case-studies/

Selected Case Studies

Three engagements, expanded on request.

Customer specifics are redacted where confidential. Ask me directly for anything that needs more depth.

Fortune 500 Manufacturing

A pilot program and an evaluation experience, both built from the same stack

Challenge

A Fortune 500 manufacturing prospect was evaluating a new IT and HR service product against entrenched ITSM incumbents, with no existing reference customers in this category to point to. ITSM is also big, complex, and mission-critical: a CIO at a $300B-revenue company isn't going to rip out the architecture running their entire business for something relatively untested.

Approach

Used the AI stack to build a white-labeled, account-specific evaluation experience pulling in their real context, rather than handing over a generic deck: interactive vision, ROI calculators tied to their outcomes, recorded demos specific to their business. Also built a pilot program, with partner buy-in, packaging the most foundational components of the solution so the customer could see the full vision and test and build on their own, including how to use agentic coding tools to extend the solution themselves: a multimillion-dollar solution for close to zero dollars.

Output

A live, custom evaluation experience built in hours, not weeks, that let the customer validate the solution on their own terms before a single conversation. A white paper version of the same work went directly to the customer. The pilot program was packaged so other accounts can run it too.

Result

That white paper got us into the conversation for a $25M opportunity. The account is currently running its technical evaluation of the platform.

Global Energy Company

Details pending

I'm being careful about what's shareable here without sign-off from the account team. Happy to walk through the real specifics live rather than post them publicly.

Competitive Takeout

Details pending

Same redaction logic as above. This one involves a named competitor and a named account, so I'd rather talk through it directly than write the specifics here.

side-quest_itil.app

Side Quest 01

🎓

Pass The Foundation

ITIL 5 exam prep · vibe coded · launched for free

Salesforce launched a new ITSM platform going toe to toe against ServiceNow.

To build credibility with IT buyers fast, I studied for and passed the ITIL exam. But all the exam-prep courses on the market were absurdly expensive, unnecessarily long, and felt like mandatory compliance training videos à la Workday. Likely to justify their bloated price tags.

So I built a better one. More interactive, more engaging, and straight to the point. Then I posted it for free, for coworkers who needed to get up to speed and for anyone studying for the exam who can't justify a thousand-dollar course.

Check it out here: passthefoundation.com →

side-quest_hiphop.app

Side Quest 02

🦈

JAWZEEZY

Children's board book · world's first read-aloud hip hop book

This was a fun COVID project, because I didn't want to come out the other side of the pandemic with nothing to show for it.

Before Jawzeezy, any children's book I read that had a rhyming scheme, I'd rap it to my kids to make it more fun. And when I couldn't find a single read-aloud hip hop book on the market, I decided to write one myself.

Out of that, Jawzeezy was born: the world's first read-aloud hip hop children's book.

Because rapping > reading.

Check it out at jawzeezy.com →

side-quest_lineitem.app

Side Quest 03

📋

LineItem (formerly Vendors)

AI-RFP tool for commercial property managers · co-founded · stepped away

Co-founded Vendors (now LineItem) as an after-hours startup to help pull the commercial services industry out of the stone age.

We built it, grew it to meaningful revenue, and validated strong market demand. I've since stepped away and am no longer involved in the business (life got super busy with 4 kids and an incredible opportunity to launch Salesforce's new ITSM platform).

LineItem is now being led by my co-founder, Jonas, who's reimagining the platform and expanding its reach globally as an AI-native RFP tool. Excited to see its continued growth.

What LineItem does: helps commercial property managers eliminate procurement busywork with AI-powered:

RFP creation
Vendor sourcing and selection
Bid analysis and comparison
Contract generation

Check it out: lineitem.co →

career.sh

Career, in Reverse

The path that got here.

The tools changed. The job didn't.

I've spent my career helping people adopt new technology, and becoming an expert in whatever I sell. AI is just the newest version of that.

2025 – present

Strategic Enterprise AESalesforce

Work strategic enterprise accounts with $300B+ in annual revenue across manufacturing, automotive, and energy, including Honeywell, GM, Ford, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. Part of the Emerging Business Operating Unit (EBOU), a startup inside Salesforce that brings new products to market. Launched a brand-new product line with no playbook and no reference customers. Built the AI-native workflow described across this desktop, plus the gamified education tools that ramped the whole team.

2022 – 2025

Enterprise AEDocuSign

Ran a GEO-based territory covering customers with $1B–$25B in revenue. Best year: 198% of quota, against reps with a decade more SaaS tenure.

2019 – 2022

Sr. Business Development ManagerMonarch & Andre Landscape

My last stop before software, and some of the most fun years of my career. Sold commercial landscape maintenance: multimillion-dollar, multi-year recurring revenue contracts to master-association HOAs, commercial shopping centers, business parks, and retail. Closed Qualcomm's corporate campus as a multimillion-dollar, multi-year deal. Grew Andre from $21M to over $30M in under a year through creativity, ingenuity, and finding ways to differentiate in a crowded market. Heavy discovery, long oversight cycles, creative solutioning: enterprise selling, with dirt on it.

2013 – 2019

Senior Business Development ManagerFour Seasons Tree Care

Started as an ISA Certified Arborist and Tree Risk Assessment Qualified rep, a literal tree scientist, earning trust with homeowners and commercial properties by diagnosing the problem correctly before ever pitching a fix. Moved into building the company's sales strategy from the ground up: introduced Salesforce, Slack, Asana, and ArborPlus to a team running on none of it, then used the data to run strategic accounts, retention programs, and pipeline forecasting. Hit 104% of quota in 2016, 127% in 2017, and 156% in 2018.

location.cfg

Moved from California to North Carolina in November 2024 to be closer to family after my father's Parkinson's diagnosis. We live in a 105-year-old historic home in a small town at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And we absolutely love it. It's our version of Stars Hollow (if you know, you know), and our kids get to swim in waterfalls all summer long.

Travel is easy too: CLT airport is striking distance away. Getting onsite with customers or my team has never been an issue.

Dad to 4 boys (Jordy, Brady, Cayden, Sonny).

Climber, mtn biker, surfer. If it's in the woods or the ocean, you'll find me out there doing it with my wife and boys. Work hard. Play hard.

Travis's extended family gathered outside a historic home decorated with holiday lights, plus a photo grid of his three boys, rock climbing, surfing, and a beach family portrait

contact.sh

Get in Touch

I'd like to keep doing this from the inside.

I've spent my career helping organizations adopt technology that made people nervous. This year I built my own workflows and GTM tools with AI-native tooling, taught hundreds of others how, and watched it spread like wildfire throughout Salesforce. Let's build the future together.

travismathews88@gmail.com 858-413-5588 LinkedIn

Travis

hire-me.exe

Achievement Unlocked

You explored the whole desktop. I'd call that qualified interest.

You've now seen the pattern up close: ropes course engineer to arborist to commercial closer to AI-native strategic seller. Every stop, the same move. Go deeper than anyone expects, build the thing, teach everyone else.

The next thing I want to master is selling for the company building this future. If you're reading this from inside one of those companies, the buttons below are for you.

travismathews88@gmail.com 858-413-5588 LinkedIn

// double-tip: type "travis" anywhere

Deal Review 01

S&C Electric

A century-old company that makes the global power grid work, still running its highest-dollar agreements on guesswork. Here's how a free training session turned into an 8-month deal cycle and a $1.2M TCV win, against a competitor that wasn't even a CLM company.

GNACV: $384K

TCV: $1.2M

Cycle: ~8 months

The Setup

S&C Electric, headquartered in Chicago, designs and manufactures the electric power transfer equipment behind commercial, industrial, and institutional power systems. In short: they help make the global power grid work.
Over a century old, and only just now going through a real digital transformation.
No single source of truth for existing contracts. No real pathway to negotiating high-dollar sales and vendor agreements.
The cost of that gap: millions lost over the years to missed renewals and lost contracts.

↓ it started with a training session nobody thought would matter

How It Started

Self Sourced: hosted a free training for the legal and HR teams to drive adoption and increase utilization.
Post-training, the Q&A sesh turned into a technical discovery.
Their GC, Harman Toor, lifted the veil on major issues with how contracts actually moved through the business.
That one conversation kicked off an official CLM review.

↓ at the same time, a second team was quietly running its own evaluation

The Curveball

At the same time, Katie Booth, S&C's IT Global Sourcing Leader, and her team were evaluating a Source-to-Pay solution. Each team had its own board-approved budget.
Harman flagged it to me directly. Neither budget was close to what a deal like this would actually cost.
Competitors in the room, ContractPod AI and Ironclad among them, raced to the bottom to fit that number.
We made a different bet: instead of shrinking the deal to fit the budget, build the case to expand the budget itself.

↓ so instead of selling to one department, I threaded the whole business

The Play

Spent time with our SI partner, Audet Magna, digging into sourcing's requirements: could one platform actually solve both legal's CLM problem and sourcing's S2P problem?
The play wasn't just multi-threading up legal's chain of command. It was cross-department threading: sourcing, procurement, IT, and legal, all at the same table.
Brought every one of those department heads together for an onsite in Chicago and showed them how a single platform could solve all of it at once.
Still well outside their original budget, but now every leader in the room could see exactly why it was worth fixing that.

↓ but the deal almost died over one word: POC

The Workaround

Their insistence on a POC nearly killed the deal. For a CLM deal like this, we can't hand over a traditional POC.
Called our SI, Audet Magna, and asked for a guided sandbox instead.
Gave Harman and Katie hands-on control of a legal- and procurement-focused CLM environment: AI-assisted contract review, workflow building, all of it.
It worked. They loved it, and we controlled the experience instead of leaving them to blindly test features in the dark.
That guided experience is what built the comfort they needed to actually partner with us and Audet Magna.

↓ then came the number that almost broke the deal

The Wall, Won

Believing in the value wasn't enough. They needed to build their own internal case to take back to the board to actually expand the budget and the scope.
We could have taken a quick, easy ~$75K win in Q3. DocuSign's CLM stands on its own merits, and I believe we win that deal on that alone.
We bet on the bigger opportunity instead. It pushed the timeline into Q4, but it 5x'd the deal.

Exhibit — Business Value of DocuSign CLM for S&C Electric

Business Value of DocuSign CLM for S&C Electric slide showing $655,625 total estimated annual benefit, 6000 annual contract volume, 7416 annual sales and legal hours saved, and 171% ROI, broken into value drivers for revenue, sales and legal productivity, and reduced revenue leakage

↓ and this isn't a one-deal story

Who I've Worked With

* Dentons — $1.4M TCV

Ran an EBC at the Willis Tower in Chicago with 15 execs from around the world, closed out over dinner at Tre Dita. Led to a global consolidation plus QES/AES add-ons.

* Qualcomm — $3.2M TCV

Knew their Dir. of Engineering through mountain biking, heard about an active RFP out to 10 landscape companies, and asked to be added last minute. Multi-threaded up to the President of Procurement, built a crew structure weighted around their biggest pain point (irrigation), and priced 30% above the next vendor. Won on understanding their campuses better than anyone else in the room.