Roger Shepard

Roger Shepard Sales Performance Strategist | Building AI Systems for Skill Acceleration at Fused Fortune 1000 & PE experience | Skill frameworks to AI-powered intelligence

I've spent 30+ years watching sales deals die—not to competitors, but to invisible patterns nobody talks about. The 40% that vanish because of coordination failures, not product or price. At Fused, I lead research and development for a revenue operations consultancy that helps Fortune 1000 companies and private equity portfolio companies uncover expansion opportunities hiding in plain sight—in their own data, their customers' earnings calls, strategic shifts, and signals nobody's connecting. We synthesize intelligence from everywhere to surface patterns that matter. The AI Side I've spent the last 18 months going deep on AI—not just using tools, but engineering workflows around them. My approach: match specific models to specific problems. Claude for synthesis and complex reasoning. Perplexity for real-time research. NotebookLM for document extraction. Gemini for academic validation. Each tool has strengths; the skill is knowing which to deploy when. What makes my work different is the meta-layer: I use AI to evaluate AI. I've built systems that catch when AI confidently makes things up, because I learned the hard way that impressive-sounding outputs can contain confidently stated nonsense. The discipline isn't in prompting—it's in knowing what NOT to trust. The results: 10-25x productivity gains on specific research workflows. Automated dashboards that compress 8-hour research cycles into 30 minutes. Sales playbooks that make account teams ask, "how did you see that?" The Sales Strategy Side Before AI became my daily toolkit, I spent years in the trenches of B2B sales operations. I've seen the patterns that kill deals—and the skill gaps that let them die. That domain expertise shapes everything I build. AI without business context is just expensive autocomplete. My current focus: translating customer intelligence into expansion opportunities they couldn't see. The best sales insight isn't "here's what the data says"—it's "here's what they're not seeing about their own customers." The Mexico Side I live in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where I'm working to grow the disc golf community. It's a different kind of systems thinking—building something from scratch by installing courses, developing players, and sponsoring tournaments. There's no playbook for establishing a sport in a city where nobody knows what it is. You just throw discs, make friends, and figure it out. It's also a useful reminder that not everything worth building can be optimized or automated. Some things require showing up, being patient, and trusting the process. What I'm Learning The AI landscape shifts weekly. I subscribe to the practitioners who are actually building—not the thought leaders recycling takes. I test learning methodologies on myself before deploying them with clients. And I'm increasingly convinced that the real competitive advantage isn't AI fluency itself—it's the ability to transfer that fluency into systems that work without you. I'm still figuring that part out.

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salesrampage/ rshepard@fus-ed.com

Roger Shepard is a Sales Performance Strategist with 30+ years in B2B sales operations who has spent the last 18 months engineering AI systems that compress 8-hour research cycles into 30 minutes. He builds multi-model workflows with publication-quality documentation, deploys verification protocols that catch AI fabrications before they reach clients, and architects intelligence systems that surface expansion opportunities hiding in customer data.

These capabilities position him to solve the transfer problem that separates individual AI mastery from organizational transformation—turning hard-won judgment about what AI should not say into systems that scale beyond any single practitioner.

Currently building disc golf infrastructure in San Luis Potosí, Mexico—proof he knows how to establish something from scratch where no playbook exists.