Scaling Mindset & The Modern Selling Podcast

Mario Martinez Jr. and I opened this episode of the Modern Selling Podcast with his signature question — something nobody would find on my LinkedIn — and I told him I'm a licensed food sanitation manager, a certification I've kept current for over a decade so I can legally run the kitchen at the homeless organization I helped found in Chicago, which serves about 150 hot meals a day. It's a strange thing to have in common with the executive chefs I sit next to at recertification classes, but I love it.

From there we got into the real topic: what happens when sales and marketing stop being on the same team. I told Mario about a company where marketing hit every bonus target for MQLs while sales missed quota almost across the board — not because either team was bad at their job, but because nobody had agreed on what those leads needed to convert into. The fix wasn't firing anyone in either department; it was aligning both sides around one number, sales velocity, instead of letting each team optimize its own local metric in isolation.

We also talked about the moment a founder's superpower becomes their ceiling — the six-person startup where being the super-seller in every deal is exactly what built the company, and exactly what breaks it once you're at $100 million in revenue with 3,000 customers and can't personally take every call. Mario reminded me of the Marshall Goldsmith line: what got you here won't get you there. When I told him our actual win rate had come in at 23% instead of the 30-35% I'd assumed was "world class," it clicked for both of us — the number itself matters far less than knowing it cold and building your plan around the real one instead of the one you hoped for.