Mark Zides

The reasoning is that at every growing company the list gets longer, everyone is busy, and the work that actually moves the number keeps sliding because something louder arrives in the inbox. Zides uses a time calculation rather than an exhortation: if 15 of 60 working hours go to things that really matter, getting that to 30 doubles output without adding a single hour.

Zides retells the 1997 Apple story, where Steve Jobs drew a grid on a whiteboard — consumer and pro across the top, desktop and portable down the side — and told the team to build one great product per box while everything else got cut. The exercise that follows is five minutes long: list everything on your plate, separate what moves the business from what keeps you busy, circle the two things that would change where the year ends, and hand off or kill the rest.

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Two pieces of reasoning support this.

• The first is a five-minute dependency test on the last 10 closed-won deals, where fewer than seven deals closing without the founder in a single meeting signals dependence, with the cost argued to land at exit as an earn-out and a smaller check rather than this quarter.
• The second is arithmetic: 15 selling hours a week, a deal that consumes about 10 of them across calls, proposal and pricing, roughly 75 deals a year with no holiday, and a $3M ceiling at $40K a deal — so buying more leads only makes the line outside the founder's calendar longer.
• The prescribed sequence is player, then player-coach.

In the second post Zides walks through the ceiling math directly, noting that founder-led sales is great until it becomes the ceiling, and says the handoff order is the thing most founders get backwards.

Zides states plainly that at Series A a founder should be closing most of their own deals, so the target is not an early exit from selling — it is a company that can close without the founder once it needs to.

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The fix is deliberately boring: an hour on the calendar every Friday, same time, no exceptions, where every deal gets the same question about what it would take to move it toward close next week.

• If a salesperson is in a client pitch, someone else gives the update.
• No new tool or CRM overhaul is involved; the point is that the review happens on a schedule instead of depending on someone remembering to look.
• Without it, a stalled deal surfaces only when someone finally asks, weeks later.

Zides says CoreAxis missed its number early on and the miss was on Zides, because nobody knew until it had happened.

• The following week the Friday hour started, and by Monday morning the team knew exactly which deals it was going after.
• Zides connects the habit to playing goalie at Babson: see the whole field, be the last line, tell everyone where to stand.

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The method is an audit before any spend: the client list, the CRM and the pipeline, with a named relationship owner attached to each priority account and an approach designed so the internal partner can easily say no.

A staffing group inside a larger services firm asked Zides for more leads and more marketing.

• Zides asked to see the client list first and found that most of the accounts the team wanted were already clients of the wider firm, with the relationship sitting in another part of the business and nobody having walked down the hall to ask for the introduction.
• The response was a short priority list with the owning partner named next to each account, joint client meetings instead of the two teams taking turns, and a quarterly business review on every priority account because that is where the next need shows up, often months before anyone would otherwise hear about it.
• Zides describes the outcome as net new opportunities with existing clients and nothing spent externally.

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Zides extends the argument with a credited outside source: Mark Schopmeyer of Revenue Brew notes that reps who skip the BDR path and go straight to AE tend to have a lower success rate, which Zides reads less as a matter of months served than as the loss of the correction that seat provided.

A CEO brought Zides in on a rep who was not hitting her number.

• Zides listened to the next five calls and found every one ended with no ask and no next step, because nobody had taught the rep to ask.
• Once the rep started asking, the post says the pipeline more than quadrupled over the next five deals and the rep made the number.

Zides treats the compressed SDR-to-AE path as a real gain and does not argue for restoring the old timeline — the open question raised is who does the correcting now that the longer path has been shortened.

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The method is four questions answered before posting the job or calling a recruiter: what this person will own in 90 days that nobody owns today, who they report to and whether that manager has time to manage them, what would make you let them go a year from now, and whether the need is permanent or a project with an end date. An unanswered fourth question means the work may not need a full-time hire at all.

Zides's prompt is a request to hire a Rockstar, met with the question of what the Rockstar is supposed to do on a Tuesday. In a separate post on the chief-of-staff role, written for Forbes in an item credited to Edward Segal, Zides describes the strong version of that job as someone who sees friction coming and deals with it before it reaches the founder, with the presence to get a decision made on the founder's behalf; early on the founder explains what they want, and a year in the good ones are two steps ahead.

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If you see the play developing and stay quiet because it feels awkward, it ends up in the back of the net and everyone looks around wondering what happened. The flip side for founders is making it safe for the people on the team who see the whole field to say where to stand.

Zides draws on their own time as a soccer goalie: goalies see the whole field, are the last line, and tell everyone where to stand whether they were asked or not. In a second post Zides quotes HR leader Diane Gherson's question for boards — what steps are we taking to protect brain health — with the observation that everyone gets the same AI, but not everyone keeps a team that can think.

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Zides describes missing a number early at CoreAxis and not knowing until after it happened.

• The fix was an hour on the calendar every Friday, same time, no exceptions.
• Every deal got the same question: what would it take to move this toward close next week?
• By Monday the team knew which deals it was going after.
• Zides says no new tool and no CRM overhaul were involved, just an hour that never moved, and connects the habit to playing goalie at Babson: see the whole field, tell everyone where to stand.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the clearest evidence for the brief's repeatable pipeline review process. A brand evaluating a fractional CRO engagement can ask how this cadence gets adopted, who runs it when the leader is absent, and what happens to a deal that stalls between Fridays.

Zides draws a line: founder-led selling helps until it becomes the only path to a closed deal.

• The test is to pull the last 10 closed-won deals and count how many closed without the founder in a single meeting.
• Fewer than 7 out of 10 signals founder dependency.
• Zides argues the cost lands at exit rather than this quarter, because buyers discount a company that cannot show revenue repeating without the founder, and that discount shows up as an earn-out and a smaller check.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a transition plan because it gives a specific diagnostic and ties the problem to valuation rather than only workload. A campaign angle can lead with the 10-deal test and then move into the handoff sequence.

Zides walks through a simple calculation: 15 hours a week available to sell, one deal eating about 10 of those hours, which caps the year at roughly 75 deals.

• At $40,000 a deal, the ceiling is about $3 million, and more leads only make the line outside the calendar longer.
• The recommendation is player, then player-coach, and Zides writes about the handoff order most founders get backwards.

For brands planning a campaign

This gives a buyer a concrete way to frame the founder-led sales transition: quantify the current ceiling first, then sequence the handoff. It also suggests question areas for a fractional CRO interview, such as how the first sales hire is chosen and what the founder stops doing.

A staffing group inside a larger services firm asked Zides for more leads.

• Zides asked to see the client list, CRM, and pipeline first.
• Most of the accounts the team wanted were already clients of the firm, and someone else in the building already had the relationship.
• The work became a short list of priority accounts with the partner who owns each relationship, a way to approach that partner without it feeling like a land grab, joint meetings with the client, and a quarterly business review on every priority account.
• Zides reports net new opportunities with existing clients and no external spend.

For brands planning a campaign

A campaign can use this as an example of pipeline review before pipeline generation. It is also a practical prompt for a fractional CRO engagement: who inside the company already has the relationship, and what internal referral path is missing?

Zides was brought in on a rep who was not hitting her number.

• Zides listened to her next five calls and found that every one ended with no ask and no next step, because nobody had taught her.
• Once she started asking, Zides says her pipeline more than quadrupled over her next five deals and she made her number.
• Zides also cites Mark Schopmeyer on reps who skip the BDR path and go straight to AE having a lower success rate, and argues the value of the BDR seat was having someone correct what the rep could not see in themselves.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant to AI-related briefs because it separates speed from skill. A campaign angle can ask whether a company has shortened the SDR-to-AE path and who is doing the correcting now.

Zides uses a goalie background as the frame: the goalie sees the whole field, is the last line of defense, and tells everyone where to stand.

• Leading means saying what you see early, loud enough for people to hear it, and then trusting them to move.
• Zides also tells founders to find people on the team who see the whole field and make it safe for them to speak up.

For brands planning a campaign

This is a useful starting point for the voice and operating philosophy behind the pipeline-review work. A campaign could use it to show that the reviews are about early visibility and escalation, not just reporting.

One post sets a five-minute test: pull the last 10 closed-won deals and count how many closed without the founder in a single meeting.

• Fewer than seven points to founder dependency, and Zides argues the cost lands at exit, as an earn-out and a smaller check, rather than this quarter.
• A second post runs the arithmetic: 15 selling hours a week, a deal that eats 10 of them across calls, proposal and pricing, roughly 75 deals a year if there is never a holiday, and a $3M ceiling at $40K a deal.
• Buying more leads, in that framing, only makes the line outside the founder's calendar longer.
• The prescribed sequence is player, then player-coach.

Founder-free share of the last 10 closed-won deals as a dependency test, plus time-and-deal-value arithmetic to size the revenue ceiling.

Zides states directly that at Series A a founder should be closing most of their own deals; the problem is only when founder involvement is the sole way a deal closes.

For brands planning a campaign

Strong material for a brief about moving a founder out of every deal: the test and the ceiling math give a campaign a concrete opening and something the audience can check with their own numbers.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The fix is an hour on the calendar every Friday with no exceptions: every deal gets one question, what would it take to move this toward close next week, and by Monday morning the team knows which deals it is working.

• If a salesperson is in a client pitch, someone else gives the update.
• No new tool and no CRM overhaul is involved; the point is that the review happens on a schedule instead of depending on someone remembering to look.
• Without it, Zides says, a stalled deal surfaces only when someone finally asks, weeks later.

A standing Friday hour, a single standard question per deal, and a substitute reporter when the deal owner is unavailable.

For brands planning a campaign

A campaign can offer an immediately adoptable low-cost process rather than a software purchase, which is easy to demonstrate step by step in a guide or a co-created template.

Examples: Source 1

Zides asked to see the client list first.

• Most of the accounts they wanted were already clients of the wider firm, with the relationship sitting in another part of the business, and nobody had walked down the hall to ask for the introduction.
• The response was a short list of priority accounts with the owning partner named next to each one, an approach designed so the partner could easily say no, joint client meetings rather than the two teams taking turns, and a quarterly business review on the calendar for every priority account because that is where the next need shows up, often months before it would otherwise be heard.
• Zides describes the outcome as net new opportunities with existing clients and nothing spent externally.

Audit the existing client list, CRM and pipeline first; assign a named relationship owner; pair the approach with a quarterly review cadence.

For brands planning a campaign

Suits a campaign aimed at a revenue engine that has stalled at the top of funnel, and gives an unusual angle against lead-generation pitches: the growth came from relationships the company already owned.

Examples: Source 1

The diagnostic is the reader's own week.

• If 15 of 60 hours go to work that moves the business, getting that to 30 doubles output without adding a single hour.
• The exercise is five minutes of listing everything on your plate, separating what moves the business from what keeps you busy, circling the two things that would change where the year ends, and handing off or killing the rest.
• Zides notes the list keeps getting longer at every growing company and that the work which moves the number keeps sliding to next week.

Time-allocation arithmetic, then a five-minute list, circle two, hand off or kill the remainder.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful when a brief is about operating discipline rather than demand generation: the exercise is small enough to put in front of an audience as a worksheet and produces a visible decision.

Examples: Source 1

The illustration is a rep whose five recorded calls all ended with no ask and no next step; once she started asking, the post says her pipeline more than quadrupled over her next five deals. Quoting Mark Schopmeyer of Revenue Brew, Zides notes that reps who skip the BDR path and go straight to AE tend to have a lower success rate, and attributes that less to months served than to having someone beside you correcting the thing you could not see in yourself.

Call review against a specific pattern, plus a credited external source used to extend the same argument.

Zides accepts the shorter SDR-to-AE path as a real gain; what it removes is the coaching, not the seasoning.

For brands planning a campaign

A fit for a sales-enablement or AI-in-sales campaign where the differentiator is coaching behaviour rather than tooling, with a before-and-after example that is easy to retell.

Examples: Source 1

Four answers come before posting a job or calling a recruiter: what the person owns in 90 days that nobody owns today, who they report to and whether that manager actually has time to manage them, what would make you let them go a year from now, and whether the need is permanent or a project with an end date.

• An unanswered fourth question means the work may not need a full-time hire at all.
• A separate post on the chief-of-staff role, written for Forbes in an item credited to Edward Segal, describes the strong version as someone who sees friction coming and deals with it before it reaches the founder, with the EQ and presence to get a decision made on the founder's behalf; early on the founder explains what they want, and a year in the good ones are two steps ahead.

Four defining questions applied before a role is opened, including a deliberate question about the conditions for ending the hire.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant for a talent, recruiting or people-ops brand: the questions are specific enough to become a short assessment or a co-branded checklist, and the chief-of-staff material shows reach into executive-team design rather than only sales.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

One draws on their own experience as a soccer goalie, where seeing the whole field means telling everyone where to stand whether they asked or not, to argue that leaders have to say what they see early and loud enough for people to hear, and that founders should make it safe for the people on their team who see the whole field to tell them where to stand. The other quotes HR leader Diane Gherson's question for boards, what steps are we taking to protect brain health, with the observation that everyone has access to the same AI but not everyone keeps a team that can think.

A personal sports background used as a leadership model, and a named external leader quoted to raise the AI question at board level.

For brands planning a campaign

Gives a campaign a leadership-and-team-angle beyond sales process, and the AI framing is a natural hook for an executive-audience brief that wants a human-judgment argument rather than a tools argument.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

They typically open with the failure mode, supply a number or a test the reader can run in minutes, and close with a direct question back to the reader.

• Several carry labelled framework elements, including a pipeline-review cadence and keeping the company scaling beyond the founder, both named as parts of the UNLOCK Method.
• External material is credited by name when it is used, including a Forbes article and a Revenue Brew piece attributed to Mark Schopmeyer.
• The range is steady across revenue mechanics, hiring, and leadership rather than one narrow beat.

For brands planning a campaign

Shows the shape a co-created asset would take in this creator's voice: a diagnostic question, a short arithmetic walkthrough, and a closing prompt to the reader rather than a product pitch.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

He says he has run some version of that review at every company since, which places him inside CoreAxis at the time he describes.

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He was quoted in the article; the post does not describe any commercial arrangement with Forbes.

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The post does not say whether he owns the publication or contributes to it.

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No working relationship with Revenue Brew is stated.

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He states the playing history directly; no current institutional role is described.

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Levey compares won-deal and lost-deal sales cycles to show how long deals linger, argues for disqualifying earlier and moving those opportunities into community-based nurturing instead of monthly newsletter follow-ups, and separately calls out CRM field sprawl — the habit of answering every question by adding another field — as the root cause of sales admin and angst. The move is the same as Zides's: diagnose an existing process before buying anything, then hand the question back to the reader.

Levey's frame is CRM and revenue-operations hygiene, with sales and marketing alignment as the payoff; the writing is informal and jargon-forward (DISCO, BANT, MEDDPICC, the LAAF syndrome) and runs on rhetorical riffs, where Zides leans on short arithmetic and founder-level decisions such as the handoff out of founder-led selling.

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Wilson's account of walking into companies as a fractional VP of Sales — a product not ready for the market, a weak pricing model, an undertrained team, a CRM untouched for 18 months, and a 90-day timeline to fix sales — ends at the same conclusion Zides reaches: the visible failure is usually evidence of a problem the founder has not located.

Wilson writes long narrative essays about accountability and the conditions for success, drawn from named fractional engagements, and covers CRM implementation partnerships; Zides stays shorter and more procedural, centred on cadence and on the founder's own exit from every deal rather than on sales-leader accountability.

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Mackenzie describes deals that stall even when the solution and the numbers stack up, attributes a dry pipeline to buyers who have learned to ignore generic outreach, and argues the fix is digital trust built before a meeting is ever requested — the same territory as Zides's argument that a rep who never asks for the order will not be rescued by faster tools.

Mackenzie writes from a procurement background and frames everything around buyer-side risk and trust, with posts disclosed as co-created with an AI tool; Zides works from the seller's operating rhythm — pipeline reviews, coaching, the founder's dependency on themselves — and names external material by source when used.

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The two posts here attack deal hygiene directly: one compares average sales-cycle length for won deals (165 days) with closed-lost deals (223 days) and describes cutting the lost cycle to 85 days by dis-qualifying earlier and properly, then moving those opportunities into community-based nurturing instead of leaving reps to check in on deals they know will not close.

• The other names the habit of solving every information gap by adding a CRM field, which Levey calls the L A A F syndrome (Let's Add Another Field), and argues for testing proposed fields without polluting the live instance.
• For a B2B SaaS company whose pipeline review keeps surfacing deals that should already be dead, or whose reps are buried in admin, those two arguments are closer to the problem than a handoff plan is.

The tradeoff is that Levey supplies the diagnosis but not the cadence.

• There is no equivalent of the weekly review hour, the same question asked of every deal, or the test of how many closed-won deals close without the founder in the room, so a company that wants a named, repeatable process and a sequence for moving from selling alone to player-coach still has to get that elsewhere.
• The evidence is also thin: two posts, roughly two months apart, with no framework, newsletter, or engagement model described.
• Treat this as a strong specialist view on deal hygiene and sales-marketing alignment, not as a substitute for the fractional engagement in the brief.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The first post walks through fractional VP of Sales engagements and lists what usually greets the new person: a product not ready for the target market, pricing that puts every deal in a weak negotiating position, a small and undertrained team, a CRM untouched for 18 months, and a 90-day deadline to fix sales.

• Wilson's conclusion is the sharpest line in the comparator set: the sales leader is almost never the problem, the sales leader is usually the evidence of the problem.
• The post also describes turning down full-time offers after seeing that the conditions for success were not there.
• If the B2B SaaS company suspects its last two sales hires failed for structural reasons, this is the framing that would surface it before another hire.

Wilson is diagnostic rather than procedural.

• The material explains how to find the real problem and says the job was to turn the lights on and set the next person up, which is useful before a transition plan but does not itself produce a weekly pipeline review or a defined handoff order.
• The second post is a public endorsement of a HubSpot consultant's onboarding approach, so it shows a network and a point of view on CRM setup rather than Wilson's own method.
• Two posts is also a narrow base; there is no described engagement model, no framework, and no process a reader could run next week.
• Choose Wilson to challenge assumptions about why sales keeps failing, and choose the reviewed creator when the deliverable is the repeating mechanism itself.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Both posts come at the problem from the buyer's side.

• One leans on an MIT Sloan Management Review article to argue that B2B decisions are more emotional and human than sellers admit, and that the people across the table are mainly trying to avoid the risk of choosing wrong; it draws a parallel between procurement and sales as two roles built on trust and risk reduction.
• The other describes a sales director whose team was making the calls and sending the emails and still getting no conversations, and reframes the dry pipeline as a trust problem rather than an activity problem, with the fix being to build digital trust and be seen as an insightful advisor long before asking for a meeting.
• If the assessment brief shifts toward why qualified buyers go quiet, this is the more relevant lens.

Mackenzie's material is philosophy before process.

• There is no review cadence, no pipeline arithmetic, no founder handoff sequence, and no measurement suggestion, so it will not satisfy a fractional CRO brief that asks for a repeatable operating mechanism.
• There is also a disclosure worth weighing for a co-created campaign: both posts state they were co-created with an AI tool, which establishes that Mackenzie works in that mode but means the published voice is a blend rather than one person's writing.
• A brand that wants a single distinct authorial voice should treat that as a factor, and a brand that wants to co-create should note the precedent.
• The two posts are close together in time, so this is a directional comparison rather than a full picture of the body of work.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2