Business Episodes

Most companies believe revenue growth solves everything. Doug C. Brown has spent 33 years proving that the hidden profit in your business is usually a bigger opportunity than the next deal.
Doug is CEO of CEO Sales Strategies, and his premise is uncomfortable: the money you're chasing is already inside the company. You paid to acquire it. It's sitting in underpricing, in proposals nobody followed up on, in a fulfillment process that takes eight weeks when it should take one. It just never made it to the bank.
He walks host Lee Levitt through the diagnostic he uses to find it — 21 EBITDA drivers, each with five or six sub-points, applied in a fifteen-minute conversation. Then the results. A $2.4 million HVAC company that grew to $4.96 million while EBITDA moved from 13% to 28%, adding roughly a million in operating cash and $7 million in enterprise valuation. A $772,000 plumbing shop sitting on $226,000 in unclaimed EBITDA, found in two hours, with $40,000 of it recovered inside thre…

Episode Summary
Is the "growth at all costs" era over? In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt sits down with Amos Bar-Joseph, a third-time entrepreneur joining from Tel Aviv, to dismantle the broken "Unicorn Playbook."

Amos describes himself as an "Anti-Capitalist Capitalist," rejecting the traditional VC model of raising massive rounds to hire bodies. Instead, he is building Swann, an Autonomous Business designed to scale with Artificial Intelligence, not headcount. We explore why ...

In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt sits down with ETA leader Garth Fasano to discuss the massive shift from traditional inside sales to "Agentic AI"—autonomous agents that think, adapt, and sell without fatigue. Garth explains why small businesses are adopting this technology faster than enterprises to solve the "consistency" problem, ensuring every prospect gets a "fully caffeinated" interaction even after 175 calls. We also explore the future of "Bot-to-Bot" commerce, where AI buyers negotiate with AI sellers, and how this shifts the sales function from simple execution to strategic business visibility.

Episode Summary
What do selling gum in the 5th grade and playing defense in hockey have in common with high-stakes Enterprise Sales? According to Nina Iannuzzi, absolutely everything.


In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt sits down with Nina, a sophomore at the Isenberg School of Management (UMass Amherst) and a top-tier finalist at the recent National Intercollegiate Sales Competition (NISC).


If you think the next generation of sales talent is "soft," you haven’t met Nina. We...

Episode Summary
In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt sits down with Sean Gannon, founder of GTMPPL (GTM People), to answer the "unanswerable" question: Who is Sean Gannon?
We dive into a refreshing (and controversial) take on Sales Leadership: why the best managers strive to make themselves obsolete. If your team can't function without you, you aren't leading—you're hovering. From the trenches of EdTech to the nuances of Sandler Training, Sean shares candid stories about the transi...

Episode Summary
In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt geeks out with Maeve Ferguson, an ex-steeplechase jockey turned Big Four consultant and data expert. We dive deep into why the "Quiz Funnel" is dead and how Diagnostic Assessments are the new gold standard for generating high-quality leads.

Maeve explains the "Delulu Factor"—how data exposes the gap between perception and reality—and how to leverage that gap to close deals. We also explore Agentic AI: agents that run continuousl...

In this episode, I sit down with Matt Wilkinson — life sciences marketer turned AI strategy partner, Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, and board member at the Association of Key Account Management. Matt brings a sharp lens to the challenges of sales and marketing alignment, the rise of AI in B2B, and what it really takes to create customers in today’s environment.

We cover a wide range of topics, from why account-based approaches are so powerful when done right, to how culture ...