Sales Talk for CEOs

Denielle Finkelstein and Thyme Sullivan are Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Unicorn in Every Stall. Before becoming entrepreneurs, Denielle spent more than 20 years in fashion leadership, including executive roles at Ann Taylor, Coach, Kate Spade, and Talbots, while Thyme built a 27-year career at Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestlé. Both were the primary breadwinners for their families when they made the decision to leave corporate life and p...

"Nobody knows what the heck they're doing. It's the people willing to go out there and do it that are gonna be successful."

Lauren Goodell left a successful sales career to launch a startup while caring for both parents through serious health challenges and managing her own chronic illness. She shares lessons on resilience, leadership, customer discovery, and building a sustainable company.

• Left corporate sales and took a pay cut w...

Most sales organizations are training sellers to do the wrong job. In this episode, sales expert Becc Holland joins Alice Heiman to challenge some of the biggest assumptions in modern selling, from what qualifies as a lead to why buyers ignore outreach and what CEOs can do to build sales teams buyers actually want to talk to.

Becc argues that today's buyers are not looking for another product pitch. They are looking for expertise. S...

"There's never a good time to have a child. When you're a founder, you just do it."

Marie Berry built three companies across four continents before a personal osteopenia diagnosis led her to create YVO, a women's wellness brand making bone health modern, feminine, and measurable. In this episode, she shares how a 30-day rucking challenge with friends turned into a sold-out product line and a growing community of 600 women.

- Designed...

Cheryl Sew Hoy, CEO of Tiny Health, built a gut microbiome testing platform from her living room with a newborn, a toddler, and a co-founding spouse. In this episode, she shares the real mechanics of scaling a science-driven health company while designing a support system that actually works.

- Validated market demand by testing search keywords around baby eczema and allergies, then used those insights to shape paid and organic chan...

After spending a decade building a successful consulting career, Nikita Jain made the difficult decision to walk away from a path toward partnership and become a first-time founder. She shares how she navigated family concerns, found the right co-founder after more than 50 conversations, balanced entrepreneurship with her marriage and personal well-being, and discovered that building a company isn't about having the perfect plan&md...

Life has a way of interrupting even the best-laid plans. After nearly 30 years helping founder CEOs grow revenue - including working with companies that later became unicorns and helping many businesses increase their valuation and successfully exit - Alice Heiman is relaunching Sales Talk for CEOs with a specific focus on female founders. Going forward, the podcast will explore the realities women navigate behind the scenes while ...

Win more high stakes deals. In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Yvonne Lines, a strategic presentation expert, to unpack exactly how B2B sales teams can win their most important, high-stakes sales presentations, the ones that make or break deals.

Yvonne shares her proven process for creating audience-centric, story-driven presentations that drive decisions and close business. This episode is packed wi...

Events create demand. In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Jonathan Kazarian, Founder & CEO of Accelevents, the all‑in‑one event management platform that’s redefining how organizations run events from 20‑person dinners to 30,000‑attendee conferences.

Jonathan didn’t start in events tech, he came from finance. But when he couldn’t find software powerful enough to run a 900‑person f...

In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with trust‑selling pioneer Ari Galper to reveal why traditional sales techniques are failing in today’s climate and what CEOs, Founders, and Sales Leaders must do instead. Ari argues that trust isn’t a byproduct of selling; it’s the core of it.

Actionable takeaways for leaders:

• Train your team to lead with questions, listen until they share the full ...

In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Adi Klevit, founder and visionary behind Business Success Consulting Group, to expose a powerful truth many CEOs and Founders don’t face, your sales success often lives in someone’s head instead of in a scalable, repeatable system.

Adi walks through her proven approach of documenting, optimizing, and implementing processes so companies can finally scale ...

In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman talks with Gavi Wolf, CEO and Founder of IndieWalls, about how he scaled a creative business, turning an art marketplace into a commercial art consultancy serving major brands. Gavi discusses founder‑led sales, when and how he realized it was time to build a sales leadership function, and the hard lesson about motivating and compensating a high‑performing sales team.Rapid‑fire pi...

Stop wasting money on lead generation that doesn’t work. In this solo episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman delivers a powerful, no-nonsense rant every B2B CEO needs to hear. She challenges the outdated playbook of cold calling and SDR-driven outreach, revealing why it's costing you more than it’s delivering and what to do about it.

Alice shares real examples and modern strategies to generate high-quality leads th...

What happens when a math major turned cold-caller gets frustrated with broken sales systems? He builds a better one, then builds a company around it.

In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Ryan Reisert, the co- founder of Outbound Operators and CallBlitz, to trace his journey from burned-out rep to process-driven founder. Ryan reveals how years of trial, error, and dialing taught him that sales doesn&rsq...

What if your sales team is focused on the wrong thing?

Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt, co-founders of A to B Insight and co-authors of The FrameMaking Sale, reveal why traditional B2B tactics like BANT are outdated and how to win by building buyer confidence in their own decisions.

Connect with:

• Brent Adamson: LinkedIn | A to B Insight
• Karl Schmidt: LinkedIn | A to B Insight
• Alice Heiman: LinkedIn | Website
• Link to The FrameMaking Sa...

From hockey stick growth to flat on your face, it hurts and Collin Stewart can tell you firsthand. He had one customer before he left his full-time job, the problem was he still had one customer 18 months later. In his first endeavor this entrepreneur built what he thought everyone needed and kept showing them and expecting them to say how great it was, but they didn’t. “I was building my idea. I wasn’t building w...

When CEOs struggle to connect with customers, teams, or investors, it's rarely a strategy problem, it’s a storytelling problem. In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman sits down with Jeff Abracen, Founder of Disruptive Influence and storytelling coach to tech leaders, to uncover why a great story is a terrible thing to waste.

Jeff shares how he turned a high school “disruptive influence” label into a s...

There are two key ways to get in front of the people most likely to buy from you and Alice believes you may be overlooking them. 

The first is something she talks about all the time. So if you haven’t started expecting your team to do it, now is the time. 

Referral selling. Yes, you get a few referrals here and there but why not make it a regular occurrence. Alice explains briefly in this episode but for more details ...

Imagine if your sales team could rehearse complex deals before ever meeting the buyer, just like elite athletes pre-game. That’s exactly what Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (CEO) and Alix Berry (COO) of ExpertTheory make possible.

In this episode, Alice Heiman dives into how ExpertTheory helps companies simulate real-world sales situations through AI-powered, custom-built games. These immersive experiences go far beyond traditional t...