"I Can Sell Anything to Anyone" Is a Red Flag: A Conversation with Marta Rzymek

There's a compliment salespeople love to give each other that Marta Rzymek can't stand. "That person is great, they can sell anything to anyone." To her ears, it's an admission of guilt.

Marta is the head of sales at Brand24, one of Poland's best-known SaaS companies. She's spent nearly two decades in international sales across an unusually wide range, fashion, 3D printing, now a social listening platform, and she climbed from sales specialist to head of sales inside Brand24 itself rather than by hopping companies every eighteen months. She understands selling from the ground floor to the strategy layer, and she's refreshingly free of buzzwords about it.

The red flag hiding inside a compliment

Start with the line that gives this piece its title. When someone brags that they can sell anything to anyone, what Marta actually hears is: I don't care about your product, I don't care about your organization, and I don't care about your customer. It's about me and my ability to sell. Her whole approach runs the other way. She's been privileged, she says, to carry genuinely good products in her portfolio, and being honest to herself and to everyone she works with, all parties, is the thing that made selling feel clean.

She's quick to add the balancing truth, and it's an important one. Sales is not rocket science. It can be learned. It's not some godlike gift only a few people possess. You do need a certain set of skills, openness, willingness, curiosity, and some people genuinely won't enjoy it. But if you take the time to understand the product, the customer, and the process, it isn't something impossibly complicated. The red flag isn't confidence. It's confidence unhooked from the product and the customer.

Promoted from within, and honest about it

Marta joined Brand24 as a sales specialist and became head of sales in under two years. Asked what she did to earn it, she gives an answer she calls very Polish, very millennial: she wasn't the best salesperson on the team, and she wasn't the longest-tenured. There was a genuine gap in the organization, the team needed someone to lead it, and her CCO saw her in that role. She's grateful for the trust, and just as grateful the team accepted her, because moving from colleague to team leader is rarely as smooth as it looks. It's a strikingly unshowy account of a promotion, and it tracks with everything else she says about not making sales about yourself.

Balancing results and morale by staying close

Her LinkedIn lists team leadership and generating results as her main skills, two things that are often in tension. Push too hard for numbers and you can wreck a team. Her way through is proximity. She spends a lot of time on one-on-ones, understanding what each person needs right now, their strengths, their weaknesses, where they are. Not constant coaching, but constant understanding, which is what lets her hold team spirit and the process together at the same time.

Managers should keep selling

Should a head of sales still sell, or just manage? Marta is clear: don't stop selling. She doesn't have time for many customer calls now, but she jumps at every chance when a rep asks her to hop on. Selling is muscle memory, and muscle atrophies. Staying in live deals is how she understands what her team faces, what the industry looks like right now, and what customers actually need. The danger she names is becoming the person who only does sales in theory, and she refuses to be that.

Hire for curiosity, and distrust the magic question

The trait she looks for across every industry is the ability to learn, paired with curiosity and open-mindedness. The salespeople she most enjoys have a spark, they question the process, they'll tell her "we do it like this, and maybe we shouldn't." The second must-have is team spirit. She'd rather lose a high performer who kills the vibe than keep them, because the culture is worth more than one person's numbers.

And when I asked for her iconic interview question, the one that opens all the doors, she wouldn't fake it. She doesn't have one. Her intuition, she admits, has failed her hard many times, and she's lucky to have people around her who read candidates better than she does. It's the same humility again: the good call is often a team call, not a solo one.

Losing is the game

Every salesperson loses deals. Marta still wakes in the middle of the night replaying what she said, what she didn't, what she'd fix. That's just who she is, and years of trying haven't cured it. But she isn't mourning. Losing is part of the game, and she understands the game. You can't enjoy winning if you're never losing, and there's no win without a loss.

What AI actually changes, and what it doesn't

On AI, Marta is neither breathless nor dismissive. The single thing she recommends to anyone: record your sales calls and squeeze the intel out of them. The transcript holds a mountain of insight, customer pain points, patterns across use cases, material for product and marketing, that no human can extract by listening to two or three calls out of three hundred a month. It also powers self-coaching, and she's noticed people find it easier to take feedback from "a robot" than from the boss replaying the exact moment they fumbled. Use AI to help you write, too, but don't over-AI everything, because everyone can spot an AI-generated email a mile away.

Her time-capsule prediction is that the thing that won't change is people. B2B, B2C, it's human to human at the end of the day. Generations shift, communication styles shift a bit, but there are no "new people" that require reinventing the sales process from scratch. People don't change that much.

Key takeaways

"Sell anything to anyone" is a warning, not a flex. It signals a rep who cares about their own ability over the product and the customer. Honesty to all parties is the foundation.

Sales can be learned. It's not a mystical gift. Understand the product, the customer, and the process, and the interpersonal skills follow with willingness and openness.

Managers should keep selling. Selling is a muscle. Stay in live deals to keep it, and to actually understand what your team and customers face.

Hire for curiosity and team spirit. The ability to learn transcends industries, and a high performer who kills the vibe isn't worth it. Don't trust a single magic interview question.

AI's best use is intel, not automation. Record calls and mine them for patterns and coaching. Let it help you write, but don't over-AI everything.

Frameworks worth stealing

The honesty test for a sales hire

Before you're impressed that someone can "sell anything to anyone," flip it. Ask whether they care about the product, the organization, and the customer, or mostly about their own prowess. The salespeople who last are the ones who stay honest to every party and only sell what they believe is genuinely good.

Manage close, sell often

Hold results and morale together by spending real time one-on-one, understanding each person's strengths, weaknesses, and where they are right now. And keep taking live calls yourself, not to hit a quota but to keep your instincts sharp and stay in the loop on what customers actually need.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

When someone says they can sell anything to anyone, what I hear is: I don't care about your product, your company, or your customer.

Sales is not rocket science. It's not a godlike gift only some people have. It can be learned.

There is no win without a loss. I lose on a daily basis, and I understand the game.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Learn to walk before you run, one she admits she rarely follows because she always runs and then fails. And fake it till you make it, which she genuinely believes in, because you can't just will imposter syndrome out of your head, so you smile until you feel it.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? The same one, learn to walk before you run. She listens to good advice and then tends to ignore it, because she's not a fast learner.

What would you tell your younger self? Good days are coming and the prospecting grind ends. And, more seriously, losing several battles doesn't make you a loser. Young Marta treated every failure like the end of the world; she'd tell her to chill, it's a small part of what happens later.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Revenue versus team building, delivering the number while building a genuinely good team. She suspects that tension never fully resolves in sales.

Favorite spot? A picky eater who loves simple food, she'll take potatoes in any form, but above all kluski, Silesian dumplings, her comfort food.

Tool you can't live without? Besides Brand24 itself, Fireflies, her note-taker for transcribing calls, on top of the CRMs she treats as a given.

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Marta Rzymek is the head of sales at Brand24, where she rose from sales specialist inside the same company. Over nearly two decades she has led international sales across industries from fashion to 3D printing to SaaS. She can be found on LinkedIn.