In the Season 3 premiere of Revenue Mavericks, I sat down with Greg Davis, Chief Revenue Officer at MarkMonitor. Greg has had a career shaped by one consistent theme: the willingness to be uncomfortable. From Thomson Reuters, where he spent a decade rising from individual contributor to Head of the Americas, to stints at LinkedIn and Dow Jones, to his current role leading the entire commercial organization at MarkMonitor, Greg keeps choosing the stretch assignment. What makes him stand out isn't just that he takes the risk. It's what he does once he's in the seat.
Before Greg ever set foot in a professional sales environment, he was already running a full outbound motion. He just didn't know it. As a junior college soccer player, he wanted a Division I scholarship but had no connections and no recruiting interest. So he pulled out a massive college handbook, identified 300 schools, wrote about 200 handwritten letters to coaches, and started cold-calling another 50. He tracked every call on a data sheet: who he reached, what they said, whether he needed to follow up.
Most coaches told him he was too late. Scholarships were filled. But one coach at the University of Denver happened to have a starter go down with an ACL tear at the exact position Greg played. Timing met persistence, and Greg earned a partial scholarship.
He didn't realize he was training himself for sales. His plan was to become a bond trader. But the system he built, the tracking, the follow-up cadence, the willingness to hear "no" and keep calling, became the foundation for everything that followed. As Greg put it, if he hadn't measured what was working and what wasn't, he never would have known which calls to keep making.
Years later at Thomson Reuters, Greg was managing a sales team he'd turned from underperforming to the top-selling team in the division. When the head of Americas role opened up, he assumed he wasn't qualified. He told his boss he wasn't going to put his hat in the ring.
She didn't accept that. She pushed him to speak with the division's general manager, who asked Greg a series of "why not?" questions and told him he was selling himself short. The advice was simple: apply for the learning experience. If you don't get it, you'll be better prepared next time.
Greg applied. He got the job. And the imposter syndrome hit hard. But as he settled in and the team responded, the experience fundamentally changed how he leads. He now believes that one of the most important things a leader can do is see potential in people that those people don't yet see in themselves. Growth, he says, always starts with discomfort. And if you never take the chance, you stay stagnant.
Greg coaches UFC fighters in his life outside of sales, and the philosophy carries over directly. His approach to leading a commercial organization starts with one principle: never forget what it's like to be an individual contributor. The people on the front line are the ones fighting the battle. His job, as he describes it, is to be an obstacle remover. He wants reps to come to him with the things getting in their way, and then he solves for those.
Beyond removing friction, Greg emphasizes a coaching model that mirrors what happens in a fighter's corner. You can give guidance between rounds. You can prepare someone with the right training. But when the bell rings, the person in the ring has to solve their own problems. He gives every new manager on his team a Harvard Business Review article called "Who's Got the Monkey?" for exactly this reason. If you do the work for people, they'll just keep handing you more of it.
The rest of his framework is equally practical: a consistent sales vocabulary across the organization, an integrated go-to-market strategy where marketing and sales speak the same language, and a set of KPIs that measure what actually matters rather than vanity metrics. He also spends the first two months in any new role just listening, interviewing reps about what's working and what isn't, then reorganizing around what they tell him.
What stuck with me about Greg's story is the consistency of the thread. The 17 year-old who built a tracking sheet to cold-call college coaches is the same leader who today tells his reps they're the CEO of their own territory. The instinct to figure it out, to build a system when no one hands you one, to keep showing up when the answer is "not right now," that's not something you learn from a training manual. It either gets built into you through experience, or it doesn't.
Greg also reminded me of something I think about a lot as we build Terret: the best sellers often don't know why they're great. They just do things intuitively. The opportunity with AI is to extract what those top performers are doing and make it available to everyone else who's coachable but needs someone, or something, to show them the way.
Listen to the full conversation on the Revenue Mavericks podcast.