On this episode of Revenue Mavericks, I sat down with Lauren Goldstein, co-founder of Women in Revenue and Advisor to the CEO at Winning by Design. Lauren has run 25 marathons, built a mentorship community of over 11,000 women in revenue, and spent her career helping teams grow through the hardest stretches. In this conversation, she shared the leadership principles she carries from the road into the boardroom.

1. The Reset at Heartbreak Hill

Lauren's marathon career has taught her something she keeps coming back to in her professional life: the value of knowing how to reset when things get hard. She described running the Boston Marathon on a 70-degree day, climbing Heartbreak Hill late in the race with her resources depleted. The hill itself is not especially steep. What makes it brutal is the timing. It arrives when your body has already given most of what it has.

Rather than push through on willpower alone, Lauren chose to slow down, take water, and take inventory of the training she knew she had behind her. That moment became a principle she now applies everywhere. When markets tighten, when teams hit walls, when the energy drains out of a quarter, her instinct is not to grind harder. It is to pause, recalibrate, and draw on the preparation that got her there.

She also told me about pacing a friend named Barb through the New York City Marathon. Barb wanted a Boston qualifying time but had a tendency to sprint out of the gate without managing her effort. Lauren committed to pacing her through the first 20 to 23 miles, holding her steady. At mile 21, Lauren hit her own ceiling and told Barb to go. Barb finished with her qualifying time. For Lauren, the real takeaway was the discipline of holding someone at the right pace until they are ready to run on their own.

2. Alignment Is the Repeating Pattern

When I asked Lauren about the turning points in her career, she kept coming back to a pattern rather than a single moment. Every five to seven years in the tech industry, the market shifts and the headwinds pick up. The teams that survive those stretches are not necessarily the most talented. They are the most aligned.

She traced this back to her early career at Babcock & Jenkins, a B2B demand generation agency that rode the dot-com wave and then had to fight through its collapse. What she saw there has repeated across every downturn since: when times are good, talented individuals can move fast in different directions and still produce results. When the wind is in your face, that fragmentation breaks teams apart.

This was not just personal observation. Over the summer, Lauren interviewed roughly 60 go-to-market executives, including CEOs, CROs, and private equity operating partners. The question was broad: what are the levers and constraints you see in growth today? The answer that kept coming back was leadership and alignment, consistently ranking above new technology or new playbooks. Getting an entire team moving in the same direction at the same time with the same goals.

3. Three Principles, Not a Framework

Lauren is deliberate about calling her approach a set of principles rather than a framework. She credits Jacco van der Kooij's Revenue Architecture as the definitive growth framework and keeps the book by her side. Her own contribution, she says, is about what makes teams actually execute.

The first principle is enthusiasm. She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." She has carried this since she used it in her college essay, and her children can recite it from memory. She means it as a diagnostic tool, not a motivational poster. When enthusiasm disappears from a team, something is wrong, and no amount of process will fix it until someone stops to figure out what broke.

The second is getting comfortable with discomfort. Lauren described the daily experience of learning to do an old thing in a new way as genuinely uncomfortable, especially in an era when AI is changing how work gets done. She sees the willingness to stay in that discomfort, to keep experimenting and stay curious, as the real source of growth.

The third is alignment. For Lauren, great results come from great people, and when those people are truly aligned, one plus one equals a hundred. It is a simple idea, but the interviews she conducted this summer confirmed that it is the one most teams struggle with.

Why This Matters

Lauren's career spans three decades of market cycles, and the lesson she keeps learning is the same one: the teams that grow are the ones that stay together through the hard parts. That is a message worth hearing right now, when every revenue leader is navigating pressure to do more with less while the ground shifts under them. Her framing of leadership as pacing, resetting, and aligning is the kind of thing you can take into your next team meeting and actually use.

Listen to the full conversation on the Revenue Mavericks podcast.