How the Deal was Done · 2026-04-20 · 1h 4m
Episode Speaker Notes: Merel Roest - Head of Sales at Guardey, Founder @ Blackbird GTM The Episode: Merel Roest spent her first five years in marketing before moving into enterprise sales - and that background became her edge. At Freshworks, she closed a three-year, group-wide customer service transformation deal with a 5,000+ employee American organization, selling a product that wasn't fully built yet. Getting to yes meant running two parallel sales motions at the same time: one across multiple client stakeholders all the way up to their CEO, and one internally - working level by level through a hierarchical American HQ she could barely get face time with from her satellite office in the Netherlands. She won both. Now Head of Sales at Guardey, Merel is building the sales org from the ground up - rewriting the pitch, cleaning the CRM data, and using custom-built GPTs to accelerate her team's learning curve. What you'll take away: How to build a deal story that actually lands, how to run an internal sale when the product isn't ready, and what it really takes to go from President's Club rep to first-time leader.
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