I Stopped Chasing the Number and Started Studying What Created It
Roxanna Marazzi is the founder of RM Consultancy and a former Vice President at Salesforce with over 20 years of experience in commercial leadership, sales and enablement across the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. She brings a practical perspective and approach to hiring, coaching, leading and developing consistently successful teams.
I spent the early part of my career obsessed with the number. I had good reason to be. My commercial instincts were formed in my family’s business, where revenue was never an abstract key performance indicator (KPI) on a dashboard. It paid the mortgage. It created choices. It helped build the life my parents were working so hard to create. Performance mattered because the consequences were real.
When I entered corporate sales, I brought that same drive with me. I wanted to achieve, grow and prove what I was capable of, and the numbers followed.
At Rackspace, I worked with 70 enterprise clients and owned more than $500,000 in revenue. I ranked second among 24 business consultants in the United Kingdom. After moving to Asia, I achieved 159% year-to-date and was promoted from corporate business consultant to enterprise business consultant within six months.
At that point, I thought I understood performance. Then I became responsible for somebody else’s number. Everything changed.
What made me successful wasn’t enough
As an individual contributor, I could control many of the variables. My preparation. My activity. My customer relationships. My discipline. My response when something went wrong.
Leadership was different. My performance no longer depended only on what I could do. It depended on what I could enable other people to do.
People are different. One person needs autonomy. Another needs structure. One responds well to direct challenge. Another needs confidence before they can stretch. Some people have the capability but don’t yet believe in themselves. Others have plenty of confidence but need greater self-awareness.
I started to understand that leadership wasn’t about replicating my own approach in other people. It was about creating the conditions in which different people could perform.
The first proof came in Hong Kong
As sales manager for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in Hong Kong, I focused deliberately on engagement, morale, capability and sales training. The team achieved 158% in the first half of 2014. We established the first cloud business development team in Asia and achieved the highest organic delta hosted revenue in the region’s history that year.
The numbers mattered. But the lesson underneath them mattered more. People did not perform because I applied more pressure to the target. They performed because we strengthened the environment around them.
We developed capability. We created clarity. We built confidence. We made expectations visible. We paid attention to what individuals needed to execute consistently.
The number was the output. The human system helped create it.
The results travelled across markets
When I became head of sales for Asia, the scale and complexity changed. I was leading across Hong Kong and India, working with different personalities, markets and cultural contexts.
In the fourth quarter of 2014, we delivered 35% year-on-year revenue growth. The top three of the 17 sales representatives across Asia-Pacific came from our team.
Again, the numbers were important. But I was becoming increasingly interested in what was creating them. How much of the result came from the strategy? How much came from capability? How much came from confidence, clarity and consistency? How much came from the environment leaders created around their people?
Commercial outcomes told me whether the business had performed. The way people developed along the way told me whether that performance could last. High performance that leaves people depleted, fearful or dependent on one leader is not sustainable. The real test is whether people become more capable as the business grows.
High performance isn’t two people carrying everyone else
Later, when I led the United Kingdom mid-market team, we delivered 104% in the first quarter of 2015, 110% in the first quarter of 2016 and 100% in the second quarter of 2016. But one of the results I value most was a consistent 75% participation rate, alongside people progressing into the enterprise segment.
Why did participation matter so much? Because a team repeatedly carried by one or two exceptional performers may hit the target, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have built a high-performing team. You may have built dependency.
Sustainable leadership is not only about reaching the number. It is about increasing the number of people capable of contributing meaningfully to it. That requires coaching, clarity, honest performance conversations and consistent standards. It also requires leaders to stop stepping in and solving everything themselves.
I began asking myself a different question. Could I help more people succeed without needing me to be the hero? That became a far more meaningful measure of leadership.
Different company, same human principles
When I moved to WP Engine, the company, product and environment changed. The principles underneath performance did not. I continued focusing on clarity, coaching, accountability, individual motivation, behavioural standards and operating rhythm.
In 2018, I was named Global Sales Leader of the Year. In 2019, I earned Circle of Excellence recognition as a manager in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in both halves of the year. In 2020, I became International Sales Manager of the Year.
I don’t share those awards because the awards are the story. I share them because they gave me further evidence that the approach could travel. It wasn’t dependent on one company. One product. One market. Or one team.
The context changed. The humans didn’t.
Then came Salesforce
At Salesforce, the scale changed again. While I was a regional vice president, the organisation delivered 31% year-on-year growth in fiscal year 2020, 53% in fiscal year 2021 and 40% in fiscal year 2022.
By this point, I had stopped believing that sustainable performance could be created simply by pushing harder on the number. I was looking at the system around it.
Are expectations clear? Are leaders coaching or simply inspecting? Do people understand what good looks like? Are standards being applied consistently?
Are we developing capability or creating dependency? Do people understand how their work connects to the commercial outcome? What happens to leadership behaviour when the pressure increases?
My subsequent move into the role of vice president of enablement widened that lens further. I was no longer looking only at the performance of one team. I was considering the leadership capability, commercial discipline, operating rhythm and alignment across functions required to make performance more consistent at scale.
The question became bigger. How do you make high performance repeatable without removing the humanity that created it?
The numbers were evidence, they weren’t the lesson
Looking back across my career, there are plenty of results I could talk about.
159% individual performance
158% team performance
35% year-on-year growth across Asia
A consistent 75% participation rate
Three successive years of strong growth at Salesforce
Multiple global and international leadership awards
But none of those results tell the whole story. Behind them were people. Different motivations. Different strengths. Different experiences. Different responses to pressure. Different leaders creating different environments around them.
That is what eventually became the bigger lesson. You cannot sustainably extract performance from people. You have to create the conditions that enable people to produce it.
That means defining what good looks like, coaching rather than constantly rescuing, and recognising high performance without tolerating damaging behaviour. It means combining empathy with accountability, building confidence and capability rather than dependence, and paying attention to what happens to leadership behaviour when the pressure rises.
The frameworks came later
The systems I now use through RM Consultancy were built through years of carrying targets, making mistakes, leading across cultures, developing talent and being accountable when performance wasn’t good enough.
Every role added another lesson. Every team challenged another assumption. Every result gave me more evidence about what could be repeated and what could not.
Those lessons eventually became connected systems spanning leadership, human performance and commercial execution. Leadership Lens™ creates greater behavioural clarity around how people hire, manage, perform and lead. The RM Operating System™ focuses on the commercial rhythm and structure teams need to execute consistently. The Human Operating System™ starts further inside, with the self-awareness, regulation and identity required to lead other humans well.
The names came later. The lived experience came first.
Leadership becomes real under pressure
This is why I believe leadership development has to move beyond theory. Leaders don’t need another model that works perfectly in a workshop but disappears when they return to the business. They need something they can use when the quarter isn’t going well.
When the forecast changes. When somebody is struggling. When their best performer is damaging the culture. When the difficult conversation can no longer be delayed. When everyone is looking to them for an answer they don’t yet have.
Leadership becomes real when pressure tests whether the behaviour has genuinely changed.
Look underneath the number
When performance drops, leaders naturally examine the pipeline, conversion, activity, productivity, the forecast and execution. Those measures matter. But they are not enough.
Look underneath the number. Do people know what good looks like? Are managers coaching people to build capability or inspecting activity? Is accountability consistent? Are high performers being recognised and challenged?
Is the operating rhythm creating clarity or adding noise? Are leaders building confidence or dependency? Perhaps most importantly, what behaviour is pressure creating in the leadership team?
The number is often the visible output of a much less visible human system. I spent the early part of my career chasing the number. Then I became responsible for other people’s numbers and started studying what created them.
That changed how I sold. It changed how I led. It changed how I developed people. Ultimately, it shaped the work I do today.
The numbers changed. The companies changed. The humans didn’t.
Read more from Roxanna Marazzi
Roxanna Marazzi, Leadership & Commercial Performance Advisor
Roxanna Marazzi is the founder of RM Consultancy and a former Vice President of Enablement at Salesforce, with over 20 years of experience spanning commercial leadership, sales, enablement and people development across the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Roxanna’s work challenges the assumption that humanity and high performance sit on opposite sides of the table. She believes the strongest organisations build both. Through RM Consultancy, she helps leaders put that belief into practice by improving the everyday decisions and behaviours that shape culture and commercial performance.
