From Pressure to Partnership: What Martial Arts Teaches Us About Building Sales Engines That Actually Last
Entrepreneurship isn’t a career path. It’s a full-contact sport.
I left my conversation with Michel Laporte Godorn feeling like I’d just stepped out of a sparring session, not a podcast booth. My mind was spinning. Because he articulated something I’ve been struggling to explain to clients for years: entrepreneurship isn’t a career path. It’s a full-contact sport. And most people have no idea what they’re signing up for.
Michel is a serial entrepreneur, a full-contact karate black belt since childhood, and someone who has spent the last decade building what he calls a “black belt sales” methodology for founders and small business owners. He’s been through the highs and lows—built six companies, worked his way from immigrant kid with a thick accent in Sweden to sales director managing 120-million-kronor turnovers, and then chose to step away from safety to build something uncertain. Again.
What struck me most wasn’t his credentials. It was his calmness about the brutality of the journey.
Entrepreneurship as a Full-Contact Sport
There’s a narrative about entrepreneurship that I call the “Ferrari narrative.” You see it on Instagram, in TED talks, in founder profiles. It goes like this: you have a great idea, you build it fast, you raise money, and suddenly you’re living a dream life with unlimited freedom and exponential growth.
Michel laughs at this narrative. Not unkindly. He just says: that’s the 1%. For the other 99%, entrepreneurship is the hardest way of life you can choose.
His background in martial arts is key to understanding why he’s so calm about this. He’s been getting hit his entire life—literally. When you grow up in full-contact karate, you don’t romanticize pain. You respect it. You learn that pain is information. You learn that your reaction to getting knocked down matters infinitely more than how hard you got hit.
I kept thinking about one line he shared: “It’s not about how hard you can get hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
That’s Rocky Balboa’s speech, and it’s also the entire game of entrepreneurship.
This week, I was sitting with a founder who was two months into a funding round. She’d raised some money—enough to feel real, but not enough to feel safe. And she was in that weird space where the pressure had actually increased. Now she had a burn rate. Now she had people depending on her. Now every week without traction felt like a countdown timer.
I told her what Michel told me: “The toughest moments are often the closest you’ll ever be to your next level. Most people throw in the towel right there.”
She went quiet for a moment. Then she said: “So I’m not supposed to figure it out quickly. I’m supposed to figure it out while I’m getting punched.”
Exactly.
The implication here is huge for any leader building a team or culture. You can’t opt out of the hard moments. They’re not bugs in the system; they’re features. The question is whether you’ve built the mentality, the process, and the culture to keep moving through them.
Your Product Is Always Second
Here’s a statistic that stopped me in my tracks: seven out of 10 solopreneurs can’t pay their bills with their own business. And nine out of 10 startups fail within the first 18 months, even with funding.
Let that sit for a second.
Michel didn’t throw these numbers at me to be depressing. He threw them at me to make a point. And that point is this: having a good product or service is not enough. Not even close.
Most entrepreneurs get this backwards. They obsess over the product. They refine it, perfect it, add features, polish the pitch. And then they go to market and wonder why no one cares.
Michel’s insight—one he’s tested across dozens of founder relationships—is that the product or service is always second. What comes first is a deep, real understanding of the problem your buyer is facing and the buying behavior behind that problem. Not the intellectual understanding. The real one. The one grounded in economic stress, frustration, and the actual way people decide to change.
Most entrepreneurs never do this homework. They think the solution is obvious and that everyone will just see it. Instead, they end up in what Michel calls the “discovery phase”—which is really just months of confusion, burning money, and wondering why their thing isn’t selling.
When Michel finally cracked the code around 2020–2021, it wasn’t because he had a better product. It was because he started talking to founders about what was actually stressing them out. Survival. Cash flow. Not knowing where the next paying client would come from. And suddenly people started listening. Because he was talking to their pain, not his solution.
I see this all the time on the agency side. A brand will come to us and say, “We need a new campaign.” What they really mean is, “We’re not getting enough leads, and we don’t know why.” So we dig. And nine times out of 10, the problem isn’t the campaign. It’s the positioning. Or the pricing. Or they’re talking to the wrong person. Or they don’t have a real sales process. It’s rarely the creative.
But because “creative” is tangible and “let’s rethink your entire buyer experience” is scary, brands keep throwing money at campaigns.
The pattern Michel described is almost universal: companies invest heavily in what they’re selling and underinvest catastrophically in understanding how their buyers actually buy.
Here’s what I tell clients now, borrowed directly from Michel’s framework:
Start with the problem, not the solution. What economic stress or frustration are your buyers facing? Write it down. Be specific.
Map the buying journey, not the funnel. Where do they actually find information? Who do they talk to? What conversations happen before they’re even looking?
Test your understanding. Go talk to 10 buyers who chose not to buy from you. Why? What did you miss?
Then, and only then, adjust your positioning, messaging, or offering.
Most companies skip straight to step 4.
From Pressure to Partnership: Redesigning Sales Culture
Michel used a metaphor that I haven’t stopped thinking about. He said: when you have a closed fist, you can only punch. But when you open your hand, you can invite. You can collaborate. You can receive.
Pressure is a closed fist. Partnership is an open hand.
I immediately thought about sales teams I’ve worked with. The ones built entirely around quotas, daily targets, and “make the numbers” mentality. There’s a specific energy in those places. It’s desperate. Transactional. Tactical. People are hunting for wins, not building relationships. And buyers can feel it. Michel mentioned this—we don’t communicate through words first; we communicate through intention. If you’re desperate for the deal, your buyer senses that. And they pull back.
Partnership-driven sales organizations operate differently. They’re still ambitious, still hungry for growth. But the urgency is reframed. Instead of “hit the number this quarter,” it’s “do we understand why our buyer should change?” Instead of “send more emails,” it’s “are we solving the right problem for the right person?”
The incentives are different too. Instead of rewarding closed deals at any cost, you reward deep buyer conversations, accurate forecasting, and retention. Instead of “how many conversations can you have?” you ask “how many good conversations can you have?”
I was at a conference last month where someone on stage was talking about “growth at all costs.” And I realized: that phrase is the war cry of the closed-fist sales culture. It sounds motivational. It isn’t. It’s exhausting. It leads to churn. It leads to small teams burning out. And it usually leads to a product or service that no one actually wants.
Michel doesn’t argue against ambitious growth. He argues for intelligent growth—growth grounded in a real understanding of the market and a process that can be repeated without burning out.
The shift from pressure to partnership isn’t small. It requires:
Redefining KPIs: Not just deals closed, but quality of pipeline, forecast accuracy, and customer lifetime value.
Redefining rituals: Weekly team stand-ups where people share what they learned from buyers, not just how many calls they made.
Redefining hiring: Looking for people who want to build relationships, not just close deals fast.
It sounds soft. It’s actually the hardest work because it requires patience and a willingness to let go of the immediate hit of the closed sale.
Black Belt Sales in the Age of AI
The question Michel gets asked constantly is: “Should I automate this with AI?”
His answer is elegant. First, be humble about it. Second, understand that a tool is only as good as the person using it.
He explained what he means by “black belt sales” through a story. He brought a client who practices martial arts to his sparring session. Afterward, the client said something like: “I noticed you and the other black belts didn’t rush at me like the lower belts did. You were patient. You waited. And then you destroyed me.”
That’s black belt sales. It’s not about being aggressive. It’s about patience, precision, and understanding the opponent. Beginners swing wildly and hope something lands. Black belts observe, wait, and strike with economy of motion.
For decades, sales has been measured in outputs: calls made, emails sent, meetings booked. But a black belt in sales is measured in understanding, in reading the buyer’s state of mind, in timing. It’s about process, not just results.
Here’s where AI comes in—and where it doesn’t.
AI is perfect for the repetitive, low-complexity parts of sales. Reminder calls? Absolutely. Initial qualification sequences? Yes. Data enrichment and list building? 100%. These are the things that free up human sales time and attention for what actually matters.
But AI is not a substitute for understanding. Michel gave the perfect analogy: “I can get a tractor, some water, some seeds, and a piece of land. But that doesn’t make me a farmer.” You still need to understand the earth. You still need to understand agriculture.
The same is true in sales. You can buy every AI tool on the market, but if you don’t understand how your buyer makes decisions, you’ll just accelerate your current level of incompetence. You’ll send more bad emails, faster.
I’ve seen this exact pattern. A Marketing Director gets excited about an AI outreach tool. They load it up with their list of 10,000 people. And suddenly they’re reaching way more people with their mediocre message. The unsubscribe rate goes up. The spam complaints go up. The “do not contact” list explodes. And they’re left wondering why a tool that promised to save them time actually made their situation worse.
The truth is, the tool did exactly what it was supposed to do. It amplified their current approach. If their current approach was flawed, all they did was scale the flaw.
For leaders trying to navigate this right now, here’s what I’d suggest:
Where to automate:
Outbound scheduling and reminders (especially for people already in your funnel)
Data collection and enrichment
Follow-up sequences once a real conversation has started
Analysis of customer data to identify next-best actions
Where to stay human:
Initial discovery conversations with prospects
Complex deal navigation
Relationship building with key stakeholders
Strategic account planning
Any moment where the buyer is deciding whether to change
The hybrid approach wins. You use AI to handle the routine so your people can focus on the complex. But you only do this after you’ve invested in understanding your buyers deeply.
Breaking the 1M Ceiling and Staying Sane Doing It
Michel works a lot with small business owners stuck between 500K and 1M in revenue. There’s a specific wall there. The business is real enough that it feels viable, but it’s not yet big enough to feel safe. The founder is doing the work of three people. The margins are tight. One customer leaving feels like a catastrophe.
His advice is practical and unsexy. Start at the roots of the tree.
First, do your competitor research. Michel asks founders: who are your top five competitors? Why do people buy from them? What’s their weakness? Most can’t answer these questions. They’re too busy executing. But without this foundation, you’re flying blind.
Second, work backward from a realistic number. If you need to make 100K a month to survive and grow, how many customers at what average deal size gets you there? Now, what does your sales process need to look like to hit that consistently? Most businesses don’t design from this anchor point. They just “sell” and hope.
Third, fix your pricing and packaging. There are so many underpriced businesses out there. A founder will have a service that’s worth 5K a month and they’re charging 1.5K because they’re not confident enough to ask for more. This keeps them in survival mode forever.
Fourth, build a real digital strategy. Not a social media presence that makes you feel productive. A strategy for where your actual buyers are and how to reach them with substance. For a lot of B2B businesses, that’s LinkedIn. For others, it’s somewhere else entirely. But the strategy should be intentional, not reactive.
This week, I realized something while working with a new client. We were redesigning their go-to-market, and I kept coming back to Michel’s framework. And I realized that this work—the unglamorous stuff of understanding competitors, fixing positioning, building process—is the real work of scaling. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t make for a good LinkedIn post. But it’s what determines whether you break through the 1M ceiling or get stuck there for five years.
There’s another part of Michel’s advice that I think is underrated: the importance of routine for emotional survival.
Michel spars every Monday. Fifty rounds. He walks in the forest. He has a rhythm that grounds him. He told me that entrepreneurship without routine is a recipe for burnout and bad decision-making.
I’ve noticed this in my own life. The weeks where I protect my early mornings for a run, where I have tech-free time in the evenings, where I’m intentional about disconnecting—those are the weeks where I make better decisions. The weeks where I’m “always on”? That’s when I make dumb calls and get reactionary.
For any founder reading this: routine is not a luxury. It’s infrastructure. It’s how you stay sharp enough to keep punching back when life hits you.
Build a Process, Not a Persona
I think the thing I’ll take from Michel forever is this idea of process over personality, of maturity over aggression, of staying in the fight long enough to learn.
The world doesn’t need more charismatic founders or salesy sales people. What it needs is more people who understand their market deeply, who build repeatable processes, and who have the discipline to trust those processes even on the hard days.
You don’t need to look like LinkedIn’s version of success. You don’t need the Ferrari or the three exits or the perfect pitch. You need to understand your buyers, build a sales process that’s grounded in that understanding, and keep showing up.
In the end, both on the mat and in the market, the winners are rarely the ones who hit the hardest. They’re the ones who stay in the fight long enough to learn.
Read more at: https://codedesign.org/voice-experts-michel-laporte-godorn