The Inside Out Problem - A Founders story

The Inside Out Problem - A Founders story

I watched Inside Out with my kid last year.

Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, Disgust — five characters arguing over the control panel of a person's mind, each one taking the wheel at exactly the wrong moment.

Somewhere during that moment, I stopped watching it as a kids' movie. I was watching every sales call I'd sat in on for fifteen years.

I've lived this industry from every seat there is. built a portfolio of $1.2M as an account manager, built an SDR team, sat as an AE, a sales manager and so on. At every rung, I did what every operator does — I hired people, coached people, promoted people, and made calls on who was ready and who wasn't.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're climbing that ladder: the higher you go, the more your job becomes reading people you've known for twenty minutes and deciding their next two years.

What the resume never tells you

Every CV I've ever reviewed looked good. Great numbers, sharp frameworks, confident answers. That's not a compliment to the candidates — it's a fact about how good everyone has gotten at preparing for an interview.

AI has only accelerated this!

A candidate today can rehearse with a chatbot, get word-perfect answers to "tell me about a deal you lost," and walk into round two sounding like a “seasoned closer.”

None of that tells you what happens in the room that actually matters — the one with the prospect, the real budget, the real pushback.

Someone says no for the third time today. Prospect asks for a 20% discount you can't give. A deal goes quiet for two weeks after sounding ready to sign. What does that person do, not say?

Five AEs get the exact same onboarding, from the exact same manager, selling the exact same product. One hits 70% of quota. The rest struggle to clear 20%. Same input. Wildly different output.

If training alone explained performance, that gap shouldn't exist. It does, every single time, in every sales floor I've ever managed.

The difference isn't skill. It's what's running underneath the skill.

32 mental constructs, and why 180 km/h isn't the same for everyone

Think of a mental construct as a memory with a feeling attached to it. If I tell you I've ridden a motorcycle at 180 km/h, that number means something specific to me — calibrated by every time I've done it before. For you, 100 km/h might feel like the edge of control. Same number, two completely different internal experiences of speed.

Sales runs on the same wiring. A prospect says no. One person hears: useful data, move to the next account. Another person hears: I'm not good at this, nobody likes my pitch, maybe I don't belong here. Same input. Two entirely different internal reactions — and two entirely different next moves.

I spent the last six months working with psychologists, not building something new from scratch, but applying frameworks with decades of proven grounding — some dating back to the early 1980s — specifically to the sales seat. We mapped out 32 of these mental constructs and built a way to see, in about 20-25 minutes, which ones are running strong in a candidate and which ones aren't there yet.

Not "is this person smart." Not "can this person talk."

But: under real pressure, what does their mind actually do?

Why this can't be gamed the way an interview can

Here's something I tell every hiring manager I talk to: AI can help a candidate sound impressive. It cannot help them sound like themselves. Every person has a vocabulary fingerprint — specific words, specific rhythms, specific ways of explaining a deal that's unique to how they actually think. You can't borrow someone else's mental model the way you can borrow their interview answers.

That's the part I built IncaZing to protect. Not a score nobody can explain. Not a personality label that doesn't translate to a sales floor. A read on whether someone's actual decision-making, under actual pressure, matches what the seat in front of them demands.

What this changes for the people I built it for

For a sales professional, this means finally getting judged on something closer to the truth than a resume and a good interview day. I've sat on both sides of that table long enough to know how often it gets it wrong — candidates interview brilliantly and stall in the first quarter, while strong performers never get a real shot because their first interview call didn't land.

That gap, between who someone actually is under pressure and who they appear to be on paper, is expensive.

For a hiring manager, this means knowing — before the offer, not 90 days after it — whether someone can sit in that seat and deliver, or whether they're someone you should be coaching differently, or someone you shouldn't be hiring at all. It means the difference between a "shortlisted" candidate and a "role-ready" one. Everyone can shortlist. Almost nobody can tell you, with evidence, who's actually ready.

A wrong hire costs a team months and money. A wrong promotion can take a strong performer and make them feel like a failure. A wrong read on a person can follow them for years, in their own head, long after anyone else has forgotten it.

Where this goes next

I'm starting with sales because that's the floor I know best — fifteen plus years. The same thinking is already being built out for customer success, with the same psychologists, the same rigor. Eventually I want this to sit as a layer over how any organisation understands its own people — not replacing judgment, never the sole basis for a decision, but giving the humans making the call a far clearer picture before they make it.

IncaZing is live today.

If you hire sales talent, or you are sales talent — take a look.