The Business Development Mistake That Makes You Feel Productive with Kymm Martinez

Kymm Martinez was doing everything she was supposed to do.

She had scorecards. She had a tracker. She was having discovery meetings, working her network, logging her outreach activity. She had nearly 20 years of marketing experience at General Mills plus two CMO roles, and she understood business fundamentals. By every surface-level measure, she was doing the work.

But her pipeline wasn’t becoming predictable. And she couldn’t figure out why.

In Episode 285 of the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business podcast, Kymm Martinez sits down with Melisa Liberman to share what she discovered — and what it took to shift from doing more activity to doing the right activity.

About Kymm Martinez

Kymm Martinez is the founder of Wilder Marketing Group, a fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory practice. She works with small and mid-sized companies in the $5M to $150M range, helping leaders diagnose what’s happening at the heart of their growth challenges. She brings a general management lens to marketing — one shaped by nearly 20 years at General Mills and two CMO roles at a university and a large national nonprofit.

Kymm started Wilder Marketing Group in September 2024. At the time of this recording, she’s been in business for almost two years.

What Surprised Her About Going Independent

Kymm didn’t plan to become an entrepreneur. She describes herself as “a large company girl” — someone who loved the structure and scope of corporate life. But the longer she stayed in executive roles, the more she started tracking what gave her energy versus what took it away. She wanted more agency, more choice. She quit with no plan and figured out the rest on the other side.

One of the biggest surprises: the mindset shift from employee to business owner. She describes reading Melisa’s book on vacation in Spain — two chapters every morning, taking notes — and the moment she realized she had been sandbagging her own targets.

“When you’re in a large organization, every time you would go to set targets for the year, it was always underpromise, overdeliver. You never wanted to sign up for a target that you didn’t 100% know how you were going to hit.”

Reading the book reframed what was possible. She stopped thinking about replicating her corporate income and set a new goal: a million-dollar business with two months off a year.

The Activity Trap

The core problem Kymm brings to this conversation is one a lot of independent consultants will recognize: she was busy, she was tracking everything, and none of it was creating the pipeline she wanted.

“I tried to be like the straight-A student following your book. I literally put into place all the scorecards, the tracker, going from requesting a meeting to the number of meetings, the percentages. I had all of that, and yet it wasn’t translating into the kind of repeatable, predictable pipeline that I wanted, and I wasn’t 100% sure why.”

Part of what she discovered in the sprint: she was focused on quantity instead of quality. A lot of the meetings she was having — and taking pride in having — weren’t with her ICP at all. Her ideal clients are CEOs and executive directors of companies in the $5M to $150M range. Those weren’t the people she was consistently getting in front of.

She was also getting a lot of referrals to people who were fractionally curious — people who wanted to pick her brain about going independent, not people who could hire her. She talks about creating a written version of her own story to send to those requests now, so she doesn’t have to tell the same story fifteen times over coffee.

When she looked back at the meetings she was logging, the subset that actually fit her ICP was much smaller than the total count.

“When I went back and thought about it — how many CEOs and executive directors am I actually sitting down in front of — that was a wow moment. The number of discovery meetings that I was so proud of having was a really small subset that are people who actually fit this ICP.”

The Mindset Shift: Who Do You Want to Know?

One of the biggest unlocks from the sprint was moving from “who do I know?” to “who do I want to know?”

Kymm came in with a large corporate network. The impulse was to work that network, which she was doing. But the sprint helped her think more strategically about which relationships she was investing in and which she needed to build.

“How do I leverage that network more strategically to get to the people I want to get to?”

The sprint also introduced her to the BD modes framework — sprint mode, active mode, run/maintain mode — and the idea that the goal is never zero. Even when she broke her arm mid-sprint and was managing a new client engagement with one arm, she still had goals for her run/maintain period. The floor shifts; it doesn’t disappear.

Perfectionism as a Business Development Blocker

Kymm names perfectionism as one of the biggest things she discovered about herself in the sprint — and she’s specific about how it was showing up.

The most vivid example: she wanted to launch a newsletter for months. She had the idea, she had the content, she genuinely enjoys writing. But she couldn’t get it to be perfect enough to send. It kept getting deferred.

She brought it up in a coaching call. Melisa’s advice: just do it. Within a week, The Wilder Brief was live.

Other places perfectionism was showing up: her emails. She’d been trained in Fortune 200 environments where every communication had to be polished before it left your hands. She was applying that same standard to her warm outreach. The sprint introduced time-boxing — 15 minutes, then send, regardless of whether it felt done.

And then there was the overbuilt system problem. She had built a tracking and analytics setup that ChatGPT told her would be appropriate for a mid-sized company. She was a solopreneur. The time she was spending reviewing and pulling data was out of proportion to what the business actually needed.

The Lorne Michaels framing from a sprint cohort member landed hard: someone asked him how you know when Saturday Night Live is ready to go on air. His answer: “Because it’s 10:30, and that’s when the show starts going live.” You’re never going to feel completely ready. That’s not what ready means.

“I realized that I was focused on some of the wrong things. I was focused more on quantity and I wasn’t focused on quality, and that was something I needed to recalibrate for myself.”

Breaking Her Arm Mid-Sprint

One of the most striking parts of this conversation is what happened in the middle of the sprint.

Kymm broke her arm. Pins in 20 places. The day before she was due to start a new eight-to-ten-week client engagement.

She had to figure out how to run a new client engagement and continue her business development — with one arm. Her approach: prioritize ruthlessly, adapt where she had to, and be direct with the client. She moved to more virtual meetings. She started using dictation and voice-to-text more heavily, running stream-of-consciousness into ChatGPT first to make it more concise before bringing it into other AI systems — a practice she’s kept.

“There’s nobody else that can really step in. But I was able to manage, just staying accountable, finding new ways to do things, and staying really aligned with the priorities.”

The client ended up being great about it. The eight-to-ten-week engagement became a second project. And the experience reinforced the fundamental point about running your own business: you make the policy. You decide what your sick leave looks like. You decide how to navigate when something unexpected happens. That’s not a liability — it’s one of the things that makes this worth doing.

Dreaming Bigger Than Corporate Taught You To

Before she found Melisa’s work, Kymm was thinking about her business through a corporate lens. She wanted flexibility and fewer hours — and she was mentally anchoring to her old corporate salary as the ceiling.

Reading the book shifted that.

“I didn’t know that I was going to be this happy and that I was going to be this fulfilled by this brand new entrepreneurial adventure — from somebody that never thought she would be an entrepreneur. But I love it.”

The goal she set in Spain: a million-dollar business, two months off a year. She doesn’t know yet exactly how she’ll build it. But she’s set the expectation, and she’s finding that it changes how she operates.

She also talks about the title shift happening in real time with her current client. The CEO didn’t want her pigeonholed into marketing — the company calls her chief growth architect. That expansion of what she’s known for, and what she’s capable of, is part of what she’s building toward.

Advice for Independent Consultants Considering the Sprint

Kymm’s take on the investment:

“It’s a very cost-effective way to get into Melisa’s brain. Professional development is really important, and we would’ve had that in the corporate world. You’d be asking somebody else to be paying for it, but you’d still be asking for it.”

Her recommendation to consultants who are stuck in the activity trap or unsure whether their business development is breaking down: the sprint provides the structure and the live access to ask the questions you can’t answer on your own. For Kymm, it was the combination of her coaching calls with Melisa and listening to how other consultants were working through the same challenges.

“The ROI of doing the sprint has already paid out for me in spades.”

Resources Mentioned

Companion Resource: The Consultant’s Lead Gen Sprint — fall cohort starts September 22nd. Enroll at www.ConsultantSprint.com.

Connect with Kymm Martinez:

More Resources for Independent Consultants

Coaching for Consultants: Click here to apply for your Coaching Fit Call.
Book: Grow Your Consulting Business: The 14-Step Roadmap to Make Your Independent Consulting Goals a Reality
YouTube Podcast Channel
Melisa’s Free Resources, Books, Planners & Journals: https://linktr.ee/melisaliberman
LinkedIn
Website