There’s something unforgettable about watching a seasoned mechanic fumble with a Ferrari. Especially when that mechanic is Ed Soo Hoo—the Worldwide CTO at Lenovo—and the Ferrari is his own 360 Modena, 250,000 miles and counting.

Soo Hoo tells the story with the swagger of a storyteller and the soul of a philosopher. He recalls the moment he misdiagnosed a misfire in cylinder five—until his longtime mechanic, Mario, said five words that changed everything: “Pull the plug on five.” What looked like a perfect machine was crippled by one small flaw: a spark plug with zero gap.

“Small things matter,” Ed said. “This was a tale of two plugs. A $200,000 machine underperforming because of a 1/32-inch oversight.”

That moment became metaphor. Gerhard Gschwandtner, host of the Sales 3.0 Masterclass, seized on it. “Most companies have Sales Enablement. Some have Customer Success. But where’s the department that watches for the gap? The space between what is and what could be?”

And just like that, the conversation turned electric.

Soo Hoo, Gschwandtner, and Matt Slotnick, CEO of Poggio, weren’t just prepping for a Master Class. They were shaping a worldview. A new mental model for how companies sell, scale, and succeed.

The Gap and the Map

Soo Hoo, ever the systems thinker, transformed the UK’s subway warning—“Mind the Gap”—into a sales framework: Governance, Architecture, and Process. And to cross that gap, he offered another acronym: MAP—Manageable, Actionable, Predictable.

This wasn’t slideware. It was soulware.

“If you can’t map the interconnections in your business like Charing Cross to Wembley,” he said, “you can’t scale alignment. And if you can’t scale alignment, your customer conversations are chaos.”

Slotnick chimed in. “That’s the problem Poggio solves. Most sellers don’t lack passion—they lack precision. They walk into meetings without a point of view, without intelligence, without orchestration. Poggio makes sure they never have a bad conversation again.” AI isn’t replacing your sales team. It’s preparing them to ask sharper questions, provoke deeper insights, and elevate the entire customer conversation.

From Orchestrator to Alchemist

Sales, Ed reminded us, is not a transaction. It’s a composition. “Every seller is a conductor,” he said. “You have to know when to bring in the horns, when to soften the strings. Poggio gives you the sheet music for every account.”

The metaphor lands because it’s real. In one powerful anecdote, Ed compared Poggio to the Matrix scene where Trinity downloads the ability to fly a helicopter. “That’s what sales needs,” he said. “Download the knowledge, flicker your eyes, and say: Let’s go.” In Poggio speak, “Andiamo!”

Slotnick extended the metaphor: “And if you don’t give your sellers that download? Then you’re giving them a Ferrari with no spark plug gap. All engine, no ignition.”

Find Yourself. Define Yourself. Refine Yourself.

The conversation drifted into deeper waters. How do we become the sellers our customers actually want? “It starts with knowing yourself,” Ed said. “Sales is personal. And to truly listen, you have to show up without armor.”

In a moment that felt more like a TED Talk than a prep call, Ed quoted Confucius, General Patton, and a banned casino card mechanic—all to make one point: selling is a form of co-creation. “You don’t push a product. You provoke insight. You become part of the buyer’s dream.”

The Red Pill, the Blue Pill, and the Truth in Between

Poggio, Ed said, is the red pill. It breaks the trance of the status quo. “It doesn’t just reveal what is. It shows what could be. It calls out the elephant in the room—and then gives you the language to talk about it.”

Slotnick added the clincher: “It’s not about scaling data. It’s about scaling empathy. Scaling preparation. Scaling insight. You can’t fake that.”

The Masterclass Ahead

When these three take the stage, the audience won’t get a panel. They’ll get a performance—part jazz improvisation, part Socratic dialogue, part Ferrari tune-up.

And the first question they’ll pose to the room is deceptively simple:

Where’s your gap?

🎯 Call to Action:
Enterprise revenue leaders—CROs, CGOs, CSOs, VP/SVPs of Sales, Heads of Rev Ops &/or Enablement—join Ed, Matt, and Gerhard at the Sales 3.0 Masterclass on May 20 to discover how to orchestrate smarter conversations, fix invisible misfires, and turn your sellers into conductors of insight. Because in sales, like in life, small things matter.

🗓️ Register now – https://tinyurl.com/PoggioMasterClass