Ep # 180: The Consensus Architect: What Modern Selling Actually Demands ft. Cristina De La Cruz (CRO, ISG Partners)

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Ioanna Onasi sits down with Cristina De La Cruz, CRO at ISG Partners, to explore what 20 years in talent and recruiting actually teaches you about people, sales, and leadership. Cristina shares her journey from working a full desk in a San Francisco branch to building the entire go-to-market function at ISG Partners, an embedded recruitment firm that operates on a talent-as-a-service model, placing on-loan recruiters inside organizations as a flexible, month-to-month alternative to traditional staffing. The conversation digs into why sellers who know the script but not the buyer keep losing deals, how ISG's subscription-based hiring model gives companies the agility to scale recruiting up or down across growth sprints, and why emotional intelligence and coachability matter more than any technical skill when building a sales team. Cristina also opens up about leading a fully remote sales org, the intentionality it demands around communication and shared learning, and why she still does her own meeting prep by hand because the human connection is the whole point. The episode closes on what it means to show up as a female leader in a male-dominated industry, how life experience shapes leadership style, and why the best thing any leader can do is make the path visible for the people coming up behind them.