Kelsey Muruato has a question she’s been meaning to ask more customers.
Not a sales question. Not a qualifying question. Just: How much do you actually know about drayage?
“Because the more they know,” she says, “the better we all handle it when something doesn’t go as planned.”
That’s Kelsey in a sentence — someone who thinks about the relationship before she thinks about the transaction. It’s probably why, when Mark-it’s owner Tony Apa was once asked what kind of person he’d want on an expanded business development team, he said: someone like Kelsey.
She found out about that secondhand, at a late-night event during TPM in Long Beach. A recruiter walked up and told her. She still thinks about it.
“When I was hired, my leadership knew the return wasn’t going to be immediate,” she says. “This is my first true business development role. I came from operations. They were investing in potential, not a guaranteed pipeline.”
Hearing that the investment had registered — that Tony was describing her to people outside the company, unprompted — meant something real to her. Not because it confirmed she’d arrived, but because it confirmed she was somewhere worth staying.
She used to be on the other side of the phone.
Before joining Mark-it, Kelsey worked in operations at C.H. Robinson. Part of her job put her in regular contact with Mark-it’s Kansas City terminal — and with Scott Finlayson, who is now the company’s Vice President.
“As a customer, I used to beg Scott for trucks,” she says, and you can hear the smile in it. “And now one of my favorite things is running into former customers who describe how much they love him. Because I completely relate.”
What made the impression wasn’t just getting the trucks. It was Scott’s passion and loyalty — qualities she describes as “next level” — and the fact that those qualities were still visibly intact years later when she came on board. When Mark-it promoted Scott to VP and relocated him to Chicago, Kelsey — a Chicagoan — suddenly got to work alongside the person who’d made her a believer in the first place.
“That’s 100% why I stay,” she says simply.
She didn’t take any shortcuts to get here.
Kelsey spent her career in operations before she ever took on a customer-facing role. It was a deliberate choice — learn the business from the inside, understand what actually happens between the booking and the delivery, before you’re ever the one making promises.
“When you’ve only ever sold, you don’t understand the experience,” she says. “You can’t talk the language. And customers feel that.”
She can. And they feel that, too.
When she meets someone at a trade show, she doesn’t lead with Mark-it. She leads with questions. How did you get into this industry? What’s been hard? She wants them to know who Kelsey is first — and only then does she start talking about what Mark-it is.
“This industry is all about relationships,” she says. “If there’s no connection with me, the rest doesn’t matter anyway.”
It’s a philosophy that requires a certain comfort with patience, with not being the loudest person in the room, with letting the trust build at its own pace. A lot of salespeople can’t do it. Kelsey seems constitutionally suited for it.
On the sales side, she and Matt Belanus are a genuine team.
They don’t divide accounts by region or rank them by size. They pay attention to the customer — to what they need, and sometimes to who they are — and assign accordingly.
“There’s a lot of ego in sales,” Kelsey says. “People hold onto leads forever. Matt and I don’t do that. We’re thinking about what’s best for the organization.”
In practice, she might get a foot in the door with someone and then hand it to Matt — not because she can’t close, but because she genuinely thinks he’s the better fit. Matt does the same thing in the other direction.
“If you took Matt and combined him with me,” she says, “you’d have the ultimate salesperson.” She means it as a compliment to both of them, and it lands that way. Matt converts. Kelsey connects. Together, they cover each other’s gaps without making it a competition.
She’s honest about what’s hard.
Kelsey doesn’t oversell the job or the industry. She’ll tell you plainly that some days the grind gets to you — that supply chain is not an easy business, and that there are moments where you’ve exhausted every option and still have to deliver news a customer doesn’t want to hear.
“There are times where we’ve planned, we’ve forecasted, and there are still variables that just work against you,” she says. “It’s really hard to explain that to a customer. And it’s even harder for them to swallow.”
Her answer to that isn’t to manage expectations with a disclaimer. It’s to educate upfront — which brings her back to that question she wants to start asking: How much do you know about drayage? How much more would you like to know?
The customers who can answer honestly, who understand the process and accept that some things are genuinely outside anyone’s control — those are the ones who become real partners.
“We’re selective about who we work with,” she says. “And so are our customers, in the best way.”
Ask Kelsey to describe Mark-it in one sentence — the real version, not the brochure version — and she doesn’t reach for the polished answer.
“Organized chaos at times, but if you can keep up, you’ll learn a ton and this company will allow you to make a real impact.”
She’s been here a year and a half. And if you’ve spent any time with her — at a conference, on a call, across a table at a late-night industry event — there’s a good chance you already want to work with her.
The good news is, that’s exactly the point.