How to scale a sales hire from 0 to quota: a training checklist and 30-day action plan

When I run a 90-day growth sprint, my north star is simple: get measurable impact fast. That doesn't mean chasing short-lived spikes — it means prioritizing experiments and activities that move revenue, conversion or retention this quarter, not vanity metrics that look good in a dashboard but don't change outcomes. Over the years I’ve run these sprints with startups and midsize teams across Europe and the UK, and the pattern that works is...

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I’ve designed commission plans for startups and scale-ups in Europe and the UK, and one lesson keeps coming back: a well-crafted plan does three things at once — it incentivizes the behavior you want (hunting big, high-quality deals), it aligns salesperson effort with company profitability, and it controls payout risk so you don’t overpay on noisy results. Below I walk through a practical approach you can implement this week to boost...

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When I first started implementing revenue operations (RevOps) in small teams, I made the classic mistake of trying to mirror enterprise playbooks: lengthy RACI matrices, multi-day workshops and three different tools for tracking the same metric. That approach crushed momentum. Over the past decade I’ve learned that for small teams the priority is clarity and repeatability — not complexity. In this post I’ll walk through a pragmatic RevOps...

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I’ll show you how to run a focused, practical audit of your marketing stack in 2 hours and find the redundant tools that are quietly costing you ~30% of your recurring SaaS budget. This is the exact process I use with startups and scaling companies: fast, evidence-led, and aimed at decisions you can act on the same day.Why this audit matters (and why you can do it fast)Most teams accumulate tools the same way they accumulate browser tabs: one...

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I used to think the fastest way to respond faster to incoming leads was obvious: hire more SDRs. Then I ran a few experiments across startups and mid-market teams and found something more effective and cheaper: a combination of smart automation, ruthless prioritisation and a few simple routing rules can get your median lead response time under 15 minutes without increasing headcount.Why 15 minutes mattersWhen I measured lead response vs...

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I’ve run enough onboarding experiments to know there’s a predictable gap between “nice product” and “habit-forming product”: new users who sign up but never become active. On several projects, a relatively small, focused redesign of the onboarding funnel increased first-month retention by 20–35% — and most of the gains came from fixing predictable leaks rather than reinventing the whole product.Below I share a practical,...

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I used to think a stalled deal was just part of the pipeline lifecycle — a natural casualty you reconcile at the end of the quarter. After a few years helping startups and growth-stage teams recover revenue, I changed my mind. A "lost" or stuck opportunity is often a process problem, not a pricing or product problem. With the right playbook, many of those deals can be reactivated and closed.Below is a 7-step playbook I use to diagnose,...

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