Sales

Hiring a salesperson is easy. Scaling that hire from zero to quota in their first 30 days is where most teams stumble. I’ve seen it dozens of times: new reps arrive with energy, a handful of meetings are booked, and then momentum stalls because onboarding wasn’t structured, the playbook wasn’t clear, or the manager didn’t have a realistic early ramp plan.Below is the playbook I use when I’m asked to get a new sales hire productive...

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I’ve launched referral programs for three B2B SaaS companies over the past six years. Some worked beautifully and became a reliable source of qualified leads; others generated buzz but no real pipeline. What separated the two was almost never the reward itself — it was the design, segmentation and operational discipline behind the program.Below I’m sharing a practical, repeatable approach I use now: from defining the right target, to...

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I used to think customer interviews were a qualitative exercise that lived in the marketing or product team’s world — useful for empathy, not for closing enterprise deals. After a decade working revenue operations and GTM for B2B businesses across Europe and the UK, I’ve flipped that view. Done right, customer interviews can double your win rate on enterprise deals by giving you the intelligence to shape value propositions, uncover...

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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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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 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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