Accelerated onboarding
Traps
New hires are left to 'pick things up' by talking to people around them.
Weeks pass before you realise they’re not ramping up as fast as expected.
No checkpoints mean gaps stay hidden until it’s too late.
Cures
Structured onboarding programs with measurable progress tracking.
Includes certification-style elements: mock calls, presentations, and scenario role-plays.
Founders gain confidence early that new hires are on track, gaps are identified fast, and the team sees this is an organisation that takes development seriously.
Early structure in onboarding prevents costly drift and sets the tone for a high-performance culture.
Bar-raising hiring
Traps
Hiring based on domain knowledge instead of adaptability and resilience.
Costly mis-hires set the business back months and drain limited runway.
Decisions made on gut-feel and urgency, not process.
Cures
We’ve developed and refined a proven hiring process for customer-facing roles - specifically critical early sales role.
Includes scorecards, structured interviews, and attribute-based assessment. Built from years of scaling at MuleSoft, Informatica, and tech scale-ups since.
Helps you avoid expensive mis-hires and ensures each new hire raises the bar.
Don’t hire for logos on a CV. Hire for attributes that fit a scale-up.
Skills development
Traps
New hires don’t have the DNA you hoped for. What they sold in the interview isn’t what they deliver on the job.
Founders assume new hires will 'self-correct' or learn by osmosis, but performance never lifts.
Responsibility for feedback often lies with the founder - who, whilst impressively entrepreneurial, isn’t trained to coach professional sales skills.
Cures
Structured role plays and deal clinics so sales and associated new hires can practise real scenarios and get feedback.
Coaching is specific, practical, and based on proven sales methods - not theory or books.
Founders get confidence that their team is learning the right skills, the right way.
Professional skills aren’t learnt from books, but from practice, feedback, and coaching.
Product: market fit
Traps
Constantly customising to win each deal → nothing is repeatable.
Unsure when the product is “finished enough” to sell.
Sales team hesitant. Worried they’re selling something incomplete.
Cures
Define your 'sellable now' core: what works reliably today.
Position the roadmap: sell the future vision without overpromising.
Train sales to confidently sell today’s product, while framing upcoming features as a bonus.
Momentum comes not from waiting for perfect, but from selling confidently what’s ready now.
Forecasting
Traps
Forecasts driven by intuition, optimism, or deal age rather than verifiable customer behaviour.
Quarter after quarter, forecasts are missed. The business simply can’t rely on the projections and confidence is lost.
When forecasting is unreliable, teams often respond by adding more pipeline - bloating the funnel and making it even harder to see what is real.
Deals often eventually close, but far later than predicted, making the business unpredictable and delaying investment decisions.
Cures
Anchor forecasting to observable, customer-validated actions, not internal activity.
Align forecast stages directly to the sales process and mutual success plan milestones, creating consistency across execution and reporting.
Build shared definitions so forecasting language means the same thing to sales, leadership, and finance.
Treat forecast accuracy as a capability, not a hope - something that improves as execution discipline improves.
Predictable forecasting unlocks confident decisions. And confident decisions enable scale.
Sales process
Traps
Sales processes built entirely around internal steps such as meet → demo → proposal → close, with little connection to how customers actually make decisions
Each salesperson interpreting “progress” differently, making pipeline reviews subjective and unreliable.
Single-threaded: only one contact engaged, while in reality many people influence the buying decision.
Teams relying on effort and activity, rather than disciplined decision criteria, to move deals forward.
Cures
Establish a clear, best-practice sales process that defines how we do things around here - grounded in proven patterns for technical and complex sales environments
Define objective stage criteria so opportunities only move forward when the customer has taken a meaningful action.
Create common language and shared judgement: the same deal, assessed by different salespeople, should be rated the same way using the same criteria
Allow room for individual selling styles, while anchoring execution in a consistent framework that scales
The result: a sales process that is repeatable, coachable, and trusted - by sales leaders, by executives, and by the team.
Close plans & mutual success plans
(Close plan is a well-known term, but Mutual success plan is so much more effective).
Traps
Opportunities that appear healthy but quietly stall because no one is clear on what actually needs to happen next.
Sales teams fixated on internal milestones (proposal sent, contract drafted) that are disconnected from the customer’s real timeline.
Customers unsure how to navigate their own internal steps - approvals, stakeholders, funding - and progress slows.
Close plans treated as sales artefacts, not shared tools, and ignored (or not even seen) by the customer.
Cures
Replace seller-centric close plans with mutual success plans - a shared view of how the customer achieves their desired outcome. Start with the customer’s end goal, then work backwards to define the critical milestones required to achieve it.
Make the purchase just one step in this journey, not the centre of the conversation.
Use experience to guide and prompt the customer, helping them anticipate obstacles they may not have navigated before.
Result: a transparent roadmap that keeps both seller and customer accountable, aligned, and focused on value delivery.
When done well, momentum becomes natural. Progress is visible. And deals move forward because everyone is aligned on what success looks like and how to get there.
Go-to-market & territory plans
Traps
Lack of clarity on how to align your most valuable resources for the best return.
Right people in the wrong positions.
Too much time and energy consumed by conflicts - between direct reps, between sales and channel, and over account ownership.
Misuse of partners: no clear rules on when to sell through a channel, when to sell with, and how to define channel-specific territories.
Cures
Design territories and segments that align sales talent with the right market opportunity. Seniors on strategic accounts, juniors on SMB.
Define clear rules of engagement for partners: when to co-sell, when to hand off, and how to avoid channel conflict.
Ensure alignment with the organisation’s corporate objectives, so resource allocation supports the strategy, not just local targets.
Deploy supporting roles (inside sales, SDRs, telesales, AI tools) in a way that feeds pipeline and maximises ROI on scarce resources.
Effective go-to-market design reduces costly conflict & friction. It aligns people, partners, and resources to drive the company’s biggest objectives.
Deal clinics
Traps
Founders and managers often discover late that deals were never truly qualified.
Reps repeatedly make the same mistakes in calls and pitches without correction.
Critical opportunities stall because issues aren’t surfaced or addressed early.
Cures
Run structured deal clinics to review live opportunities and stress-test the strategy.
Your people learn in real-time through coaching and peer discussion.
Issues are exposed early, preventing wasted cycles and improving win rates.
Deal clinics turn every live opportunity into a learning moment and a step towards higher win rates.
Commission plans
Traps
Plans are too complex → reps don’t understand how they get paid.
Incentives reward the wrong behaviour (e.g., chasing smaller, easy wins instead of investing in larger, more strategic deals).
Frequent changes undermine trust and focus.
Targets feel unrealistic, leaving reps demotivated.
Poorly constructed plans consume disproportionate time and energy → people argue internally instead of focusing on customers.
Cures
Keep plans simple, transparent, and easy to understand.
Ensure incentives are congruent with the organisation’s business objectives.
Apply proven compensation frameworks drawn from years of experience scaling sales teams.
Follow a few simple principles that, once mastered, deliver sustainable motivation and performance.
The right plan doesn’t just pay reps - it channels energy into the outcomes that matter most for the business.
Leadership coaching
Traps
Founders often install processes but fail to get their people to use them effectively.
Leaders default to managing things, rather than leading people.
Without coaching, dependency on outside help grows and self-sufficiency never develops.
Cures
We coach founders and leaders to lead their people through the modules, not just install them.
This means using the modules in one-on-ones, team meetings, and performance reviews.
The goal isn’t dependency on us — it’s self-sufficient leaders who can embed and sustain the practices.
The modules matter, but leadership is what makes them work.
Cohesive teaming
Traps
Teams operate in silos - sales, marketing, product, and customer success all pulling in different directions.
Individuals don’t understand each other’s working styles, which creates friction and slows progress.
Collaboration depends on personalities, not a shared framework.
Cures
We create environments where cross-functional collaboration is systematic, not accidental.
Using Gallup CliftonStrengths, we help people understand their own strengths and, crucially, the relative strengths of their colleagues.
This builds respect, improves handoffs, and accelerates problem-solving across functions.
No one scales in isolation — strengths-based teamwork makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.