The diagnosis
The first thing we do in any commercial engagement is find out whether the business actually has a sales problem. Most do not. Most have something that looks like a sales problem from the outside but is something else entirely underneath.
We call it the vitamin versus painkiller test.
A vitamin is something people want but do not urgently need. Nice to have. Easy to delay. Easy to cut. You can hire the best salesperson alive and put them on a vitamin product and they will not save it. The market is sending a signal. More execution is not the answer.
A painkiller is something the buyer cannot ignore. It costs them money, time, or risk every single day the problem goes unsolved. If you have that — and this founder did — and people are still not buying at the rate they should be, the problem is not the product. It is the system around the product. That is fixable.
This was a painkiller business with a vitamin-level sales operation. No defined ICP. No playbook. No repeatable process. Each hire had come in, figured out their own approach, generated some noise, and eventually left — taking whatever they had loosely built with them. The founder had been solving a people problem when the actual problem was a system problem.
There was nothing for a salesperson to operate against. Every hire started from a blank sheet.
What we found when we dug in
We pulled apart every customer the business had ever won.
Fourteen customers in total. Eleven of them had come directly through the founder's network. One had come through a referral from an existing customer. Two had come through a conference the founder had spoken at.
The business had never actually tested whether it could sell. What looked like commercial traction was really a very good founder with a very good network. Those are not the same thing. One scales. The other does not.
The customer base told the same story. Concentrated. Three customers represented over 60% of revenue. The ICP had never been formally defined because it had never needed to be — the founder had just called people they knew.
None of this was the founder's fault. It is how most businesses get their first customers. The problem is when the playbook for getting to ten becomes the assumed playbook for getting to a hundred. It is not.
What we built
Before we ran a single outbound sequence we built the full commercial infrastructure.
ICP definition — not a vague description of the kind of company that might buy, but a specific, ranked profile of who was most likely to buy, why, and how quickly. Target personas within those companies. The core problems the product solved and how to talk about them in the language buyers actually use, not the language the founder used internally. Channel selection based on where those buyers actually spent their time. Messaging for every stage of the funnel. A structured discovery call framework that any salesperson could run from their first week.
This document had never existed. There was no agreed view inside the business on who the ideal customer was, what they cared about, or how to have a commercial conversation with them. That single gap was the root cause of every hire underperforming.
We ran a 90-day outbound campaign against the defined ICP. Targeted. Specific. No paid ads. No waiting for inbound. Direct outreach to exactly the buyers the business believed it should be reaching, using the messaging and channels the playbook had defined.
The sprint did three things.
It validated the ICP. The buyers the business had assumed were the right target were largely correct — with one significant exception. A secondary persona the business had largely ignored converted at nearly double the rate of the primary target. That insight alone was worth the engagement.
It generated real pipeline. Qualified meetings with decision makers who had budget, urgency, and a problem the product solved. Not leads. Not interest. Actual commercial conversations.
And it surfaced what was not working. Two channels the business had assumed would perform did not. Better to know that after 90 days of controlled outbound than after 12 months of a full-time hire operating on the same flawed assumptions.
At the end of 90 days the business had a validated ICP, an active pipeline, a fully built playbook, a configured tech stack, and a weekly reporting cadence that showed exactly what was working, what was not, and why.
The next hire stepped into all of it. Not a blank sheet — a fully operational system. A more junior profile became viable because the infrastructure did the heavy lifting. Onboarding time dropped. The risk of another failed hire dropped with it.
From an investor or VC perspective
There is a version of this engagement that has nothing to do with fixing a broken sales function.
It is about de-risking a commercial bet before capital goes in.
Most due diligence looks at CAC, LTV, and revenue history. The problem is that early-stage commercial data is almost always misleading. Founder-led. Referral-heavy. Concentrated in a handful of relationships that do not reflect what the business can actually do at scale.
A 90-day sprint run before or alongside a raise changes that picture entirely. Qualified prospects taking meetings means the commercial assumption is validated with real market data, not a founder's conviction. Outbound falling flat means the investor finds out before committing capital — not 12 months after, when the runway is shorter and the options are fewer.
For a business raising a meaningful round, the cost of running a sprint is a fraction of what it costs to discover post-investment that the commercial model does not hold. De-risking commercial viability before writing a cheque is one of the highest-value decisions an investor can make. This is one way to do it with real data instead of projected assumptions.
What changed
The founder stopped wondering whether the problem was the people.
The business stopped treating hiring as a substitute for building a system.
The next salesperson had something to run against from day one — a defined audience, a proven message, an active pipeline, and a playbook that told them exactly what good looked like.
And the commercial assumptions that had never actually been tested got tested. Before another hire. Before another wasted year. Before more capital went in on a bet that nobody had thought to validate.
The thing most businesses get wrong
They treat the hire as the solution. The hire is the last step, not the first.
Before you bring someone in you need to know who they are selling to, what they are saying, which channels they are working, and what a good week looks like. Without that you are not hiring a salesperson. You are paying someone to figure out what you should have figured out first.
That is where we start. And it is usually where the real work is.