Founder was personally involved in every deal over £10k. Pipeline stalled every time he travelled. Two sales reps couldn't close independently.
Within 9 months, the founder was off 80% of sales calls. First unassisted close by a rep within 12 weeks. Forecast accuracy improved from 'guesswork' to within 18% on a rolling quarter.
The situation
The founder had built something genuinely good. A B2B SaaS product with real customers, real retention, and a growth rate that looked healthy from the outside.
He’d also, without fully realising it, built a business that could not function without him in every deal.
Two account executives had been hired over the previous eighteen months. Both were capable. Neither had closed a deal worth more than £8,000 without the founder on at least one call. The founder was on somewhere between twelve and fifteen sales calls a week, writing or reviewing every proposal, and personally shepherding every deal through negotiation.
He hadn’t taken a proper holiday since the company reached £1M ARR. The first thing he’d done on his last attempt at a week off was rejoin a deal he’d supposedly handed over.
By the time we spoke, he was exhausted and worried. Not about revenue; revenue was fine. About whether this was sustainable. About what he was actually building.
Discovery Week: what we found
The diagnostic turned up a few things that weren’t obvious from the outside.
The reps weren’t underperforming; they were under-equipped. The company had no written sales process. No defined stages with exit criteria. No qualification framework. No objection handling guidance. The founder had all of this in his head, applied intuitively, and closed accordingly. The reps were expected to absorb it by osmosis. They couldn’t.
The founder’s involvement had become a crutch for buyers, not just reps. In several accounts, prospects had explicitly asked for the founder on calls because earlier experiences had set that expectation. The company had, in effect, sold “you’ll get the founder’s time” as part of the proposition.
The pipeline was chaotic. HubSpot had been configured twice, in different ways, by two different people. Stage names didn’t map to anything specific. The founder couldn’t reliably forecast because he didn’t trust the data, so he ran his own mental model of the pipeline, which was accurate but entirely in his head.
Two obvious quick wins. The reps were doing almost no multi-threading; virtually every deal was managed through a single contact. And there was no structured follow-up process; deals went quiet because nobody had a system for re-engaging them.
What we built
The Discovery Week output was a prioritised roadmap. We agreed to a Fractional engagement to execute it.
In the first four weeks:
- Defined pipeline stages with specific exit criteria, written in plain language the reps could apply themselves
- Rebuilt the HubSpot configuration around those stages
- Wrote a qualification framework (not BANT, but something more specific to how this company’s buyers actually made decisions)
- Established a weekly pipeline review format where the right questions got asked consistently
Weeks five through twelve:
- Built a structured discovery process and trained the reps on it through role play and live deal coaching
- Wrote an objection handling guide based on the thirty most common objections the founder had encountered and resolved over three years
- Built a proposal template that captured the founder’s structure and argument, so reps could produce versions that actually read like the ones prospects had been responding to
- Started a deliberate process of introducing a second contact in every active deal
Month three onwards:
- Fractional involvement expanded to include weekly sessions with each rep and a monthly commercial review with the founder
- Started working on the founder’s gradual extraction from deals: first as a backup, then as an escalation, then not at all on sub-£20k deals
- Built a hiring brief for a Head of Sales to eventually take over the function
The outcome
Twelve weeks in, one of the AEs closed a £14,000 deal with no founder involvement. It was, by his own description, the first time he’d felt like he was actually doing his job rather than assisting somebody else’s.
By month nine of the Fractional engagement:
- The founder was on fewer than 20% of deals (down from effectively 100%)
- Forecast accuracy had improved significantly, the team was hitting within 18% of their quarterly projection consistently
- Pipeline coverage was up, because reps were qualifying properly and multi-threading on every deal
- The founder took a two-week holiday. No deal died. One closed while he was away.
The engagement ran for fourteen months in total. It ended with the company in the process of hiring a permanent Head of Sales into a role that was clearly defined, with a process that already worked, and a founder who finally had a business that sold without him.
What this came down to
The problem wasn’t the reps. It wasn’t the founder. It was the absence of a system, and the fact that the founder’s personal effectiveness had masked that absence for long enough that fixing it felt unnecessary.
The moment someone asked “what would happen if you stepped back?” (and nobody had a good answer) was the moment it became obvious that something needed to change.
The work itself was straightforward, once we knew what we were building. That’s usually how it goes.