Two options:
• A full end-to-end review, usually about a fortnight
• A shorter review of one team, or one part of the sale
Coaching the person who owns the revenue number, whether that's a CRO, a VP of Sales, or a CEO or founder carrying revenue themselves. It's a job most people end up learning on their own, because there isn't usually anyone above you whose job it is to develop you. What you get is somewhere to think out loud without performing, where you can say the thing you wouldn't say to your board or your team. Someone who has been in your shoes, and who has seen the same thing play out in enough other businesses to help you get to the bottom of what's happening in yours.
Go-to-market advisory, which usually follows a diagnostic and is about making the recommendations actually happen. Working alongside the CEO or the revenue leader and with the team itself: who you're selling to and what you're saying to them, the sales motion, the pipeline stages and what has to be true for a deal to move between them, a CRM that reflects all of it, and reporting that tells you something you can act on. Then the cadence to run it week to week, and often scoping and hiring the person who will eventually take it on.
In neither case do I take the number or run the team. That part stays yours.
Most sales teams can describe every step of their own sales process and not one step of the customer's buying process. The stages in the CRM are named after what the seller does. The mutual action plan is a list of what you need from them. The business case is built from your data, in your language, proving your point. None of that is anyone's fault, it's what happens when nobody ever wrote it down from the other side.
We work on your live deals rather than case studies, and the team leaves having changed the things they use every day.
What tends to happen a few weeks later is that the language changes. People start asking each other how to make this easier for the customer, without anyone prompting them.
Definely builds AI contract drafting and review software for lawyers, sold into large law firms and into corporate legal departments. Long cycles, large buying committees, and procurement on both sides of the deal.
Octopus Ventures introduced me during the final stage of Series A due diligence. The board and the founders wanted an experienced CRO view on whether the commercial organisation was ready to scale, and on where the new money should go.
Sensat builds data and visualisation software for major infrastructure and construction, sold into large contractors and the organisations that own the assets. Long procurement, a lot of stakeholders, and at that point a project sale rather than a recurring one.
The business had grown quickly after its Series A without much structure, and the next stage was proving much harder than the last. I came in to work out why, and stayed on as fractional CRO to do something about it.
"Having her energy and skills on the team would certainly change the odds of success for any startup."
Michele Battelli, Chief Product Officer, Sensat
Makers was Europe's first coding bootcamp, retraining career changers into software engineers. The model was a marketplace with trainees on one side and employers on the other, and it only worked if graduates got jobs, which made the enterprise partnerships with employers the thing everything else rested on. It was a long sale, persuading large organisations to hire a career-changer over someone longer qualified.
They were already selling, but the company didn't think of itself as a business that sold. There were no targets and no commission, the numbers were being missed, and graduates were finishing the course without the job it had promised them.
"Sophie's strengths are her experience with enterprise sales and the ability to drive transformation by influencing sales, marketing and product functions together. Sophie made an effort to understand our culture well and make sure it was expressed in how we marketed and sold to clients, which was very important to us. I wouldn't hesitate to work with Sophie again given the chance."
Evgeny Shadchnev, CEO and Founder, Makers
Mosaic builds real-time data analytics for capital markets, sold into tier-one investment banks, which is about as long and as committee-heavy as a sale gets. The early traction had come through the founder's own network. What the business needed was a commercial function that could sell credibly to a demanding global client base without him in every room.
If any of this sounds like where you are, please do get in touch.
