Founders
For Founders
The product wins on merit. Your engineers can show exactly why it is better, the technical evaluator usually agrees — and then the deal sits.
Somebody in finance asks what it does to their numbers, and the answer comes back in features. You are on the fourth call with a company that said yes in principle two months ago, you cannot say precisely what is blocking it, and the board deck is due on Friday.
The cost is not this deal. It is that you cannot tell which of the other eleven are about to do the same thing, so you cannot forecast, and you cannot fix a pattern you cannot see.
Technical founders selling into enterprise, roughly $1M to $50M ARR, where the product wins on merit and the deals stall anyway. The unit is the deal. The constraint is translation.
What you actually need
- Your capability stated as the outcome a buyer’s CFO will pay for, not as a feature list
- The reason each stalled deal is stalled, named — and the work to unstick it
- A sales process your team runs the same way whether or not you are in the room
- A revenue story that holds up when an investor’s diligence team pulls on it
Three rungs, in order, and the same rule as everywhere else: none of them is worth starting before the one below it holds. Most founders start at the first, because being understood is usually the constraint and everything above it depends on that being solved.
- 1FoundationsBe understood by the people who sign.$20,000 pilot
- 2GrowthWin the committee, not the evaluator.$30,000 pilot
- 3ScaleCompound what already works.$40,000 pilot
Foundations
Available nowBuyers do not understand the value proposition, technical features never translate into business outcomes, and selling feels like guesswork rather than something engineered. The first rung fixes the translation, because no amount of process compensates for a buyer who cannot repeat what you do.
What it installs
- Feature-to-outcome translation for your top three capabilities
- Evidence-based buyer personas, and a non-ideal profile with explicit disqualification criteria
- Buyer intelligence for every key prospect in the active pipeline
- A buyer-journey-driven sales process, wired into the CRM
- Competitive battle cards and an objection-handling framework built from your own lost deals
What it moves
- Value proposition a buyer can repeat
- The test is whether your champion sells it without you
- Qualified pipeline against a real ICP
- Most stalls are disqualification failures, not closing failures
- Stall reasons, named
- A pattern you can see is a pattern you can fix
Growth
Once the rung below holdsComplex deals stall inside buying committees, champions are hoped for rather than developed, and enterprise politics get navigated by instinct. This rung turns the part you are good at into something the whole team does the same way.
What it installs
- Champion identification and development, applied to deals that are live now
- A buying-committee map for each enterprise opportunity in play
- Stage-gated advancement criteria the whole team applies identically
- Customer value realisation tracked against metrics the buyer agreed to, not metrics you chose
- Systematic enterprise selling capability across the team rather than in one person
What it moves
- Win rate on complex deals
- The only number that proves the committee work landed
- Sales cycle length
- Committees do not slow deals down; unmanaged committees do
- Net revenue retention
- What value realisation produces, and what the next round prices on
Scale
Once the rung below holdsCustomers succeed and never become advocates, growth feels reactive rather than systematic, and new markets threaten to dilute the thing that made the first one work. This rung makes expansion repeatable and the revenue story defensible.
What it installs
- Advocacy criteria defined, and the accounts that already meet them identified
- Organisational values aligned with what your buyers actually value
- Expansion into adjacent markets without diluting the positioning that won the first one
- Systematic advocacy generation producing measurable pipeline rather than occasional referrals
What it moves
- Share of revenue with willing references
- What a diligence team will actually call and check
- Pipeline sourced from advocacy
- The cheapest pipeline you will ever have
- Expansion revenue in new segments
- Whether the second market was a thesis or a guess
On pricing
Every rung is priced, with the pilot and the engagement stated separately because they are separate decisions. The pilot does not credit against the engagement — it is judged on its own, and refunded in full if nothing on the week-one list moves. Compare it against a boutique strategy engagement, which runs $50,000 to $200,000 and ends with a recommendation.