THIS IS THE STAGE WHERE FOUNDERS MAKE AN EXPENSIVE MISTAKE OUT OF NECESSITY
You cannot keep doing everything yourself, so you hire. An AE. A few SDRs.
Maybe someone senior enough to own sales.
But without a real motion in place, all you did was hand a messy system to someone new and hope they could carry it better than you did. That rarely works. And now you have spent six months and a significant chunk of budget on headcount, when what you actually needed was traction, structure, and someone inside the work.
01
More people did not create more clarity.
02
More activity did not create more revenue.
03
You still had to step back in.
04
And now the next decision feels heavier than the last.
68%
70%
$250k
of first sales hires at startups are gone within 18 months.
OPENVIEW
of first VP Sales hires at early-stage startups do not survive the first year.
SAASTR
average AE OTE, before ramp, before onboarding, before the cost of starting over
INDUSTRY AVG.
HIRING IS NOT THE WRONG MOVE.
IT IS THE WRONG FIRST ONE.
BUILT FOR FOUNDERS ALREADY RUNNING
SOMETHING REAL
Still carrying too much of the commercial weight themselves.
Not early-stage guessing. Not late-stage scaling. The in-between moment where the business is working but the motion around it is not keeping up
YOU RUN A B2B TECH COMPANY
Complex enough that a real sales motion has to exist.
YOU ARE FUNDED OR GENERATING STEADY REVENUE
This is not pre-demand. The business is already moving, but the sales side of it is not keeping pace.
YOUR DEALS ARE HIGH-VALUE
These are not $5k self-serve signups. These are $50k or $100k conversations where one mishandled follow-up can lose six months of pipeline.
THE HANDOFF HASN'T WORKED YET
You either have not hired because the risk feels too high, or you did hire and ended up stepping back into the deals yourself within a few months.
THIS IS NOT ADVICE FIRST AND EXECUTION LATER.
IT IS BOTH, AT THE SAME TIME.
6
WEEKS TO A LIVE SALES MOTION
Not a plan sitting in a folder, but a system that is running, with real pricing, real objection handling, and real deals moving through it.
3x
CLOSE RATE
2x
REVENUE PACE SET UP TO DOUBLE
When the motion works, the math changes. Deals get bigger, cycles get shorter, and the founder stops being the bottleneck in every conversation.
M2M TO MULTI-YEAR
CONTRACT STRUCTURE SHIFTS
Buyers go from agreeing to month-to-month commitments to
multi-year enterprise contracts. Same product, but a different conversation.
BASED ON RECENT CLIENT ENGAGEMENTS
#1 Offer
#2 Offer
THE DEALROOM
YOUR REVENUE ENGINE
This is where I step into your live deals and carry the part that is usually slipping.
The discovery calls, the follow-up, the stakeholder conversations, the pricing, the close. I run that layer with you while building the structure underneath it, so the motion starts existing somewhere other than your head.
This is for founders who already have deals on the table and need someone in the middle and bottom of the motion before anything else.
You bring the pipeline, I step into the deals, and we stop losing good revenue for stupid reasons.
This is the full build. Pipeline to close
For founders who need sales taken out of founder mode and built into a complete, working sales motion.
I step into the commercial motion end to end, with a custom-recruited SDR generating pipeline alongside me. Outbound is no longer sitting on your desk. The top of funnel is being filled, live buyer conversations are being handled, and the motion underneath it is being built as the work happens.
I run the deals, manage buyer relationships, shape discovery, follow-up, pricing, and close, while building the structure that lets the whole thing start moving properly.
This is for when sales cannot keep living and dying by how much the founder can personally carry. Revenue Engine gives the motion more hands, more rhythm, and more room to grow.
The motion gets built in the place where it actually has to hold. Real buyer conversations, real friction, real deals.
That is why it works later.
HIRE FIRST VS.
BUILD AND RUN IT FIRST
Salt runs during the months a hire would still be ramping.
What gets built during that time becomes the foundation the hire walks into later.
HIRING A FULL TIME AE
$150k to $250k OTE, plus taxes, benefits.
COST
Three to six months ramp before consistent output.
TIME TO IMPACT
High sunk cost, plus the restart and rehire.
IF IT'S THE WRONG FIT
Institutional knowledge walks out the door.
WHAT STAYS
WORKING WITH SALT
Retainer plus percentage of ARR closed.
COST
Live deals supported by week two.
TIME TO IMPACT
You can stop, and you keep the system.
IF IT'S THE WRONG FIT
A documented, working motion. And someone to hire into it.
WHAT STAYS
MEET
HANNAH
In 2025, I left a sales job where I was continuously blowing past quota, up to 400%, to start SALT.
I was growing too fast for the roles I was in. Every job I had, I was only ever touching one piece of the sales motion, and I already knew I could run the whole thing. So instead of spending another ten years waiting for the title to match, I just went and did it.
I think sales is one of the most natural things humans do. It is grounded in curiosity, trust, and understanding. Not tactics. Not scripts. Not making people feel cornered.
Most of the industry has overcomplicated something that is actually instinctive when you let it be. People buy from people. And to be good at sales, you have to be great at building trust.
That is what I built SALT around.
FOUNDER OF SALT & Sales Execution Partner
SALES IN FULL MOTION.
LET'S
TALK
If any of this reads like where you are, it is worth a conversation. I take only a couple of engagements at a time, and I would rather tell you early that we are not a fit than drag you through a pitch.