Case study · Founding sales
First business hire, from first contact to renewal
Tinycoaching, a B2B EdTech SaaS, had a very first proof of concept and no product-â market fit yet when I joined as its first business hire, alongside the founder, in January 2020. Over four years the role went from growth marketing to founding sales, then to the whole go-â to-â market. In 2023, the customer portfolio I managed generated about âŹ350k in annual revenue, renewals and upsells included.
The constraint: A product still finding its market, no CRM yet, and buyers who rarely decide alone: training, HR, management, purchasing, legal and finance, over cycles usually of 6 to 10 months.
How it ran
- Targets and positioning defined with the founder and Product, from what discovery conversations revealed.
- Demand opened through LinkedIn outreach, cold calling and cold email, content and three VivaTech editions.
- Sales enablement built from scratch: demo playbooks, pitch and objection handling, scripts, one-â pagers, proposals, business cases and tender responses.
- Partnerships alongside direct sales: about 15 training and commercial partners onboarded with a pitch kit, presentations and webinars, then co-â selling on deals.
- Paid pilots, most often 2 to 6 months long, for about 30 to 300 learners, designed per client: kickoff with the sponsor, admin and team training, usage tracking and reporting.
- Renewals prepared from usage data. On a 300-user account, surveys and usage surfaced a soft-â skills need: an additional sale worth about 20% of the original contract.
- Customer feedback taken to Product: notification timing per client and save-â for-â later on modules, built by the Product team, then featured in demos and newsletters.
- Pricing, margins and the final steps of some deals worked through with the founder.
- Two people reporting to me directly, in customer success and in communication and sales support: goals, processes, follow-â up.
Outcome
- In 2023, the customer portfolio I managed generated about âŹ350k in annual revenue, renewals and upsells included.
- Enterprise and public-â sector accounts, among them a deployment at a major engineering and services group.
- A national tender won with a professional federation.
- One HubSpot, built from scratch, to run it all from first touch to renewal.
What carries overThe whole commercial cycle, run hands-â on at an early-â stage company: opening demand, selling to buying groups, proving value in a paid pilot, then renewing and expanding.