Hold the bar on B2B sales hiring — digital-native, LinkedIn-fluent candidates, not "basic Office" résumés. Protect founders from the most expensive mis-hire in their business.
Role specification, screening criteria, interview design, founder coaching on rejection calls, post-hire enablement. Delivered across multiple fractional CMO engagements — most visibly for a B2C leisure brand.
Chosen hires stay and operate solo after the engagement ends. Pattern replicated across multiple clients. Founders stop wasting six-figure base salaries on the wrong profile.
The challenge
Every founder I've worked with has asked for the same thing at some point: "I need a sales manager." What they usually mean is: "I need someone who can walk into a room, make the first relationship, close the first deal, and build the motion from there." Those two job descriptions produce very different résumés — and the wrong hire can burn a year of runway and a six-figure base.
The pattern I see repeatedly: a founder settles on a generic profile ("10 years B2B sales, industry adjacent, Office power-user") and ends up with a candidate who can't source on LinkedIn, can't enrich a list, can't run a community play, and waits for leads to show up.
What I did
This is a pattern I've run for multiple clients — most visibly on a recent B2C leisure engagement, but grounded in 7 years of tech talent acquisition before I moved to marketing.
The spec that says no
- Required: LinkedIn-fluent (not "has a profile" — actively networks in HR / People / Ops communities), digitally native, comfortable in modern tooling.
- Disqualifiers: "basic Office," no LinkedIn activity, uncomfortable with outbound sequences or CRM.
- Screening signal: can this person source and enrich a list of 100 HR leads in their first week without hand-holding?
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Holding the bar in the room
- Pushed back when founders were ready to compromise on digital fluency "because the candidate has industry experience." Industry experience is cheap; digital fluency is the part that can't be taught in a month.
- Coached founders through rejection calls on candidates they liked personally but who didn't fit the spec.
- Wrote the onboarding plan — 30/60/90 — so the new hire could hit the ground running, not sit in a founder's lap.
The outcome
Chosen hires stay, ramp, and run the channel solo after my engagement ends. On the B2C leisure engagement the sales manager hired against this spec continued running the B2B channel after I left — and the 50 corporate orgs closed were partly his book. Pattern replicated across multiple fractional engagements. Founders stop wasting six-figure base salaries on the wrong profile.
This page is a cross-client meta-case covering a recurring pattern. The B2C leisure specifics are one instance — with more client engagements being written up and added here over time.
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