Sales advisory for seed and Series A founders. I help technical founders sharpen positioning, win early customers, and build a GTM motion that doesn't fall apart the moment you hire your first AE.
Three patterns I see in nearly every seed and Series A team I talk to. Sound familiar?
Prospects nod, ask for a follow-up, then ghost. The deck describes what you do but doesn't make anyone feel they need it now. Positioning is the bottleneck, not effort.
Wins feel like luck. Losses feel like bad timing. Without a repeatable read on what's actually moving deals, you can't coach anyone else to do what you're doing.
You're hiring an AE because you're tired of selling. But without a playbook, ICP definition, or a sane comp plan, that AE will burn 9 months and leave. I've watched it happen dozens of times.
No retainers I can't justify. No "12-week transformations." Concrete work, clear deliverables, founder-grade pace.
You walk me through your deck and demo as if I were a prospect. I tear it apart, rebuild the narrative arc, fix the qualifying questions, and you leave with a recorded session + a rewritten deck outline. Good for founders who are still pitching every deal themselves.
Weekly working sessions. I sit in on your live calls, review your CRM hygiene, build out the ICP definition, write the discovery script, define the qualification criteria, and document the motion. You finish with a playbook a new AE could actually use.
I sit at the leadership table as your interim head of sales. Hire your first 1–3 AEs with you, build the comp plan, run weekly forecast and pipeline reviews, and coach the team. I leave when your full-time VP starts.
A few pieces that explain how I think. If these resonate, we'll probably work well together. If they don't, we won't.
The most expensive mistake founders make in their first 50 demos — and the three-question framework that fixes it.
Read →Why pattern-matching to your last startup's playbook is the fastest way to burn $300K and a year of runway.
Read →How to know when you've actually learned what you needed to learn — and it's time to step out of the sales seat.
Read →"Maryanne has a strong instinct for messaging and buyer psychology. She helped us refine our pitch and simplify how we communicated our value, and we saw the impact right away in conversations with customers. The difference was noticeable almost immediately." — Leslie, Founder, Camu
I've sold everything from 3D printers and CPG subscriptions to institutional crypto infrastructure, data products, research, events, and advisory services. My buyers have ranged from solo founders to hedge funds, trading firms, financial institutions, and C-suite executives.
I've been the first sales hire for new product lines, the person building the playbook while simultaneously carrying the number, and later the person teaching teams how to run discovery in markets where there wasn't really a template yet.
Over time, I started noticing the same pattern over and over: highly intelligent founders who deeply understand their product, but struggle to understand how buyers actually make decisions in the real world. Not because they're incapable of learning it — mostly because early-stage sales advice is often too theoretical, too enterprise-y, or coming from people who inherited an existing category, sales motion, or buyer behavior instead of having to figure it out in real time.
I'm not coming at this as a "guru" or a detached strategist. I've been the person trying to close deals in messy markets with unclear positioning, changing products, skeptical buyers, and no real playbook. Sometimes I hit the number. Sometimes I missed it. Both taught me something useful.
Tell me a bit about your company and the specific thing you're stuck on. If I'm not the right person, I'll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Tell me your company stage and the specific thing you're stuck on. If I'm not the right person, I'll tell you and point you somewhere better.