President's Club
You can pitch the product. You built it. Procurement, security review, and the buying committee speak a different language — and that's where the deals you should be winning are sitting right now. Stephen takes each one end-to-end and stays to close the next.
Multiple successful exits and fundraising events led by Stephen. $0 in direct enterprise software sold for seed and Series A startups.
Send Stephen a stuck deal →60 minutes. No charge, no pitch. · Only 2–3 founders at a time.
"I've been able to call Stephen with a new hire, when I think they're a good fit but I want another opinion, and he's always happy to jump on a screening call and ensure that we are making the right decisions. One of these reps brought on 42 new customers in the past year."
David Abell · CEO, AM Transport Services
"Stephen has been a strong example of an individual contributor at Opensense. He is a real teammate. It feels like he is wholly a part of Opensense."
Bobby Narang · Co-Founder, Opensense
"Stephen was helpful for us to learn how to have a structured process. I appreciate the work we did together to learn about sales as an early stage company and put the first level of structure in place."
Including the ones that ended in acquisition. He builds the version that actually gets used, not the version that looks good in a demo. The CRM is configured to your motion. The playbook is written in your voice. Both are built into your company from day one.
Seven years running sales at Data Advantage Group — $10M+ in direct enterprise sales into Fortune 100 banks and healthcare — until DAG was acquired by Sequoia-backed Bigeye. Same arc at Datacoral, which exited to Cloudera. Build the motion. Get bought. That's the pattern.
Joined pre-revenue. Built the CRM and pipeline from zero. Closed the first enterprise contracts — including a top-5 automotive supplier — and the close paid out as the next round, led by Index Ventures.
Won enterprise evaluations against Informatica and Collibra — public companies with 10× the marketing budget and the brand recognition buyers default to. Repeatedly. Procurement teams sign contracts. Founders' decks don't.
Took the AE seat directly on Opensense's first Enterprise deals — and inside 90 days closed the largest contracts in the company's history. The motion put them on a $1M+ Enterprise run rate. CEO Bobby Narang: "It feels like he is wholly a part of Opensense."
"It comes down to being scrappy, but also being smart. Hustle culture is important at startups, but you want to make sure you're hustling on the right thing, not just being busy to look busy."
3× President's Club at FullFunnel
Sandler & Costigan trained
10+ years selling enterprise data infrastructure
Cost of one call: 60 minutes.
Cost of next quarter without it: the same stuck deal.
Two of the founders Stephen has worked with hit the same wall: pipeline that looked plausible on paper, conversations that died on the call. In both cases, the deal wasn't broken — the ICP was. Stephen's first job was to reframe who the company was selling to. The motion he built came after.
Bateau came in selling SMB. Stephen stood up the outbound tool, wrote the campaigns, and put contract SDRs on the phones — and the first hundred conversations made it clear the volume, the budget, and the data lived with the top senior-living groups, not the long tail. The whole motion got re-pointed at larger, multi-property enterprise buyers. Today, Bateau's understanding of the senior-living market, its target customer, and how to close large deals is the company's foundation.
Read the full Bateau case →Opensense had a working inbound motion and a young, scrappy team — but no Enterprise channel and no consistency in their outbound. Stephen audited the existing process, rebuilt the outbound effort against the right target market, and took the AE seat on Enterprise deals himself. Same product. Different buyer. Inside 90 days, the largest contracts in the company's history closed, with a path to $1M+ in Enterprise revenue the following year.
Read the full Opensense case →Your stuck deal might be a deal problem. It might be an ICP problem. The post-mortem tells you which. View all case studies →
Most founders are losing winnable enterprise deals, not because their product is wrong, but because nothing about how they're running the close is built for the procurement side of the table. I've sat on both sides of that table for a decade.
Procurement, security review, the buying committee — on the other side of the table.
Two of the founders Stephen has worked with had built motions against the wrong ICP.
The number is smaller than your pipeline says.
Every quarter, the same five deals limp forward. None of them were ever going to sign.
That's where founder time goes once the deal hits procurement.
That stops working the day you have to hand a deal to anyone else.
Not a deck on a shelf. The actual ability to look at your pipeline and tell anyone — your board, your investors, yourself — exactly who is buying each deal, what problem they're solving, why your product is the one to solve it, and how their procurement will get it signed.
When you're ready to bring on a full-time AE or SDR, Stephen sources, vets, and helps onboard the hire, making sure whoever joins can actually run on the rails you've built together.
Each one loses to a different aspect of how we work — for different reasons, at different stages.
The right move once the motion is proven. Before that, you're hiring against a hypothesis, and if the hypothesis is wrong, you've spent eighteen months and a six-figure base learning that. Stephen proves the hypothesis first. Then he helps you hire against the proof.
Consultancies sell hours and leave a deck behind — the playbook that worked for one founder gets repackaged for the next. Stephen takes the AE seat on your deals and builds the motion that fits your buyer specifically. Bobby Narang at Opensense put it plainly: "a consultative approach, not one-size-fits-all — very much tailored to our business." The CRM, the playbook, the procurement motion — built into your company on day one, not rented from somebody else's firm.
You built the technology and you can pitch the technology. But enterprise procurement, security review, and compliance run on a different playbook, and that's where most first enterprise deals stall. The math gets paid back the moment your first enterprise contract closes.
These aren't separate services. They're the infrastructure Stephen builds while he closes your first deals — and keeps running as the team scales.
Implemented and tuned to your motion — Salesforce or HubSpot, your call. Configured the way the people using it will actually use it, not the way the demo looked.
The ICP, the message, the discovery questions, the demo flow, the objection answers, the procurement playbook — written down, in your voice, so your next hire ramps in weeks instead of quarters.
Why "President's Club"? The award sales orgs give their #1 performer — usually locked up at large companies. President's Club, LLC exists to put that talent inside earlier-stage companies for the months when it matters most.
Stephen has been on both sides of the procurement table for more than a decade — running enterprise sales at the seller side, sitting in the buying committee on the buy side. He's led the sales motion at two companies through their acquisitions (Data Advantage Group → Bigeye, Datacoral → Cloudera) and the sales motion behind a $25M Series B at an AI/electronics SaaS startup backed by Index Ventures. The throughline isn't a category. It's a way of building a sales motion that survives the procurement, security, and committee gauntlet enterprise deals actually run through.
Outside of work: a masters-level water polo player who still competes. Golfer. Father, husband, and the housemate to two beagles with strong opinions about most things.
Your pipeline coverage is thin. Your POCs are stalling at procurement. Your board has told you what to fix. You don't need another deck — you need someone who has closed these deals before to look at why yours aren't closing.
Pick the enterprise deal that's costing you the most sleep — the one that died in security review, stalled at procurement, or has been "two weeks from signature" since last quarter. Stephen will work it back end-to-end with you: where it broke, what was missing, what your next deal needs to do differently. You'll leave with a post-mortem you can take to your board.
60 minutes. No charge, no pitch, no follow-up sequence. If after the post-mortem you want Stephen to run your next deal, you'll tell him.
Stephen reads everything personally. He'll be in touch within one business day.
If it's time-sensitive, his direct line is [email protected].