Half the time, the deal isn't stuck.
The ICP is.
Two founders. Two stuck ICPs. Two reframes. Both companies came in selling to the wrong buyer. Stephen reframed the ICP, took the AE seat on the right deals, and built the motion that fit. These are the long versions of those stories — what was actually broken, what was rebuilt, and what closed because of it.
About Bateau
Bateau works with top senior-living groups in the U.S. Their platform integrates data from disparate systems into a single source of truth — without asking operators to change anything about the systems they already run. Paul Jarvis, Bateau's Co-Founder and CEO, brought President's Club in at the moment he was standing up the company's first sales organization.
The challenge
Bateau's founding team did not come from sales. They needed someone who could help put the first level of structure in place — an outbound motion, an initial sales bench, and the operating discipline to keep both honest. The product was real. The motion didn't exist yet.
The solution
Stephen began by building the foundation. He stood up the outbound sales tool, wrote the campaign sequences and the copy in conjunction with the Bateau team, and brought in seasoned contract SDRs to start working leads and having live conversations. From the start, the structure was instrumented to learn — every conversation, every objection, every "we wouldn't buy this" was treated as a signal.
That data answered a question Bateau hadn't been able to answer on its own: who is actually buying? The early SMB target was producing motion but not deals. The top senior-living groups, by contrast — larger, multi-property operators with the data volume Bateau's platform was actually built for — were producing budget, qualified conversations, and procurement paths. Stephen worked with Paul to re-point the entire outreach motion at the larger end of the market.
The outcome
Bateau didn't just find product-market fit — they found the buyer the product was built for, and re-organized the sales motion around them. Stephen taught the management team how to run a sales organization with discipline: regular pipeline reviews, data reviews, forecast hygiene. The first level of structure became the foundation Bateau scaled on.
Today, Bateau's understanding of its market, its target customer, and how to close large deals is the company's working knowledge — not a deck, not a memory of an engagement, but the operating reality of how they sell.
About Opensense
Opensense is one of the leading email signature data providers in B2B. Their platform gives marketing, sales, and IT teams a single place to manage email signatures, ad campaigns, sales insights, and email compliance. Co-Founder Bobby Narang engaged President's Club to grow Opensense's average deal size and its Enterprise customer base.
The challenge
Opensense had real inbound demand and a young, scrappy sales team — but the outbound channel wasn't activated, and inbound wasn't being maximized. As a startup moving upmarket, the company needed to raise the level of skill and professionalism with which it ran each opportunity, and learn how to source, manage, and convert deals that were bigger and more complex than anything the team had closed before.
The solution
Stephen ran a full audit of Opensense's sales process — outbound consistency, target market, inbound conversion, the way the team handled discovery, demos, and procurement. The audit surfaced a real Enterprise opportunity sitting under-pursued. He brought in an experienced SDR to run outbound at a measurable cadence, and rebuilt the target list against the right buyer.
On the inbound side, Stephen led by example: he took the Account Executive seat directly on Enterprise deals, ran the discovery calls, owned the demos, navigated procurement and security review, and closed contracts. While he did, he trained the existing SDR and AE teams — sitting in on sales meetings, reviewing pipeline live, coaching every step of the way.
The outcome
Within the first 90 days of taking the AE seat on Enterprise deals, Stephen closed the largest contracts in Opensense's history. The Enterprise channel that didn't exist when the engagement started was generating pipeline — and on the strength of that motion, Opensense was targeting $1M+ in Enterprise revenue the following year.
The deeper outcome was internal. The professionalism of the sales organization stepped up immediately. Inbound conversion improved as the team learned to work each opportunity at the level the larger deals demanded. Time-to-close shortened. The team got more assertive heading into bigger, more complex evaluations — because they'd watched someone run those deals end-to-end alongside them.
"Stephen brought a level of skill and professionalism to our sales team that as a young, scrappy team we just didn't have. Instantly that brought up the quality and expertise to our approach, specifically with larger, more complex deals."
"I have the confidence as a manager that when we are getting those inbound leads we are maximizing those opportunities and converting them into customers."
"I was most impressed by the amount of depth that was provided. It was clear that we were getting a consultative approach, not just a one-size-fits-all approach, something that was very much tailored to our business."
"Stephen has provided a massive benefit beyond revenue."
Your reframe might be the move.
Two founders. Two stuck ICPs. Two reframes that re-set the trajectory of each company. If your pipeline is producing motion but not deals, the question worth asking before the next quarter starts is whether the deal is broken — or whether the buyer is.
Send Stephen a stuck deal →