They were selling SMB.
The buyer was Enterprise.
Bateau had a real product and no sales motion. The first hundred conversations proved the ideal customer profile was wrong — the volume, the budget, and the data all lived at the top of the senior-living market. This is what was rebuilt, and what it changed.
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.
A working inbound motion, no Enterprise channel, and the largest deals in company history closed inside 90 days.
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 →