About the client
An Irish-headquartered managed service provider with more than twenty years in business, serving the SME market with deep expertise in cybersecurity, and moving from founder-led sales to a predictable revenue engine.
The challenge
The net new logo run rate was acceptable with room to grow, but the white space inside existing accounts was a far bigger opportunity, and nobody was actively working it.
The brief asked for one person to close both gaps at once: build a sales process that could win new logos predictably, and build account management and customer success from close to nothing. The business’s depth in cybersecurity added a further requirement, since a CRO without genuine intel in that space would have struggled to be credible with the team or with customers.
How it played out
We were engaged to build the brief around these two gaps, predictable new business and growth inside the existing base, and produced a first shortlist of excellent candidates for the budget as it had been set. As the search went on, it became clear that inheriting a founder-led sales motion called for a more senior profile than that budget allowed, so we went back to the client and made the case for a larger one, which they agreed to. We came back with one candidate against the revised budget, and that candidate was hired six weeks after the search began.
The candidate
The person placed brought sales operations discipline, someone able to build a repeatable system rather than simply work a pipeline, alongside genuine account management and customer success experience and real depth in cybersecurity, which mattered as much for credibility with the team as with customers.
What made this work
Recognising early that stepping into a founder-led motion needed a more senior hire, and making that case to the client, is what got them the person the role actually needed.
Once the right candidate had been identified, there was nothing to gain from padding the shortlist with others, so we presented one person because one person was right for the role.
Cybersecurity depth was treated as a genuine requirement rather than a preference, since without it the credibility gap with the team and the market would have undermined the hire from day one.