Narrativai Revenue Consulting

Narrativai Revenue Consulting (NRC) is a specialized firm that accelerates revenue growth for early-stage B2B SaaS companies. Our team comprises seasoned Chief Revenue Officers, Revenue Operations leaders, and sales managers. Our focus is on early-stage companies in the seed or Series A/B round transitioning from founder-led sales to a scalable go-to-market function.

Partnership with Venture Capital Firms

NRC is a natural partner to venture capital firms. Our services are often engaged as a requirement of an investment, increasing the likelihood that a VC will see a return on that investment. We support founders in engaging with the VC in ways that keep all sides informed and happy, thereby fostering a healthy investment environment.

Rather than a ‘board advisor’ we serve as partners to the founding team - developing tailored strategies and implementing proven systems. We serve as operators-in-residence supporting your portfolio and offering standardised, best practice reporting back into your firm.

The Problem

Early stage companies transitioning from founder-led sales into a scaled go-to-market function are stuck. They need the skills and experience of a senior revenue executive to help with overall strategy, positioning, systems and process design, market testing, etc and they need a talented revenue operations leader with exposure to a lot of different scenarios. But these are expensive roles, and once the system is up and running they are roles that quickly become too heavy - overpaid and not fit for execution.

To compensate for this companies hire in ambitious sales reps or earlier career managers and hope they can bring whatever system worked for them at the previous company over. This runs into an immediate challenge - these hires have never actually implemented a new system, nor do they have enough exposure to multiple use cases to be effective at tailoring a system to a new business model.

The problem isn’t in the people they are hiring - the problem is that founders are trying to buy very different things in one non-existent bundle.

What Founders Need

  1. A go to market strategy.
    Not a mission statement or an aspiration, but a concrete, near-term, achievable plan complete with actionable tasks and clear measurement of the outputs - born of a clear-eyed assessment of the obstacles and opportunities a business faces.

  2. A streamlined tech stack and resilient data structure.
    The majority of early stage businesses try to reinvent the wheel and end up having to completely overhaul the systems and throw away historical data somewhere between series B and D. Revenue generation and ongoing customer impact have clear and simple inputs and outputs that can be tailored to fit.

  3. Proven and easy to administer forecasting and reporting.
    Getting this wrong early on will guarantee a miserable few years of over-promising, under-performing, high-churn and low-morale sales and success teams. Another place where reinventing the wheel is worse than a waste of time - the implication of getting this wrong reaches all the way from the board and investors through to recruitment efforts and marketplace position.

  4. A sales and success team that understands how to sell in the modern marketplace.
    Interviewing sales people is tough - they’ve all blown away quotas every quarter, are customer-centric consultative enterprise ninjas, and know how to spin. Interviewing sales managers is even harder - there is almost no real training for a sales manager and most of them were simply the top sellers who got told to replicate themselves. Most importantly - this team will very likely not have the skillset to actually build points 1-3 above and trying to find a customer-facing closer who has that skillset is a waste of time.

Our Solution

NRC addresses these challenges by partnering with a business for 3-6 months. Think of us as your interim enterprise revenue organization: CRO, Head of RevOps, and Head of Sales Enablement:

  1. Go-to-Market Strategy: We develop a concrete, near-term, achievable plan complete with actionable tasks and clear measurement of the outputs.
  2. Tech Stack and Data Structure: We design a streamlined tech stack and resilient data structure, preventing the need for a complete overhaul of systems and loss of historical data in later stages.
  3. Forecasting, Reporting, and Documentation: We establish proven and easy-to-administer systems, preventing years of over-promising, under-performing, high-churn, and low-morale sales and success teams.
  4. Sales and Success Team: We help source, interview, and onboard the sales and success teams you need (including management), providing them with the training and context they need to grow with your business.
  5. Market Analysis: Move beyond competitor ‘battlecards’ and instead develop a real understanding of the value drivers that bring your buyers to a competitor and attract investment.