Your manager got fired last month. The BDR lead went the week before.

You’re four months in to an AE role you fought to get, you’re running four or five calls a day back-to-back, and you’re not hitting your number.

Nobody’s telling you what to do because there’s nobody left to ask.

So you do the only thing that feels like progress: more.

More calls. More demos. More pipeline.

You’re holding onto 50 deals because letting go of any of them feels like giving up.

That’s where Marcus was when he started.

The Before

Marcus was a new AE at a legal tech startup.

He’d spent 15 months as an SDR at the same company and earned his promotion.

His annual target was £550K.

In his first quarter, he’d closed £6K.

The company was in chaos.

His Head of sales, BDR Manager, Pre-sales lead, and a fellow AE were all fired within the same period.

He was covering colleagues’ deals on top of his own pipeline.

He was running 30-minute discovery-plus-demo calls with anyone who’d book a meeting.

No qualification criteria. No way to tell a real buyer from a tyre-kicker until he’d already given them half an hour.

In his own words:

‍“I was in that scarcity mindset of being like let’s just try and push this deal along.”

Outside work, he had a burning ambition to build his own business.

But the mental bandwidth wasn’t there.

He was on a burnout trajectory and he knew it.

The Work

Over six sessions, the programme worked across Energy, Mindset, and Focus - with Focus as the primary lever.

On Focus, Marcus built product-specific qualification criteria for the first time.

He had three products, each with different buyer profiles. He’d been treating them identically.

Once he had clear qualification questions for each, he could identify within minutes whether a prospect was worth his time.

He shortened initial meetings from 30 minutes to 20. He redesigned his pre-qualification email to filter before the call, not during it.

On Mindset, the shift was from scarcity to discipline.

He stopped treating every deal as precious and started treating his time as precious instead.

On Energy, the same principles transferred outside work.

He broke his startup idea into weekly actions. Time-blocked his evenings. Started writing things down instead of keeping everything in his head clouding his judgment.

He built a full website and business plan alongside his day job.

The After

Marcus’s average deal size went from £10K to £35K. A 250% increase. In six sessions.

He didn’t get there by adding activity. He got there by subtracting it.

Fewer calls. Shorter calls. Better qualification.

The right prospects getting his best energy instead of every prospect getting his left over energy.

Pipeline generation became steadier. He set boundaries with internal teams he’d previously been afraid to push back on.

And alongside his full-time role, he built a functioning business from scratch.

He’s since moved into a Founding GTM role at a new company, where he’s “finally closing some real deals.”

“The most surprising thing was how small I had to start. I normally tried to fit in so much within a week that I would often overwhelm myself with tasks for the sake of feeling productive. Starting small helped me to actually get things done.”

- Marcus, AE → Founding GTM Team

Name changed to protect the individual's privacy.