For Founders
From founder-led to team-led, without losing the thing that made founder-led work.
A few days writing down what you already do in a good sales conversation, so somebody other than you can do it too.
The longer version of thatClose
The job is not to replace you. It is to get what you do in a live conversation out of your head and onto paper, in your own voice, so that somebody else can run it and you can tell whether they ran it well.
Every month the light bulb stays off is burn against a finite runway.
- You own
- The product's survival.
- It rides on
- Buyers seeing their problem in it.
MISSING
a founder's words. The deck has it IN PROGRESS. Russell supplies.
What it is
A short, founder-led build of your story and the conversation that carries it. Days rather than weeks. You, one or two people whose view genuinely counts, and me.
Not a brand exercise, not a positioning deck, not a program. There is no binder and there is no methodology to adopt. If you have no runway to spend on either, that is the correct instinct and I am not going to argue you out of it.
The rest of what it isClose
We are writing down a translation that has only ever existed in your head: from what you built, to the capabilities a buyer needs, to the result they are accountable for. That is what you perform without noticing in a good conversation, and it is what your best early customers performed for themselves. On paper it becomes two things at once. Something a new seller can learn. And something a buyer who will not translate for you can follow.
A point of view about your market you can say out loud in under a minute. The conversation itself: what you ask, in what order, and what you say once they have named what they need. And the customer stories that hold the position up when somebody pushes on it.
Why it is you in the room and not a hire
What you are best at, you cannot describe, which means you cannot delegate it. A seller who arrives before it is written down has to invent it, and they will invent it from the product, because the product is the only thing anybody hands them on day one. You end up paying market rate for someone to reconstruct work you have already done and never recorded.
So the order is: write it down, then hire. Even roughly, even in a week. Then the hire is onboarding rather than archaeology, and you learn something you cannot learn today, which is whether the thing that will not scale is you or the story.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
Founders still carrying most of the conversations, with a product that works and customers who like it, being told by a board or by arithmetic that the conversation has to belong to more than one person.
If the product does not yet solve a problem someone will pay to have solved, messaging cannot fix that and neither can I. I would rather say that in the first thirty minutes than in the third month, and I have said it.
If you already have a leadership team with a Chief Product Officer and a Chief Customer Officer in it, and the problem is that your field cannot carry a message written above their heads, this is not your page.
- That work is bigger and it has its own. Conversational Messaging →
Why it matters
Impact it creates
Somebody other than you can run the whole conversation, start to finish.
And you can say why it worked, which is the part that matters, because a conversation nobody can explain is a conversation nobody can improve.
It lands on buyers who did not arrive already agreeing with you.
The people who used to convert your product into their own outcome unaided were never many, and the conversation stops depending on finding more of them.
You get a straight read on your own market.
When a story that works on a stranger still does not close, that is a market answer rather than a mystery, and it arrives in weeks rather than at the end of your runway.
Your first sales hire onboards against an artifact instead of against you.
That halves the time before they are useful and it removes the thing that quietly kills first sales hires, which is being asked to invent the story and sell it in the same quarter.
The story is the same in the room, on the site and in the deck, including the deck you take to the raise.
Investors and buyers are hearing the same account of why you exist, which is the cheapest credibility available to you.
Being the one in the room becomes a decision you make about where your time is worth most, rather than a fact about the company you cannot change.
Who it is for
What I usually hear before this starts
- The board says it can't keep being me.
- I can have this conversation. I cannot explain to anyone else how I have it.
- Everyone who gets it loves it, and getting them to get it is the problem.
- The people who bought fastest already knew they had the problem.
- I'm about to hire a salesperson and I can't write down what they are supposed to say.
The full version of why this happens, and why those five are one problem rather than five. The problem page →
How it runs
- What it looks like
- Working sessions, not interviews. Days rather than weeks. We build it with you rather than going away and returning with a document, because a story you did not author is a story you will quietly stop telling by the third week.
- Who must be engaged
- You, and whoever genuinely shares the view. Usually a co-founder, or whoever owns the product. It matters that your product person is in it: the how you deliver half is a claim about what you have actually built, and a story your product lead did not help write is one they will correct in their own meetings without telling you.
- What you supply
- Whatever you already believe, written down badly. Your last ten conversations, and above all the two that are worth more than the rest of the pipeline put together: the last deal that closed fast, and the last one that went quiet after a good demo. Recordings if you have them, notes if you do not.
- What happens after
- It gets tested in live conversations rather than signed off in a document. You run it, we look at where it bent, and it gets fixed. A story that has never met a buyer who pushed back on it is a hypothesis, and it is worth saying that out loud before anybody prints it.
- What it costs
- This is typically a few days of narrative work rather than a program. On the commercial side I am flexible with companies at this stage and prepared to be: mixed fees that combine fixed, performance or variable elements, and equity where the mission and the people are right.
Two reasons this works
Built for Your Motion, Not Delivered From a Binder
Nothing here arrives pre-written. It is built out of your discovery, in your buyer's terminology, around deals you have actually had. A binder would be faster and it would be somebody else's story, which is a more expensive version of the problem you already have.
Why that mattersClose
Risk: what comes out is testable against your own pipeline in the first week, because it was built from it. Cost: your time in the room, which is the input nobody else can supply.
Works at Every Altitude
The same account has to work in a board meeting and on a first call with a stranger, without being rewritten in between. At your stage those two rooms are weeks apart, and a version that only works in one of them is how a company ends up telling its investors something its market has never heard.
Why that mattersClose
I have grown an application business from $2.6M to $14.1M, a distribution business from $45M to $77M as its business unit executive, and a commerce business from $324M to $394M as CMO. Those are different altitudes with the same words, and the second and third are where you find out that a sentence a board loved has a clause nobody can say aloud.
Risk: the story is tested in a live conversation before it is printed anywhere. Cost: one person on both ends, with nothing lost in a handoff.
What it is like to work with me
“I had the privilege to work with Russell 3 times. After many years of selling and sales leadership where I have been trained at Solution Selling twice, Customer Centric Selling 3 times, Sandler once, Force Management 3 times, I can easily say that Russell is one of the best facilitators of sales training I have met. His ability to lead a room with 2, 3 or 400 people is absolutely incredible. Russell has this gift of feeling the energy of the people he interacts with and can instantly adapt his speech to them; Russell has an extremely strong psychology and can really lead and inspire others through a shared objective. Last point that really inspired me when I was working with him is that Russell enjoyed so much what he does that it is contagious with everyone and make them enjoying learning.”
“Russell, I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate your efforts this week! I’ve been through many sales trainings and this was the best I’ve ever attended, much due to you. My team is pumped!”
“Russell, I teared up at the end of your session b/c you reminded me of why I loved sales strategy so much. Thank you for your warmth, the kindness you exuded, and the passion you shared.”
“I was not exaggerating when I told you, and several others, that I have been in many training classes over the years, and this will absolutely stand out as the best one, bar none.”
“Russell’s ability to break down complex concepts into simple, actionable strategies made an immediate impact. Since then, I’ve brought him back multiple times. Russell has a unique talent for making sophisticated sales principles easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to apply in day-to-day selling. Russell immediately elevates any GTM teams efforts.”
Questions people ask
Isn't this just messaging?
It is messaging in the same sense that a blueprint is drawing. What makes it different from what you have probably been sold before is where it starts. Most messaging work starts at your product and looks for better words for it. This starts at your buyer's situation, what it costs them, and what capabilities would change it, and only then asks what you have. That order is the entire difference, and it is why the output works on somebody who has not already decided they like you.
How is this different from the Strategic Narrative page?
Same work, different room. That page is written for a leadership team with a Chief Product Officer and a Chief Customer Officer in it, sitting inside a larger messaging engagement. This is the version where the leadership team is you and one other person, the scope is days, and the commercial terms flex.
If you have the first situation, use that page. Strategic Narrative Development →
Do I hire a salesperson first, or do this first?
This, and it is quick enough that the question is nearly academic. A seller who arrives before the story exists invents one from the product, because that is all anybody hands them in week one. You then spend two quarters correcting a version of your own story that you never wrote down in the first place. A week of this makes the hire onboarding rather than archaeology.
What if it turns out the problem is the market?
Then you find that out in weeks instead of at the end of your runway, and that is a real outcome rather than a failed engagement. A story that works on a stranger and still does not close is a market answer. It is expensive to get and it is cheaper than the alternative, which is spending a year unable to tell the difference between a market that will not buy and a pitch that has not asked it to.
We are three people. Is this too early?
Sometimes, and I will tell you. The boundary is the same one on the problem page: if the product does not solve a problem somebody will pay to have solved, messaging cannot fix it. But if the buyers who understand it want it, and your problem is that too few of them get there, this is exactly the moment, and it is the cheapest it will ever be, because there is no existing story to unpick.
This is the smallest version of the work I do and the one with the most leverage, because at this stage exactly one person can author it and you are already authoring it in your head every week. Your goal, not my service line.
Thirty minutes, and bring two deals.
The last one that closed fast, and the last one that went quiet after a good demo. What the first one already believed, and where exactly the second one stopped, is most of the diagnosis. You will get my read on it in the call whether or not anything follows.
Start a conversation