Lifting your close rate by 20% in 90 days by replacing standard playbooks with signal-driven sales | Co-Founder & CEO at bont | Business Angel

As a serial entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in strategy consulting, I am committed to driving 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐁2𝐁 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 in the digital age. 🚀

𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬

𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 & 𝐂𝐄𝐎 𝐨𝐟 𝐣𝐚𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨 (2012-2023):
•	Grew the HR Tech SaaS company from zero to several hundred clients. 	
•	Achieved annual recurring revenues in the mid-seven-figure range. 	
•	Successfully executed an exit to a strategic buyer in 2022 and transitioned out as CEO shortly thereafter. 	
•	Learned the critical importance of data-driven decision-making in sales.

𝐂𝐨-𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 & 𝐂𝐄𝐎 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐨𝐧𝐭 (2024 - 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭):
•    Our mission at bont is to transform sales processes for B2B companies by leveraging data-driven insights and AI technology.     
•    We aim to move beyond traditional sales methods and create more effective strategies that empower sales teams to make informed decisions quickly.     
•    We focus on integrating 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚-𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐜𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐞, including: 
– 𝐎𝐮𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Identifying high-potential leads and optimizing outreach strategies, as well as implementing targeted campaigns to maximize engagement and conversion. 
– 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Using AI tools to provide insights that help close deals faster and improve retention, and personalizing customer interactions to identify upsell opportunities.     
•    By using AI-powered deal intelligence, we help sales teams prioritize their efforts and make better decisions, ultimately driving higher conversions and more predictable revenue. 

𝐓𝐞𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬:
•    Managing Partner advising scale-ups and startups on growth strategies and investor decisions. •    Passionate about supporting emerging B2B tech startups in optimizing their sales and operational processes.     
•    Co-founder of Investor Rating, a platform designed to streamline investor evaluations and enhance decision-making for startups and investors alike.

Outside of work, I’m a dedicated father of two, living near Bern. I love staying active and embracing new adventures. My roots in East Frisia give me a diverse outlook that enriches my professional life.

Let’s connect—whether to exchange ideas, explore collaboration, or discuss innovative sales growth strategies. 🌟

Dennis Teichmann

In 2022, I sold jacando to a strategic buyer. 

I was proud as hell.

A year later, I stepped down as CEO. 

I realized something I wish I'd known earlier: 

a founder and a strategic investor rarely see eye to eye.

Then came the hardest part.

From the outside, I watched the company I built go into bankruptcy.

Ten years of work, hundreds of customers and a team that believed in the product.

I can't describe what that feels like. 

But I can tell you what I did with it.

I started again. 

I co-founded bont sos. with Nik and applied everything I'd learned. 

We built leaner, smarter, with more focus from day one.

You don't need to be over your failures to start something new. 

You just need to be honest about what they taught you.

🚀 Boosting B2B Revenue & Retention with AI | Co-Founder & CEO at bont | Investor & Advisor

During COVID in 2020, I had to cut my jacando team by half.

60 people became 30. 

It was the hardest thing I've done as a founder. 

Every second person, gone.

What happened next surprised me.

We became more productive. 

And not a little bit. → A lot.

All because we kept the people who were intrinsically motivated. 

The ones who believed in the vision, not just the paycheck.

More headcount doesn't mean more output. 

It often means more coordination, more meetings, more diluted ownership.

I'm not saying firing people is a strategy. 

(of course not)

It was a crisis. It had to be done.

But it taught me something I still carry:

A small team of believers will always outperform a large team of participants.

After almost a decade in strategy consulting, I thought starting a business would feel familiar.

I had frameworks. 
I had analytical skills. 

I have managed teams across 3 countries.

None of it prepared me for day one as a founder.

I started at zero. 

I had to learn data architecture, operational sales, customer development, product management. 

→ All from scratch.

The funny thing? 

I didn't even know how much I'd enjoy it. Consulting never let me get close enough to the real work to find out.

The biggest lesson: expertise in advising is not expertise in building. They're completely different muscles.

If you're a consultant thinking about making the jump, know this: you won't be ready. 

And that's exactly why you should do it.

My leadership philosophy comes down to two words: 

coaching and independence.

1 - Coaching means sparring. 

Challenging assumptions → Helping someone reach a level they didn't think they could hit.

2 - Independence means stepping back. 

No daily check-ins → No hovering.

I expect a lot from the people I work with. 

But once trust is earned, I give full autonomy and invest heavily in their growth.

Micromanagement is just coaching without trust.

I run over 2,000 km a year on my cargo e-bike. 

Just commuting. 

Getting my kids to daycare and school and back.

People ask: "Why not just drive?"

Because it's the best part of my day.

There’s no screens. 
No Slack. 
No pipeline reviews. 

Just me and my kids, talking about whatever two small humans find important that morning.

As a founder, your calendar fills up fast. 

These rides are the one thing I protect.

What are the things in your life that you protect?

"You're not a consultant. You're a builder."

That's what Michael Ollmann told me after I placed second out of 20,000 students in a business competition.

I didn't believe him.

I was 23. 

I wanted to be a consultant. 

That was the plan: the prestigious path, the safe track.

He saw something I wasn't ready to see yet.

It took me another decade of flying between Brussels, Stockholm, and Helsinki, writing strategies that sat in folders, before I understood what he meant.

The gap between advising and building is enormous. 

You only feel it when you're on the wrong side of it.

He was right. I just needed the bore-out to prove it.

Has anyone ever seen something in you before you did?

Early in my career, I gave the most attention to the loudest voices on my team.

I mistook volume for substance.

The quiet ones? 

They were often doing the deepest work. 

Solving the hardest problems. 

Building the things that actually moved us forward.

It took me years to learn: 

The smartest people in your company are rarely the loudest.

I built jacando from zero to exit. Now I'm building bont. Here's what actually stuck from both:

1. Find a topic you're passionate about. 

If you don't care deeply, you'll quit when it gets hard.

2. Nothing is easy. 

Stop looking for shortcuts. 

The best businesses are built through persistence, not hacks.

3. Trial and error is the method. 

Not the backup plan. 

You need the willingness to try one more time, always.

4. Don't watch competitors. 

Talk to your customers. 
They'll tell you more in one call than a month of market research.

5. Use your network. 

Don't be shy about asking for intros. The worst they can say is no.

6. Hire slow, spend slower. 

Keep runway to stay independent. 

The moment you depend on outside money for survival, you lose control.

7. Focus on yourself. 

Because comparison kills momentum.

Last month, a sales leader told me: "I can look at a deal and know if it's real. I don't need a forecast model."

I asked: "Can you do that for 50 deals at once?"

He couldn't.

Gut feeling works on individual deals. You might be right about one account because you've been in those calls, you know the players, you've built the relationship.

But can you accurately assess 50 deals across your pipeline? All in different stages, with different champions, different timelines?

That's where gut feeling falls apart.

Data isn't a replacement for experience. It's a multiplier. It lets you scale your judgment across your entire pipeline, not just the deals you remember.

I've seen this play out dozens of times. The best sales leaders combine instinct with data. 

Gut feeling alone will always lose at pipeline level.

Do you know what I mean?

Your playbook tells a rep what to do on day 7.

But it has no idea what the buyer did on day 6.

That's why static playbooks fail.

I worked with a client last quarter whose playbook said: 

"Send pricing on day 5 of evaluation."

But their champion had just left the company on day 4. 

Following the playbook would have killed the deal.

The best sales teams don't follow scripts. 

They follow signals:

"The champion just re-watched our demo." → Time to loop in their Head of IT.

"Engagement dropped two days after the proposal." → Something changed. Call them.

"Two new stakeholders showed up from finance." → The deal is expanding, or it's dying. Find out which.

These are real-time reads, not playbooks.

Teach your team to interpret signals, not memorize steps.

Sellers only spend only 25% of their time actually selling.

(from a study Bain published recently)

Sellers are buried in:

- Manually updating CRM fields after every call
- Pulling reports for leadership meetings
- Researching accounts that’s already been researched
- Scheduling follow-ups that should have been automated

All necessary. None of it selling.

The fix isn't "work harder." It's removing the work that shouldn't be manual.

AI won't replace your sales team.

But it will replace the tasks keeping your sales team from doing what they're good at.

At bont, we've automated 90% of those processes. 

The result? 

Our team spends time with customers, not on admin.

84% of technical leaders say their data strategy needs a complete overhaul before AI can deliver real results.

That should tell you something.

AI doesn’t fix bad data.

It scales it.

If your CRM is messy, with deals logged wrong, customer history scattered across systems, and key signals missing, AI will process that mess faster and more confidently than any human.

- Forecasts
- Account prioritisation
- Next step recommendations

All built on a version of reality that is wrong.

We see it all the time.

Companies buy AI tools hoping to solve a data problem, forgetting that AI sits downstream from the data.

The tool works exactly as designed.

The foundation doesn’t.

If you’re implementing AI 👉 start with the data.

Make sure it reflects the reality you want decisions to be based on.

Otherwise you’re just accelerating bad decisions, not building smarter systems.

What data problem are you trying to solve with AI right now?

At jacando, we used to run 100 inbound demos a month. 

We closed 15 deals.

Then we changed one thing.

Before booking the demo, we asked one question:

"What triggered this internally, and what happens if you change nothing?"

If they could answer clearly → real deal.

If they couldn't → content consumer.

After that small change: 

60 demos → 20 closed deals.

We did fewer demos and more revenue. 

Less wasted time for everyone, including the buyer.

Most sales teams are so afraid of missing a deal that they demo everyone. 

But a demo to a buyer who isn't ready doesn't accelerate anything. 

It just delays your focus on the ones who are.

White-collar jobs will change completely in the next 5 years.

Not all of them. 

Not the leadership ones. 

But the operational, repetitive, process-heavy ones.

Those are being replaced by AI agents. 

Faster than most people expect.

At bont, we've already built our own pipeline to run 90% on automated, AI-interpreted processes. 

Human interaction only kicks in when AI can't judge.

For us it’s no longer a future scenario. 

We're living it right now.

The question for every business leader is no longer: "will AI replace jobs?" 

It's: "which parts of my team's work should have been automated two years ago?"

If the society doesn't have a good answer for the people affected, this will create real pressure on employment markets. 

That's something I think about a lot.

What’s your opinion on this?

The second time I started a company, I made completely different mistakes.

I’m failing forward.

Trading old mistakes for new ones at a higher level.

For example:

👉 At jacando, I started with a consumer marketplace and spent four years figuring out that the market wasn't ready. 

👉 At bont sos, I started with a niche in B2B sales intelligence and didn't move until I understood exactly who we were building for and why they'd pay.

🧑🏻‍🦱👩‍🦰 🧔🏽👩🏻 🙋🏼‍♂️👨🏿‍🔧 At jacando, I built the team first and searched for revenue second. We had 60 people before the business model was proven. 

🧑🏻‍🦱🧑🏻‍🦱 At bont sos., we stayed tiny and profitable from year one. Revenue before headcount. Always.

💯 At jacando, I built alone. Every strategic decision ran through me. It was fast in the early days and exhausting later. 

🤝 At bont sos, I co-founded with Nik from day one. We share the workload and having a co-founder improves the quality of the decisions greatly. There's always someone to push back.

🚀 At jacando, I raised money from a strategic investor and eventually discovered that our incentives didn't align. The exit proved it. 

👍 At bont sos, we're bootstrapped. The only stakeholders we answer to are customers.

None of this means jacando was a failure. 

The exit happened. The lessons were real.

But the second company benefits from the first one's tuition. 

The question is whether you're honest enough with yourself to actually apply what you paid for.

Hot take: what Clay is doing, you can build on your own with Zapier, n8n, and a bit of patience.

Clay brings a nice interface to a process that's really just a chain of automations. 

Lead enrichment, email sequencing, data pulls. 

All of it can be stitched together with tools you probably already pay for.

Clay is for teams who want to skip the setup.

But if you're bootstrapping or running lean, you don't need another subscription. 

You need to understand what the tool actually does, and then build it.

Most sales automation isn't rocket science. 

It's connecting APIs, setting triggers, and letting the data flow.

The best founders I know build before they buy.

Most deals don't die at the finish line.

They were never real to begin with.

A deal is real when 3 things are true: 

1. There's a named person whose job depends on solving this
2. There's a date that means something (not "Q3")
3. The buyer can explain the cost of doing nothing

If any of those are missing, you have a conversation. 

Not a deal.

What else would you add?

Sales teams are WRONG about why they lose deals more than 60% of the time.

An analysis of over 100,000 B2B purchases narrowed it down to this:

👉 Almost all win/loss analysis is internal. 

Reps report what they think happened, the managers accept it and the CRM gets updated with whatever explanation feels least uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, the buyer had a completely different experience.

I see this in the data we review at bont sos as well. 

A rep logs "lost on price." while the buyer's actual reason was that the champion couldn't get internal buy-in and the rep never spotted it. 

A rep logs "went with a competitor” while the buyer actually paused the project entirely. They were never close to buying.

These aren't small discrepancies. 

Strategy gets built on this information, playbooks get updated, and pricing gets reviewed. 

All based on a story the seller told themselves.

Proper win/loss analysis means talking to the buyer after the deal closes or dies. 

That’s the only way you are going to truly understand what’s happening.

There needs to be a real conversation, by someone the buyer has no reason to be polite to.

You won't always like what you hear.

But you'll finally know what actually happened.

When did you last ask a lost prospect what really happened?

For the first few years building jacando, I hinted at what I needed.

"If you ever come across anyone who might be interested..." 

That kind of thing.

It was vague, forgettable and easy to ignore.

At some point I changed how I asked. 

I was specific. 

Specific name, specific reason, specific introduction text already written. 

Something like: 

"I'd love to speak with your Head of Sales at [company]. Would you be willing to make that intro? I've written a short message you could forward if it helps."

Response rate went up and so did the intro quality. 

And meetings booked faster.

From my experience people want to help.

They just need you to make it easy.

I wasted a lot of my early years hinting.

And hinting isn't asking. 

If you want something you have to ask directly.

What stops you from being specific?

I had a client last quarter who changed one thing in their sales process: 

→ they set a 60-minute SLA on inbound lead response.

❌ Not 24 hours. 
❌ Not "end of day." 

👉 They went for 60 minutes.

Their conversion rate jumped from 19% to 41%.

Same product, same team and same leads. 

Just faster.

And it’s not just them.

Others see similar results. 

Companies that respond within one hour see conversion rates 3x higher than those who wait a day.

And It's all about being relevant while the buyer still cares.

If your lead response time isn't a KPI, it should be.

I am a tech entrepreneur, AI product leader and ex-business consultant, with 20+ years of experience building products at the cutting edge of AI technology. I have led both large and small teams, and am a hands-on executor, passionate about building products that users love and find truly valuable.

Sophia Solanki

Hiring for this amazing Staff Product Manager - Design and Intelligence role at Typeface - https://lnkd.in/gkA_i9AF . If you are looking to build the future of marketing intelligence, love building AI-native products, and enjoy digging in deep to build and drive big impact for enterprise customers - this is the role for you - Apply Today!

Sr. Director, Product @ Typeface AI | AI-Native Builder | Serial Entrepreneur I IITD’05

Open article: Staff Product Manager-Design and Intelligence by job-boards.greenhouse.io

Staff Product Manager-Design and Intelligence

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