You’ve built something great.
Investors believe in your team and your product - and they’ve backed you.

Now, you're under pressure to deliver commercially. Growth has stalled. 
Sales feels unpredictable. Your dream of scaling to €5M ARR (and beyond) is clashing with the reality of investor expectations, patchy sales processes, and uncertainty around product-market fit.

Sounds familiar? You're not alone.

Many founders hit this wall around €1M ARR.
The early traction is there, but turning it into predictable, scalable growth? That’s a whole different game.

That’s where I come in.

I work with founders and revenue leaders of scale-ups in Energy, New Space, and Sensor-driven tech to:
✅ Stabilize commercial operations
✅ Implement a tailored sales playbook
✅ Prove and sharpen product-market fit
✅ Build and coach your team
✅ Scale revenue to €5M+ ARR and get investor-ready for your next round

You’ve made it this far.
Let’s turn your innovation into commercial success.
📬 Drop me a message if you’re ready to grow with confidence.


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What my clients achieve:
📈 Scaling revenue from < €1M to > €5M
💎 10x-ing ACVs
🎯 Redefining ICPs to win the right customers
🔁 Building repeatable sales processes and rolling out the right tools

My genius zone:
🔹 B2B startups between €1–5M ARR
🔹 First sellers already onboard
🔹 Selling to large/enterprise clients
🔹 Operating in Sustainability, Space or Sensing
🔹 Commercial traction not yet matching investor expectations

Bad sales incentives are startup killers.

I had a call with a founder. He was complaining that acquisition works okay-ish - but they are not able to increase their customer basis significantly because of high churn. 

So I went into a detailed analysis. Conversion, cycle length, average deal sizes... 
All looked good in principle.

Two things were remarkable though: 
- increase in loss rates before quarter end 
- high churn rates 

We analyzed the higher loss rates - all because of intense pressure on deal and stakeholders 
I talked to customer success: "we tried anything we can, but we cannot reduce churn. Sales is bringing the wrong clients on board." 

Wait, "wrong clients"? 

I went back in the history. Churn rate increased last year. I asked the founder what has happened? 

He explained: "we had some pressure to increase topline after our financing round. So we hired some sales rockstars and gave them a large share of commission based salary. Investors told us that this would encourage them to do more and help us reaching the targets. We implemented an incentive scheme". 

We found the root cause. The source of all evil. And to be honest, it was not the first time I saw it. 

What happened? The rockstars were hunting down anything they could. ICP fit? Did not matter anymore. Promises on product features? Let's do it, we have to win the client. 
Feedback to improve product-market fit and iterate ideal client profile? Inexistent.
ABC for the pay check.  

-> No check of whether order intake fits the ideal customer profile was implemented. 

We fixed it. The overall growth story is now sustainable. How we did it is a topic for another post. 

What is the worst incentive you have seen so far? 

P.S. In my opinions, incentive schemes are always driven by a specific image of human beings and character, which I anyway not support. What is your take on it?

Bernd Kuhnle

🚀 Transformation of a start-up sales organization into a scalable performing scale-up sales organization with +10X revenue 

🤝 Development of customer-centric sales processes to increase customer satisfaction along the whole journey

📈 Increasing predictability and repeatability of sales activity outcomes in fast-changing environments 

🌏 Market expansion and internationalization strategies

👉 I am very much interested in an open exchange with other thought leaders in sales to exchange on growing sales organizations! Looking forward to receive your network invite.

I help founders turn 1 Mio into 10 Mio ARR ↗️ Wingman for scale-ups in Energy, New Space & Sensor-driven solutions ↗️ to establish sales processes, prove product-market fit and nail their next funding round

Founder yesterday, after a one-hour call:
“Within an hour, you understood more of our go-to-market than other advisors did in weeks or months.”

We had just hung up.
First conversation. No long history. No theoretical complex tactics. 
Just one honest hour, circling around what’s actually not working and what keeps coming up again and again.

What stayed with me wasn’t the statement itself, but the tone behind it. I could hear a sense of relief in his voice - not excitement, but the kind of relief that comes when something finally starts to make sense. And that relief stood in contrast to everything that had happened before, because prior to this call there had already been many conversations, many opinions, and many well-meant suggestions, yet despite all of that input, things still felt heavy and unresolved. And that experience isn’t unique.

I see this pattern again and again with founders: surrounded by advice, frameworks, and recommendations, yet still carrying the core questions alone because most conversations move too fast toward answers before the problem itself has really been understood. 

The result isn’t clarity. It’s more noise layered onto existing complexity.

That's why I do thing differently. I do not listen to answer but to understand. I am really curious to see, learn and experience innovation and new business models. And to dive deep into motivation of a founder, to truly support him or her. 

On a personal level, these moments matter to me because I know how exhausting it is to sit with decisions that don’t fit into clean models, especially when growth pressure is real and time feels scarce. When a conversation creates space to think - really think - something shifts. The weight eases, options become visible again, and momentum returns quietly instead of being forced.

That’s usually where real progress begins.

When was your last conversation with a clear "wow" after you hung up? 

P.S. For me, it does not take an hour. 15 minutes max. and you receive first value - want to challenge me? 😁

taplio

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