Flare Sales Organization
Infrastructure, process, and partnerships
Head of Community and Customer Experience, 2021 to 2022
Safety technology startup, acquired by Smart Holdings in 2023
April 2021 - April 2022
Pipeline to Playbook: Building a sales function from scratch.
OverviewSales is where I started my career, so once community and customer experience were established, I took on Flare's sales organization as well. The goal was to reach institutions already thinking about safety, like hospitals, schools, city governments, and turn that into awareness, B2B revenue, and eventually a stronger position for acquisition.
Established Outreach, LeadIQ, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and HubSpot as a connected stack.
Defined prospecting priorities, email sequences, deal stages, and success plans.
Opened and documented partnership conversations with major employers, healthcare organizations, schools, and government agencies.
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Flare was a consumer product with no B2B motion: no CRM, no pipeline, no prospecting process, no templates, and nobody whose job it was to build any of it. Everything had to be built before any partnership or B2B conversations could take place, and it had to be simple enough that someone else could run it too.
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The stack: Outreach as the source of truth, LeadIQ and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting, HubSpot as the CRM.
The process: A prospecting method that prioritized institutions most likely to move quickly and adopt widely, email sequences, and success plans for each deal.
The pipeline: Defined deal stages with the key questions at each one, so anyone looking at it could see what was real.
The conversations: Partnership calls with Netflix, Kaiser, Care.com, PatientPop, and healthcare and government agencies, each documented with next steps.
The handoff: SOPs, documentation, and a transition guide so the team could carry every conversation forward.
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A sales function where there had been none, with tools, process, pipeline, and templates that outlived my time there.
Handoff documentation and a pipeline anyone could interpret, with defined stages and the questions to answer at each, so the team could see what was in progress and where to go next.
Partnership conversations opened with institutions large enough to expand both reach and revenue, each documented and handed off with the process behind it.
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At four people, you don't wait for someone more qualified. Building three functions inside one company is how I found out I could build them anywhere, and that what survives a handoff is the process built underneath it.
