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What is StartupSalesPro?

StartupSalesPro is a startup consulting shop helps early-stage startups close deals and build scalable sales processes. My expertise is helping startups and sales teams close deals, generate leads, and build scalable sales processes.


After working with hundreds of companies on their sales and growth strategy, I'm painfully aware of how many ambitious founders fail because they make avoidable go-to-market mistakes. As a startup with limited capital, a small team, and high expectations, your sales challenges are vastly different from later stage companies, who can pour cash into every growth strategy under the sun, whether it works or not.


You’re different—You need to close deals and get customers or you won’t survive. That’s where I help. 

I'm Darren - a startup and SaaS sales leader and practitioner with 10+ years of experience building, managing, and scaling the systems, people, and processes companies need to outperform better-funded, better-known competitors. 


Growing up in Oklahoma in a family of public school teachers and coaches, I barely knew sales was a job outside movies and TV. After college, I spent 4 years as a teacher in Japan before coming to San Francisco in 2013 to start my sales career and discovering that being an outsider to sales and tech would be my strength.


Throughout my career, I’ve closed millions in revenue at high-growth startups, public, and bootstrapped companies, doing everything from 85 dials a day to complex enterprise sales cycles.


I've been an SDR, an AE, a manager, a sales leader, and a founder.


I've set sales records, run thousands of sales meetings, closed hundreds of deals, formed partnerships, built go-to-market strategies, launched blogs, started companies, led sales teams, and mentored sales leaders.


Before StartupSalesPro, I was the Co-Founder and CRO of a successful marketing agency that ran revenue generating campaigns for 80+ startups, agencies, and tech companies over the course of three years. From there, I joined Ascent Conference, one of the largest SaaS conferences in the US, as VP of Sales turned CRO, where I led a team of BDRs and AEs to build a pipeline and revenue generating machine, 3x'ing revenue two years in a row.


Aside from StartupSalesPro, I help companies stay ahead of their competition with the web's top website-builder specifically designed for agencies and SaaS.


Contact me now to chat to about your sales strategy and I’ll share best practices and creative solutions for companies at your stage.

Services / Skills

What I Can Help With

Outbound Sales

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Sales Playbook Development

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Sales Ops

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Sales Coaching

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Sales Strategy & Planning

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Hiring

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  • Darren is one of the best people you could work for. In the time I spent working under Darren, I was able to learn a vast amount of knowledge that has helped me better myself in my current position. Darren was always able to help me with questions I had and always made sure his team was taken care of. Without working under Darren, I would not be where I'm at today."


    Jordan Riha, Community Manager @ Ascent Conference

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    Darren is one of the best coworkers I have ever had the pleasure working with and fortunately I was able to work with him twice! What makes Darren so great is his ability to uncover details- whether on a sales call with a client or in an executive meeting, he always knows exactly how to ask the best next question. It’s a unique skill set to be able to listen for the details and react in real time to control the narrative, which makes him incredibly effective. He’s extremely articulate, thoughtful and strategic. He would be the best addition to any team. 


    David Dwyer, Controller @ Platform Science

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    We teamed up to grow the business from almost nothing to bringing in millions in agency fees, scoring some serious wins and reputation gains in the process. No VC money, no fancy office... just pure f*cking hustle. Results. Growth.


    Grit. Grind. And never, ever, an ounce of ick: Darren is powerful, confident, and ethical to the last detail. He is strategic, calm, collected, and sees the bright side in everything. He is at the same time one of the top revenue performers on a team, while watching everyone else's back the whole way. 


    Darren is and will always be: my good friend, my first call when I step into a new chapter in life, and a force of nature.


    Alex Boyd, Founder & CEO @ RevenueZen

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    Darren has a knack for creating personal connection and getting a sense of what motivates people to excel. And here's the thing: it's not an explicit, robotic, Q and A type of situation wherein he'll basically ask you what gets you going. Anyone can do that. What Darren does is take the time to genuinely get to know you as a person, while sharing who he is. The result? Natural, organic conversation.


    After a few conversations with him, you'll notice that new ideas for what you do just start coming to you; then you start to see angles to do something better that you never considered before. It's almost like a "Jedi Mind Trick" but without the trickery. Because people rarely like tricksters, right? But people DO like someone who they can look at and say, "that person is walking the walk and helping me to increase my stride." People like a leader. 


    LeVaughn Erskine, SDR @ Amplify

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    Darren is what I would call a true mentor and any company would be lucky to have him onboard. He was always able to step in and lend a perspective that was helpful in aiding me to solve for some of my most complex situations with clients. He was also always his team's #1 advocate both internally and externally to help us overcome any roadblocks. Darren is an empathetic leader and a strategic seller which I think makes him a great addition to any client-facing team!


    I hope I get the chance to work with and for Darren again!


    Nichole Friday, Strategic Programs Manager @ Airtable

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  • Darren was great to work with and he was as key member of the overall organization. Not only was Darren consistently at the top of the leaderboards, he was always coaching other sales reps to success. He also drove the largest and most complex deal in company history and (during the process) changed the way we went to market. All the while, Darren constantly sought to learn and challenge himself.


    Michael Keister, SVP of Sales @ Syntrio

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Side Projects

What Else I'm Doing

The Ultimate Climb

Rock climbing board game designed to be played in a tent. Kickstarter coming soon.

NameSpeller

The world's first spellchecker for names. Works on Gmail via a simple Chrome plugin. Free.

20 Year Love

Soon to launch podcast that tells the stories of couples who have been together for 20-30+ years.

SDRaaS

Sales development services, including copywriting, list-building, and sequence development.

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