Sales Development · Private Equity & Venture Capital
The revenue problem
hiding in your
portfolio.
It's not always the product or the market. Often, it's that your portfolio company's sales team doesn't know how to sell with equal stature, and nobody has taught them.
Request a diagnostic callThe thesis
The financial engineering
playbook is mostly used up.
For decades, PE firms created value the same way: be smart about borrowing, cut costs, and wait for the market. But the old levers aren't working anymore. What's left is actual growth.
A January 2025 Gain.pro study found that 71% of exit value created in 2024 came from revenue growth, up from 64% the year before. The pressure is real, and most sales teams aren't ready.
Why? Because founders hired sales reps for their conviction, not their process. Sales leaders got promoted for closing, not for their ability to coach new reps. The result is a team that can't replicate what works and can't diagnose what doesn't.
The exit multiple math
A 1-point win-rate improvement.
Run the number.
The gap between a sales team that exits at 3.5× and one that exits at 4.5× is worth $50–$100 million per company. That gap almost never comes from the product or the market. It comes from what's happening, or not happening, inside the sales conversation. Sandler programs typically run $15K–$60K annually.
Win-rate to exit-value calculator
Run the math on
your portfolio company.
Enter a portfolio company's annual revenue, their current win rate, and the exit multiple you're targeting. See what a single percentage-point improvement in win rate is worth at exit.
What the data doesn't show
Five things your operating
partners can't see.
When revenue misses, the instinct is to look at the product, the pricing, the marketing. Those are visible. The sales conversation isn't, but that's almost always where the deal is won or lost.
A rep who can't qualify properly spends six months on a deal that was never going to close. A rep who discounts to close instead of earning the price leaves margin on every deal. The losses are quiet, but they compound. At a 4× exit multiple, every dollar of missed revenue is $4 in exit value lost.
Most international companies make the same move when they enter the U.S: they send their top salesperson. Inevitably, that person almost always underperforms, not because they aren't talented, but because everything they know about selling was learned somewhere else.
American buyers are direct in a way that reads as rude in São Paulo. They make decisions faster than buyers in Stockholm, and they're more skeptical than buyers in Mumbai. A great salesperson in one commercial culture is not automatically a great salesperson in another.
Operating partners are excellent at reading financial statements, restructuring operations, and making strategic decisions. But diagnosing why a sales team is underperforming with American buyers requires a specific kind of pattern recognition that only comes from having been inside those conversations thousands of times.
The breakdown almost never appears in the data until the quarter is already lost.
Ebbinghaus proved in the 1880s that people forget roughly 80% of what they learn within a month without reinforcement. Sales behavior works the same way. Bring someone in for a weekend, run the workshop, send everyone home energized. Three weeks later nothing has changed.
What changes behavior is repetition: practicing the same skills, month after month, with a manager who can actually coach them. That's what Sandler is built around. I came to it as a client, not as a trainer, after 26 years in commercial real estate. I adopted the methodology because it was the only framework I found that explained why I was leaving deals on the table even when I had the better solution.
Every engagement includes parallel development for sales managers. If the manager is still coaching on gut and instinct, the training investment erodes within 90 days of the last session. Methodology compounds when managers can coach it, not just when reps know it by heart.
What it looks like
The symptoms of an untrained
revenue organization.
International PE firms
There's a second hurdle for
international PE companies.
A U.S.-based PE firm buying an American company has one version of this problem. The portfolio company's revenue team is undertrained and inconsistent, relying on instinct rather than process.
An international PE firm — European, Asian, Brazilian, Middle Eastern — buying or backing a U.S. company has that same problem plus a completely different layer. Their portfolio company now has to sell to American buyers. And nobody on the team, including the sponsor's own operating partners, fully understands why that's harder than it looks.
When a Swedish PE firm acquires a U.S. software company, the operating partners back in Stockholm are measuring performance against benchmarks that make sense in a European context. American B2B buying is faster, more direct, more skeptical. The mismatch between how the sponsor thinks about business development and how American buyers actually make decisions is a real execution risk. Almost nobody names it.
Engagement options
Four ways to work together.
I assess whether a portfolio company's revenue issue is actually a training issue. No pitch.
A structured review of one or more portfolio company revenue teams. Prioritized recommendations and a clear action plan.
Monthly sessions over 12 months. This installs the methodology into daily selling behavior. Includes a manager coaching track and Sandler LMS access. This is the core program.
Best for a specific breakdown — qualification, negotiation, or closing.
Sandler's enterprise client network
500+ franchised trainers.
50 countries.
"Aron has an exceptional ability to engage, encourage, and motivate. His sessions are consistently among our highest rated — not because the material is accessible, but because he knows how to make people feel confident, supported, and willing to push themselves."
Cedric Bobo · CEO & Founder, Project Destined · Former Principal, The Carlyle Group
About Aron Schreier
I came to Sandler as a client.
917-287-2860
After 26 years in commercial real estate, representing international banks, sovereign institutions, and PE-backed companies across New York, I adopted Sandler because it was the only framework I found that explained why sophisticated buyers stall, deflect, and defer. Even when you have the better solution.
I became a franchisee because the methodology is durable enough to stake a business on. That's the same bar I apply when I recommend it to a portfolio company.
What I bring to PE firms isn't a training catalog, but pattern recognition, built from 25 years inside complex sales conversations across cultures. I can quickly identify whether a revenue problem is actually a training problem, and exactly where the breakdown is happening so we can fix it.