Case study
Halcyon Fintech
Problem
Founder-led sales for 4 years had built a £6M-ARR business and a 9-seller team. Forecast accuracy had drifted to ±34% over the prior three quarters. Two senior board members had given the founder 90 days to deliver an unfiltered baseline.
Halcyon's CRM (HubSpot Sales Pro) had 412 open deals — 89 of them more than 90 days stale. Stage exit criteria were undocumented. The founder was making the close-date call on every Q-end deal personally.
Engagement
Threshold ran the four-week Pipeline Diagnostic in March 2024. The readout flagged three findings the board accepted: stage exit criteria were missing for 4 of 6 stages, MEDDPICC fields were optional in CRM and filled on under 20% of deals, and the senior IC bench was carrying 80% of revenue with no successor pipeline.
Halcyon retained Daniel as Fractional VP Sales in May 2024. He held the seat for nine months — owning the forecast, the hiring plan, and the weekly board reporting line. Imran led a parallel RevOps remediation that closed in week 16.
Outcome
- Forecast accuracy improved from ±34% (prior 3 quarters) to ±9% (final 2 quarters of the engagement).
- Open-deal stale-rate (no touch >14 days) reduced from 47% at engagement start to 11% at handover.
- Successor VP Sales hired in February 2025 — Halcyon's first VP Sales hire from outside founder network.
- ARR closed to £14.2M at handover (vs £8.4M at engagement start). Threshold did not run sales for that growth — Threshold built the discipline that let the team run sales for that growth.
“Daniel held the seat for nine months and wrote down what we should never let slip again. The hardest part of his job was leaving on schedule. He did anyway.”