The business
Kaizan is an AI SaaS business building technology that helps client-facing teams understand relationships, identify opportunities and improve the way they manage and grow accounts. Sales had been founder-led, but with a funding round approaching and ambitions to accelerate growth, the commercial model needed to evolve. Kaizan needed someone capable of building the sales function itself, which is a different hire from adding another salesperson.
The challenge: moving beyond founder-led sales
Founder-led selling can be highly effective in the early stages of a SaaS business, because the founders understand the product, the customer problem and the vision better than anyone. It becomes difficult to scale indefinitely, though, and Kaizan needed its first VP Sales to turn that early traction into a more structured and repeatable GTM engine. The role would help shape commercial strategy, keep winning business directly and, over time, build a mid-market sales and SDR organisation underneath it. That called for a very particular type of operator.
Defining the brief
Glen Calvert, Kaizan's CEO and Founder, briefed Ultimate Asset directly. The core requirements were strong SaaS sales experience, experience building repeatable commercial process and strong commercial judgement. Kaizan also needed confidence working with AI and AI-led products, experience operating within an early-stage environment, the ability to remain hands-on while building a team, and highly credible professional references.
Above all, Kaizan needed someone who understood what it takes to create a sales organisation, which experience of managing an established one does not guarantee.
The market reality
The brief created a real tension. Kaizan was a bootstrapped business moving into its seed-funded phase, yet the role needed an experienced commercial operator, and many senior SaaS sales leaders have built their careers inside businesses where the infrastructure already exists: sales development teams in place, documented processes, enablement, marketing generating demand and mature CRM workflows. Kaizan needed someone comfortable without all of that, with the experience of a senior sales leader and the mentality of an early-stage builder. That combination narrowed the relevant market considerably.
Finding someone who had been there before
Ultimate Asset's SaaS practice ran the search on an exclusive basis, led by Swaran Sandhu. We focused on senior SaaS sales leaders who had been through comparable stages of growth and understood the difference between inheriting a sales engine and building one. The market was mapped directly and candidates were approached through targeted headhunting. Around 12 serious candidates reached the shortlist, and the successful candidate was directly headhunted.
Why the successful candidate stood out
The appointment came back to the original reason Kaizan had opened the role: moving the business beyond founder-led sales. The successful candidate combined SaaS sales credibility, process orientation, commercial judgement and hands-on operating experience, and addressed the broader commercial problem the hire was meant to solve as well as the individual requirements on the brief. At VP level, that difference matters a great deal.
The appointment
Within two months, Kaizan appointed its first VP Sales. The role has three clear priorities. The first is to build the team, creating the mid-market and SDR capability beneath the senior sales function. The second is to create repeatable revenue, bringing more structure, process and predictability to the commercial engine. The third is to drive enterprise growth, developing the sales approach needed to win and grow larger customers.
These are the objectives of the appointment, not outcomes Ultimate Asset would claim have already been delivered.
Why this search mattered
The first senior sales hire is one of the most consequential commercial appointments an early-stage SaaS business makes, and it can go wrong in several directions. Hired too early, the person may lack the infrastructure to succeed. Someone used only to mature organisations can struggle without established process and support, and hiring purely for individual sales performance can leave the business with a strong seller but no scalable sales function. The right answer usually sits somewhere between all three. For Kaizan, the challenge was finding someone senior enough to shape commercial strategy and hands-on enough to help build the engine underneath it.
Ultimate Asset perspective
Hiring a first VP Sales is a different search from replacing an existing sales leader, because there is no function to inherit. The person often has to sell, build, recruit, introduce process and work closely with the founders all at once, so stage experience carries as much weight as seniority. A candidate who knows what a scaled sales organisation looks like is useful; one who knows how to get there from where the business is today can be considerably more valuable, and that was the distinction at the centre of the Kaizan search.