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Undercover VC | From Growth to Precision: VC's New Sales Mandate 🎯

Plus: Sheevaun Thatcher’s rule - ditch the decks, win the room đŸŽ€

Author

Rafe Houston
July 02, 2025

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Welcome to Undercover VC — your inside track on how today’s top investors and operators are building high-performance, venture-backed businesses. Each edition delivers sharp, actionable insights on GTM strategy, capital efficiency, and portfolio execution across B2B SaaS, fintech, and AI. Built for VCs, operating partners, and scale-stage founders who want to win smarter — not just bigger.

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TODAY’S PICK 🎯

Two questions define sales leadership in 2025:

  1. Have we set the right strategy?

  2. Is our team executing it?

For most GTM leaders, the answer is “not really.”

Sales stacks have exploded with dashboards, enablement tools, and forecasting tech. But they don’t connect what leadership plans with what reps do.

That’s why Hive Perform built the first Sales Operating System, a platform that connects your GTM strategy with real execution in the field.

👉 Learn how a Sales OS tracks strategy, prioritizes based on buyer signals, and gives leaders visibility into what’s actually working. Read the full article here

📣LEADING VOICES 

Sales Enablement Collective Summit: Key Takeaway from Saul Lew On The Ground

Wrapping up our two days at Sales Enablement Collective Summit with a big takeaway from Saul Lew on the ground:

The most impactful teams aren’t just working harder, they’re working together. With product, marketing, sales, and customer success all under one roof this week, it’s clearer than ever: If your tools don’t help you share context, insights, and deal intelligence across teams, you’re leaving revenue on the table. That’s why we built Hive Perform as the first truly cross-functional sales operating system. - One source of truth. - Insights that flow between product, marketing, sales, and CS. - Buyer context and messaging that don’t get lost in handoffs. Ready to see how connected sales execution works?

Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC via LinkedIn:

Too many decks are built like scripted documents; words, words, words, words, words, more words, words, words.... đŸ˜”â€đŸ’« 

If your audience is reading every slide, they’re not listening to you. And if the font is so small in order to get ALL those words in that it’s hard to read, they stop reading the slides too. ⭐ ✏

Press here to see what I coach instead.

INDUSTRY NEWS đŸŒ

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are harnessing AI productivity tools, like Zoom's AI Companion and Betterworks' platform, to enhance employee satisfaction and achieve revenue growth beyond industry averages. These tools streamline processes, cut meeting times, and improve performance reviews, leading to higher retention rates and significant ROI for companies investing in employee training. For investors, focusing on platforms and startups supporting SMEs in these areas can offer promising returns and competitive advantages.

AI Invest

Ramp's $200 million Series E funding raises its valuation to $16 billion, and Finom, aimed at SMEs, secures €115 million in a Series C round. Juniper Square's $130 million Series D funding elevates its valuation to $1.1 billion, enhancing its AI solutions for private markets.

Fintech Futures

UK government initiatives in the VC sector, including tax incentives and funding programs like EIS, VCT, and BBB, help bridge investment gaps and support SME growth. Despite fluctuations in investment trends, these policies foster a robust eCommerce environment and catalyze substantial SME advancements.

PhysicsX, an AI startup based in London, secured $98.1M in Series B funding to enhance its AI-driven engineering platform for sectors like aerospace and automotive. This funding highlights PhysicsX's potential to impact the engineering lifecycle by integrating AI with physics-based models, presenting lucrative opportunities for global expansion and innovation in the industrial AI ecosystem.

Venture capital's shift towards a private equity-style focus on profitability demands startups redefine their sales strategies for efficiency and precision. This involves honing in on narrow customer profiles, leveraging product usage data, and optimizing sales teams for high output with minimal resources. Emphasizing sales productivity over volume ensures startups meet investors' demands for tangible returns and financial discipline.

Alan Splurgin via LinkedIn