SaaS, Cyber & AI Sales Hiring — Talent Architects
SaaS · Cyber · AI & ML infrastructure

Every CV says 120% of quota. Almost nobody can check what it was made of.

So we find out. Before you interview.

A shortlist of people who can already do the job, with the evidence on each one written down. You read it and decide who to see.

People already selling your motion — with the attainment verified and the scaffolding behind it laid out.

Tony Goodwin
Ninety seconds on how we find people who aren’t looking.
1:30

Tony Goodwin, founder

Filled in 2 weeks

“I have a mistrust of recruiters, but you’ve restored my faith in the value of getting the right hire.”

Neil Latcham
Sales Director, Tomrods
Multiple hires

“Absolutely delighted with the hires we’ve made. The screening was first class and we had amazing candidates to choose from.”

Gary Hall
Managing Director, TQ Environmental
140% of quota

“After 2 bad hires and months of lost opportunities, you found us an amazing Head of Sales — they’re 140% of quota.”

Emma Armytage
HR Director, HL Tech
Roles we fill
Enterprise Account Executives
Mid-market Account Executives
Sales Development Representatives
Account and Customer Success Managers
Solutions and Sales Engineers
Sales Managers
Heads of Sales and VPs
Chief Revenue Officers
… and the roles either side of them
How this actually goes

Six things go wrong when you hire.

Here’s each one, and what we do about it.

01
Three hundred people apply. None of them are right.

Volume was never your problem. Post an AE role and the inbox fills with people whose numbers were made with a brand, an SDR and a demand gen team behind them.

What we do

We map who is actually doing the motion you need — right deal size, right buyer, self-sourcing — and go to them. You get that map free, before you commit to anything.

3×
Applications per hire have tripled since 2021. Volume was never the problem.
Candidate Market Map
Complimentary
Enterprise Account Executive
Work modelRemote, UK
MandateNew logo, enterprise
Package£70k base, £140k OTE
Key barSelf-sources
Top candidates — ranked for sector relevance and origination
1A. WhitworthLondonFive years enterprise at a competitor. FY25 at 118%, roughly 60% self-sourced with no SDR support.
2J. FerrisManchesterSells the same buyer a different product. Long cycles, security review, procurement-heavy.
3S. BrackenBristolCame from a Series A with no marketing behind her. Everything she closed she found.
4D. MalloryLeedsMid-market moving up. Deal sizes below yours today, but the motion is right.
Built from public profile evidence for this role. We verify current employment and availability before any approach.
42 mapped · 4 shown

Yours free, whether you use us or not.

02
The ones you want aren’t on the market.

A rep at 120% isn’t looking, isn’t answering InMail, and has no reason to hear about a company they have never heard of. Nearly nine in ten smaller businesses say they can’t match the salaries larger organisations offer — on a job board, that’s exactly what you’re competing on.

What we do

We market the role properly. Every person we approach gets a page built for the role and addressed to them by name, with a video explaining the business, what the job actually involves and who it suits. It’s the difference between being pitched at and being made a case to.

“After 2 bad hires and months of lost opportunities, you found us an amazing Head of Sales that not only is a perfect cultural fit, they’re 140% of quota.”

Emma Armytage — HR Director, HL Tech
a page built for one person
Hi James — thought you might find this of interest.

Not sure if this is on your radar, but it felt worth putting in front of you.

The opportunity
Enterprise Account Executive
Pipeline you build, commission that reflects it
A product the buyer evaluates rather than a brand they already know
Founder still in the deals with you
Who won’t enjoy this?

Anyone who needs an SDR booking their meetings or a brand that opens doors for them.

A real page, sent to one person, by name.

03
You can’t tell who’s any good.

Interviewing is a separate skill to the job. Some people are polished because they’ve done a lot of interviews, not because they’re any good. Others are awkward in a room and would be the best hire you make this year. And every CV now arrives with an AI polish on it, so the ones that read best aren’t necessarily the best people. You come away feeling reasonably sure — but feeling sure and having evidence aren’t the same thing, and only one of them survives month five.

What we do

A long screening interview, conducted by someone who has sold in your market, then a written suitability report on every candidate we recommend — scored against your brief, with the evidence underneath. And a section called Watch Points, where we set out what isn’t proven.

Candidate Suitability Report
Private & Confidential
Recommendation
Progress to interview
8.0
out of 10
04
Scored against your brief
Self-sourced pipelineStrong9.0
Quota attainment, verifiedStrong8.5
Selling without air coverStrong8.0
Multi-threading and procurementGood7.5
Enterprise cycle lengthPartial6.0
06
Watch Points
Attainment verified for one year, not two.
FY25 figure confirmed and consistent. FY24 sat under a different quota structure and wasn’t disclosed. Worth pressing before an offer.
Best years came with an SDR feeding meetings.
Self-sourcing is evidenced and genuine, but it has never been the whole motion. In a team with no SDR, that’s the risk to test.
Deal sizes cluster below your ACV.
Strong mid-market record. Enterprise cycles are present but thin — treat as a stretch to grow into, not day-one capability.
Talent ArchitectsPage 5 of 7
04
Interviewing eats your week.

Thirty CVs to read, eight people to see, half of them a waste of an afternoon. And you’re doing it around the day job, which is why the role has been open five weeks already.

What we do

You see the ones worth seeing, and nobody else. No padding a shortlist to make it look busy, and no thirty CVs to sift. The questions worth asking are already written down, because they came out of what we couldn’t close on the screening call.

19:4
People screened to produce a shortlist worth meeting
Shortlist — the ones worth seeing
01
A. Whitworth
Most self-sourced. Attainment verified.
8.5
02
J. Ferris
Best on procurement and security review.
8.5
03
S. Bracken
Strong self-sourcer. Deal sizes below your ACV.
7.5
04
D. Mallory
Mid-market moving up. One to watch.
7.0
Nineteen people screened to get here. Every one you see comes with a full report.
05
It falls apart at the offer.

Five weeks in, the person you wanted takes a counter-offer, or mentions a competing process nobody knew about, or turns out to have been thousands off on salary the whole way through.

What we do

We establish what it’ll take to land someone before you meet them — what they’re on, what they’d move for, whether they’re being pulled toward your role or pushed out of their current one, and what else they’re in process on.

Candidate Suitability Report
Private & Confidential
07
What it’ll take to land him
Current package
£68,000 base, £136,000 OTE
Would move for
£75,000 base
Equity
Unvested cliff next quarter
Motivation
Pull — wants earlier stage
Other processes
Two, one at final
Notice
One month
Available to interview
From Monday

Counter-offer and equity. He has unvested options with a cliff next quarter. Establish the number before you make an offer, not after.

Talent ArchitectsPage 6 of 7
06
And then they leave in month five.

Which is the expensive one. You’ve paid a fee, paid five months of salary, lost the ground for half a year, and you’re back where you started with less confidence than before.

What we do

If they leave, or you exit them, within six months, we run the search again at no fee. But the real protection is upstream: Watch Points exist so the risks are on the table before you hire, not discovered in month five.

Candidate Suitability Report
Private & Confidential
Recommendation
Don’t progress
5.5
out of 10
08
Verdict
The attainment is real. The motion behind it isn’t yours.
FY25 at 128% checks out. Pressed on it, two SDRs booked most of his first meetings and marketing sourced roughly half the pipeline. In a team with neither, that number means very little.
Nothing self-sourced above £40k ACV.
Everything he originated himself sits well below your average deal. The large ones were all inbound or partner-led.
Self-sourced pipelineWeak4.0
Selling without air coverWeak4.5
Talent ArchitectsPage 7 of 7
Proof

Hired, and still performing.

We work across technical B2B. The method is the same everywhere — the criteria are what change.

“After 2 bad hires and months of lost opportunities, you found us an amazing Head of Sales that not only is a perfect cultural fit, they’re 140% of quota.”
Emma Armytage — HR Director, HL Tech

“Absolutely delighted with the hires we’ve made. The screening was first class and we had amazing candidates to choose from.”

Gary Hall — Managing Director, TQ Environmental

“The quality and speed of the process has been outstanding. I have a mistrust of recruiters, but you’ve restored my faith in the value of getting the right hire.”

Neil Latcham — Sales Director, Tomrods
140%
Of quota — Head of Sales placed at HL Tech, after two failed hires
1
GTM Engineer placed — ParcelPlanet, ecommerce fulfilment platform
2 wks
Fastest fill to date — brief to signed offer
Who it’s for

Commercial roles in technical software businesses.

Where the buyer evaluates before they buy — a security team, a platform team, or a domain expert who knows the category better than your rep does.

—Sales Development — SDR and BDR
—Account Executives — SMB, mid-market, enterprise
—Solutions Engineers and technical pre-sales
—Customer Success and Account Management
—Partnerships, channel and alliances
—Revenue Operations and GTM Engineering
—Sales Managers, Heads of Sales and VPs
—Chief Revenue Officers
Who this works for

Businesses building the commercial team, not backfilling a seat in one.

  • Typically 20 to 200 people
  • Founder-led, or post-Series A building the first proper GTM function
  • No in-house capacity to run a targeted search — or a talent team who’d rather not
  • Hiring people who have to originate, not work an inbound queue
If you already run a structured internal hiring process with a dedicated talent team, you probably don’t need us. Say so on the call and we’ll tell you straight.
Three motions, scored differently
After the first one

Most clients don’t stop at the role they came for.

We’re usually brought in for a commercial hire. Then, once we know how the business works and what it takes to succeed in it, clients ask us about the roles around it.

The method doesn’t change. The criteria still come from your brief, and where the assessment needs technical depth we bring in someone from our bench who has done that job.

Commercial
Business development, account management, key accounts, sales management and commercial leadership. Where we usually start.
Operations
Service delivery, operations management, project and programme management, planning and coordination. The people who keep what the sale brought in.
Technical
Where the brief demands it and we can assess it properly. One client currently has us filling a cloud engineer, a DevOps engineer and a project manager.
Leadership
Heads of function and director-level appointments, usually once we’ve placed underneath them and know what the seat actually needs.

One client has had us fill four roles across commercial and operations. Another started with a Head of Sales and is now three roles into a technical team. If we can’t assess something properly, we’ll say so rather than take it on.

Risk removal

You don’t pay unless you hire.

◎

No fee unless you hire.

Most clients start here. We ask for 21 days' exclusivity so we can invest properly in the search rather than race three other agencies to the same active candidates.

⟳

Six-month replacement.

If the person leaves, or you exit them, within six months of starting, we run the search again at no fee.

✕

We’ll tell you when to stop.

If the market for the brief isn’t there at the package you’re offering, you’ll hear it early — and we’d rather send three people we’d back than four to fill a shortlist.

Full terms confirmed in writing before any search begins.

Tony Goodwin, founder of Talent Architects
Tony Goodwin — Founder
Who screens your candidates
Built them.
Sold them.
Hired for them.

Tony Goodwin has built, scaled and exited B2B businesses — selling them himself — and spent the years since rebuilding the commercial function inside more than 170 companies. He designed the way we screen, and he still runs searches.

What we assess against comes out of your brief, not a template. And where the assessment needs depth we haven’t got in-house, we bring in someone from our bench who has done that job — a sector specialist, an engineer, whoever the brief actually demands.

Most screening tests whether someone can talk about the job. Ours tests whether they’ve done what your role actually requires.

Why we’d rather bring someone in than guess.

A generalist recruiter can check a CV against a spec. Only someone who has sold in your sector can tell whether the numbers were earned or inherited, whether the accounts they name are the ones that matter, and what they’d struggle with in your business.

170+
Companies we’ve worked inside
30yrs
Selling and hiring in B2B
19:4
People screened to produce a shortlist worth meeting
0
Candidates sent without a written report
Straight answers

The things people ask before they call.

If yours isn’t here, ask it on the call. We’d rather tell you no early than sell you a search you don’t need.

We ask what the number actually was, what the territory was, whether an SDR was booking meetings, and what marketing was contributing. Where we can only verify one year rather than two, we say so in the report.

Possibly not, and we’ll tell you. Where we usually add something is a hard role your team has already been on for two months, or a market they don’t have the network for.

We work on contingency for most roles — no fee unless you hire. The fee is a percentage of first-year salary and we agree it in writing before anything starts. We aren’t the cheapest option in the market and we don’t try to be; what you’re paying for is the research, the screening and the report.

Tell us on the call. If you’ve someone promising we’d rather pressure-test them than run a search you don’t need. We’ll be straight with you about whether it’s worth doing at all.

For 21 days, yes. It’s what makes the approach possible — nobody writes a page for each candidate and records a video on a role four agencies are racing. After 21 days the role is yours to run however you like.

If they leave, or you exit them, inside six months of starting, we run the search again at no fee. Full terms are confirmed in writing before we begin.

The UK, the United States and Australia. Most of our searches are field or hybrid roles outside the major cities, which is where the agencies chasing volume tend not to look.

A limited number. The research and the reports take real time, and doing eight searches badly is worse for everyone than doing three properly. If we can’t give a role the attention it needs we’ll say so.

Next step

Tell us the role.
We’ll show you who’s out there.

A researched Talent Map for your role, built from scratch, and fifteen minutes to walk through it. Yours whether you use us or not.

No fee, no obligation.

The map takes days. The search starts the moment you say go.

Talent Architects
Fifteen minutes
Fifteen minutes on the role. Then you’ll know whether it’s fillable.
◎
We go through the brief. What the hire has to deliver, by when, and what has to be true for that to happen.
→
We’ll be straight about the package. If the salary won’t buy what you’re describing, you’ll hear it on the call, not in week three.
✓
Then you decide. If we go ahead, you’ll get a shortlist with a written report on every person we recommend. No fee unless you hire.

No sales deck. No hard sell. Just an honest conversation about the role.

Choose a time
Free Talent Map
The people who could do it, before you spend a penny.

We research your role properly, then walk you through it on a fifteen-minute call. Yours to keep whether you use us or not.

Candidate Market Map
Complimentary
Business Development Manager
Work modelHybrid, regional
Package£48k + bonus
1A. WhitworthNine years doing this job for the same kind of customer. Opened 14 accounts from cold last year.
2J. FerrisAt a direct competitor. Consultative, long-cycle, used to working without a big brand behind them.
3S. BrackenAlready covers your region. Strong technically, and the only one local to you.
Names released on the call, once we’ve confirmed the brief.
31 mapped

Real people, researched for your role. Where they sit, what they’re on, how movable each one looks — and where your brief is fighting the market.

We build a limited number each month. A few days to research, then fifteen minutes to go through it. No fee, no obligation.