Brendan Burnett’s bet on the next hello

Before Brendan Burnett was selling businesses a better way to find customers, he was trying a rather different proposition: jeans. In March 2012, he co-founded Sterling Brendan Jeans. By December, another venture, PreShelf.com, had joined his working life. The future chief executive of SalesHive was getting an early education in the distance between having an idea and getting someone else interested in it.

His entrepreneurial self-description has the cheerful impatience of someone with several browser tabs open: “A relentless young entrepreneur, social media maniac, and idea machine.” It is quite a calling card. Most business cards settle for a job title.

SalesHive, founded in 2016, eventually gave that appetite for business a more concentrated subject. Burnett would build a company around the work that happens before a sale: identifying a prospective buyer, making contact, handling the response, and arranging a conversation worth having. The product, in its most recognizable form, is an appointment on somebody else’s calendar. The machinery required to produce it is considerably less tidy.

From denim to customer acquisition

Burnett grew up in Washington, D.C., and studied at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business from 2008 to 2012. Entrepreneurship appears early in his education and early in his working record. The jeans venture ran from March 2012 to February 2013; PreShelf began in December 2012. Those dates place experimentation alongside the transition out of university, rather than years into an established executive career.

His subsequent jobs brought him closer to the practical business of acquiring customers. He worked in online marketing at mGage from 2012 to 2014, then joined TaskUs as director of customer acquisition in October 2014. Marketing, acquisition, entrepreneurship: the recurring question was how a business gets its offer in front of someone who might actually buy it.

There was a technical thread, too. In June 2015, he earned a Salesforce Administrator certification. A customer database has little of denim’s glamour, but it has a useful habit of revealing whether anyone followed up. Burnett’s career was moving toward the place where marketing promises meet records, processes, and the small administrative decisions that determine what happens next.

SalesHive began in May 2016, while his TaskUs tenure continued into January 2017. That overlap is a useful detail. The company’s beginning belongs to a working career already in progress, with experience in both promotion and the operational side of winning business.

A company built before the handshake

Burnett’s opportunity lay in a deceptively crowded corner of business. Sales development requires people, contact information, email systems, calling tools, research, messaging, and someone responsible for making the pieces cooperate. Buying the parts is easy to understand. Making them behave like a team is the interesting part.

He has described that abundance as paralyzing. A shopping list can become a management job before the first prospect has answered. The attraction of more choice comes with the responsibility of making each choice work with the last.

SalesHive’s response was to combine a managed service with software of its own. A client could hand over the prospecting work rather than recruit and coordinate every role internally. The company’s original scale was modest: two people, working remotely. Its stated ambition was to make sales development simpler and more affordable.

The distinction between finding a potential buyer and closing a sale matters here. SalesHive takes responsibility for the earlier work; the client’s team takes the resulting conversation forward. It is a division of labor that gives Burnett a specific problem to solve. He does not have to pretend that every calendar invitation is a completed transaction.

“There’s just an incredible ecosystem behind sales development. It’s great, but paralyzing.”

Brendan Burnett · 2022

The customer gets another vote next month

The commercial model is as revealing as the technology. SalesHive offers flat monthly pricing and month-to-month engagements. For an agency, a long agreement can provide a comforting runway. Burnett built a business whose proposition gives the customer regular opportunities to reconsider.

That choice makes the renewal a recurring test. The company can explain its research and display its activity, but the client still needs a reason to continue paying. A pleasant dashboard has its uses. It rarely receives a standing ovation from the finance department.

By September 2022, SalesHive reported that it had booked more than 45,000 sales meetings since launch, including 15,000 during that year to date. It projected $15 million in revenue for the year. Those are company-reported historical figures, and the revenue number was a forecast. Together, they show how far the operation had traveled from its two-person beginning.

That September also brought a loyalty offer: lower ongoing rates after clients passed three- and six-month milestones. It fitted the same commercial argument. Staying longer would earn a price reduction, giving the customer a practical reward for continuing the relationship.

Burnett had built the business through self-investment. By 2022, its public account of the journey emphasized growth without outside funding. The achievement belongs to a particular kind of entrepreneurship: assembling a service people pay for, then expanding the operation around that demand. The customer relationship carries much of the story.

There are people inside the system

SalesHive’s growth also involved people whose expertise complemented its founder’s. Sam Feldotto, its chief revenue officer in 2022, joined the founding team after meeting Burnett roughly five years earlier. Feldotto brought experience building sales development programs and managing sales teams. The company’s expansion was a collective operating task, with specialized work accumulating around the original idea.

For Burnett, remote work was part of the business from the start. SalesHive says it has operated remotely since 2016. That makes the arrangement an early design choice, embedded in how the company was put together. Its present model includes a core US-based calling team, with Philippines-based representatives available as a separate option.

His own geography supplies a more personal version of that flexibility. In late 2022, Burnett was living in Cabo San Lucas with his wife and young son, enjoying sport fishing and surfing. Washington, Boulder, customer acquisition, a company associated with Denver, family life in Cabo: his working story has room for more than one map.

Surfing and fishing are useful details because they give the executive title some ordinary company. They belong to a life beyond prospect lists and recurring revenue. There is no need to turn either pastime into a theory of leadership; sometimes a fish can simply remain a fish.

Owning the tools means owning the joins

The software is where Burnett’s agency takes on a second identity. SalesHive runs managed outreach on its own platform, with calling, email, data, reply handling, and customer records brought into the same environment. Building that infrastructure creates another obligation alongside providing the service: the tools have to work for the people using them every day.

It also gives the company a direct route from an operational problem to a product change. The team running outreach uses the system that supports it. That relationship helps explain the combination at the center of Burnett’s business. Software and service have to answer to the same conversation.

By February 2023, he was discussing precisely that combination in a conversation about agency acquisitions and exits with Peter Lang of AVA. The question extended beyond generating appointments: how should a technology-enabled agency be understood when it contains several kinds of business? A founder who builds his own infrastructure eventually has to explain what, exactly, he has built.

There is an appealing complication here. Simplifying the customer’s work can make the provider’s work more demanding. Burnett’s proposition depends on SalesHive taking on the coordination, so the client has fewer separate things to manage. Convenience has a workshop behind it.

The next hello still needs a person

Today, SalesHive’s AI direction follows that same concern with coordination. Its platform supports research, personalized email, replies, reporting, and conversational projects that can use connected tools. Human sales development representatives continue to lead its managed cold calls. The company describes AI as support for the work before, during, and after those exchanges.

The current onboarding process is similarly concrete. A strategist builds the playbook, researchers prepare lists, and the client reviews the proposed campaign before launch and billing. Weekly reviews then feed responses back into targeting and messaging. The system is designed to keep learning from what prospective customers actually do.

The ambition has widened toward sales, marketing, and operations workflows. The underlying question remains recognizable from Burnett’s earlier career: how do you organize the work that brings a business closer to a customer? It was there in marketing, explicit in customer acquisition, and eventually substantial enough to become a company.

The younger entrepreneur advertised an abundance of ideas. SalesHive shows what happened when Burnett gave one of them years of sustained attention. The company has changed its tools and expanded its remit, but it still has to help two people reach a useful conversation. For all the infrastructure around it, the next step remains wonderfully small: someone says hello, and someone else decides to answer.