tenfold
Tenfold Advisory / London Practitioner-led advisory

tenfold

Senior gtm and product leadership for technical b2b companies that have built something worth selling.

Most technical B2B companies don't have a sales problem. They have an alignment problem. The product was built for a vision. The customer has a budget, a boss, and four things they'll actually spend money on - growing revenue, cutting costs, moving faster, or reducing risk.

When what you've built doesn't map cleanly to one of those, no amount of better messaging or sharper discounting fixes it. The real work is upstream. Aligning what you build - and how you sell it - to the value a customer can actually measure. That's what Tenfold Advisory does.

start the conversation
Practitioner-led · London-based · Two decades operating
01 / Diagnosis
The gap is rarely where you think it is.

symptoms in sales. cause upstream.

By the time a company realises something is wrong, the symptoms are usually in sales. Deals stall. Conversion is inconsistent. The pipeline looks healthy until it doesn't. A new hire or a new deck gets tried. Neither works.

The diagnosis stays shallow because the people closest to the product believe in it - and they're not wrong to. The product does something real. But belief isn't a commercial motion, and enthusiasm isn't a value proposition.

What's usually missing is the thread between what the product does and what the customer needs to justify the spend. Not in theory - in the specific, measurable terms that an economic buyer can take to their CFO.

Make money. Save money. Move faster. Reduce risk. If the product doesn't connect cleanly to at least one of those, the deal doesn't close - regardless of how good the demo is.

/ The work

Fixing this isn't a messaging exercise. It's a structural one. It touches product priorities, sales discovery, marketing narrative, and how the three talk to each other. Most companies don't have anyone who can work across all of it at once.

Buyers approve outcomes, not products. Four drivers fund every deal.

/ Value drivers
01

make money

Win rate, ACV, expansion, conversion. The metric an exec can fund this quarter.

02

save money

A line on the P&L Finance can close. Cost per transaction, cost-to-serve, rework.

03

move faster

Lead time, cycle time, time-to-first-value. What becomes possible when weeks come out.

04

reduce risk

Incident rate, audit findings, SLA breaches. The bad outcome the buyer is preventing.

02 / Engagements
Three ways to engage.

three ways in.

Embedded, not advisory in the slide-deck sense. Two or three companies at a time, maximum. Shallow engagement doesn't fix deep problems.

/ 01

build the motion.

Most technical founders can build the product. Few can build the commercial engine that sells it at scale.

This is the engagement that closes that gap - faster pipeline, repeatable process, a sales and marketing team that knows what it's doing and why.

/ 02

hold the seat.

A senior operator in the chair, not on retainer. The kind of leadership that moves revenue, aligns teams, and sets the company up for a permanent hire or a clean exit.

Without the cost or commitment of a full-time C-suite.

/ 03

read the deal.

An operator's read before you wire the money. Two decades of pattern recognition on whether the GTM story holds, the product is real, and the numbers make sense.

So you know what you're buying.

03 / Receipts

the pattern, not the timeline.

Two decades at the intersection of product and commercial leadership. Mostly in technical B2B companies where the product was genuinely novel and the market wasn't obvious.

Planet Labs. Built the channel business that scaled to $63M through IPO.

LiveEO. Three products to market. Three Red Dot Awards. $10M+ ARR.

HyperSphere Technologies. Currently President and Board Member. Gartner Cool Vendor 2025.

Methodology: Force Management's Command of the Message and MEDDPICC. A system for turning product capability into customer value, in terms a CFO will fund.

$10M+
ARR scaled at LiveEO
$63M
Channel through IPO
Red Dot Awards
25y
In the room
04 / About
Founder · Tenfold Advisory

john atkinson

Founder · Principal

I'm an American in London, which means I have no patience for hierarchy and no excuse for bad weather.

I've spent twenty-five years at the intersection of product and commercial leadership - mostly in technical B2B companies where the product was genuinely novel and the market wasn't obvious. The work has taken me from satellite imagery to cybersecurity to geospatial AI. The problem has always been roughly the same.

I built Tenfold Advisory because the gap between what technical companies build and what they're able to sell is consistent, expensive, and almost always fixable. It just requires someone who can read the product, run the commercial motion, and tell the difference between a messaging problem and a structural one.

I work with two or three companies at a time. That's deliberate. Shallow engagement doesn't fix deep problems.

If something here sounds familiar, it's worth a conversation.

05 / Get in touch

if you need a deck, hire mckinsey. if you need it fixed, talk to me.