Success in sales is not just about talent or product-market fit. It is about grit, structure, and the right guidance along the way. Few journeys illustrate this better than Brian Li’s.

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From Founder Hustle to Revenue Vessel

When Brian Li co-founded Revenue Vessel, his vision was clear: help companies build outbound sales machines that actually deliver pipeline. But in the earliest days, the only “machine” running was Brian himself.

“I was living in spreadsheets, doing endless cold outreach, and hoping something would stick,” Brian recalls. “Even though we had some early wins, momentum stalled. We were losing deals early on, and it was not clear why.”

Revenue Vessel was built to scale outbound for others, yet its own founder was stuck in the grind. The lesson came quickly: grit alone can take you only so far.

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Why Coaching Accelerates Growth

That realization led Brian to work with Morgan Shelly, a sales coach and experienced sales leader. Morgan had led high-performing teams and carried a background in education that sharpened her coaching style.

Brian credits Morgan with reshaping his entire approach to selling. She helped him refine the fundamentals that many founders overlook, including:

• Call structure: setting a clear agenda and controlling the flow of each conversation.
  
  
• Discovery: asking sharper questions to uncover real pain points.
  
  
• Demos: showing value visually and concisely to spark those “aha” moments.
  
  
• Next steps: ensuring that no call ended without clear, value-driven actions.
  
  

“Morgan is incredibly thorough,” Brian explains. “She pinpoints exact moments in calls and shows me how I could have handled them differently. Within days of applying her feedback, the difference was night and day.”

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Founder Blind Spots

For many founders, deep product knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. They know every feature, every backstory, every detail. But that often leads to long-winded explanations that overwhelm prospects.

As Morgan puts it:

“Founders see their product as their baby. They want to tell the full story. But prospects do not care about the backstory. They care about how your product solves their very specific problem.”

Shifting from “here is everything my product can do” to “here is how this fixes your challenge” was one of Brian’s biggest transformations. The result was shorter, clearer calls that led to more consistent outcomes.

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Building Repeatable Sales Motions

Through coaching, Brian and Morgan mapped his journey in three phases:

1. Mastering the basics: learning to structure calls and run effective discovery.
   
   
2. Creating impactful collateral: building slide decks and visuals to tell a sharper story.
   
   
3. Returning to fundamentals: revisiting process whenever calls drifted and tightening execution.
   
   

What started as founder grit turned into something larger: a repeatable sales motion that could be passed on to SDRs and AEs at Revenue Vessel. Brian was no longer just closing deals himself. He was enabling his team to do it too.

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Key Takeaway

Grit gets founders into the game. Coaching, structure, and repeatable processes keep them there.

As Brian sums it up:

“The real improvements came from making time to review every line of every call. That is where you see performance grow over time.”

For founders and sales teams alike, the formula is clear: grit plus coaching equals growth.

At WingRep, we believe that kind of growth should not be limited to rare one-on-one coaching sessions. Our platform puts real-life, world-class sales coaches in salespeople’s pockets, so they can get the feedback they need on a daily basis, not once a year at sales kickoff. Just like Brian’s experience shows, the right coaching can be the difference between stalled momentum and scalable success.

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