How Collectly 3x'ed New Business and Built a Repeatable Sales Motion
Tim gave us a model that told us exactly who to hire, when to hire them, and what to expect from them — before we spent a dollar on it.
— William Henschel, VP of Sales, Collectly
Challenge
Why Collectly Had No Model to Scale Sales Against
Collectly was founded in 2016 to fix patient billing for healthcare providers. By 2023, the company had closed a $25M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures. Five months later, Tim Salikhov, CEO of Bridges, joined to build the finance function and invest the new capital.
The sales team was small, deals varied widely in size, and the founders still closed much of the business. Nobody yet knew what a repeatable, scaled sales motion at Collectly should look like. The uncertainty wasn't a lack of effort — it was a lack of a model to plan against.
The board wanted to deploy capital into growth, specifically into building out sales. Tim needed to turn that uncertainty into a plan, working closely with William Henschel, VP of Sales, and Collectly's founders. The goal was a sales org built from numbers, not guesses.
"We knew we wanted to scale. We just didn't have a way to know what scaling the right way actually looked like."
Solution
How Bridges Turned Uncertainty Into a Modeled, Repeatable Sales Engine
Tim worked hand in hand with William and Collectly's founders to model the sales org from the ground up. The work started with a single question: what does this team need to look like to hit the growth target?
A Sales Org Sized From a Real Growth Target, Not a Guess
Tim built a model combining top-down and bottom-up analysis to size the team Collectly actually needed.
- Set a growth target, then backed into the new-business number required to hit it.
- Subtracted expected growth from existing accounts to isolate the new-sales goal.
- Ran scenario analysis across quarters, varying quota size, customer type, and rep success rates.
This surfaced the deal-size threshold that made the math work: reps needed to focus on deals worth $50,000 or more. It also produced a quota benchmark near $1.5M per rep per quarter, with a 1-to-5 OTE-to-quota ratio.
Customer Acquisition Economics That Exposed the Real Payback Timeline
With quota targets in hand, Tim modeled the full customer lifecycle to see what those targets would cost to hit.
- Mapped time-to-hire and ramp time for new reps before they could carry a full quota.
- Segmented sales cycles by customer type — 3 to 6 months for mid-market, 6 to 12 months for enterprise.
- Modeled cash payback for each segment, since larger deals paid back faster despite longer cycles.
The model showed payback running 24 to 36 months — a timeline Collectly had never been able to see. That number changed how the company planned its runway.
A Hiring Plan Built Around Runway and Seasonality, Not Headcount Targets
The payback timeline meant Collectly couldn't drop below 24 months of runway without risking the plan. That constraint reshaped how Tim and William approached execution.
- Hired reps in cohorts instead of one at a time, since ramping one rep cost the same as ramping four.
- Mapped seasonality, with February through April as the strongest months and August through October the weakest.
- Timed cohort hiring to land new reps ahead of the strong season, when ramping to quota was easiest.
This turned hiring from a reactive decision into a scheduled plan, timed to when reps were most likely to succeed.
"Tim didn't just tell us who to hire. He showed us when, and why waiting would have cost us a season."
Results
Collectly Now Replaces Guesswork With a Modeled Sales Engine
Collectly now hires, manages, and forecasts its sales team against a model instead of intuition.
- A 15+ person sales team, built in year 1 — the org Tim modeled scaled from a handful of reps to a full team within a year.
- 80%+ quota attainment — the quotas Tim modeled held up once reps were actually carrying them.
- 3x growth in new business in year 1 — the sales motion built from the model turned into real revenue, fast.
- Cash payback fully visible, 24 to 36 months out — runway planning now accounts for the true cost of growing the sales team.
The same model now drives every hiring and capital decision Collectly makes about its go-to-market team.
"We're not reacting to the sales team anymore. We're planning it — a quarter, and a cohort, ahead of time."