Now in early access

Hitting your number starts with
who you put in the seat.

The best minds in sales hiring just
joined your hiring committee.

Prelude interviews you the way a roomful of veteran sales leaders would, then turns that conversation into a precise hiring profile for the exact role you're filling: enterprise reps, BDRs, or the leader who will own the number. Then it screens candidates for judgment and real skill — not the rehearsed answers AI can now write for them.

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Built for sales leaders  ·  Not another HR tool

Built for sales leaders at companies like

Enterprise SaaS Manufacturing Financial Services Professional Services Distribution
The problem

Sales hiring is broken —
and expensive.

Most sales leaders rely on gut instinct and recycled job postings. The result is predictable: bad hires, missed quota, and a revolving door that kills team momentum. The failure starts before the first candidate is interviewed.

6–9mo

Average time to identify a bad sales hire

3×

Annual salary is the true cost of a failed hire

46%

Of new sales hires fail within 18 months

What does a bad hire
cost your organization? Calculate now →
How it works

Your process, upgraded.

Most sales hiring follows the same script: post a job description borrowed from last time, run candidates through a standard assessment like OMG or Criteria, interview whoever scores well, and make the call on gut instinct. The assessment measures a candidate against a generic universe of salespeople — not against your specific selling environment, your culture, or how your best people actually work. And now that candidates can use AI to polish their answers in real time, the interview itself proves even less. The result is a hire that looked right on paper and failed in the field.

Prelude flips the sequence. Before any candidate is evaluated, Prelude builds a precise hiring profile from the inside out — starting with the sales leader. The assessment only happens after you know exactly what you're measuring against.

1

Start with the leader

Before any candidate is evaluated, Prelude interviews your sales leader to define what success actually looks like in your business: the selling environment, the culture, the non-negotiable must-haves, and the failure modes to avoid.

Starts with the sales leader
2

Build the bar

Prelude turns that conversation into a precise hiring profile, custom to your role. The dimensions Prelude measures stay consistent. What “good” means is yours.

A profile custom to your role
3

Screen every candidate against it

Each candidate is interviewed and scored against your profile, not a generic benchmark. You see who actually fits before you hire, and you compare candidates on the same footing.

Fit score · fair comparison

That’s the shape of it. The full process, how Prelude validates the profile, rewrites your job posting, guides your live interviews, and supports coaching after the hire, is something we walk you through directly.

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Who you hire with Prelude

One methodology.
Every sales role you hire.

The same inside-out approach works whether you're hiring a rep to carry quota, rebuilding a BDR function for the AI era, or bringing on the leader who will own the number. The interview subject and the profile change from role to role. The discipline — define what the role actually requires before you evaluate a single person — does not.

Sales Reps & Account Executives

The original Prelude use case. Build a precise profile for the person who has to close in your specific environment — the selling motion, the team culture, the must-have attributes you can't train, and the failure modes that have quietly cost you before. Then score every candidate against it on the same criteria.

Individual contributor track

BDRs & SDRs

The role has changed underneath everyone. AI now handles the inbound qualification BDRs used to own, and the human in the seat is being hired for judgment, credibility with senior buyers, and long-cycle relationship work instead. Most teams are still screening for the 2020 job description. Prelude surfaces what the role requires now — for your sales cycle, your inbound-to-outbound mix, and your motion.

AI-era profile

Sales Leaders

Your first sales leader isn't there to replace you — they're there to turn what you do on instinct into something a team can repeat. The most expensive miss in leadership hiring is the marquee name handed the keys before a motion exists to transfer. Prelude interviews the founder or CRO to surface the motion, the environment, and the failure mode before the search begins.

Founder & CRO interview
Before you buy

5 questions to ask before you buy
any sales assessment tool.

Most sales assessment tools answer the same question: is this person good at sales in general? That isn’t your question. Yours is whether they’ll succeed in your role, on your team. Before you buy any tool, ask these five things. If the answers are no, keep looking.

1

Does it measure candidates against your specific role, or a generic benchmark?

The skills that win at your company aren’t the skills that win at the company down the street. If a tool can’t account for your selling environment, your buyers, and your culture, it’s measuring the wrong thing.

Prelude builds the bar from your business first, then measures every candidate against it. The dimensions are consistent. The bar is yours.

2

Did it start by understanding what success looks like in your business, before scoring anyone?

A score is only as good as what it’s measured against. A tool that jumps straight to evaluating candidates never learned what you actually need. The most important interview happens before any candidate shows up.

Prelude interviews your sales leader first and turns that into a custom hiring profile. Candidates are only evaluated once you know exactly what you’re looking for.

3

Can it tell you how to coach the person after you hire them, not just whether to hire?

The assessment that gets you the hire is worth far more if it keeps working after the offer. Knowing where a new rep is strong, where they’ll struggle, and how they want to be managed is the difference between a fast ramp and a slow one.

Prelude’s profile becomes a coaching guide for every hire: strengths, gaps, and how to develop them. The value doesn’t stop on day one.

4

Where does its judgment come from — real sales expertise, or just an algorithm?

Plenty of tools are a familiar model behind a polished screen, with nothing proprietary underneath. What matters is whose judgment is built into the questions. An assessment is only as smart as the expertise behind it.

Prelude’s methodology is built on decades of B2B sales hiring expertise, contributed by a group of the field’s most respected voices. The intelligence is the judgment, not just the software.

5

Does it tell you what you need to hear, even when it’s not what you want to hear?

The most valuable tool is one that will disagree with you. If you’re about to hire for the wrong role, or you haven’t defined the job as well as you think, you want to find that out before the hire, not after.

Prelude surfaces the hard truths: when the role isn’t defined, when the problem isn’t really a hiring problem, when the must-haves don’t add up. It’s built to tell you what you need to know.

If you’re evaluating sales assessment tools, these five questions will save you a bad hire. Prelude was built to answer yes to all five.

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Why Prelude is different

Not another AI wrapper.
A methodology made scalable.

There is no shortage of AI tools being marketed as hiring solutions. Most of them are interfaces — a familiar AI model behind a polished UI, with nothing proprietary underneath.

Prelude is built differently. The framework behind it draws on decades of research and practice in B2B sales hiring — contributed by industry thought leaders who have spent careers studying how sales organizations hire, why those hires succeed or fail, and what the industry gets chronically wrong.

We call this wisdom-based AI: it applies the hard-won judgment of named experts to your specific situation, instead of generating generic answers from the average of the internet.

Assessment tools measure candidates against a generic benchmark. Prelude starts a step earlier — by building the specific profile first. The assessment is only as good as what it measures against.

Here's why that order matters: sales success is situational. The skills that win at your company — your product, your buyers, your motion, your culture — aren't the skills that win at the company down the street. A one-size benchmark answers a generic question, and it can quietly screen out the very person who'd thrive in your specific role. Prelude builds the bar from your situation first, then measures against it.

And there's a new problem. Candidates can now use AI to generate polished answers in real time, so any tool that scores the answer is increasingly scoring the software, not the person. Prelude screens for what a copilot can't fake — how a candidate thinks, how they adapt to coaching, and what they've actually built.

  • How selling environment and organizational culture predict candidate fit more reliably than skills and experience alone
  • Why the hiring manager's clarity matters more than the candidate's credentials — and how to surface it before the search begins
  • The specific failure modes that sink qualified salespeople in the wrong environment
  • The behavioral and attitudinal attributes that predict sales performance regardless of role type
  • How to separate what a leader must have from what can be developed through good coaching

How Prelude compares

Others
Prelude
Generic benchmark
Role-specific profile built from the leader
Starts with candidates
Starts with the sales leader
Compatibility score only
Fit score + defensible business case
Static job posting
Revised posting + side-by-side comparison
No profile validation
Calibrate against your own top performers
Built for HR
Built for the person who owns the number
AI interface only
Decades of B2B sales hiring IP
Scores answers AI can fake
Screens for judgment and real work
One-way recorded video
A real conversation
Built for sales leaders

Not another HR tool.

Prelude is designed for the person who owns the number — not the recruiter who fills the req.

🎯

A profile that reflects your reality

Every hiring profile is built from your specific interview — your selling environment, your culture, your failure modes. Not a template. Not a generic job description.

📊

Candidates scored on the same criteria

Every candidate goes through the same structured interview — a real conversation, not a one-way video graded on how they look — and is scored against the same profile. Comparisons are fair, fast, and defensible to your leadership team.

📋

A job posting that attracts the right people

Prelude rewrites your posting based on what the role actually requires — and shows you exactly what changed and why. Post the right signal, attract the right candidates.

✅

A calibrated profile before you start

Before the first candidate is evaluated, validate your hiring profile against top performers already on your team. Know your profile is right before you take it to market.

🔎

An interview guide built for your role

A structured interview framework — organized by competency, coachability, culture fit, and career trajectory — with specific questions and red flags for your role.

💡

A decision you can stand behind

A one-page fit summary your whole team can align around — so the hiring decision is clear, not political, and the profile is on record for the next time you hire for this role.

The founder
Orrin Broberg, Founder of Prelude

Built by someone who has been here before.

Prelude was founded by Orrin Broberg — a sales leader, GTM strategist, and entrepreneur who has spent thirty years at the intersection of sales performance and organizational design.

An earlier version of this idea — built on the same methodology — was deployed at major US corporations and worked. The technology at the time couldn't keep pace with the vision. AI has changed that. What once required days of structured interviews and manual synthesis can now happen in a focused 25-minute conversation.

The methodology has gotten sharper. The research behind it has deepened. And the problem it solves — sales leaders hiring the wrong people because nobody asked the right questions first — has only gotten more expensive.

"The problem isn't that sales leaders don't care about hiring. It's that nobody ever gave them a system for doing it well — one built on how B2B selling actually works, not how HR thinks it works."

— Orrin Broberg, Founder, Prelude

The intelligence behind it

Decades of original research
Landmark studies on what separates top-performing sales organizations from average ones — and why.
B2B sales leadership practice
Real-world experience running and rebuilding sales organizations across industries, markets, and company stages.
Deep expertise in failure modes
Hard-won understanding of why qualified salespeople fail in the wrong environment — and how to see it coming.
A collective, not a product team
Prelude's methodology draws on a group of thought leaders who have spent careers earning their understanding of how B2B sales hiring actually works. More details coming.
Get in touch

Be first to know
before you hire.

Tell us about the role you're hiring for, and we'll be in touch as Prelude comes together. No spam, and no hard sell.

No spam. Just a reply from a real person.