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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.

Decades of expertise in why sales hires succeed and fail, made scalable by AI and tuned to your team. Not a generic benchmark. The profile that actually fits, before the first candidate is ever evaluated.

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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. 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

Upload your existing job posting

Prelude reads your existing posting, extracts the role context, and immediately surfaces what it omits — the selling environment, team structure, failure modes, and must-have attributes that postings almost never capture. You see the gaps before the search begins.

30 seconds · Gap report generated
2

Prelude interviews the sales leader

A structured, conversational 25-minute interview — voice or text — takes the leader through four areas: the selling environment, the culture and team, the non-negotiable must-haves, and the organizational fit. Questions adapt to what you say. The AI listens, probes, and builds.

25 minutes · Built on proven methodology
3

A hiring profile is built — and validated

Prelude synthesizes the interview into a precise hiring profile: selling relationship type, must-have attributes, failure mode to avoid, culture signals, and success factors. The leader reviews and approves it. Then, optionally, a small group of current top performers go through a short validation interview — calibrating the profile against people who already succeed in this environment.

Profile ready for use
4

Your job posting gets rewritten

Prelude generates a revised job posting based on the hiring profile — and shows you a side-by-side comparison with what you started with. What changed, why it changed, and what kind of candidate the original posting was actually attracting versus the one you need.

Revised posting · Comparison report
5

Candidates are interviewed and scored

Each candidate receives a link to a structured Prelude interview — voice or text, about 15 minutes — built around the hiring profile. Prelude scores every candidate against the same criteria and stack-ranks them by fit. You stop relying on who interviewed best and start predicting who will perform best.

Fit score · Stack rank · Candidate comparison
6

Top candidates face a structured interview — built for your role

Your shortlisted candidates come in for a face-to-face interview guided by the custom interview framework Prelude generated from your hiring profile. Every question is organized by competency, coachability, culture fit, and career trajectory — with role-specific red flags built in. You're not winging it. You're running a consistent, defensible process every time.

Custom interview guide · Competency framework · Red flag alerts
7

Make the call with a clear business case

A clean fit summary gives you and your team a shared, data-backed view of every candidate. The hire decision stays where it belongs — with the sales leader — but it's backed by a structured profile, scored candidates, and a defensible rationale you can stand behind.

Hire decision · Profile on record for future hires
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
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.

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.

  • 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
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 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.
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