
Dan Oakes
5.0
(13)
AI sales and marketing transformation | Stanford MBA & Startup Sales Expert
47 followers
Studied at Stanford Graduate School of Business
Works at Startup Sales Consulting
Successful clients at
Available tomorrow at 3:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Dan's Coaching Offerings
Custom hourly · $350/hr
Get help with Lead Generation & Scoring, AI Fundamentals, and .
Dan also coaches for Sales, Business Development & Partnerships, and Break Into AI Careers. View all.
Dan’s AI for Sales & Marketing Qualifications
Coaches professionally
Experience level: Executive
I run a sales consulting business where I help venture backed startups and SMBs improve their sales strategy and implement AI into their go-to-market workflows. I work directly with founders, sales leaders, AEs, and SDRs to identify where AI can meaningfully improve productivity, pipeline generation, and deal execution. I then help teams actually implement these workflows using tools like Claude, Clay, other AI agent platforms, and the tools already existing in their tech stack. Some of the areas I've helped organizations implement AI: - Increasing individual seller productivity and effectiveness with AI (research, messaging, call prep, follow-ups, CRM updates) - Creating AI agents to automate signal based prospecting and outreach - AI enabled pipeline reviews to spot risk and accelerate deals - Automating post-call summaries, next steps, and CRM hygiene - Using AI to build sales playbooks, onboarding materials, and internal training content - Using AI for marketing content, outbound campaigns, and case studies My focus isn't just on AI tools, but on how AI fits into a practical, repeatable sales process. Most teams don't need more tools, they need better workflows. I help teams figure out what to automate, what to keep human or keep with deterministic workflows, and how to use AI to close more deals rather than just create more activity.
Dan can help with:
Lead Generation & Scoring
AI Fundamentals
AI Agents
CRM Automation
Personalization & Segmentation
AI Automation
Outbound Automation
Freelancing
Dan also coaches for Sales, Business Development & Partnerships, and Break Into AI Careers. View all.
About Dan
I cut my teeth as employee #1 and founding AE at Arc, helping drive revenue from $0 to $5 million ARR in under a year. Those 12 months were a roller-coaster...at first prospecting for weeks with zero meetings, watching our first demo crash, then stacking wins as we doubled month over month growth our first five months of generating revenue. Since then I’ve helped dozens of founders of venture-backed startups go from zero to one. In my work, I've interviewed and mentored hundreds of AEs and BDRs. I also have offerings to folks who want to break into sales at a startup or sellers needing to upskill themselves. Selling without a strong brand name behind you is challenging, so founders only hire the best of the best. I help sellers from all backgrounds prepare for the interview process and become a top performer selling for a startup. Outside the sales arena, I’m a certified sommelier, former improv actor, and relentless explorer, having traveled to 41 U.S. national parks, all 50 US states, and 100+ Italian restaurants in Manhattan. That curiosity fuels the way I coach: experiment, iterate, refine. Today I run Startup Sales Consulting to help founders build repeatable, scalable GTM engines. One wrong move can set you back a year; the right move can ignite escape velocity. Let’s make sure it’s the latter.
Why do I coach?
Early at Arc I hired an outside sales coach named Jared. He’d seen “good” across multiple startups and turned our chaos into clarity. The frameworks he shared leveled up my own thinking and were instrumental in Arc’s breakout growth. That experience lit a fuse: if one coach could accelerate an entire company, why shouldn’t I do the same for dozens? My coaching philosophy is simple: sales isn’t rocket science, so let's break the motion into first-principle parts, diagnose the constraint, then fix the smallest thing that unlocks the next deal. Effectiveness before efficiency. Take “Jen,” a brilliant YC founder with an engineering background, selling into a male-dominated industry in her second language. The idea of selling initially seemed intimidating, but we reframed selling as something in her wheelhouse: structured problem-solving. Within weeks she closed her first enterprise logos and rediscovered joy in the process. Watching her confidence soar and seeing deals land faster reminds me that great products deserve great distribution. I coach because founders should be wrestling with scale problems five years from now, not still wondering how to win their first customer today.
Work Experience

Founder
Startup Sales Consulting
2023 - Present
I help B2B SaaS startups scale beyond founder-led sales I work with founders still acquiring their first 20 paying customers through tailored 1:1 coaching programs to generate more meetings in your ICP, and to drive urgency turning "interested" prospects into paying customers. For startups who have traction and are ready to scale, I help ensure you have the right sellers in place and turn what's worked into a repeatable sales process. yourstartupsales.com
Head of Sales
Trunk.Tools
2023 - 2024
Hiring Manager
First sales hire, from seed to Series A and beyond

Account Executive, Enterprise Accounts
Arc Technologies
2021 - 2024
First employee at Arc, from pre-seed to Series A and beyond
Petroleum Engineer
Marathon Oil
2011 - 2019
Education

Stanford Graduate School of Business
Master of Business Administration - MBA
2019 - 2021

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
B.S., Mechanical Engineering
2007 - 2011
13 Reviews
Overall Rating
5.0
Dan has helped Leland clients get into Zip