Currently booking · Q3 2026

The Interim President you bring in when the team stops agreeing.

Marketing blames the funnel. Finance blames the spend. Sales blames the leads. Three smart leaders, three different diagnoses, and a number that keeps slipping. Chris Schafer steps in as Interim President, owns the seat, and aligns the team around one revenue plan. He leaves a system that runs after he does.

Apply to work with Chris ↗ See the engagement

Chris Schafer

Interim President

25 yrs

Inside SaaS GTM
NA · APAC

$30M → $1B+

NetSuite arc
Mid-market to enterprise

$9.3B

Oracle acquisition
Inside the full arc to exit

Largest Q ever

ImportGenius, as President
B2C to B2B in 18 months

01 · The real problem

Urgency became your operating system.

Marketing says pipeline is thin. Finance says the forecast is fiction. The CEO is calling more meetings to solve both at once.

Nobody is wrong. Nothing is moving.

This is not a people problem. It is an alignment problem. When three parts of the business each solve a different version of the same situation, the noise gets louder and the progress stalls. More sprints, more standups, more pressure. None of it changes the mechanics underneath.

"Velocity without awareness creates friction." Chris, on what he sees in week one

Marketing

"Pipeline is thin because sales won't work the leads we give them."

Response. More campaigns. Higher MQL targets.

Finance

"The forecast missed three quarters in a row. We need tighter controls."

Response. Restrict spend. Require approvals on everything.

CEO

"We just need everyone moving faster, pulling in the same direction."

Response. Hire a consultant. Run an all-hands. Set a new OKR.

What happens

Three teams. Three diagnoses. Zero shared definition of what fixed looks like.

The revenue plan becomes harder to believe with every quarter that passes.

02 · The primary engagement

Chris steps in as the Interim President. Not adjacent to it.

One operator. 3 to 12 months.
Owns the seat. Owns the number.

Chris embeds inside the business as your Interim President. He leads the leadership team. Owns the GTM motion. Runs the operating cadence personally until the company can run it without him. Three to twelve months. One seat. One operator. One accountable line to the number.

Repair the revenue plan. Replace the forecast everybody has stopped believing with one the team builds and defends together.

Rebuild the operating cadence. Weekly mechanics where decisions land in the room. Not in a follow-up.

Move from founder-led to systems-led. A GTM motion that survives the next quarter without Chris in the room.

Prepare for the capital event. So the narrative the board sees matches the mechanics the team is running.

Apply to work with Chris ↗ See the operating system

03 · Track record

This is not theory.

Chris has been inside the rooms where the revenue plan broke down and got rebuilt. Not as an advisor who delivers a deck and leaves. As the operator who stayed, owned the number, and delivered.

ImportGenius. Stepped in as President. Eighteen-month B2C-to-B2B transformation. Rebuilt the GTM motion. Realigned the leadership team around one revenue plan. Delivered the largest revenue quarter in the company's history. This is the scale and the kind of work most engagements look like today.

NetSuite. Joined at ~$30M ARR. Fifteen years later: past $1B, through IPO, into the $9.3B Oracle acquisition. The full arc from mid-market to global enterprise.

Early 2000s

NetSuite. Enterprise GTM build.

Joined as the company was scaling its enterprise motion. Built and led sales teams across North America targeting mid-market and enterprise.

~$30M ARR

2007

NetSuite IPO

Present through the public offering on the NYSE. Continued expanding GTM operations across NA into APAC. Australia, Singapore, Manila.

NYSE: N

2010s

NetSuite. Global expansion.

Led global sales leadership with teams across three continents. Built the APAC revenue engine from the ground up.

Crosses $1B ARR

2016

Oracle acquires NetSuite

The $9.3B acquisition completed. One of the largest enterprise SaaS deals of the decade. Chris was inside the full arc from $30M to exit.

$9.3B exit

Recent

ImportGenius. President.

Led an 18-month B2C-to-B2B transformation at mid-market scale. Rebuilt the GTM motion. Realigned the leadership team. Delivered the company's largest revenue quarter.

Largest quarter ever

04 · The operating system

Four disciplines. Decisions that stick.

The H.E.L.P. operating system. Co-developed with Elisha Schafer over ten years, rooted in behavioral science and motivational interviewing. It converts urgency into discipline. Noise drops. Progress accelerates.

Hear

Full attention, not partial input. Skip it and you train the team to escalate just to be heard.

Evidence

Separate what you know from what you assume. The diagnosis cracks at the spot you treated a story as a fact.

Learn

Recognition over instruction. The team gets sharper when they pull the pattern from their own past, not yours.

Proceed

Surface the options. Don't name the winner. The team gets a decision either way. Only one version gets conviction.

05 · Other ways to work together

When the embed is more than you need right now.

Advisory 3 hours

Three-hour strategic session

A focused working session for founders and leadership teams who need a clear diagnosis. Not a long engagement. Walk out with a specific action plan and accountability to it. Not a deck.

Book a session →

Speaking Keynote · Workshop

Keynote & executive workshops

Chris speaks on GTM alignment, the H.E.L.P. operating system, and the future of B2B buying behavior. Available for leadership offsites, revenue summits, and board sessions.

Discuss a date →

06 · What people say

From the people who reported directly to him.

Each of us has had one person who saw our potential and gave us what we needed to go from good to great. For me, that was Chris. His ability to develop a team while keeping the revenue engine moving is genuinely rare.

Kristen Visser

Former direct report · NetSuite

I reported directly to Chris when he led our sales organization. He has the experience to build real growth strategies. And the discipline to make them stick. He is simply the real deal.

Nicole James

Former direct report · NetSuite

07 · Recent thinking

Where the buyer changed and the playbook didn't.

From LinkedIn
2,555 followers

Christopher Schafer

Interim C-Suite Operator · GTM Turnaround & Scaling Expert

1w · Public

Auditing Gong calls and web meetings is tough to stomach. Reps are gripping a manual that no longer exists. Running the script. Following the discovery framework someone built in 2019. And losing.

2019 didn't have Claude. 2019 didn't have a buyer who watched your demos, read customer reviews, and had an AI generated competitor matrix at their finger tips, before the call was even booked. The world the playbook was written for is gone.

The reps winning right now are not better at scripts. They are better at real conversations. Curious from the start. Genuinely curious until it is time to be prescriptive. And knowing exactly when that shift happens. Timing recognition.

You don't earn the right to be prescriptive by reaching the right slide in the deck. You earn it by listening hard enough that the buyer feels heard. Then you can proceed.

#GTMStrategy · #RevenueLeadership · #HELPOperatingSystem · #FutureOfSelling

Read the full post on LinkedIn →

07 · Work with Chris

Make the revenue plan believable again.

If your leadership team is solving different versions of the same problem and the number keeps slipping, this is a 30-minute conversation. No sales deck. No pitch. Just the situation, and whether Chris is the right operator for it.

Apply to work with Chris ↗ Send a direct message

Greater Toronto Area · serving NA & APAC