Scott Leese

Advisor to startup revenue teams

Scott Leese is the founder of Scott Leese Consulting, an advisory practice that helps early-stage companies build repeatable sales: the strategy, the process, the hiring plan and the systems underneath it. His press biography presents him as the firm's CEO and founder, as well as an author, and says the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals named him to its Top 25 list three times.^[1]

A short author biography published on Rippling's blog describes the shape of his working life in numbers: six stints leading sales teams, five companies founded, three books written, roughly a dozen billion-dollar startups advised and thirteen exits. His own press page uses larger totals, citing 160-plus companies helped and 15 exits as an operator and advisor. All of these counts are self-reported and have not been independently audited, so they are best read as his own account rather than a verified record.^[2][1]

Early career and the climb into sales leadership

According to his press biography, Leese did not start in sales. He earned a psychology degree at Dominican University of California and later a master's degree in learning and instructional technology at Arizona State University. He says he took his first sales job around age 27 at a Bay Area startup, with no prior selling experience.^[1]

His first large leadership role, as that biography tells it, was as vice president of sales at Main Street Hub, where he says he grew the team from two representatives to about 200 and opened offices in Austin, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. The biography notes that GoDaddy acquired the company in 2018 for a reported $175 million, after the period he describes. He then served as senior vice president of sales at OutboundEngine from 2013 to 2015, where it credits him with 650 percent revenue growth, and held sales roles at Payfirma and MediaValet before founding his consultancy in 2016.^[1]

Qualia and the 2017 industry award

In 2016 Leese joined Qualia, a title and closing software company serving settlement professionals and real estate law firms, as senior vice president of sales. In May 2017 the AA-ISP named him one of its Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals, and Qualia published the news on its own blog. The association's founder said in that announcement that Leese had shown real dedication to advancing the profession of inside sales.^[3]

The press biography says that during his Qualia years, which ran to 2019, the company grew from a standing start to roughly 15 percent of its market, and that headcount rose from about 25 people to more than 200 as the company reached unicorn status. Those are claims from his own materials; the Qualia post confirms his title and the award but not the growth figures.^[1][3]

Books and writing

Leese has written three books. His press biography lists Addicted to the Process (2017), More Than a Number: The Modern VP Sales Playbook (2021) and From Rep to Manager (2021), the last co-authored with Ryan Walker. It also describes him as a prolific LinkedIn creator, citing more than 127,000 followers as of April 2025.^[1]

Communities: Surf & Sales and Thursday Night Sales

Alongside consulting, Leese has built several communities for sales professionals. Surf & Sales, which he co-founded in 2017 with Richard Harris and Jeff Coleman, combines a summit in Costa Rica with a podcast that he co-hosts and that launched in 2019. Thursday Night Sales, a virtual gathering for sales practitioners, and GTM United followed around 2020. Chargebee's podcast series also lists him as running Thursday Night Sales and Surf & Sales alongside the consultancy.^[1][4]

Milos Ventures

In January 2024, according to his press biography, Leese launched Milos Ventures with Taylor Leese, an investment vehicle he describes as focused on frontier technology areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, energy and cleantech. Rippling's author page lists Milos Ventures among the organizations he currently runs, together with the consultancy and the Surf & Sales Summit.^[1][2]

Perspective and why he matters

On Chargebee's Champions of Change podcast, in an episode on sales strategies and communities, Leese discussed how living with an autoimmune disease changed his outlook and shaped the sales leader he became. That personal history is part of how he presents his work.^[4]

His importance in his discipline is less about a single company outcome than about a kind of public leadership. He is one of the more visible operators who documents how startup sales teams are built and managed, and who has turned that visibility into a network of events, podcasts and books that other sales leaders use to compare notes. For founders deciding how to hire a first head of sales, his advisory practice sits in the gap between the founder's instinct and a repeatable revenue engine.^[1][2]

On The Executive List

Scott Leese is ranked No. 80 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Revenue Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.