Dr. Priya Nair, founder & principal consultant. Photo from the office, pre-coffee.

About

Sales was never magic. I just counted the cards.

I’m Priya. I started The Sales Scientist in 2017 after eleven years in B2B revenue roles, because I kept meeting dashboards full of numbers nobody had actually read.

My route here was unusual. I did a PhD in organizational behaviour at McMaster, studying how forecasting committees fool themselves, then went into industry instead of academia — first as an analyst at a logistics software firm in Mississauga, then through a series of sales leadership jobs at Ferrous Metrics, a Kitchener-Waterloo SaaS company where I ended up as VP Sales running a 47-person org across Canada and the U.S. northeast.

At Ferrous I learned the unglamorous truth: most pipeline problems are not motivation problems. They’re measurement problems. Half the deals we “lost” were never really deals; a quarter of them stalled because two departments each assumed the other owned follow-up. Fixing that took a spreadsheet and some courage, not a motivational offsite.

Credentials, for those who like receipts

• PhD, Organizational Behaviour & Management Science, McMaster University (2011)
• VP Sales, Ferrous Metrics Inc., 2013–2017 (grew ARR from $9M to $44M)
• Instructor, B2B Revenue Operations, Schulich ExecEd (sessional, 2019–present)
• Author, The Revenue Leak Method (self-published, 2022 — sold 6,400 copies, no bestseller lists)
• Occasional writer for a few Canadian SaaS newsletters nobody under 30 reads

How I work

Small engagements, senior attention. When you hire us you get me and at most one associate — we deliberately stay under ten active clients a year. My Canadian clients tell me I’m direct but polite about it; my American clients tell me I’m just direct.

I live in the Junction with my partner, a rescue greyhound named Isoquant, and an unhealthy number of mechanical pencils.

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