Nora Khalili has over 20 years of B2B sales and customer success experience in AI, SaaS and professional services, leading commercial teams serving both Large Enterprise and Mid-Market customers. She specializes in working with high-growth firms and has helped to take companies through Series A and B funding as well as to IPO.

As Vice President of North America for Receipt Bank (now Dext), she grew the Annual Recurring Revenue 400% within the first two years by leveraging well-disciplined process management, targeted compensation plans and an aggressive go-to-market strategy. During her career, Nora has also served as Vice President of Commercial Sales at ID.me, leading all private sector sales and customer success teams. She opened the first East Coast office for Xactly Corporation and spent over 10 years in revenue leadership roles with CEB (formerly Corporate Executive Board, now Gartner), advising Fortune 1000 C-level executives on their business strategies.

As an advisor and fractional leader for early-stage businesses, Nora has supported companies including Bild, Cognitive Credit, DNSFilter, Evabot, Finagraph, Forecastr, Kleene.ai, Mosaic Smart Data, On The Goga, Parlay, Presta, Qualifi, and Symba. She was named a Techstars All-Star Mentor for 2024 and 2025.

Why are you a mentor with Techstars?

Mentoring has been incredibly rewarding and inspiring for me. Having a front row seat to both the innovation and determination of founders is so powerful. I continue to be impressed with not just their ingenuity but their drive. When it is time to pivot or to double down, they make the tough decisions and never lose focus. I find myself motivated in my own life and career by their energy.

What advice do you find yourself giving most often to founders?

While there are a number of critically important areas, I find myself often reinforcing a few key messages.

First, sales is as much a science as it is an art. Even if you aren't a natural-born seller, you can still drive revenue and create momentum if you develop the right skill set. And the skill set is not as complex as you might think. Activities like surfacing hesitations, creating (and scheduling!) follow-up steps, as well as simply directly asking for the business, will change your entire sales conversations.

Second, customer engagement is as important as closing the sale. Founders are often singularly focused on new logos and discount the importance of their post-sale strategy. Closing the deal is only the first step; it doesn't matter how intuitive your product or solution is — it is still new to your customer. They need guidance on how to achieve the greatest return, and you are the expert. Without a comprehensive strategy before the customer comes aboard, you will undoubtedly face churn, which will ultimately cripple your business. However, with a strong plan in place, you will find your business scaling quickly and profitably.

What impact do you hope to make with the founders you mentor?

I am hoping to leave them with the confidence and skills to run their commercial (revenue-generating) functions. It may not be their direct role at a point, but their understanding of the function will enable them to hire and develop productive teams, diagnose and strategize challenging customer situations more accurately, and mature the business in both a rapid and scalable fashion. Without this skill set, businesses often run into a revolving door in their sales, account management and customer success teams — never really understanding why and continuing to stall growth.

What's your favorite moment or memory from mentoring that stands out to you?

One of my favorite moments was finding out that Qualifi was being acquired by Humanly HR. Admittedly, I am a bit biased as they were the first company I ever lead-mentored and, having worked with the founding team for nearly 5 years, they feel like family. Across those years, I watched them persevere, pivot, regroup, and most importantly, never let up. They knew they had a strong value proposition and trusted that if they kept to the key fundamentals of their business, they would ultimately have a positive outcome.

What are some of the biggest learnings from your career that you bring as a Techstars Mentor?

Foundations and process are the keys to sustainable growth. Having spent my career leading commercial teams in high-growth organizations, the one consistent learning is that consistent execution will lead to success. Even when we had an excellent product to sell, if we did not establish a deliberate strategy and execute with precision, our progress would falter. This is not to say that your strategy doesn't evolve and that you shouldn't experiment to get to the correct motion. Once the correct motion is identified, however, it is the execution that is absolutely key.

What trends or innovations are you most excited about?

Leveraging AI for productivity. While I am NOT a big fan of using ChatGPT to write all of your comms (although I don't mind people having them edited this way), I am excited to see the pace of business moving so quickly when utilizing AI tools. Whether it is more complex activities like product development or simply doing pre-call prep more efficiently and effectively to tailor your sales conversations, when used to augment already sound business processes, the impacts are incredible.

What advice do you have for other mentors?

I encourage mentors to be a thought partner with their founders. It isn't about coming in and dictating a strategy or having all of the answers; it is helping them to develop the skills and the knowledge to make the best decisions for their business. In my most productive founder relationships, I ultimately become a sounding board and brainstorming partner vs pure guidance.

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