Why Hannah Schlosser Walked Away at the Top of Her Game—And What Came Next

Hannah Schlosser was crushing it at her sales job.

She was consistently hitting 400% of quota, excelling in every role she stepped into, and quickly becoming the kind of employee companies work hard to keep.

Naturally, she quit.

Frustrated by the limitations of traditional sales roles and convinced she could drive greater impact by owning the entire process, Hannah stopped waiting for a title to catch up with her vision. Instead, she founded SALT, where she helps B2B tech founders transition from founder-led sales to scalable revenue engines by building the sales architecture behind growth and stepping directly into deals from discovery to close.

At the core of Hannah's work is a belief that sales isn't nearly as complicated as we've made it. For thousands of years, humans have built trust, exchanged value, and formed relationships without pipelines, playbooks, or jargon-filled frameworks. Somewhere along the way, sales became crowded with tactics and scripts that often distract from what matters most: genuine human connection. Today, Hannah helps founders cut through the noise and build sales processes that feel both effective and authentic—because in her view, people still buy from people.

In this Q&A, Hannah shares more of what she's learned from SALT about building a business from the ground up.

In what ways have your upbringing or past experiences contributed to how you operate as an entrepreneur?

I basically grew up inside a business. My parents started theirs in their early 20s, back when getting clients meant paying a fortune in postage and circling leads in the yellow pages instead of annoying the crap out of people in their LinkedIn DMs. My brother and I were raised in a house where work and life were never really two separate things. You pick up so much that way without anyone ever actually teaching you. I learned plenty about the actual craft later, too, from working with all sorts of companies and people, but the entrepreneurial way of living came from being raised in the middle of it. Before I moved out, I had what amounted to an 18-year-long internship! My approach to running my business didn't come from a course or some framework on the internet; I just absorbed it, the way you absorb a trade by growing up in it.

Have you ever felt like you’re “different?” If yes, in what ways has this contributed to your journey as an entrepreneur?

I'm one of those people with what feels like a million interests all yelling at once. As a teenager, it came out in my hobbies. I was making art while also obsessing over making everything around me more efficient, already daydreaming about the business I'd start one day. In the professional world, they have a neat little word for people like me: generalist. It's not always a compliment. Everyone around me was busy specializing their way into one tiny lane. Meanwhile, throughout university and every job after, my curiosity stayed all over the place. Getting boxed into one corner of a sales process always felt like a cage to me. 

With SALT, I finally get all of it: the strategy underneath, the actual people work with the SDRs and the clients, the constant adjusting as the thing shifts under you in real time. It turns out that a brain that refuses to pick one lane is kind of perfect for running a sales motion from start to finish.

What’s been the most unexpected part of your entrepreneurial journey?

People are always kind of surprised when I tell them SALT isn't even my first company. Straight out of high school, I worked as a marketing assistant at my local tourist agency and really took to it. When I went off to university, the only sane option was to start a whole business around it. (Naturally.) Throughout my degree, I was working with impact-focused companies on their marketing—and later their sales strategy, too. 

After business grad school, I hung up the founder hat and went and got myself a corporate job like you're supposed to. I didn’t predict that the day I actually shut that first business down, something would just feel off. I didn’t notice or realize it at first, but closing that business was the moment I wandered off my own road. The good news is that the scenic route taught me half of what I lean on now. 

SALT never really felt like some big leap. Instead, it was like coming back to something I'd put down for a while.

Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

The first time I was properly dead set on starting my own thing, I was 11 and wanted to be a fashion designer. I built a whole website (no vibe coding back then, btw), wrote myself a mission statement, learned to sketch and sew, and—much to the despair of all the adults in my life—refused to use a single pre-made pattern because the designs had to be mine. At that age, a career advisor asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and since “entrepreneur” didn’t really seem like a job I could write down, I said “a successful fashion designer.” As adults often do, she told me to aim lower and be realistic. 

I remember being extremely annoyed by that conversation, and I still find myself thinking about that woman from time to time. To be honest, not a whole lot has changed since then. I'm still the same person who won't work off someone else's pattern and who refuses to take the path that looks “realistic,” which is half the reason SALT looks and works the way it does. I don't just hand founders a generic playbook or advice when I work with them. Instead, I build the sales motion around their actual company, how they sell, and who they're selling to. I understand that the founders I work with are as passionate about their businesses as I am about mine, so making sure that they are set up for success commercially is close to my heart. 

There's always going to be someone telling you to be realistic, to want a little less than you want. I never really listened, and my 11-year old-self would be pretty happy to see where not listening got me.

What would you tell your younger self if you were to start your entrepreneurial journey all over again?

Keep aiming high and chase the ideas that look unrealistic on paper. Some of the best things that have happened to me came from deciding to bet on myself and my skills. Most of the time, that bet paid off—big time.