TheCEOVerse • Digital Edition
“The Visionary CEO Behind Boost Sales Success”
Cover story
Este Pretorius
Featured Profile - Este Pretorius
Este Pretorius: The Woman Rewriting the Rules of Modern Sales
There is something peculiar about the kind of silence that falls over a boardroom when a strategy document has just failed in front of everyone who signed off on it. Este Pretorius has sat inside that silence more times than most executives will admit to. She has also, by her own account, caused a fair share of it. Early in her career, before she learned the lesson that now sits at the centre of everything she builds, that a business does not grow because its marketing is clever. It grows because somebody, somewhere, said something specific enough to be believed.
Today, Pretorius is the CEO and Founder of Boost Sales, a revenue systems consultancy that has become the name enterprises in IT, healthcare, telecommunications and finance call when their growth targets are not negotiable and their compliance requirements are unforgiving. She holds a cum laude Master’s degree in Marketing, carries more than two decades of hands on experience with brands including Dell, Dimension Data and FNB, and in the last two years alone has collected upward of ten international honours, among them the Forttuna Global Excellence Award, a place among the Top 25 Women in Digital, and recognition as South Africa’s Digital Marketing Leader of the Year. Her name has appeared on a screen in Times Square. She has accepted an award inside the Houses of Parliament. None of it, she will tell you, is the point. The point is a gap she first noticed at twenty one years old, and has not stopped chasing since.
Where It All Began: The Gap Nobody Taught Her
Pretorius was still a university student when she took her first marketing job, learning the discipline in lecture halls by morning and watching those same lessons fall apart in client meetings by afternoon. The theory was never wrong, she says. It was simply incomplete. Textbooks do not cover the moment a client says no within four minutes of a pitch, or the quarter a budget is halved without warning, or the strategy that is correct on paper, fully evidenced, elegantly built, and then dies anyway, because the sales team never believed a word of it and nobody had thought to ask why.
That gap between what marketing produces and what a sales team can actually use in a room with a sceptical buyer became the single problem Pretorius has spent her career solving. It has not gotten smaller with time. If anything, she says, it has gotten more expensive every time she encounters it, because the stakes attached to it, including the clients, the budgets, the regulatory scrutiny, have only ever grown.
Her path through agency life taught her an early, uncomfortable truth. What clients say they want in a strategy document is rarely what they expect when the invoice arrives. From there she moved deliberately into digital marketing, drawn by the fact that it was the first environment in her career where she could actually see cause and effect, rather than debate it in a boardroom with people who outranked her but understood the numbers less. She sought out every international conference she could reach, absorbing ideas long before the rest of the local industry had caught up to applying them. Then came 2020, and with it, the call that would recalibrate everything.
A man who sold commercial real estate rang her. Nobody was viewing buildings. Nobody was signing leases. He did not ask her about his brand positioning or his content calendar. He asked whether he would be able to pay his staff that month. That single conversation set the standard Pretorius has used to judge her own work ever since. Can the client see the money? Everything else, she says plainly, is a report nobody reads. It is a standard that has scaled with her, with same gap but bigger companies now, heavier regulation, and other countries, yet the underlying question has never changed. The distance between what a business says and what its buyers actually hear does not close because somebody said something clever. It closes because somebody said something true, in the buyer’s own language.
From Struggle to Strength: The Portfolio That Taught Her How to Listen
If there is a single episode that reveals how Pretorius actually works, it is the one she describes from her time at a global IT services group, where she inherited a marketing portfolio bleeding R1.7 million and a team that had spent months being told, implicitly, that they were the problem.
Everyone was working hard. Almost nobody was working together. Marketing was producing material it found clever, sales was quietly discarding it, because it echoed nothing a real prospect had ever said out loud. Rather than interrogate the numbers or the people producing them, Pretorius made an unusual request. She asked to sit in on sales calls. It is not a comfortable thing to ask for. A marketer listening in on a sales conversation is, in most organisations, assumed to be there to judge it. Instead, she took notes. The exact words prospects used. The objections that surfaced in call after call without fail. The one question nobody inside the business could answer without visibly hesitating. Then she rebuilt every piece of marketing material around those actual words, discarding what marketing had assumed prospects wanted to hear in favour of what prospects had, on record, already said.
The portfolio grew 72 per cent year on year, flipping from a R1.7 million loss to a R7 million gain. More lasting than the number, Pretorius says, was what the experience permanently changed about how she diagnoses a struggling team. Morale, she concluded, is a symptom and never a cause. And the better question is never “defend your results” but “tell me what the prospect actually said.” Nobody, she points out, gets defensive about a transcript. The second test of that decade arrived in March 2020, when in person corporate training, which was roughly half of Pretorius’s revenue at the time, disappeared within a fortnight. The anxiety was not simply whether the business would recover. It was whether live corporate training, as a category, would exist in any recognisable form again.
Her response was to tell clients the plain truth. She did not know when she would be able to stand in a room with their teams again, but she could deliver virtually, different, not worse, and she would test and adjust as she went. Every decision in that period was sorted into one of two lists. Postpone, or do not. It was not an inspiring system. It worked. Platform contracts were postponed and run month to month at higher fees until she understood which tools genuinely suited her teaching style. Hiring was postponed, because she could not responsibly promise a salary she had no visibility on. But building virtual capability was never postponed for a single day. She invested immediately, tested formats aggressively, failed fast, and by the time the rest of the market began adapting, she held a six month head start. What changed in her permanently, she says, was patience. She stopped needing certainty before she was willing to act.
The Innovation Edge: Why She Won’t Let AI Touch the Relationship
Ask Pretorius about the ratio between data and instinct in marketing, and she will give you a number most of her peers would dispute, that is ninety nine per cent data, one per cent instinct, and she believes most of her industry has that ratio backwards, dressing up the imbalance as creativity. She is quick to add that instinct is not worthless, it is simply expensive when it is allowed to go first. Her own instinct, she says, has earned its one per cent by being wrong often enough, in public, in front of numbers that disagreed with it. That grounding is also why her position on artificial intelligence was set early and has not shifted. Automate the research, never automate the relationship. It is a line she defends against considerable commercial pressure, because much of the industry went the opposite direction. Automated connection requests, templated outreach fired at thousands of people who never asked for it, volume sold as a strategy in itself.
Pretorius watched companies buy into that promise while their own reply rates quietly told them what was actually happening. The position has cost her paying work. She has turned down projects that would have been lucrative because the brief amounted to building a system that would spam a client’s own network and burn relationships built over a decade. She told those prospective clients why, and they went and bought the shortcut from someone else. She does not describe this as a regret.
What Pretorius builds instead, she is careful to distinguish, is not prompts. Prompts, she argues, are now a commodity, and ten prompts anyone can copy will produce content indistinguishable from everyone else’s, because that is exactly what it is. She builds systems that hold context. A specific company’s voice, its buyers, its sales cycle, the words it is not permitted to use, the regulatory limits it operates under, all embedded in the system before a single request is typed. She then engineers the output to survive an audit, not merely to earn a compliment.
For enterprise clients, this runs as a thirteen phase programme with audit gates at every stage and a pass or fail compliance layer underneath it, with every claim traced back to a primary source. In one engagement, she consolidated eleven separate, conflicting brand voices within a single organisation into one rulebook that any writer could apply and any auditor could verify. Two proprietary methods sit underneath the work, they are Connection to Conversion, which starts from what prospects actually say and builds outward in their own language, and Intelligent Personalisation, which restricts AI strictly to the research layer so that a human being writes the message that proves someone actually understood the business on the other end. The differentiator, she insists, was never the software. Everyone has the software.
Lessons Learned the Hard Way: The Decision That Would Have Felt Like Leadership
Pretorius is candid about the near miss she considers her worst almost decision, one that, in the moment, would have felt entirely responsible. In April 2020, with half her revenue gone overnight, every instinct told her to cut her rates immediately, chase volume, and keep everyone busy. It is the decision that looks like leadership from the outside and is, in her words, fear wearing a good suit.
She gave herself ninety days instead of acting on impulse. The evidence that came back showed clients valued her methodology regardless of the format it was delivered in, and her rates held. Had she moved on instinct in week one, she believes she would have repriced herself as a commodity permanently, a position she has watched other professionals never fully climb out of. The rule she extracted from the episode governs her decision making to this day, which is the instinct that feels most urgent is usually the one that deserves the most delay.
A second, related lesson came from an early habit of giving advice simply because it had worked before, and being wrong often enough that the pattern became impossible to ignore. Confidence without evidence, she now says, is arrogance with better manners. The discipline she built in response, audit trails, source verification, written methodology that a stranger can pull apart line by line, once caught a 42.5 per cent inflation in keyword data on a major enterprise engagement, where global search volumes had been presented as market specific figures.
The number had passed through several sets of hands without anyone checking it, and it would have misdirected a significant budget with no one able to explain, months later, why the results never materialised. It is why the rule inside Boost Sales is now absolute, that is figures are never invented, never rounded, and never recalculated to sound better. If a source cannot be confirmed, the figure is removed. She also deliberately breaks her own work every quarter, actively trying to make her own frameworks fail. Most experts, she observes, stop questioning a system the moment it starts working, and five years later they are teaching something quietly outdated with total confidence.
Voices That Shaped Her: Mentors, Sceptics and the Prospects Who Said No
Este Pretorius traces a direct line to one person who backed her before she had a track record to justify it, a leader named Elize, from her time at a global IT services group. Pretorius makes a sharp distinction between leadership and management, arguing they are two different jobs that almost never live in the same person. Leaders tell you where you are going, managers make sure you can actually get there. Elize, she says, did both, and mentored her while doing it. It is a rarity Pretorius says she only fully appreciated years later, when she found herself deciding whether to hand a piece of work to someone who had not yet proven they could do it and now says yes more often than she otherwise might.
Beyond formal mentorship, she credits people who were never trying to teach her anything at all. The sales reps who had every reason to refuse her request to sit in on their calls but let her anyway, reshaping how she works entirely. The business owners she worked alongside through the upheaval of 2020, who taught her a standard no client with a healthy balance sheet ever could. When a company is deciding whether it survives the quarter, you are useful this week, or you are not in the room the next. And the prospects who explained precisely why they weren’t buying, who she says shaped her methodology more than any client who simply said yes. A polite no, in her view, teaches you nothing. A blunt one is worth a month of research.
Stronger Together: Partnerships With No Obligation to Help Her
Some of the most consequential relationships in Pretorius’s career were the ones no one owed her. At a global IT services group, she negotiated more than R2 million in vendor funding, and the business went on to be named Partner of the Year by four of its five vendors, a result she attributes to bringing vendors into the planning process early, while the shape of the year was still flexible, rather than approaching them later with a sponsorship request and a deadline attached. She has structured every partnership the same way since.
Inside client organisations, she has learned that a delivered system only survives if someone internal takes ownership of it. She can build the framework, train the team and hand over the methodology in full, and it will still quietly die if no one on the inside wants it to live. So she looks, in the very first meeting, for the person asking the most specific questions, not necessarily the most senior person in the room. Her own team, she says, is what separates a good idea from a delivered programme. Enterprise engagements run to hundreds of pages with every claim independently checked, and enthusiasm alone does not get a team there. What does is people holding a standard when nobody is watching.
Her approach to collaboration itself is built around admitting what she does not know from the outset. Most consultants, she notes, walk into a room with answers, which puts every specialist present on the defensive for the remainder of the project. Admitting ignorance, by contrast, gives everyone else permission to admit complexity, and that is when the real problems surface instead of the tidy version prepared for outsiders. Three rules govern how she runs a room. Ask the question that sounds stupid, credit publicly and correct privately, and ban jargon wherever more than one discipline is present, because if the finance person in the room cannot follow the marketing person, the marketing person has not actually made a point yet.
A Word for the Next Generation: Pick a Position and Be Willing to Lose Money Over It
Pretorius’s advice to those coming up behind her is deliberately unfashionable. Pick a position, she says, and be willing to lose money over it. The conventional advice, to stay flexible, keep your options open, never alienate a potential buyer, produces professionals nobody remembers and nobody calls. The clients worth having, in her experience, want someone who has already thought the problem through and is prepared to say so out loud, including the parts they would rather not hear. She is equally direct about sequencing. Do the job before you attempt to teach it. Credibility, she argues, comes from having sat in the meeting where the number was missed and having had to explain it, a form of knowledge no amount of reading substitutes for. She also urges a generosity that runs against industry convention.
She teaches enterprise methodology in free masterclasses that more than a thousand small business owners have attended, deliberately rejecting the standard practice of teaching the “what” for free while charging for the “how”, a model she believes manufactures dependency by withholding information. She competes on implementation instead, and says companies that sat through her free sessions years ago now hire her precisely because nothing was held back. Her final instructions to younger professionals is to write down what you believe and let people test it, because vague expertise can never be verified and therefore can never be trusted. And then be patient with the slow part, because trust accumulates quietly and is, in her words, the only asset that survives a platform change.
Beyond This Milestone: Building an International Business, Not an Export Business
Pretorius is precise about how she frames her current ambitions. She is not building a South African business that happens to serve international clients. She is building an international business, full stop. In the past two years, her name has appeared on a screen in Times Square and she has collected an award inside the Houses of Parliament, more than ten honours across that period in total. She is unsentimental about what those accolades are actually worth, insisting it is not the trophy itself but the fact that recognition travels ahead of her into rooms she cannot physically be standing in.
Boost Sales is now expanding into the United Kingdom and Europe, with one enterprise client already asking the company to replicate a programme built for their operations locally across their broader European footprint, evidence, in Pretorius’s view, that the underlying methodology genuinely travels across borders. It was built, she points out, in a highly regulated market where every claim must trace back to a primary source.
Europe, if anything, raises that compliance bar rather than lowering it, which she says suits her exactly. The next phase of her career, as she describes it, is about testing these systems in markets with heavier compliance regimes than anything she has previously operated under. With different regulators, different buying cultures, different languages, in order to find out whether the architecture holds. If it holds, she says, it is real. If it does not, she wants to know before a client does. It has also changed, by her own admission, what she says yes to. Early on she took work because it paid, and now she takes it because it is harder than the last project.
A Final Thought: Technology Was Never the Reason a Business Grows
Pretorius’s closing conviction is the one she returns to most often in public. Technology has never been the reason a business grows. Every few years, she observes, the industry produces a tool promising to remove the difficult part of selling, which is people, and every few years, the companies that bought the promise discover that the difficult part was, in fact, the valuable part. They are left with an exhausted contact list and a reputation that can take years to repair, damage from which smaller businesses often never fully recover, which is why she is vocal about the risk.
Artificial intelligence, in her assessment, is simply the most capable version of that recurring tool, and it changes none of the underlying dynamic. Her prescription is straightforward. Use it to research faster, to prepare more thoroughly, to walk into a conversation genuinely informed about somebody’s business, and then be a person. That combination, she argues, is very hard to compete with, and almost nobody bothers, because the shortcut is sitting right there and costs less this month. Buyers, she is convinced, can always tell the difference. They always have been able to.
In Her Own Words: What Nobody Asks
There are two things, Pretorius says, that almost nobody asks her about. The first is evidence, she does not publish a figure she cannot trace to a primary source, and she does not permit a client to publish one either, not rounded, not recalculated, not borrowed from an industry report nobody has actually read past the headline. It is an unusual enough standard in marketing that people occasionally read it as difficulty for its own sake. In regulated sectors, she says, it is the only reason the work survives review, and she holds herself to the same bar even when no one is auditing her.
The second is what clients are actually paying for, which she insists is rarely content itself. It is the ability to say something specific and defensible to a person who has no obligation to care, and to keep doing that as volume scales. Almost any company can manage it for ten messages. Very few can sustain it for ten thousand. That collapse is the exact problem she has built her career around solving, and it has looked identical in every market and every sector she has ever worked in. Her last word is a quiet correction to how she is often introduced.
She would rather not be described as a LinkedIn expert. LinkedIn, she says, is simply where the work happens to be taking place right now. What she actually teaches is how to earn the attention of someone who owes you none, and how to keep that attention long enough to be trusted. That skill, she is careful to point out, existed long before the platform did, and it will still be needed long after it.
Este Pretorius is the CEO and Founder of Boost Sales. She holds a cum laude Master’s degree in Marketing and more than two decades of experience across LinkedIn social selling, SEO, demand generation and AI-enhanced customer journeys, working with organisations from Dell and Dimension Data to FNB. Recent recognitions include the Forttuna Global Excellence Award, a place among the Top 25 Women in Digital, and South Africa’s Digital Marketing Leader of the Year.