Emotive JLI

Emotive JLI is a sales consultancy for cybersecurity founders, built on a simple observation: security is not bought on fear, it is bought on trust.

I am James Irving, the founder. In 2023 I joined ThreatSpike, a cybersecurity company, as its first commercial hire. The company was the embodiment of founder-led sales: brilliant engineers joining calls, talking about the technology for an hour and hoping. Over the following years I built the entire commercial engine from scratch. Discovery, qualification, proposals, pricing and the sales team itself, hired and trained from zero. I sold to banks, law firms, manufacturers, retailers and hospitality groups, and sat across from CISOs, IT directors, procurement teams and boards. I left with the business generating £10M in revenue and a sales division that runs without me.

Now I help other security founders make the same journey. The problem is always similar. Your buyer is a professional sceptic who gets pitched fear every week. Breach statistics and ransomware headlines do not close deals; they freeze buyers. The CISO who champions you is betting their reputation on you, and nobody makes that bet on a vendor who scared them.

So we build your sales process around trust instead. Discovery that earns the right to demo. Qualification that kills fake pipeline before it eats your quarter, starting with the hardest question in sales: what happens if the prospect does nothing? Agreed next steps that keep long security cycles moving without chasing. Proposals reviewed live, so your champion can sell internally without you in the room.

No generic playbook. Everything is built on your real deals, and the entire methodology is published free at emotivejli.com/method, so you can judge how I sell before we ever speak.

Based in Manchester, working with cybersecurity and technical founders across the UK and beyond.

You built something great. Now let's sell it.