The difference between founder-led sales and team-led sales

21 Mar

You’ve probably heard the warnings from seasoned founders and investors. Don’t outsource the relationship with your customers too early.

As the founder, keeping close to your early customers will help you shape the long-term narrative of your brand. You need to know them personally: they are the lifeblood of your growth story, they will give you valuable insights to iterate and pivot on your product, and they will inspire new ideas while you’re still small and agile enough to respond. Their feedback will teach you who your product resonates with, what objections they have, and what language truly speaks to them.

Founder-led sales are the most powerful tool for finding product-market-fit and identifying a strong ideal customer profile (ICP). That intimacy with the customer, and that rapid feedback loop, is something you can’t delegate in the earliest days.

But here’s the truth many founders stumble over:

Founder-led sales don’t scale.

At some point, the very thing that helped you get traction – your personal involvement in every deal – becomes a bottleneck.

Making a successful transition

Sooner or later, of course you need a sales function. But your first sales hire – and when you hire them – can make or break your business.

Many founders get stuck, especially churning through conflicting advice and wrestling with the dopamine hits of sales or the misery of ploughing through them. Whether you love or hate founder sales, many founders either:

Hold on for too long and delay building a repeatable sales motion, or
Hand off too quickly without transferring the nuanced knowledge that made their early sales successful

Founders are motivated by vision. Founders have high credibility with prospects as the builder of the product. Founders run a fast, direct feedback loop with the marketing, product and service delivery teams. Founders can intuitively improvise their sales pitch. And founders can’t scale their sales process.

Sales teams are driven by commission and incentives. Sales teams have variable credibility with more work required to build trust. Sales teams have slower, indirect and sometimes missed feedback loops to other parts of the business. Sales teams drive a repeatable, metrics-driven pitch and process. And sales teams can build scalable systems and processes.

How can you make the uncomfortable transition between the two without breaking the machine?

Document what has worked for you so far. Scripts, decks, objection-handling, value propositions — write it all down. Then let go of it.

Hire for coachability, not just CV. The right sales hire learns fast and feeds insights back to you. Metrics in past roles for other businesses are irrelevant to your growth trajectory – but the stories of progress, learning and evolution behind them are relevant.
Shadow and onboard properly. Everything about your business is intuitive to you as founder, but your sales team won’t get the product and value prop and customer preferences instinctively – your playbook (whatever form it is in) needs to be taught. Exposure to and immersion in the rest of the business (both internal and client-facing) is vital for success.
Invest in sales ops earlier than you think. Metrics, tools, and systems keep the engine running, but you don’t want to overburden the ops. How simple is too simple? The Pitchwits rule of thumb: it’s not wasted admin if you will need it to sell to 5x as many customers in 12 months.
Stay involved – but at a distance. Sit in on key calls to start off, but don’t be the closer forever. Forget how easy it was for you, and start noticing the magic of a salesperson’s trust-building in a way founders take for granted. Let them be good at their sales job, not at your old sales job.
Let the team take over. At some point, founders need to step back and let the sales team take the reins. You’ve hired smart, autonomous people to handle a dynamic, evolving process – so trust them to do it. The market, your brand, and your value proposition are always shifting. As a founder, your job is to help the business adapt to those shifts. Your sales team’s job is to translate that adaptation into the sales process.