Every founder is the first salesperson. That’s fine
Early on, nobody sells a company better than the person who built it. The founder knows the product, can bend the price and can promise things nobody else in the building would dare to.
More importantly, the buyer isn’t only buying the product. They’re taking a risk on a company that might not exist in two years, so they need to believe the founder before they believe the product.
Founder-led sales is how you start. The trouble begins when it’s still the only way you sell.
The signs you’ve hit the ceiling
How many are true for you?
- New customers only arrive through the founder’s network, and nobody can say where the next ten come from.
- Deals stall when the founder is on holiday.
- Pricing lives in the founder’s head and changes per customer.
- Marketing money goes out, and nobody can connect a pound of it to a signed contract.
- The founder spends more time selling than running the company, and both suffer.
- Growth has flattened, and the answer on the table is “we need a salesperson”.
Why the first sales hire usually fails
The pattern is familiar. Growth stalls. The founder hires an experienced salesperson, sometimes a big-name head of sales. Six months later they part ways, and everyone agrees it was a bad hire.
“A good salesperson in a vacuum looks like a bad hire.”
Look closer and you usually find exactly that. Four things are missing:
No demand.
No numbers.
No process.
No patience.
40%
of B2B pipeline is sourced by marketing
5.7
months for a new account executive to ramp
51%
of account executives hit quota
The founder concludes that salespeople don’t work in their industry, and goes back to selling. The ceiling stays exactly where it was.
What we got wrong at Bomae, and what saved us
So when the sales team finally arrived, it walked into an engine that already worked. That order, demand and data first, salespeople second, is what I’d recommend to any founder. Just faster than we did it.
Build it. Measure it. Sell it
The way out of founder-led sales is to build the engine the founder has been running by hand, in this order.
1
Build it
Marketing that creates demand without the founder.
2
Measure it
Every pound followed from creative to contract.
3
Sell it
The founder’s way of selling, written down.
1. Build it: marketing that creates demand
Marketing is the strategy. It sets the Ps: which product you lead with, the price, where you show up and what you promise. Sales closes the leads marketing creates. That’s why I put them in one department with one owner.
Demand often goes to whoever shouts first. At MovoGO we once won a customer because a competitor was running ads at him on Instagram. The ads told him software for his problem existed. He ignored the ad, went to Google and found us.
“In a category nobody knows yet, someone is going to teach the market. Better if it’s you.”
2. Measure it: every pound, from creative to contract
At Bomae I could follow a customer from the creative, through the campaign, to the page that converted, the salesperson who closed them and the time they spent at every step. That’s what let us spend a 20M+ DKK marketing budget with confidence and grow to 28M DKK in revenue.
You don’t need that on day one. You need four numbers:
The four numbers
- Where each enquiry came from.
- The conversion rate at each step of the funnel.
- How long each step takes.
- Why you lose the deals you lose.
- Enquiry
- Meeting
- Proposal
- Signed
Six weeks of honest numbers will teach you more than a year of opinions.
3. Sell it: write the founder down
Record the founder’s sales calls. Write down the questions they ask, the objections they hear and what they say back. Turn it into a short playbook: who we sell to, how we qualify, how we price, and what happens after every meeting.
If a new person can’t run it, it isn’t finished.
When to hire your first salesperson, and who
Hire when all four are true
- Leads arrive from somewhere other than the founder’s network, and you can see where from.
- You know your conversion rates and your sales cycle.
- There’s a written process someone other than the founder has used to close a deal.
- The founder can take two weeks off without sales stopping.
Hire.
Don’t hire.
That hire is the first real step out of working in the company and into working on it. Give them the ramp time. Plan for six months, not six weeks.
What it costs to get this wrong
A wrong senior sales hire costs about a year: months of recruiting, a six-month ramp, then the exit and starting over. Meanwhile the founder is back in every deal and the company has stood still.
If you plan to sell the business one day, it costs more. A company whose sales depend on the founder is worth less to a buyer.
“The buyer is paying for the founder’s diary.”
Where a fractional CCO fits
This is the job I do. One or two days a week, I build the engine with your team: the marketing that creates demand, the numbers that show what works, and a sales process a new hire can run. When it runs, I help you hire the person to run it every day, and hand over.
Not sure where you stand? The Commercial Health Check scores your commercial engine in 60 seconds, including how much of it depends on the founder. Or read how I work as a fractional CCO.
