Define your culture

If you're a technical founder, here's something that might catch you off guard: sales teams need celebration in a way that engineering teams don't.

Engineers often work on projects for weeks or months before seeing results. Sales reps experience wins and losses multiple times per week. The emotional cadence is completely different.

While many engineers would rather the work speak for itself—"people sometimes don't even like the attention," Pylon’s Marty Kausas puts it—sales reps need external validation because their work is inherently relational and emotionally exposed.

Selling means hearing "no" repeatedly. It means rejection. Recognition creates resilience.

Marty learned this the hard way. After hiring his first few Account Executives (AEs), he ran what he now admits was a pretty unmanaged team—no one-on-ones, no team meetings, no forecasting, no celebration rituals.

Then, one of his AEs, Mana, came to him with direct feedback: "I think the team could be run a lot better. I think we don't have this good, strong, established sales culture right now."

The feedback didn't come from a management book. It came from the sales team itself.

At Pylon, they expect AEs to close around 60% more than at peer companies because of a strong inbound pipeline. That only works if there's a culture around crushing goals and recognizing wins. "I was not thinking about it in the same way," Marty says. "Even today, I'm not the best person for that."

If you've built a product culture where people quietly crush it without fanfare, you'll need to shift gears. Your sales team isn't being needy—they're operating in a role that requires different fuel.

The importance of ritual

If you're a technical founder, you may never have heard of a SPIF. Marty hadn't either: "I didn't know what a SPIF was at all."

SPIF stands for Sales Performance Incentive Fund. In practice, it's a short-term incentive to rally the team around a goal. Examples from Pylon:

• "If we hit our number this month, we're all going to the 49ers game"
• "Oura Ring for the SDR who books the most calls"
• "Team dinner for everyone who hits quota"

These don't need to be expensive. They need to be consistent and tied to real milestones.

Bell ringing seems cheesy until you see it work. The point isn't the bell—it's the public acknowledgment that someone just did the hard thing.

You don't have to become a cheerleader overnight. But you do need to create structures for celebration, even if someone else is leading it. If you're not naturally the "fuck yeah, we crushed it" person, hire or empower someone who is.

Culture should be intentional

Many different sales cultures work. Qwilr’s Mark Tanner is direct about this: "You get to define your culture. Many different types of culture in sales teams work really, really well. I've met people from wildly different firms that are very successful."

The key is being intentional. Left alone, culture will emerge anyway—and it might not be what you want.

Two values worth considering:

Customer-centric

Hire people who are company-first, not individual-first. Recall.ai’s Amanda Zhu describes it simply: "We hire for people that are customer-first. This means even if a product doesn't make sense for the customer, just being honest with them and telling them that." The result? Customers regularly tell her they appreciated how upfront the sales rep was with all their options. The anti-sell builds trust.

Play to win

Sales creates natural scoreboard moments that other functions don't have. As Clarify’s Patrick Thompson puts it: "You want people to play to win. It's really easy in the sales team to build that culture where you're hopefully closing in two to three weeks." Engineering teams often struggle to feel what winning looks like day-to-day. Sales teams don't have that problem—if you give them the structure to celebrate it.

Startup DNA is a cultural trait

Once you've hired people with the right instincts, you need to create an environment where those instincts thrive.

Tofu’s Elaine Zelby describes what this looks like in practice: "I want somebody who's gonna see something and just take action. We needed to revamp our deck. I want somebody who's not gonna be waiting there saying, 'Build me a deck, build me a deck.' Go build a deck. You need it to help sell—go do the things you need done. That's somebody who has that startup DNA and that startup hustle."

This isn't just a hiring filter—it's a cultural expectation you reinforce daily. When someone on your team identifies a gap and fills it without being asked, that's the behavior you celebrate. When someone builds a new outreach sequence because the old one wasn't converting, you make that visible. When someone creates a competitive battlecard because they kept losing to the same objection, you share it with the whole team.

The opposite behavior kills early sales teams: waiting for permission, expecting the founder to solve every process problem, and treating gaps in tooling or collateral as blockers rather than opportunities.

Your job is to make ownership the norm. That means celebrating initiative publicly, giving people room to experiment, and being explicit that "we don't have that yet" is an invitation to build it—not an excuse to stall.

Culture is recruiting infrastructure

Small investments in celebration and recognition pay compounding dividends in recruiting.

Good sellers are well-networked. Your first sales hire will tell their friends how easy—or hard—it feels to hit their numbers. When you need to make your second and third hires, this matters.

Think of culture as infrastructure for scaling. Every positive experience your early hires have is marketing to your next hire's network. The inverse is also true: If your first hire burns out or churns, that story circulates too.