Understand the benefits of founder-led sales
What you’ll learn
The less-obvious but long-tail benefits of founder-led sales that will keep you motivated in the slow, uncertain, and sometimes moments.
Why it’s important
If you expect revenue right away, you may lose your motivation. Selling is about starting a conversation with the market and speedrunning product-market fit (PMF).
Keep reading if...
- You view founder-led sales solely as a means of booking revenue.
- You think time spent selling could be be better spent elsewhere.
- You think sales is “someone else’s” job.
One-off lucky sales won’t do you much good in the early days. (iIn fact, they harm your long-term prospects by offering a false indicator of direction.).
Right now, especially if you've never done sales before, information is currency.
You need PMF.
The surest path to get there is to build a valuable product. And the surest path to building a valuable product is to talk to your customers.
What do people want to use this for? Like, what do people come to us for?
Bobby Pinero
Co-founder, Equals
The benefits of talking to your customers
The benefits of this approach are often found in places you don’t expect.
1. Scale faster
A founder owns the product in the early days and is driving the product strategy. Being able to learn and understand customers deeply to then drive the right product strategy—and then in turn being able to sell that and scale that—there's such a positive feedback loop happening there that it's quite hard to decouple those things in the early days.
Riya Grover
Co-founder, Sequence
2. Invite honesty… because you have skin in the game
People are often honest with a founder in a way that I just genuinely do not believe to be the case with a sales rep. They will give you the time of day and try to help you on that journey of figuring it out.
Mark Tanner
Co-founder, Qwilr
3. Have a better story to tell
When I'm buying early-stage products and it's the founder on the call, I walk away learning something about their view of the world and what's motivating them to build that thing. And it's just extremely compelling.
Riya Grover
Co-founder, Sequence
4. Quickly action feedback
Having the founder-led sales feedback loop is what helps you click into second gear. Maybe that's moving upmarket, opening a new geo, or launching a different product.
Mark Tanner
Co-founder, Qwilr
5. Hire better sellers
I now understand this deeply enough that if I hire a sales rep, I can understand if they're doing a good job or not, because I've done it myself.
Amanda Zhu
Co-founder, Recall.ai
6. Suss out bullshit
Money is a bullshit detector. When you show people the product for “feedback,” they will smile and nod. But when you ask them to hand over money for it, that's when the real discussion and feedback can begin.
People will be using the product for free, and they'll have these calls with you, and they sort of tell you what they like or what they don't like. And it's all kind of bullshit until you actually give me some money.
Mark Tanner
Co-founder, Qwilr
Reflect
Check your priors: Do you subconsciously view sales as something you will outsource to an “expert” so you can do other work?
Do you have a deeply embedded belief that “If we build it, they will come”? This is not Field of Dreams.
If you aren’t willing to hustle and talk to customers, how can you expect your team to do the same? Model good behavior.