Breaking into GTM

Founder-led sales sounds terrifying. Why can I not just hire a salesperson?

The short answer

Because you have nothing to hand them yet. A salesperson needs a buyer profile, a set of common objections, a working pitch, a rough price and a definition of a qualified deal, and all of those come out of the founder selling first. Hire too early and you get someone who imports a playbook built for a different product and a different buyer, then leaves in nine months having burned a year and a lot of cash. April Dunford's staged model is a good spine: sell to warm referrals yourself, then add marketing leads, then add someone to pre-qualify, and only then bring in closers. Most B2B companies carry founder-led sales somewhere between the first five hundred thousand and one and a half million dollars of ARR.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How running a sales process and closing reads from a different seat.

How do I know if a deal is real or if I am being strung along? Write down what you know against a qualification frame and the gaps become obvious. MEDDPICC is the common one: metrics they care about, the econom... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run? Write it down, then make it boring. Take your last ten closed deals and map what actually happened at each stage, then turn that into templates: a ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → What separates the top ten percent of AEs from everyone else? Discovery discipline, mostly. Top performers spread questions evenly across the whole cycle rather than front-loading a checklist on call one, and ... How the best do it 4 resources →

Terms in this answer

Founder-Led Sales MRR

People also ask

I have a call booked with a real prospect tomorrow. What do I do on it? Ask questions and shut up. Gong's analysis of more than half a million calls found the sweet spot is somewhere around eleven to fourteen questions,... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I know if a deal is real or if I am being strung along? Write down what you know against a qualification frame and the gaps become obvious. MEDDPICC is the common one: metrics they care about, the econom... Doing the work 4 resources → My demos go well and then the deal stalls. How do I stop that? A demo that goes well and dies usually means you pitched your product instead of positioning it against what the buyer would otherwise do. April Du... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run? Write it down, then make it boring. Take your last ten closed deals and map what actually happened at each stage, then turn that into templates: a ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → When do I hire a VP of Sales, and what happens to me after I do? Most founders are ready around one to two million dollars of ARR, once a couple of reps are already selling successfully and you have a process wor... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → What separates the top ten percent of AEs from everyone else? Discovery discipline, mostly. Top performers spread questions evenly across the whole cycle rather than front-loading a checklist on call one, and ... How the best do it 4 resources →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Money, pricing & model, our Starting Up track.

What business model should I choose for my startup? Don't 'choose' a model in a vacuum, copy the model that already works in your customers' world and improve one thing about it. Recurring revenue (s... 3 resources → How do I decide how much to charge for my product? Stop guessing and stop pricing off your costs, price off the value the customer gets and their willingness to pay. Talk to customers about pricing,... 3 resources →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Money, pricing & unit economics, our D2C track.

I'm not a finance person, what books/records do I actually need to keep from day one? At minimum: a sales register (every order, with GST split if applicable), a purchase/expense register (raw materials, ads, shipping, software), a b... 3 resources → What is cohort analysis, and why does it matter more than a single repeat-rate number? Cohort analysis groups customers by when they first bought and tracks how each group behaves over time - so instead of one blended '35% repeat rate... 3 resources →
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