Founders of B2B SaaS and B2B service businesses are often the best salespeople in the company. Even if they are introverted and lack formal sales training, they win clients through conviction, vision and entrepreneurial energy. At an early stage of a start-up, customers buy into the product, but they also buy into the founder.
In the early stages, this is a huge competitive advantage. It helps secure those crucial first customers and achieve product-market fit.
The challenge comes when the business is ready to scale.
Many founders assume that hiring an experienced commercial leader will naturally lead to accelerated growth. Too often, however, the expected results fail to materialise. The commercial leader struggles, frustration builds, and before long, another hiring process begins.
In my experience, the issue is frequently not the incoming sales leader. The issue is that the business has not yet built a scalable commercial engine around the founder’s success.
There are several reasons for this:
- Many founders win their early customers through their own professional network. This is entirely logical and often the fastest route to market. However, even the largest network has its limits. At some point, growth must come from a repeatable process rather than personal relationships.
- When founders successfully win business beyond their own network, their sales approach often exists largely in their heads. They instinctively know how to identify opportunities, engage prospects and close deals, but these behaviours are rarely converted into robust, repeatable sales processes that others can execute.
- Early-stage businesses are understandably focused on generating revenue wherever they can. As a result, they often sell to a broad range of customers rather than a clearly defined ideal customer profile. Before a sales organisation can scale effectively, the business needs to understand precisely who its target customers are and build its commercial processes around them.
- Founders do not have the patience, or not the cash, to give the incoming commercial lead to necessarily time to build repeatable sales processes that scale.
When these fundamentals are not addressed, founders often become trapped in a cycle of hiring and replacing commercial leaders while remaining the company’s primary salesperson themselves.
However, the founder’s greatest strength can then become the business’s biggest bottleneck.
Every hour the founder spends generating individual sales is an hour not spent on product strategy, leadership, recruitment, partnerships or capital allocation, the activities that increasingly determine the company’s long-term value.
There is another important implication that founders and investors should keep in mind.
When a company becomes heavily dependent on its founder for revenue generation, it creates key-person risk. During an M&A process, potential buyers will inevitably ask whether growth can continue without the founder’s direct involvement. If the answer is uncertain, it can affect both valuation and transaction structure, while also creating potential integration challenges after an acquisition.
This does not mean founders should step away from sales altogether. On the contrary, founders often remain the company’s most effective evangelists. They are ideally positioned to build the brand, develop strategic partnerships and help close the largest and most complex opportunities.
But there is an important distinction between being an ambassador for the business and being indispensable to its revenue generation.
Many founders believe the solution is hiring a commercial leader. In reality, introducing a commercial leader when the underlying commercial foundations are not yet in place does not solve the problem, it amplifies it.
Before making decisions about roles and organisational structure, founders need to establish who their ideal customer is, how the business consistently generates leads, how opportunities are qualified, how customers are converted and, equally importantly, how they are retained and expanded over time. These processes need to be proven and repeatable.
Only when the repeatable sales motion is clear does it make sense to build a professional sales organisation around it.