James Sinclair argues early-stage founders should hire a customer success person before a sales rep. CS handles onboarding, documentation, and feedback that founders can't scale alone, turning customers into advocates and surfacing product improvements.
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If you're a startup founder and you are leading sales for your organization currently, then you should hire a customer success human before you hire a sales human. And here's why. It's really simple. Hiring a sales human now probably won't work for you. For them to understand onboard, be able to demo, be able to talk to the vision, the passion. All things you need in sales as the early stage startup really do come from you as the founder. You're just learning your pitch, your pricing, how to articulate your message. What is the message, what is the value? What do people care about? You need to be able to negotiate, you need to be able to build relationships. These companies are taking a risk on you, so it becomes much more relationship driven. They're buying into your future journey versus where you are today. So the best hire you can actually make is customer success. Someone whose only job it is is to understand and make sure your customers are achieving value out of your technology, period. And includes all the supporting things around customer success. How do I make sure my customer experience is fantastic? Sales, after sales support, onboarding, documentation, all of these things that go into making a happy customer come from customer success. Because after you've made the sale, now the journey really starts. You need to ask them for a reference. Pretty soon when you go to your next customer, they say, can we get a reference? You need someone to go back to. You need customers that are willing to be advocates and to talk about you and to come on your podcast and to do all the things that you need to scale. So you need to make sure you have a human whose only job it is is to make sure they are happy, they are excited, they are getting value. So when it comes time to call in a favor, we need a reference, they say yes. The other reason is it lets another human into the conversation with a customer. I imagine for most founders you are doing the sales support. Most of implementation, they're texting you. You are dealing with absolutely everything. Having another human in that conversation who can see everything that's happening and think about how to automate or scale or fix these problems either in your technology, in your presentation, in the onboarding is going to be so valuable. You're more likely to be able to hire customer success and deliver that incremental value that you're looking than hire sales and get the closes you think you you might get from that person. I'm telling you, it's a understated higher because people think features is what makes customers happy. It's not. It's a relationship it's having a human. It's someone to listen to, someone to reach out to in those early customers you need to nurture and turn from just customers to deep advocates of your technology. I think people underestimate it. I think people think they need a sales rep immediately and it's just not true. Focus on making your early customers as happy as humanly possible. They will tell you everything you need to do for your product, for your sales pitch, everything. They will become your partners in success if you really are a good partner to them. That's my view. Good luck.
