Pete Kazanjy argues founders must personally lead sales during a product's early customer engagements (first dozen or so customers) because outsourcing sales too early breaks vital feedback loops. Founder-led selling helps (1) discover what to build, (2) refine positioning and pitch, and (3) create teachable, repeatable sales processes that can be packaged and scaled by hiring more salespeople in B2B contexts.
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And then this is why Steve Blank always talks about like startups can't get through, can't get to scale without firing their first VP of sales, it's oftentimes because they skip that step. And so the founder's like, hey man, I'm going to like pour a little bit of sales on this. Hire some, you know, sales leader or whatever, some sort of seller and outsources. And you really just can't do that, not for the first like couple dozen customers. It's just not tenable. You like, you lose that feedback loop, you lose the learnings of like whether or not your message fits the market, all that sort of stuff. Like you're playing a game of telephone with that with a seller, like a third party seller versus you. And like you just want to keep that in one brain to start, then package it. And then when you have a repeatable like while loop. Right, like a selling while loop, then package it and hand it to someone else. So that's kind of like my diatribe on like why founders have to do this.
I was going to try to summarize the reasons that you should be doing this and it sounds like there's so many. One is figure out what you should actually be building. That's the reason founders should be selling. Two is learn how to position and pitch and sell. Three is figure out what you could teach your salesperson when you hire them. Is that kind of the summary of why you should be selling as a founder for a while?
Yeah, for sure. I mean like one, it's going to help you with your product development because you're not going to have that abstracted for sure. Two, it's going to help like you're going to be the person who's going to figure out how to talk about it in an effective way. And then three, it's going to make it such that you can package that up such that other human. Because like that's the way that B2B startup scale is. Like, it's not like WhatsApp or, or like you know, Twitter or like Airbnb or whatever where you have like this kind of like scalability by a marketing. The way that B2B organization scale primarily is by adding more salespeople who then have customer facing meetings with prospects. And then you cap out with like the number of media, the number of hours that are in the week. Like there's only 40 or 50 hours in the week. Especially like as a seller because you interface with other people during business hours. And so the way that you scale up is by just adding more salespeople. Right. And so that's why packaging that up is really important, because then you're going to shove it into the brains of, you know, two more salespeople, and then once they're successful, you're going to go to four, and then once they're successful, you're going to go to 8, and then once they're successful, you're going to go to 16.
