Short excerpt from a Jason M. Lemkin YouTube talk advising founders and execs to retain and repurpose their first VP of Sales as the company scales (e.g., into commercial or segment-focused VP/SVP roles) rather than replacing them with an outside CRO. The speaker frames losing that early-sales leader as a strategic mistake and urges creating roles to keep them involved.
You want to keep them. So look, if they're good, find a place for them. And one of the classic mistakes you see all the time is a company hits a certain phase and that great first VP of sales is not. It's not clear. They can be the CRO at 100 million, 200 million ARR. And the founders bring in some CRO and that. That first VP of Sales leaves. No, that's a tragedy. That's a tragedy if that person is the one that got you from nothing to 10 million as your head of sales. Keep them whatever it takes. If you need to change their role. If they need to be V of commercial sales, which is a common way to do it, you take that existing VP of sales and you have them handle the smaller customers that sometimes the CRO doesn't want to do. That's a classic way to do it. A VP of something, even an SVP of something. I never see it work out well when some fancy CRO comes in and that that great first VP of sales departs quickly. No, that's the most extreme example. Never let them go. Yes. Do you have to top people.
