How to Scale Your Founder-Led Sales Strategy

Introduction

Founder-led sales is an accessible option for startups that need to make sales without exhausting their resources. Not only does a founder-led sales strategy help save money, but it can also help a brand build credibility, even in its early stages.

However, once the startup grows, it will become more difficult for the founder to be so hands-on during the sales process.

That’s why it’s important to have a plan for scaling founder-led sales without losing the authenticity and credibility you’ve built for the startup. 

Read on for practical tips on implementing and scaling a founder-led sales strategy, plus get inspired by real-life examples of scaling from successful startup founders.

Why use a founder-led sales strategy?

Founder-led sales is a model where a company founder takes the lead in developing and implementing the sales strategy for the business. For instance, the founder can take meetings with or make calls to clients rather than relying on hired sales reps. 

The founder-led sales method can be particularly beneficial for early-stage startups that don’t have the resources to hire a sales team. Plus, putting the founder in charge of sales can improve brand reputation and increase credibility.

However, as the startup grows, it becomes less viable for the founder to lead the sales team. That’s why it’s important to not only understand how founder-led sales works but also how to scale this strategy.

Benefits of a founder-led sales strategy

A founder-led sales strategy comes with many benefits. After all, who better to pitch a product to potential customers than the person who dreamed up the product and company? Founders have the passion and knowledge for the business that can drive the sales strategy.

Plus, founders have more invested in the business than anyone else, making them particularly motivated to close deals and increase revenue.

Founder sales also puts startup leaders in a unique position, where they are directly communicating with the target market. That allows the founder to build strong relationships with clients, and clients can share their feedback on the product and company along the way. The founder can then adjust and improve the sales strategy based on direct feedback.

A recap: the basics of founder-led sales 

So, how does a startup take advantage of founder-led sales? It’s not quite as simple as having the founder pick up the phone when a potential client calls. Some planning needs to go into the process, and creativity plays a role here, too.

Build your sales pitch with storytelling 

In order to hook clients into listening to the entire sales pitch, it’s important to include a narrative from the start. With founder sales, there’s a great opportunity for the founder to speak about why they started the business. Was there a problem you were experiencing that you wanted to solve for other people like yourself? What inspired you to create this company?

Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to improve a sales pitch. In fact, Lyn Graft, founder of Storytelling for Entrepreneurs and author of "Start With Story," shares on LinkedIn that adding the main points of the sales pitch into a larger story can make those points up to seven times more memorable.

Identify and contact potential customers via warm intros

Once you have the pitch prepared, it’s time to start connecting with people who can listen to said pitch. But rather than relying on cold sales emails and calls, it’s more effective to reach out to potential clients using warm introductions. A warm introduction is when a mutual friend or colleague can connect you with a potential client.

If you don’t have a wide network in your industry yet, there are still opportunities to reach potential clients via “warm” introductions. You’ll need to do some research to find where you can reach your target audience, such as at conferences or trade shows. By researching where to find your audience, you can meet others in your industry and connect to potential clients more authentically.

Build a post-sale strategy 

As it turns out, the sales process doesn’t actually end once you make a sale. It’s also important to nurture those relationships in order to establish customer loyalty. As reported by Forbes, acquiring new customers can cost as much as seven times more than retaining existing customers, so it’s important to consider how you will continue engaging with clients.

For example, Miro CRO Sangeeta Chakraborty recommends actions such as providing proactive customer support that anticipates customer needs (rather than simply responding to their inquiries or concerns later on), checking in with clients regularly, and addressing potential or emerging problems as soon as possible.

By building in time to regularly check in with clients, founders can create a feedback loop where not only are they improving customer satisfaction, but they are also receiving valuable feedback for product development with every interaction.

How to scale a founder-led sales program

As you grow from your first few customers to your first few dozen or more, it’s important to scale the founder-led sales program to make sure all clients and potential new customers are receiving the attention they need.

Scaling a founder-led sales strategy starts by being flexible and tapping handy resources, like software and AI, to allow founders to do more work and serve more customers, even with fewer resources.

Being willing to adapt as you go 

Founders must be able to adapt to changes along the way, especially as sales efforts pay off and lead to a growing client base. Plus, your market and industry will always be shifting, and it’s important to stay in the loop so you can respond to or even anticipate changes.

In a founder-led sales strategy, the founder will need to keep a close eye on the sales strategy and adjust it frequently based on customer feedback and market changes. If you start noticing more and more leads or start closing deals at a faster rate, it’s important to be ready to adjust, whether that’s by incorporating new software or preparing to transition away from founder-led sales by hiring sales reps.

Invest in the right tools 

Founders already have a lot of responsibilities to the business, so it can be difficult to respond to every single email or to track each lead manually. But by using software, AI, apps, or other tools, you can increase productivity and efficiency without breaking your startup’s budget. 

Establishing a reliable tech stack of tools that help you automatically respond to emails, respond to inquiries, or even manage leads will make it easier to scale the founder-led sales strategy. One of the most important tools you will need is a CRM that allows you to manage your client and potential client relationships better, so no one feels as though their inquiries have fallen through the cracks.

Find repeatable ways to share your vision

When it comes to scaling a founder-led sales strategy, repetition can be a helpful tactic. AI is particularly well-suited for handling repetitive tasks, which allows founders to focus on developing deeper client connections.

Mario Martinez, Jr., CEO & co-founder of Vengreso and creator of FlyMSG, relied on founder-led sales to grow the startup. He has used multiple AI tools himself to empower a founder-driven sales strategy, including tools that increased blog traffic from 3K organic clicks per month to more than 32K organic clicks per month in an 8-month timespan.

Martinez and the Vengreso team have also created AI tools to help other founders and business leaders automate messaging, social posting, and selling through user-friendly templates that are easy to find in a cloud-based system.

With one tool, Fly Posts AI, the Vengreso team found that it would take sales reps and business leaders around 6.25 to 12.5 hours to engage with 50 leads on LinkedIn in one day. Plus, it took about 32 minutes to build a social post for the platform. The Fly Posts AI tool reduced the process to less than nine minutes.

Clearly, AI tools are an effective option for saving time, whether you’re trying to engage with potential clients, attract leads through social media, or build interest through blog content.

How do you transition from founder-led sales? 

The reality is that if you want your business to have hundreds of clients or even reach coveted unicorn status, the founder can’t lead the sales strategy forever. This may be a good problem to have, but it does mean startups need to be prepared to transition away from a founder-driven sales model.

Here are the steps to transition away from founder-led sales by hiring and training a team of sales professionals.

Document the sales process

Before you start collecting resumes for new sales reps, you must be ready to train them immediately. Founders must document how they sell to leads so new sales reps can mimic the founders’ most successful tactics.

Founders must record their most successful sales processes and techniques, even down to the language used in a phone call, email, or online chat that led to a closed deal.

Ultimately, founders will want to develop a sales playbook filled with the steps of the sales process, scripts and templates for responding to certain requests or inquiries, and best practices that match the brand.

Tools like Gong.io can also help build personalized sales playbooks filled with on-brand tasks based on customer interactions, further allowing founders to save time as they scale and transition away from founder-led sales. 

Hire your first sales reps 

With a thorough sales playbook at hand, you’re now ready to start recruiting sales reps. At first, you’ll start with a smaller team of highly skilled sales professionals who can learn the sales process directly from the startup founder. Then, as your startup continues to grow, these trusted reps will pass along what they learned by training newer sales reps and even handling customer feedback in the same ways the startup leaders did in a founder-driven sales model.

For example, Ryan Meadows, SVP of Global Sales at Klaviyo, relies on highly qualified sales representatives not only for product sales but also for managing and refining product launches. In an interview with HubSpot, Meadows explained that his company taps some of their best sellers to read the pulse of their target market when preparing for a new product launch, which mimics the founder-led sales process of creating a feedback loop. 

This process allows the sales reps, who are familiar with the existing client base and their needs, to get a better read on how new products and services will fit the market. The company still receives direct feedback from potential clients, even if the founder is no longer the one leading the sales strategy and processes.

Train the team and establish KPIs 

In the early stages of hiring a sales team, the founder will directly train new hires. This process will not just involve handing over the sales playbook. If founders want the new sales reps to replicate the sales success that the founder has had so far, they will need to have the new hires shadow different stages of the sales process. Sales reps should accompany founders on sales calls and meetings so they can learn the ropes.

To ensure new sales reps perform well, founders must establish key performance indicators (KPIs), such as leads, conversion rate, sales growth rate, sales cycle length, and average deal size. Then, founders—and later, sales managers—will need to monitor these KPIs for the sales team and individual sales reps for certain periods of time, such as monthly or quarterly, to measure success.

From founder-led sales to a sales-driven team

Founder-led sales is a common way for early-stage startups to acquire customers and build revenue. However, as the startup grows and increases its customer base, the founder-led sales strategy will need to shift so it can scale with the business. 

At first, startups can use resources like AI tools to increase their productivity and manage more clients. Eventually, founders will need to start building a sales playbook and hiring and training sales reps in a way that allows new sales reps to continue the selling process that the founders developed. Monitoring KPIs will then allow founders to track sales rep success, and eventually, the most successful sales reps will then lead the sales team.

By scaling founder-led sales and then transitioning it into a dedicated sales team, startups can create a strong foundation that will lead to a successful sales strategy, no matter who leads it.

Send DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend Data