You Built the Product. Now Who's Going to Sell It?

There's a moment every founder hits. You've closed the first 10, 20, maybe 50 deals yourself. You know the product cold. You can read a room, adjust the pitch on the fly, handle objections nobody wrote down anywhere. The pipeline is growing, but you're maxed out. You're the CEO, the closer, the SE, and half the support team.

So you do what feels logical. You go hire help.

And this is where it usually goes sideways.

The Two Mistakes That Cost Founders a Year

I've built five revenue organizations from scratch. Across B2B technology, SaaS, physical security, and distribution. Different industries, different deal sizes, different buyer personas. But the pattern at the starting line is remarkably consistent.

Mistake #1: Hiring a VP of Sales too early.

The founder is exhausted from selling. They want to hand it off to someone "who does this for a living." So they recruit a VP of Sales with a great resume, maybe someone from a recognizable logo, and expect them to figure it out.

But here's the thing. A VP of Sales is a scaling function, not a building function. They're designed to take a working engine and make it bigger. If you hand them an undefined ICP, no documented process, a CRM with three months of messy data, and say "go build," most of them will struggle. Not because they're bad. Because the role you actually need doesn't match the role you hired.

Jason Lemkin has said that 70% of first VP of Sales hires in SaaS don't make it 12 months. That number tracks with what I've seen across industries. And the root cause is almost always timing, not talent.

Mistake #2: Hiring a sales rep and expecting them to figure it out.

The other version of this is hiring a junior or mid-level rep, giving them a laptop and a login, and assuming the energy of a startup will carry them. It won't. If you haven't defined what a qualified opportunity looks like, what the stages of your sales process are, what objections come up at each stage, and what "good" looks like in your CRM, that rep is flying blind with your leads.

And leads are expensive when you're small. Every one that gets burned by a rep who's guessing is a conversation you can't get back.

What Actually Has to Be True Before You Hire

Before you bring anyone into a sales seat, you need to be able to answer a few questions from your own experience as the founder-seller:

Can you describe how your last five deals got done? Not in generalities. Specifically. What triggered the conversation? What did discovery look like? How long did it take? What almost killed the deal? If you can't articulate this, you don't have a repeatable process yet. You have a collection of one-off wins.

Do you know who your buyer actually is? Not the company profile. The person. Their title, their day-to-day pain, what they care about that has nothing to do with your product, and what makes them say yes versus "let me think about it." If you're still selling to anyone who will take the meeting, you're not ready to hand this off.

Can a new person find everything they need to sell without asking you? The pitch deck. The objection handling doc. The pricing logic. The competitive positioning. The demo script. If the answer is "it's all in my head," then your first hire isn't a seller. It's a documentation sprint.

The Sequencing That Actually Works

Here's what I've seen work across five different companies, in five different industries, at five different price points:

Phase 1: Document what you're doing. Before you hire anyone, write down the sales process you've been running as a founder. It doesn't need to be polished. It needs to exist. The stages, the qualification criteria, the talk track, the common objections and how you handle them. This becomes the playbook your first hire inherits. And the thing your future VP of Sales will refine, not create from scratch.

Phase 2: Hire one or two reps, not a VP. Your first sales hire should be someone who's comfortable with ambiguity, has sold at roughly your price point before, and ideally has some startup experience. They need to be able to operate without a brand behind them, without a full marketing engine, without a polished tech stack. Test for this in the interview. Ask them to describe a time they sold something nobody had heard of. If they can't give you a real answer, they're not your person.

Phase 3: Sell alongside them. Don't just hand off the playbook and disappear back into product. Sit on their calls. Debrief every deal. Refine the process together. Your job in this phase is to prove that someone other than you can close, and to learn what breaks when the founder isn't in the room. That gap is the most important data you'll collect.

Phase 4: Now hire the VP. Once you have one or two reps consistently hitting quota using a documented process, you have something a VP of Sales can actually scale. They walk into a defined ICP, a working playbook, reps they can observe and coach, and data in the CRM that tells a story. That's a launchpad. Anything less is a guessing game with a six-figure salary attached.

The Part Nobody Talks About

There's an emotional layer to this transition that gets glossed over in every "how to scale your sales team" article.

As a founder, you have an unfair advantage in sales. You built the thing. You understand the problem at a molecular level. You can improvise because you've lived in the customer's world. When you hand that off, some of the magic will disappear. At least temporarily. Deals will take longer. Win rates will dip. Prospects who would have said yes to you will say "let me think about it" to your rep.

This is normal. It's supposed to happen. The question isn't whether there's a dip. It's whether you've built enough structure around the rep that they can recover from it and eventually match your performance without needing you on every call.

That's the real transition. Not founder-led sales to sales team. It's founder-dependent revenue to system-dependent revenue.

And the companies that make it through that transition are the ones that reach $10M, $20M, $50M. The ones that don't are the ones where the founder is still the best seller at $5M and wondering why they can't grow.

Where to Start

If you're a founder reading this and feeling the weight of being the entire sales function, here's the honest starting point: don't hire yet. Document first. Get your process out of your head and into something a stranger could follow. Then find one person who can execute it, and sell alongside them until it works without you.

The goal isn't to remove yourself from sales. It's to make yourself optional.