There is no transition "out of sales" as a founder

A 6-step framework to grow sales as a founder

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.

When I ask founders about their biggest growth mistakes, they almost always bring up early sales decisions. Their first AE was a costly mishire, setting them back 6+ months. They hired a sales leader before they were ready for it. Or they thought they could transition “out of sales” to focus on product.

Thankfully, Seth DeHart is one of the foremost experts on this topic. After successful runs as an early sales leader, he’s gone on to advise 80+ B2B startups — including Typeform, Attio, incident.io and SuperAnnotate — on this exact journey. He also runs Founder Led Sales, the free platform and community helping 250+ founders up their sales game. Today, Seth shares his six-step framework for nailing founder-led sales.

More resources: Favorite Maven courses | Future of GTM series | Zero to One series

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This wouldn’t be a post about sales if I didn’t mention that to close deals and generate revenue someone at your startup has to actually “do sales.”

And as someone who’s spent 20 years “doing sales” I’m comfortable saying that much of it sucks. Too much of it is glamorized by sales people with the “man in the arena” quotes, which misses the point that if you haven’t done it before the whole idea is extremely intimidating for many of us.

But the harsh truth is that I’ve yet to see a SaaS startup go the distance without at least one Founder closely focused on revenue. Hopefully after reading this you’ll have more confidence that you not only can “do it” but you can make it a core competency of your startup’s culture.

It may sound obvious, but if you’ve been around enough startups you see the same nonsense repeated over and over that you can “just hire someone to do sales” or that “the founder transitions out of sales.” No. There is no transition “out of sales.” The roles transition, but at least one founder is the steward of revenue for the company. Forever.

What I've learned from working with hundreds of founders is that successful revenue scaling follows a clear progression. The key is knowing exactly where you are in the journey and what to focus on next.

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The six phases of the founder-led sales journey

Check out the Founder Led Sales community for more checklists and resources

Your journey breaks down into six distinct phases, each building on the foundation of the previous one:

1. Finding early product-market fit (PMF)

2. Acquiring customers

3. The first sales hire(s)

4. Making it predictable

5. Multiple sales hires

6. Hiring a sales leader

Let's dive into each phase and what makes it critical for success. But first, here’s a quick framework to identify where you are today.

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Phase 1: Finding early product-market fit (PMF)

A wise man once said, “The best time to start selling is now.” Not sure who that was, but I agree. It can be terrifying and the volume of rejection is brutal, but the market will tell you the truth. Will your prospect exchange money and their time for the value you provide? The only way to know is to put your product and value in front of a prospect’s face and see if they bite.

This exercise of “selling” unlocks the truth about whether you have product-market fit (PMF) with the audience you're sharing your product with. Just be mindful that when you’re getting started and exploring PMF you need to make a clear distinction about whether you “just want feedback” from your prospect or whether you’re asking the prospect if they “want to buy”.

While this may feel intimidating, the good news is some of the best salespeople are the ones who don’t see themselves as sales people. They aren’t trying to spin some snake oil sales magic, but have real conversations around the prospect’s business, their pains/needs and the value the product offers. If you aren’t willing to do this as a founder you will fail, this is bare minimum.

🛠️ Tool: What to do in Phase 1 and when you’re ready to transition to Phase 2.

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Phase 2: Acquiring customers

This is where founder-led sales really starts to take off. You've validated early PMF with a handful of paying customers and now you want to get more customers. From my experience, you've done the hardest part and now it's about how disciplined you can be to execute these next few steps in the right order to scale.

This phase comes with a huge temptation: hiring your first sales professional. Don't do it. Not yet.

Prematurely hiring sales talent almost always fails and is a waste of time and money. Hiring anyone before the Founder is confident they have a (roughly) repeatable sales process relies on someone else to figure out this critical piece of the sales process and increases risk of failure.

So now you want to speak with prospects and you're in a solid place to attract these conversations because you have what I call the Founder's Super Power: you're dedicating a significant portion of your life to building in this space and talking to prospects. You are the central knowledge repository for the area surrounding your PMF. This should be valuable to prospects and you can use it as a magnet to lure them into conversations.

Think about why we come to Kyle for Growth wisdom from Growth Unhinged - he and his product are the central repository of growth wisdom (and hopefully some sales wisdom after this post!). This is why prospects should be willing to speak with you about your product and gain wisdom from you.

Through your conversations with prospects, you'll start to see patterns. What I learned early in my sales career is that if I could deconstruct these patterns into categories, I could make my process repeatable. When a prospect is interested in exploring a purchase, there are usually some steps required to get to a signed contract. (And remember, the signed contract is just the beginning of the Lifetime Value exchange.)

These steps become your framework for scaling. They emerge from the gnarly, brute-force efforts you've used to acquire your first customers. And when I say brute force - yes! Action! You can't engineer this in a silo or think your way out. It requires pure effort. Even the best make a mess at first but iterate and improve with a larger sample size.

I'm always fascinated by Founders with no sales experience closing deals without realizing they're running a repeatable process. They just get started and DO.

At this point if you can have an experienced sales person audit your process they can help you recognize and formalize what's working.

The act of acquiring customers builds your repeatable sales process. Only when you have this process can you make your first hire. The Founder needs to own this make-or-break moment for the startup. It's tough and you can get help from investors or advisors, but DO NOT rely on someone else to figure this out.

I've joined many startups as an advisor at this moment and this inflection point makes all the difference. Defining "repeatable" isn't always crystal clear, but here's a good test: Could you document the whole process and let someone else run it without your involvement? We're not actually going to do that yet, but it's a solid test of readiness for your first hire.

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Phase 3: The first sales hire(s)

The first sales hire(s) or sales pioneer(s) MUST have startup experience and be exclusively focused on selling.

This is a full cycle Account Executive who is willing to roll up their sleeves and do outbound prospecting or lead qualification or any other top of funnel activity while they’re learning the repeatable sales process from the Founder.

This is why having that repeatable process is critical — it increases the likelihood of success, enables clear goal setting, and makes it much easier to attract good talent.

Should you hire two Account Executives simultaneously? Yes, if you can find two great ones. The competition and parallel learning often accelerates success.

🛠️ Tool: What to do in Phase 3 and when you’re ready to transition to Phase 4.

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Phase 4: Making it predictable

Now the "sales playbook" becomes an important part of the process. While some documentation should exist already, this is where the pieces come together. The playbook transfers knowledge from you to your AEs who'll need to begin to manage the full sales cycle independently.

You need:

• Clear goals around KPIs, quota, and compensation

• A quantifiably predictable conversion model

• Understanding of how to predictably create pipeline

• A defined ideal customer profile (ICP)

• Clear milestones and sales stages in your CRM

Without these components, adding more team members only creates chaos. We focus so heavily on predictability because we're preparing for more hires. We need confidence they'll succeed.

The hidden benefit? This process teaches you practical sales leadership skills - crucial knowledge to have as your team scales.

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Phase 5: Multiple sales hires

Once the process is predictable (not perfect, but predictable), we can expand the team. We need clear math around inputs and outputs from our first hire(s) to know that additional salespeople will generate strong ROI.

Messing this up is expensive in multiple ways:

• Firing people destroys team momentum

• Keeping underperformers drains resources

• Uncertainty about improvement timeline creates paralysis

And this pain can be avoided if you hold off on growing the team until you make your first sales hire(s) predictably successful.

We’re NOT hiring a sales leader yet because a sales leader’s job is to scale hires. The more Sales Hires we make (AEs and SDRs) who are predictably successful the easier it is to both attract and justify the cost of hiring a world class sales leader.

And once we get a skeleton crew of 3+ salespeople successful we can hire a sales leader. But before we get there the founder is solidifying sales leadership skills that will serve the startup well forever. At this point you're reviewing deals and forecasting what’s going to close. You’re assessing the funnel metrics from leads through the pipeline. Even a primitive execution on this is wildly educational and insightful.

The reason this is important is that you will likely have to part ways with your first sales leader at some point. Many don’t have what it takes to get you to the next inflection point in your business and if they do they may not have what it takes to lead the business after the inflection point. Some also just quit.

The latest data shows that the average time a sales leader will be with you is 18 months. Which means the odds are that at some point the founder will need to step back in and right the ship. If the founder has built up some skills around sales management by managing a small sales team in this phase for even a few months this makes it considerably easier to ensure you can support the sales leader, ensure they’re operating at your standards as well as exit them from the business and take the reins if necessary.

Too many founders hurt their startup because they aren’t comfortable stepping in and they hold onto an underperforming sales leader for far too long.

🛠️ Tool: What to do in Phase 5 and when you’re ready to transition to Phase 6.

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Phase 6: Hiring a sales leader

Now we're ready to invest significant resources in a sales leader who will manage the sales force and scale revenue. If you've successfully navigated the previous phases, you're well-positioned to attract great candidates. They're looking for proof they can scale revenue to reach ambitious goals.

The better your foundation, the better the candidates you'll attract. They're managing career risk and opportunity cost, so they should question everything thoroughly. Your hands-on experience means you can answer their questions and evaluate their plans critically. You want to feel very comfortable that they will make an impact as soon as they join.

Build confidence that they’re experience selling and leading really matches exactly what you need. Spend as much time as possible with them prior to making the hire. Some VPs make excellent advisors first — consider this path to test the fit.

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The truth about founder-led sales

The myth that founders can fully delegate sales is just that — a myth. The most successful SaaS companies I've seen have founders who embrace their role as revenue stewards. They don't run from sales; they master it.

Here's what I’d like you to take away:

• Start selling now. Not next quarter, not when you hire someone — now. The market will tell you the truth about your product faster than any other method.

• The messy process of your first sales contains the DNA of your scalable revenue engine. Pay attention to what works, document it, and refine it through action.

• Your founder's super power is real and valuable. No hired gun can replicate your deep market knowledge and commitment to solving customer problems.

• Never outsource the building of your initial sales process. Get help, get advice, but own the creation of your repeatable sales motion.

• Build sales leadership muscles early. The average sales leader tenure is 18 months. You need to be ready to step in when (not if) changes happen.

Most importantly: this journey isn't a sprint to "graduate" from sales. It's about building the foundation of a company where revenue generation is a core competency, not a department.

Start where you are. Master your current phase. The next steps will become clear.

And the good news is that you don't have to figure this out alone. The founder-led sales community exists specifically to help founders navigate these phases. We've seen hundreds of founders transform from sales-anxious to sales-confident by following this exact framework.

If you want to go deeper into Seth’s frameworks, checklists and resources, don’t miss the Founder-Led Sales community — it’s a free resource for 250+ founders.