The newsletterOnce or twice a week. 1 hot take, 2 tool suggestions, 3 best practices.
No. 007
Founder-led sales is improv.
I was talking about this yesterday with someone who works with founders making their first sales hires. A lot of founders get good at selling, then have a really hard time getting somebody else to do it.
I think a lot of what’s working in founder-led sales is improv. You’re learning how people describe their problem, figuring out what the product needs, and changing what you say as the conversation goes. The buyer gets to talk directly to the person building it, and in a lot of cases they like that.
A lot of the founders that get good at founder-led sales, it’s improv.
So you hire someone and have them sit in on your calls. That helps, but there’s a lot they can’t copy. They don’t have your product knowledge, and they can’t make every decision you can make while the customer is still on the call.
Also, you were doing a lot of the marketing and customer success work in those conversations. You remembered why the person came in, what you promised them, and what they’d need after they bought. There wasn’t a sales-to-onboarding handoff when you were doing both parts yourself.
Once other people are doing the work, you have to decide how that information gets to them and who does what with it. Marketing needs to know which leads sales will take. The rep needs to know what they can promise without checking with you. Customer success needs to know what the customer actually bought the product to do, and somebody has to follow up when they aren’t doing it.
That’s why I spend time with the founder and the people doing the work, then compare what they tell me to what’s happening in the systems. You’re building a go-to-market process, meaning how the company finds customers and works with them through renewal. Some of that can come from what you’re already doing, and some of it needs to be worked out because you’ve never had separate people doing those jobs before.
I’m pretty good at kind of extracting the process from the founder that they kind of have in their head and turning it into something that works for multiple people.
Tools for the work you’re handing off.
RevenueHero
This is what I use for qualifying and routing demo requests. It sits behind your form, checks whether someone qualifies, and shows them the right rep’s calendar. I suggest it to every new customer. It’s simply a better and cheaper Chili Piper.
When the founder takes every demo, who gets the lead is pretty obvious. Once you add reps, you need rules for existing accounts and how new leads get split up and what leads should and shouldn’t hit a rep’s calendar before qualification by an SDR.
I’d skip it for one or two people taking demos if the meeting quality is fine. Full disclosure, I’m a signed referral partner and get paid if a company I send them signs up. Make sure to mention me if you’re checking it out and let me know if you want some help setting it up!
Postbeam
I tried Postbeam last month and it wrote my best-performing LinkedIn post that month. I was actually very angry about that because I’d written all the other ones by hand.
It drafts LinkedIn posts with training on your voice, and the team plan has a shared workspace and approvals. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to subscribe. But it’s hard to argue with the results I got from it so far.
I just need to figure out if I can build a similar workflow myself or if there’s some secret sauce here that I can’t replicate.
Calendly for sales booking
If HubSpot is your CRM and you’re still using Calendly, I’d reconsider. For basic booking, I prefer HubSpot meetings. For qualification and more detailed routing, I’d look at RevenueHero.
My least favorite part of Calendly is that it sends custom answers into numbered HubSpot fields. If different booking pages ask different questions, you have different answers to different questions feeding into the same field. It’s a reporting and automation nightmare.
Why pay for another tool that does a worse job than the one you already are paying for through your CRM?
Replacing it with
Three things I'd do this week
Decide who follows up when a lead sits there.
This came up yesterday when someone asked whether a sales problem needed more training. I’d check what happens after the lead comes in first. Who owns it, what are they expected to do, and who notices when it hasn’t happened? The founder probably noticed because they were handling every lead. More people = more complexity, things start getting dropped.
Does anyone even know that they’ve just been sitting there for four days?
Ask customer success what they need from sales.
Before you design the handoff, talk to the person who’s going to take the customer after the sale. I do this even when a manager has already explained the process, because I learn more from the people doing it. Ask what they still have to chase down and compare that to what’s on the deal. Then work out how that information gets there and who checks it before onboarding starts.
I’ve gotten a lot of information from people that aren’t actually doing the work.
Keep what people report separate from what AI reports.
I was talking about this yesterday while looking at customer data. If AI and the team are updating the same fields, they can keep overwriting each other and you lose the source of the disagreement. I’d keep both values separated (whether it’s in a CRM or some other source of truth) and build a process to flag the ones that don’t match. Then someone can check what happened and why, instead of trying to come up with one definition everybody agrees on before you’ve even seen the differences.
Thanks for reading. If you’re making your first GTM hires, reply and tell me what you’re still having to do yourself.
Kevin
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