This is the 4th (and final) part of our “founder-led sales deep dive.”

• Part 1 covered step 1: figure out if you’re solving the right problem.
• Part 2 covered step 2: onboard customers + ensure they get value from your product.
• Part 3 covered steps 3 + 4: prove people will pay you for your value and get to 20 repeat customers.

Today, we’ll dive into steps 5, 6, 7 and 8

Ready to sell your product like hotcakes? Let’s go!

Step 5: Hire and train salespeople to sell your product

Until now, you have set a great sales foundation: Your product solves the right problem. You’ve onboarded 20-30 customers and provided value to them. You’ve also proven that customers are willing to pay for your solution AND are repeat buyers.

Now what? It's time to hire salespeople to onboard hundreds of customers.

But don’t hire a Head/VP of Sales yet. They won’t be a fit now because they probably haven’t been selling for a while and only have been managing others.

Instead, hire Account Executives (AEs) who are experts in early-stage selling. Ensure they have experience selling in the same industry, to the same persona, and at the same average selling price as yours.

For example, say your company sells recruiting software. Look for early salespeople at similar companies like Lever, Greenhouse, etc.

Once you hire and onboard the AEs (preferably 2 of them, but not more than 3), teach them everything you’ve learned:

• sales/demo scripts
• outreach tips
• what to say (discovery questions)
• what not to say
• how to address buyers’ objections, etc.

This will help them to close customers faster.

Next, you have two options.

• Option 1: ask the AEs to either do all three: lead generation, selling, and customer support.
• Option 2: have the SDR generate leads while AEs sell and support customers. You can even act as the third AE.

Whatever you do, for the first few months, watch the AEs’ sales calls and give them regular feedback. Ensure they implement your feedback and improve.

After two to three months, they should be getting more first meetings, second meetings, follow-ups, proposals, and eventually be closing customers. If they don’t, hire new AEs.

Step 6: Build a mini sales team

Once the AEs close customers at a predictable rate, remove yourself from the day-to-day selling. Your job now is to hire, train, and manage a team of salespeople.

At this stage, you should also hire a dedicated Customer Success (CS) Manager. So, here’s what your team could look like: 1 SDR for lead generation, 2 AEs for selling, and 1 CS person.

Depending on your market, your team could even look like 2 SDRs, 3-4 AEs, and 1 CS person.

Step 7: Build a fully-fledged sales team

This is the stage where you remove yourself completely from the sales process.

Hire a VP of Sales. Hand them the full responsibility of scaling and managing the sales team. You can now run other stuff (hiring for different departments, setting the culture, and more) at the company.

But remember: bring in someone with experience leading a sales team in a similar industry, selling similar products at a similar price range.

The VP should add more SDRs, AEs, and CS managers to grow to $10-50M+ in revenue.

Step 8: Build a successful team of sales teams

Now you can clone that first sales unit and add other units to scale your revenue to $100M+. You do this by typically involving another managerial layer.

Have a separate SDR team, AE team, and CS team with individual managers hiring and managing each team — all under a VP of Sales.

This is how you scale from $0 to $100M+ in revenue. We’re not saying it’ll be easy, but the formula is simple.

We hope this whole series was helpful for you to get started on founder-led sales. And if you want to watch the full-length presentation with sales expert Pete Kazanjy, you can find it right here.
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This article was written by Sameer Ansari. Sameer has 4+ years of experience writing for technology startups, VC funds, and founders. You can find him on Twitter here.