What Is Founder-Led Sales? How to Do It (And When to Stop)

When Slack was released in 2013, it was hard to even explain what the product was — which made it tricky for the company to convert its initial customers.

Slack’s co-founder and first CEO, Stewart Butterfield, helped his company overcome this challenge by engaging in founder-led sales.

“That was tough — getting the first three or four external teams to use Slack,” Butterfield said in a 2020 interview. “It took dozens of tries, going to their office and showing them.”

For Slack, embracing founder-led sales in the beginning returned massive dividends. In 2021, Salesforce acquired the platform for $27 billion.

What is founder-led sales?

Founder-led sales is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy where the founder is heavily involved in selling the company’s products or services, instead of a traditional sales function.

In founder-led sales, founders typically run demos, close deals, and solicit feedback from prospects to learn more about customer pain points, using that data to influence the product roadmap and inform sales and marketing messaging.

This approach to sales is particularly common among startups because founders typically know the product better than anyone else, the sales team is fledgling or nonexistent, and prospects are excited to meet the product’s creator.

Benefits of founder-led sales

Why do startups and small businesses lead with founder-led sales? Let’s take a look.

Cost-effective in early stages

Founders know their companies inside and out. Who better to sell than them?

Rather than hiring expensive sales leaders and reps before proving product-market fit, founders — many of whom work for $0 — can validate there’s a need in the market before scaling, preserving much-needed runway capital.

Faster feedback loops

When founders go out into the field and speak directly with customers, they learn about pain points and feature requests faster. These tightened feedback loops ensure that products evolve in a way that prospects hope they will and achieve product-market fit more rapidly.

Better GTM alignment

With a founder driving sales, GTM alignment increases because real-world insights flow directly back to product, marketing, and customer success teams. Founders get to maintain a bird’s-eye view of their product, while also making granular adjustments to their GTM strategy and keeping teams aligned.

More deals

Ultimately, founder-led sales translates into more deals.

According to one recent report, 76% of businesses say that their founder closes the most deals. This trend is even more pronounced in early-stage startups with less than $1 million in revenue, where founders close 94% of deals. For companies that generate between $1 million and $5 million in revenue, the number still comes in strong at 79%.

Add it all up, and one can’t help but wonder why founder-led sales isn’t always the default setting for startups and smaller companies.

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, used founder-led sales to grow his company into an ecommerce juggernaut.

Before you try your hand at founder-led sales, invest time in defining and building your personal brand.

Why founders need to build their personal brand

Just because you started a business doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be successful with founder-led sales. For this approach to work, you need to first lay the groundwork.

Before you try your hand at founder-led sales, invest time in defining and building your personal brand. For most founders, the easiest place to start is LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network, home to 98% of Fortune 500 CEOs.

Begin by optimizing your profile, which includes writing an effective LinkedIn bio and choosing the right profile picture. Once your profile is buttoned up, post on LinkedIn at least a few times a week.

It’s equally important to expand your influence beyond social media. Doing media interviews and writing bylines, appearing at conferences and industry events, and participating in networking groups will all help build your brand. By creating a plan and sticking to it, you can establish a growing footprint in your industry.

As a busy founder, you might not have the time needed to do all this effectively. Partnering with a personal branding agency can make a world of difference here. An experienced pro can walk you through the process, and even manage it for you.

How to do founder-led sales

Follow these four steps to get started with founder-led sales.

1. Learn about your customers

To start your founder-led sales journey, kick things off by learning as much about your customers as you can. What pain points can you help them overcome? What drives them to make a purchase decision? What competing products have they tried before — and why have they decided to move on from them?

2. Develop your sales pitch

Use the answers to these questions to inform your sales pitch, which should quickly convey what your product does, the problems it solves, and why your solution is more effective than anything else on the market.

3. Identify your initial sales targets

At this point, devise your sales strategy and figure out which prospects to target first. Generally, founder-led sales is most effective when you take warm paths — like engaging folks in your network, getting referrals from customers, or leveraging investor and board member networks. While you could try cold outreach here, it’s more of an uphill battle.

4. Learn and iterate

Learn from each opportunity. Whether the prospect has certain objections, identifies missing features, or enthusiastically agrees to do a deal, all of this information can be used to improve both your pitch and your product.

Pro tip: Make your deals simple, straightforward, and easy to close to reduce friction and make onboarding as smooth as possible. It’s an easy way to maximize your momentum and potentially gain referrals via word of mouth.

Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky met directly with hosts and guests when his company was starting out.

Common pitfalls and challenges of founder-led sales

While founder-led sales can help you achieve your revenue goals faster, it’s not without its challenges.

Founder-led sales requires a huge time commitment.

It’s no secret that founders work longer hours than run-of-the-mill employees. Since you’re busy enough as it is, you might feel as though you don’t have enough time to devote to a proper founder-led sales strategy, which requires a consistent commitment.

And you might be right. But this is where a personal branding agency can support. By joining forces, you can outsource the brand-building part of founder-led sales, putting the foundation of your strategy in the hands of experienced professionals who’ve done it before.

You can come across as overly promotional.

If you’re constantly talking about how great your company is and how awesome your products are, chances are you’re going to turn off a significant chunk of your would-be audience. Depending on how bad it gets, many folks might even decide to block you on social media or digital channels.

The key here is to share genuine thought leadership content — not your latest sales pitch. By posting genuinely useful content on a regular basis, you can engage your audience and increase the reach of your personal brand, making it easier to win business when it’s time to pitch your next prospect.

You’d be surprised at how few founders actually write and post their own content!

How you know it’s time to transition out of founder-led sales

While founder-led sales can supercharge your startup, true founder-led sales should be limited to early-stage startups. In these environments, it makes sense for founders to stay close to the customer to learn what makes them tick and preserve precious runway.

Even so, getting support with branding and thought leadership from inside or outside teams is crucial. (Trust us: You’d be surprised at how few founders actually write and post their own content!)

Ultimately, your goal is to scale, and you can’t do that running sales on your own. As the company grows, the sales-focused part of your efforts should transition to a dedicated sales team. But that doesn’t mean your work as a founder is done.

While you might not be pitching directly to customers anymore, you’re still responsible for building brand awareness and generating buzz. That way, when your sales team sits down with prospects, they won’t have as much explaining to do because your messaging and insights will already be on their radar.

To learn more about how super-busy founders build their personal brands and publish thought leadership content regularly, read this.

Curious How Your Personal Brand as a CEO or Executive Impacts Your Business?