One of the most common topics we deal with when a small company (where the CEO does everything) turns into a company where the CEO already has people around them:
Moving from founder-led sales to sales as a craft.
If you see new salespeople every six months and a new sales director every year, your company most likely didn't make that step.
And now it's burning time, money and attention in completely the wrong place.
At this stage, the founders' main job is to build a playbook that people who weren't there from the start can actually work by.
And nobody from the outside can build that for you.
Because the founder is three people in one:
- a salesperson
- the architect of how the company runs
- a product specialist
That's what lets them win the first customers, because they:
- understand them perfectly,
- know where it hurts,
- know what to ask,
- know the product inside out, so they can explain it flawlessly through real cases, because they lived through every one of them.
That's exactly what they then built on: more versions of the product, more ways of selling, and some way to at least write it all down and measure it. This know-how is so unique that, by its nature, it can't be handed over.
Sometimes, unfortunately, the founder comes up with what looks like a brilliant shortcut:
“If I hire a senior enough, expensive enough salesperson, they'll take it over from me, no problem. They'll build a department, hire more salespeople and set up a sales machine that runs like clockwork.”
Except the new hire gets none of what I described above.
And until the founder pulls it together into a system and separates those basic layers within themselves (salesperson, architect, product person), the new hire never will.
Recognize someone in this? Give them my contact. This is why Smartin exists.