How to make sales less dependent on you: moving beyond founder-led sales

AKA why “being the company’s best salesperson” is a liability hiding in plain sight

The scaling problem

It’s estimated there are as many as 4 million businesses doing founder-led sales, without employees in the UK. Lots of SMEs started this way with one or two people, a brilliant idea and bucketloads of energy.

At that scale there’s only one person who can sell the company’s products: it’s the founder. Along with every job, it’s the owner who needs to step up and take it on.

What’s surprising is how big a business can get without this changing. After a few good years the business might be 10 or 20 people strong – but still the owner is the company’s top salesperson.

It’s rewarding and scary in equal measure.

Rewarding because every customer will be delighted to swap ideas with the owner. And they’ll feel a little privileged to have a direct line to the boss.

Scary, because every one of those 20 people needs paying at month end. And when you’re the top sales rep then you’re accountable for money coming in as well as funds going out.

For many founders it’s not sustainable. And it’s certainly not scalable.

You might just keep your head above water with 20 people but you can’t handle twice the volume of sales leads if that’s what’s needed to get to 40 or 50. Something has to change.

The valuation problem

The second problem with the founder being #1 sales rep is that it impacts negatively on company valuation.

If you’re looking to exit then the acquiring company will want to know they can install their own management team and be confident revenue will continue to flow in. That won’t happen if it’s all reliant on one person.

It’s great that the founder can sell, of course, but what happens when the owner isn’t available? Where is future growth coming from if every deal is dependent on one key person?

The worry is that the business is reliant on relationship selling and those relationships can be difficult to reproduce.

Why do organisations depend on the founder for sales revenue?

There are a lot of reasons for this. The simple answer is that it’s always been that way. If it’s worked from those early days then it’s a hard habit to break.

The bigger the organisation becomes, the bigger the overhead budget. Most owners will simply be happy that revenue is projected to be bigger than costs and keep doing more of the same.

Then you bump up against Founder Syndrome.

Lots of owners have obsessed about every tiny detail of their business. The painful truth is that employees will never be invested quite as much as they are, and some might not even be as diligent.

This makes many founders reluctant to let go – and sales can be especially difficult to delegate. Letting someone else loose with your customers isn’t just delegating a technical specialism, it’s letting people take on your relationships and reputation.

It’s emotional as well as practical.

Finally there’s the matter of how things actually work on the ground.

The reality is that employees might not have the expertise the founder has. The founder can explain every nuance of the business, every relationship (failed or successful) and every aspect of their product or service.

They just might carry this in their heads. If it’s not written down then new joiners start with one hand tied behind their back.

Deeper than this, we’ve seen organisations where the current team members ringfence the best client opportunities. It doesn’t matter whether they have the time to service them properly. If there’s bonus potential attached to them then they are the leads least likely to be handed over to new starters.

It all depends on how account portfolios are set up, and how bonus systems and KPIs are built.

A good sales manager should be sorting out these issues so that growth potential is maximised.

How does the CEO add most value to sales?

Research published by Harvard in 2021 set out to answer this question. Worryingly, they found that 28% of CEOs adopted a hands-off approach to the sales team. This low level of involvement gave the worst results of all.

Then the research looked at whether CEOs had social relationships (like meeting clients at hospitality events or playing golf) or whether they had strong commercial relationships.

The best sales results came from those CEOs who showed a combination of both these behaviours. Meeting clients socially while also being proactive commercially. Perhaps not on the same day!

So a founder acting as the company’s best sales person is doing the right thing. The question is how to make it scalable.

How can a founder replace themselves as their own top salesperson?

The first question here is where your heart really lies. At this point most owners step back from selling into a more clearly defined CEO role. That’s not essential, though.

Some founders are truly great sales people and will achieve best results by doing more of the same. What they might need is a CEO behind them who runs the business smoothly while they are out bringing in revenue.

But most owners will step back. What it’s worth doing in that case is drawing a line on your involvement so you stay close to customers. Maybe keep involved with the top 10 clients, or step into deals worth over a certain value. Stay connected with customers but be conscious of where you make the biggest impact.

It’s so important here to delegate authority as well as the sales target. Your transition to focusing on your best customers works because you know your team have the decision-making authority as well as the skills to manage the rest.

Behind this it should help to have some systems and processes in place to make your sales efforts run more smoothly.

Partly this is about sales people; how you induct them into the business, coach them and develop them. Too often junior sales people aren’t given true autonomy so they don’t develop the thinking and confidence needed to manage the biggest clients.

The need to land today’s deal stops you from building the capability that will land deals tomorrow.

It’s also about managing a reliable sales pipeline. If you’re confident that your gate stages, success criteria and lead assessment are consistent then you’ll find it much easier to allow your team to take on selected clients and projects. If they are clear what good looks like then they’ll step up more quickly and effectively.

Last, and by no means least, this is about customers. Many of them will know the founder personally and will treasure those relationships. Ensuring that they feel better looked after by your new account manager than by you is a tricky balancing act involving delegation, face time and good messaging.

How to make sales less dependent on you

If you’re a founder who’s the best salesperson in the business then you have a problem hiding in plain sight.

It’s not necessarily a problem today, but it encapsulates that saying that what got us here might not get us there.

There’s a point where a founder might struggle to be both CEO and #1 salesperson and that point is a capacity constraint. Yes, you should stay involved with customers, but you can’t be the bottleneck. Scale comes from making the hard choice about which one you’ll specialise in.

If you’d like to talk about scaling your sales operation then just drop us a message and let’s chat.