Founders are always going to be busy, with competing demands for their time. And, particularly if they aren’t from a commercial background, founders don’t usually relish the thought of leading their startup’s sales. Those founders might be forgiven for thinking, “Surely there’s someone who’d do a better job than me?” So, some founders may be tempted to hand over the reins to a hungry, ambitious salesperson who can spearhead business development. Then, they can get back to doing what they do best. Right?

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Founders hold a unique advantage in the sales process while a scalable, repeatable model is still emerging. While the trigger has to be pulled at some point, making an impulsive decision ‘just’ to free up capacity could set your pipeline and revenue targets back months. Let’s explore the ins and outs of when, and how, to move beyond founder-led sales.

While you’re figuring out product-market fit, it is extremely rare for anyone bar a founder to find ways to close those first few customers. “Founders are extremely inventive: they find ways to get deals done that might not scale but are critical in getting you towards a sales model that works,” says Seth DeHart.

A former startup salesperson himself, Seth is now a Venture Partner at Point9 and a sales adviser to early-stage founders.

Are there ‘classic’ signs that you aren’t yet ready to bring on a salesperson? “All the hiring conversations are irrelevant if you don’t have some early product-market fit,” Seth says. Your PMF is key to winning new customers, of course, but just as important is the satisfaction of those customers: are you getting positive feedback? Are your customers happy? If you’re regularly bringing customers on board who are solving problems and deriving value from your product, it's a sign that a salesperson will have a strong base to build from. But as Seth says, “Until that point, the founder needs to own sales.”

In an early-stage startup environment, every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to gauge what people really think about your product. That includes sales, and the number of conversations salespeople have with prospects means sales forms a crucial part of the product and engineering roadmap.

With that in mind, some reluctance on the part of a founder to hand over these conversations to a more junior salesperson is often wise. “Be conscious that a salesperson will be a layer between you and the customer,” Seth advises.

Once you do reach escape velocity with your early pipeline, there are many routes to finding the right salesperson. A key decision is to scope and plan the new hire’s areas of responsibility. Founders often seek to bring someone in to run a specific part of the pipeline, either sourcing new leads at the top of the funnel or taking deals from consideration through to closing.

However, that’s not the only way to do it, says Ben Thomas, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Covecta. Ben decided to give Covecta’s first hire full-funnel responsibility, from generating opportunities and closing deals right through to account expansion. What was the rationale? “We wanted our hires to be as close to the customer as possible, and to have a vested interest in customer satisfaction. We wanted our first hires to be closely involved with the relationship after signing, and to support all expansion efforts as well.”

How entrepreneurial do those early sales hires need to be? Ben reflects:

Ben brought Covecta’s first sales hire on board in June 2025, and just three months later had hired a second Commercial Lead, also with responsibility for their own full sales funnel. “The key advantage here was that my co-founders and I had worked with both hires before in previous roles. So there was less guesswork when we were debating culture fit, and we knew they would be able to take on a huge amount of information in a short time. When our first hire joined, for instance, they shadowed every single one of my meetings, so they could see exactly what was going on,” recalls Ben.

The amount of absorption needed will likely depend on the seniority of the new hire. HSBC Innovation Banking’s Emily Wood frames the debate: “Too senior, and you’ll get someone who’s used to high-level strategy, but they won’t have a team around them to execute. Too junior, and they might not be able to focus on the one or two top priorities, because they haven’t built their template yet for what good looks like?”

Hiring at Covecta, Ben landed on “the higher end of mid-level” as the right seniority for his first sales team members. Similarly, Seth cautions against shooting for a seasoned executive as your first hire. “Quite often, VPs and Heads of Sales actually find it very challenging to re-engage with the brutality of an early-stage sales process, dealing with near-constant rejection again. Also, quite frankly, really high-quality VPs are pretty unlikely to say yes to these kinds of opportunities. So consider the real value-add of a VP Sales who’s happy to take a couple of steps down to rejoin your startup.”

If you do bring on board a stellar first sales hire who can own a revenue target, where should a founder start to allocate their time? “I’ve found it most beneficial to focus on the top of the funnel,” “We’ve got great people focused on taking deals through to close, but people still want to buy from people and invest in a founder. My co-founders and I make sure we’re active on social channels and get out to events. And, we can focus more on long-term product and fundraising strategy.”

For many founders, making a great sales hire is revelatory: it opens up new capacity, and allows them to take stock of just how inefficient their founder-led process was beforehand. But with the wrong sales hire, issues can multiply. “Depending on your sector, a bad hire can be near-existential,” says Seth. “It’s especially fraught in enterprise sales, where the lead times are longest: you’ll have to wait two or three quarters before you even know whether something’s working or not.”

Startups can’t afford to wait months to see whether problems will figure themselves out. That’s why founders ideally need to wait as long as absolutely possible before transitioning the responsibility for every part of the sales funnel on to a new team member.

Interested in getting perspectives from leading founders and senior operators on getting your first hires right in marketing and customer success? Read our article on building your early GTM function.