With more than 40 years of cumulative experience in strategic selling and leadership, UpTempo's founders regularly share tips we learned along the way.
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Every week, we at The UpTempo Group talk with VC firms and startup founders, and they mention a universal challenge: A company builds a solution, and their first few sales cycles are usually with “friends and family” contacts in their network. Those conversations seem so frictionless! Their contacts are readily available, they sound receptive to the value proposition, and they’re willing to test, use, or purchase the platform. Thus, the solution seems market-ready, and the founder feels like an amazing salesperson. So, their advisors tell them it’s time to hire a VP of Sales to build a team and double revenue yesterday.
However, those first few sales cycles don’t indicate future growth. Friends-and-family referrals aren’t representative of the market, and those senior-level contacts wouldn’t be as available without a warm introduction. The founder becomes frustrated, wondering why their multi-million dollar investment in scaling a sales team hasn’t panned out. The sales team is equally bewildered, wondering whose idea it was to forecast exponential growth for a product that lacks market fit, and that first VP of Sales feels doomed.
At UpTempo, we work with startup founders and investors who believe an intermediary step is needed between Founder-Led Sales and a full-time VP of Sales (more detail here if you’re not bored yet). We believe that founders need an experienced sales partner to manage more sales cycles, help hone the solution and value proposition, and hire the first individual sales contributors to grow revenue. With this fractional sales leadership strategy, the eventual VP of Sales is set up for success, inheriting a flourishing, viable pipeline while saving the company millions of dollars in the long run by getting it right the first time.
We’re curious to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic. Have you leaped or stepped from Founder-Led Sales?
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