When to Delegate Sales as a Founder

Founder-led sales shouldn’t stop until you’re hitting at least $1-2M ARR.   At least in my book. Few people - if any - understand the nuance of what a company’s building better than the founder. And if your product is truly innovative, education is a huge part of the selling process. You need to teach buyers, help them understand not just what your product does, but why it matters, how it fits into their world, and what changes because of it. Also, as a founder, you need to hear first hand what your product is missing, where the value is being created and synthesize those lessons. When you’re pitching customers, you get immediate feedback from watching how they react, and seeing where they get stuck. Realizing “This button should be over here,” or “We need an integration for that.” Any of those conversations could offer valuable insights for the next iteration. Palantir does this insanely well—embedding themselves next to customers, solving in real-time, and refining as they go. Once you’ve gone through the cycles—pitched, tested, failed, refined—then you have a real sales motion. Then you can bring in an AE or SDR and hand them the blueprint. But if you delegate too soon, you may be missing out on long term gains. I know from experience! When we first started emailing our music to blogs, it allowed us to improve substantially because we were hitting up writers and not a label press release. We heard first hand what they liked or didn’t about our work or its promotion, and iterated fast. 

I recently spoke with an early-stage AI app founder who was desperate to hire sales reps because he dreaded founder-led sales. This is one of the most common failure modes I see with technical founders—and it significantly impedes the path to product-market fit. Here's how to think about the right order of operations in early sales motions: Phase 1: Prototype & Validation In the earliest stage, the feedback loop between customer conversations and product roadmap must be extraordinarily tight—making founder-led sales absolutely non-negotiable. This phase is critical because you're identifying your true ideal customer profile (ICP) and learning how to effectively communicate your product story and address common objections. As you accumulate hundreds of demo repetitions (while refining your product based on feedback), you gradually assemble a winning process. Phase 2: Founder-led Sales Scale-Up Your mission here is to create the sales playbook that will guide future reps. You need sufficient pattern recognition to understand which messages resonate with which personas. I recall meeting Desmond Lim, CEO of Workstream, several years ago (not an Emergence portfolio company, but I deeply admire what they've built). He showed me the remarkable 60-page playbook he crafted documenting their entire sales process—before hiring a single AE. Every nuance. Every objection. Everything a new rep would need to succeed. While perhaps extreme, this perfectly illustrates the principle: scaling go-to-market requires mastering your ideal sales motion before delegating it. Phase 3: Hiring Initial Sales Reps Most founders default to sequential hiring—start with one rep, evaluate results, then proceed. However, we recommend hiring 2-3 sales reps with diverse backgrounds simultaneously, enabling you to effectively A/B test different profiles. Regardless of approach, ensure these early hires are "renaissance reps" with rapid iteration capabilities rather than purely "coin-operated" sellers. Mark Leslie has a great foundational article on the Sales Learning Curve provides excellent guidance. I'll link it below. So embrace the early sales work, even when it feels uncomfortable. It's fundamental to building a foundation for lasting success.

One of the toughest things as an early stage SaaS Founder is knowing what you should own and what you should delegate... Here are the five stages I've guided Founders through... 0) Pre-Product Market Fit This is the stage where you don't really know who your ideal customer is, you don't really know what the differentiated product is, and you're looking to make magic happen. This is the stage you should own everything. The biggest thing to optimize for? Customer Conversations. More Customer Conversations means more Insights, Greater shots at goal, and greater chance at revenues. 1) Initial Revenues Congratulations. You've got something. Except you don't know if it's repeatable. Maybe you got that one lucky customer from your network on a sweetheart deal, or that random lead that bought. Now you need to prove that you can do it again, and again, and again. The biggest thing to optimize for? Customer Conversations. Keep owning. 2) $100K ARR OK, we're cooking here. You know what you're selling. You know what the product is. There's so much more to be done. But you obviously need more. What got you here won't get you to the next stage. Now is the time to build a scalable GTM Machine so you can get into more customer conversations. The biggest mistake to make here is to delegate this out, but quite honestly, no great Marketer is going to join your $100K ARR startup and take the risk, so you have to embrace Founder-led GTM and build your GTM machine. 3) $1M ARR Only 4% of companies reach this point. Congratulations. You're awesome. Now is the time for you to hire people who will own the Sales Process (that you've proven), the Marketin motions (that you've battle hardened), and maybe even a few more Engineers and a Product Manager. This is where delegation to DO-ers comes into play. 4) $3M ARR (and beyond) This is even more rarified air. You're now owning the Vision, the Culture, you've got DO-ers running the playbooks, you're starting to see repeatability. Now is the time to bring on some great VPs who can take each of the key pillars (Product, Marketing, Sales, Success, etc) to the next level. Keep delegating, but own the thing that you're the Top 1% of the world at. The key lesson all this? Until you've started to prove repeatability, don't delegate. Keep owning and prove out each of the pieces and then delegate the playbook. As the playbook gets run and you get more momentum, use it to recruit great Leaders. But -- still own the one thing you're the Top 1% in the world at. How does this journey start? It starts by embracing Founder-led GTM because that is the key to success, to product market fit, to repeatable revenues and it's the one thing you cannot delegate. If you're a SaaS Founder aiming to accelerate your path to $3M+ ARR and beyond, grab a complimentary copy of my 5-Point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. It's exclusively crafted to help you build a scalable Go-To-Market Machine. Follow the link in the comments below to grab your copy 👇