Scale & Strategy
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- How to Nail Founder-Led Sales
0-$5M: How to Nail Founder-Led Sales
First Round partner Meka Asonye sits down with founders and first sales hires to unpack 6 specific tactics for learning to embrace founder-led sales instead of avoiding it.
Introduction: The Founder-Led Sales Journey
The challenging but exhilarating journey from $0 to $5M in revenue requires mastering critical skills. For B2B founders, reaching that first $5 million in ARR represents a critical milestone—but the path starts long before the first dollar comes in.
Too often, technical founders focus intensely on building their product before "coming up for air," telling themselves, "We'll figure out the commercial stuff later." This temptation may grow even stronger in today's AI era, where shipping is faster than ever. But as First Round Partner Meka Asonye notes, neglecting the commercial side is a recipe for pain: "This isn't 'Field of Dreams,' and the 'build it and they'll come' strategy usually doesn't pan out."
Early commercial choices compound over time—both positively and negatively. This article aims to provide practical frameworks that early-stage founders can apply immediately to their unique circumstances, avoiding both broad platitudes and hyper-specific case studies that might not be relevant.
Confronting the Sales Boogeyman
"My biggest fear when I decided to start a company was that I would have to do sales," admits Marta Bralic Kerns, founder and CEO of Pomelo Care. This sentiment is common, especially among technical founders.
When faced with the prospect of sales, founders typically try one of two escape routes:
- Delaying indefinitely: "Maybe if I build something amazing, the product will just sell itself."
- Hot-potatoing to someone else: "I'm not a salesperson, so the product will be more successful if I bring someone else on to pitch."
But as Alexa Grabell, founder of Pocus, points out: "Founders have an unfair advantage that no hired gun can match. Unlike salespeople, founders have a right to just ask whatever they want and jam on an industry. There's a difference in expertise that a founder brings that a seller simply can't."
Tactic 1: Cast Out for the Big Fish Early
Many founders start small, afraid to waste an intro to a major prospect when their pitch isn't refined. Marta Bralic Kerns took the opposite approach with Pomelo Care:
"The first conversation I had before even raising our seed round was with a Chief Medical Officer of one of the largest payers in the country."
Her early call structure:
- Framed it as an expert interview to understand their perspective
- Kept conversations high-level, focused on market insights
- Asked who else might be interested in sharing expertise
- Always closed by asking to follow up once they had built more
While warm intros helped ("95% of our calls came through warm intros from investors, angels, and personal networks"), don't rely on them exclusively. Cold outreach, though harder, often yields more unvarnished feedback about your product and pitch.
For more effective cold outreach:
- Keep emails under 100 words with subject lines under 6 words
- Find personalization angles: shared universities, previous employers, or investors
- Try founder-to-founder approaches: "Here's a problem I faced as a founder..."
- Target industry conferences where people are already in a professional mindset
Tactic 2: Take All the Calls (and A/B Test Constantly)
Don't be too selective early on—you need to speak with diverse prospects to form an educated guess about your ideal customer profile (ICP).
"My mentality was always to take the meeting and maybe I'll be surprised," says Bralic Kerns. She took founder-led sales so seriously that during her maternity leave, she told her team not to bother her unless it was for a sales call.
Alexa Grabell approached early Pocus meetings with curiosity rather than dread: "I took a lot of initial meetings from the perspective of understanding how their business operates and figuring out where we can help."
Merge co-founders Shensi Ding and Gil Feig exemplify this approach: "For probably 4-5 months, from 10 am to when we left the office late at night, all Gil and I did was sales meetings, booked back-to-back all over the world." They A/B tested everything—messaging, demos, personas, pricing—and discovered that targeting decision-makers like heads of product or engineering led to more sales than speaking with individual contributors.
Tactic 3: Embrace Ego Death
Many founders immediately dive into demoing features. Instead, lead with curiosity about the customer's problems.
"You don't want to be a solution hunting for a problem. You want to intimately understand the problem," says Mike Molinet, co-founder of Branch and Thena. "Be very careful about building awesome tech that nobody wants to buy."
He borrows advice from sales trainer Skip Miller: "Don't talk about the dog." In other words, the more you focus on your product, the less chance you have at a sale.
Alexa Grabell recommends acting like an "armchair therapist": "I like to keep it high level to let people just complain about what they're struggling with in the business. What's keeping you up at night?"
As Molinet notes, "People care about themselves—are you solving my problem or not? They don't care about what you do and who you are."
By focusing on the problem rather than your solution, you avoid "happy ears"—where you only hear what you want to hear. Eric Lasker, CRO at Varda Space, puts it bluntly: "I'm a big believer in finding your hypothesis and trying to burn it down as quickly as possible—do as much as you can to destroy any ego you have about your product and your ability to make a sale."
Tactic 4: Leave the Sales Books on the Bookshelf
While sales books can offer theoretical knowledge, nothing beats practical experience. As Eric Lasker says:
"I've not seen great success with people trying to learn sales without doing it—the best salespeople learn from an apprenticeship structure. You have to get knocked around a bit to really internalize how this all works."
Mike Molinet's approach emphasizes relationship-building: "I did over 1,100 external calls last year—that's over 20 calls a week. There are thousands of sales books on Amazon. But doing 20 calls a week for three months will teach you more about selling than any of those books ever could."
Tactic 5: Get Some Grown-up Process
While you don't need complex sales machinery early on, a light layer of process can significantly increase your effectiveness. As founders balance multiple priorities, the simple act of organized follow-up often falls through the cracks.
"Two years ago I would say a tailored step-by-step process was overkill for founder-led sales. But the more prescriptive we got with our process, the more deals we closed," says Alexa Grabell.
Eric Lasker recommends starting simple: "If there's a pattern that just keeps coming up—if you've got five deals in the pipeline and four of them hit a sequence of stages, you should probably write that down."
Questions to consider when developing your sales process:
- Who should be in each meeting?
- How many meetings should we have?
- What are the next steps after each meeting?
- What format are we putting the contract in?
- What terms are we negotiating?
- What are we saying yes and no to?
Tactic 6: Think Advisors, Not Hires
You don't need to navigate founder-led sales alone, but you also don't need to hire a full-time sales leader prematurely. Instead, build a brain trust of advisors who've done this before.
"I had constant communication with sales advisors to walk me through best practices on everything from running great discovery, demos, negotiations," Alexa Grabell shared. "Find your sounding board."
Conclusion: Put in Your Reps Before Hiring Any Sales Reps
The early days of founder-led sales build incredible muscle memory and pattern recognition that will serve you for years. You're learning how your customers think, what motivates them to buy, and what it takes to close deals—foundational knowledge that no sales hire can replicate.
So next time you feel that knot in your stomach about jumping into sales conversations, remember: You've already sold plenty of people on your vision—your co-founder, your early employees, your investors. Now it's about taking that native talent and adding structure and intentionality. Simply put: there's no replacement for putting in the reps.
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