Founder Led Sales Got You Here and Won’t Scale
In founder led sales, the founder is the first seller and the sales process ends up built around that one person. Max Bevan, our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, talked through what happens to that arrangement as a business adds salespeople with Eric Housh on a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast. This post covers what breaks as the team grows, why the hero model can’t be copied, what a new seller needs in order to replicate it, and what to build before adding more people. It’s one of several posts that follow from Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals.
What Works at Ten Sellers Doesn’t Hold at a Hundred
Max described the early stage as a time when a little tape and glue can hold a sales process together, and at scale all of it comes crashing down. What works for ten salespeople doesn’t work for twenty, and he said it won’t come close for a hundred. His advice was to be intentional about what you’re actually trying to scale: pipeline, throughput, and revenue targets, and then your average deal size or contract value and what has to be true to hit those numbers.
From there it takes discipline in the process plus the right tooling. Max said the CRM, meaning HubSpot and platforms like it, has to support your deal model in a way that holds up, which means deciding which stages are required and what information reps should capture. He also pointed to AI as a way to enrich deal data by pulling in meeting notes and other documentation, so the context doesn’t depend on a single person.
How the Hero Model Forms
With fewer sellers, Max said, a business ends up relying on a hero model: nothing scalable, just things built around one proficient individual. The systems get anchored to that specific person, and nobody steps back to ask what process the whole business needs. Eric described the version of this that shows up in founder led sales, where the founder was the original seller, the very first salesperson, and had the idea in the first place.
Why the Hero Model Can’t Be Copied
Eric’s point was that whatever got the founder to that success won’t necessarily get the next person there. Max agreed and went further on the process side, saying there’s really no way to scale a hero model because that person is doing things you can’t hire for. They color outside the lines, so the process gets shaped around the 10 percent case, the 20 percent, or the 1 percent, and those outliers don’t scale.
Max also pointed to what the hero skips. A hero can push a deal through alone, without the three or four people the deal structure would normally require. The scalable version of the process brings those people in, along with procurement and additional levels of approval, and once the CRM is built to support those steps, the business can add more individual contributors who follow the same path. Max framed the question as whether you’re building an organization around process instead of individual heroics, and he was clear that people still matter, since they’re the ones doing the work.
What a New Seller Needs to Replicate It
Max said the goal as new people come in is to make sure they have the visibility, the tools, and the capability to deliver what the hero model was doing. Visibility and tools are the parts a business can build, and capability is the part that depends on the new seller actually working inside the system. That depends on the team using the CRM day to day, which we cover in How to Get Reps to Use a CRM They Don’t Like.
When Every Seller Logs the Numbers Differently
Max said that as more people join, everyone’s numbers start to mean something different. An example from the conversation was close dates: one rep tends to be optimistic about timing, and another is conservative enough that leadership can often move the forecast up a month, since that rep would rather pull a deal in early than push it back. Some personality will always be baked into the numbers, and the point made in the conversation was that the data should still tell the real story and shouldn’t hinge on any one person’s habits. Adjusting for individual habits is manageable when a leader knows a handful of sellers well, and it gets harder at twenty or a hundred, which is where the objective metrics of each deal have to carry the weight.
What to Build Before Adding More Sellers
Eric’s summary of the sequence was to pause, align everyone, and establish systems, processes, and standards before trying to scale, since hiring more salespeople into the existing setup just amplifies the problem already there. Max said the process has to be built on solid footing because once you bring in twenty, thirty, fifty, or a hundred sellers, everything needs to be consistent. Without that, he said, you’re scaling a process that was never designed to scale, since it was built around individuals.
Max didn’t lay out a hiring timeline or a ratio of sellers to process in the conversation, so this post doesn’t either. For help working out which habits to build into that process, Find the Sales Habits That Produce Revenue is the place to start.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.