Sales for founders, explained simply

It depends on two things: where your customers come from and whether there is proof yet. First the terms, because they often get mixed up. Hiring means bringing someone into your business for a period, working under your name, like an interim sales manager. Outsourcing means handing the process over to an agency. When you hire, you keep control over how the selling is done. When you outsource, you depend on the agency getting your story right and reaching the right people. There is a chance you end up with a calendar full of meetings that lead nowhere.

Almost every founder starts in their warm network and no one can take that part over: that is where people buy from you, and what they are buying is you and your story. The colder your sales gets, the more repeatable it becomes and the easier it is to hand over. That only works once there is a first customer and a case someone else can build on. So the order is: start warm and do it yourself, build proof, then hand over what has become repeatable.

As soon as sales takes up too much of your time and the work is easy to hand over. Those two belong together: being busy on its own is not a reason, because then you push a structural problem onto someone who cannot solve it. Easy to hand over means three things. There are customers who did not all come from your direct network, so the story also works for people who did not already know you. There is an approach that has proved itself time and again: you know who you approach, what you say and why it works. And you can explain what that person will be doing next Monday.

In the end, as a founder you want to step out of the day-to-day: working on your business instead of in it. Your first sales hire is a step in that direction.

A pipeline is not a sales team and it is not an expensive system. It is a list of the right companies and a fixed rhythm for following up. Without a team you build it like this. First work out who your ideal customer is, so you can say no to the rest. Start in your warm network and expand from there. Set aside a fixed moment each week for sales, even when things are busy. Most pipelines do not dry up because of too few leads but because the follow-up stops. And record every contact, even if that is just a spreadsheet. A working pipeline does not need a team. It needs a rhythm that holds when things get busy.

In most scale-ups the sales process lives in the founder's head but is not written down anywhere. So structuring does not start with a tool but with writing down what actually happens now, from first contact to signed deal. Then do three things. Map the stages a customer goes through and agree when a deal is allowed to move to the next stage. Record what a good lead looks like for you, otherwise the pipeline becomes a wish list. And look at each stage to see where deals get stuck, because that is where the improvement is. That makes sales predictable and transferable. You need that to grow without everything running through you.

In steps, not all at once. Founder-led sales actually works well early on: no one tells the story better than you. The problem is that it does not grow, because your calendar is the ceiling. Making it scalable does not mean letting go of everything tomorrow. It means cutting the work into pieces. Start with the parts that do not depend on you: working out who to approach, follow-up and keeping records. A system or someone else can do that for you. Keep doing the conversations yourself for now: that is where the knowledge sits that you will want to hand over later. In the meantime, write down what works: who responds, which story lands, why customers say yes. That document is your sales system in the making.

A sales consultant advises: they review your sales, analyse it and hand you a plan, but the execution stays with you. An interim sales manager steps into the operation: they execute or lead your sales team for an agreed period. The difference is who carries the work. Both come with a risk. With a consultant you can be left with a good report and too little time to act on it. With an interim, the knowledge can leave on the day the contract ends. The question to ask beforehand is the same in both cases: what remains when this person leaves?

Yes, but not in the way it is usually done. The mistake is letting AI write complete emails and sending them out in bulk. The recipient spots that straight away and you damage your name with exactly the people you want to reach. Where AI does help is the work before and after the email. Finding out which companies have a reason to talk to you right now, who the right person is and what is going on there.

And above all, keeping track. If you approach 10 or 30 companies a week, some of them need a first and a second reminder, sometimes a third and sometimes a message on LinkedIn. You cannot keep track of that by hand, not as a salesperson and certainly not as a founder. The email itself remains human work or at least under human control: your tone, your story and a reason why you are writing to this person.

Yes, but no longer in bulk. Mass mail works against you: recipients recognise it immediately. And if one recipient marks you as spam, the rest of your batch follows it into the spam folder. On top of that, the Netherlands is stricter than many other countries: you may cold-email limited companies as long as you clearly identify yourself and offer an opt-out, but you may not cold-email sole traders without consent.

What does work is small and targeted. Ten to thirty well-chosen companies a week, each with a reason why you are approaching them now. And an email that describes their situation instead of your service. Remember what the email is for: to open a conversation, not to keep talking over email. Count on around seven touchpoints on average before a conversation takes place: an email, a reminder, a LinkedIn request, a call and in between they check your website or your LinkedIn posts. Keep that rhythm up and you will still get conversations out of it.

Start with your best customers. Which small group brings in most of your revenue and is the most enjoyable to work with? Describe that group's characteristics: industry, size and how they are organised. Then look at the trigger: what problem were they facing and why did they buy at that moment? Together that is your profile. Use it mainly to say no: every lead that falls just outside it costs more time than it brings in. And review it every quarter, because it changes along with your business.

The honest answer: which CRM you choose barely matters at the start. Every well-known system can do what a founder needs. Where it goes wrong is the setup: too many fields, too many stages and too many good intentions, after which no one keeps it up to date. Set it up the other way round. Start with the stages a deal actually goes through with you, record for each contact only what you need for the next step and make updating it part of your weekly sales moment. A half-filled CRM is worse than a spreadsheet that is correct. So choose the system you will actually use and leave the rest of the features switched off.