A Super Founder-Salesman Can Hurt Your Startup

I know it sounds crazy: how can an asset - good sales skills - be bad for your tech startup? Because your persuasive skills may be too loud, creating a distorting noise that won't let your early customers raise their objections. What's more, a founder's strong salesmanship and drive are seldom scalable. 

Let's start with distortion. Every startup co-founder doing customer discovery and validation should know better: yapping and pushing too hard is useless during the early days of a company. You need to learn about your customer's problems, present the product/solution/value proposition, and shut up and learn. Pushing your product will not help you gain customer insight. You cannot be selling when you should be learning. This is not, however, what I am talking about.

What I am talking about is a much more dangerous phase of your startup: when you get closer to product-market fit. At this point, you will usually start "test-selling" your product and the dangers of being a super salesman can backfire. A founder's splendid sales abilities can easily distort customers' internal decision-making processes. A strong founder-salesperson could generate strong traction for a product that has not achieved product-market fit. Just think: how many times have you bought something or subscribed to a service - and later regretted it - because of a superhuman salesperson on the other end of the line?

However, once you raise outside capital and step on the gas pedal (i.e. try to scale), you could find that you have to go back to the drawing board. In fact, you are likely to blame your newly-acquired sales team, when in fact you should be blaming yourself for not fully validating your product.

That takes us to my second point: even if you decide to replace your sales team after the initial disillusionment, you cannot expect everyone to be a master closer. That's not what a scalable startup should be all about. In fact, even if you do get an insane sales team, you may end up just prolonging the pain: you will achieve new customer growth but your churn rate will be high and you will fail to scale. The pushy salesperson may sell you a product, but you surely won't recommend it to your friends, upgrade your service, or renew your subscription. In fact, you may even try to avoid his calls in the future because you know how difficult it is to say "no" to this guy.

Do you want to go back and revise your product late in the game? Probably not. Don't push. Shut up. Let your product do the talking. If it does not sell, then listen to your client's feedback and re-do your work.

But once you achieve product market fit, get the salesman. And get the best one out there.