You handed over the pipeline. You kept the right to say yes.

The first sales hire is usually judged on skill. More often the constraint is that the only person able to commit to anything was still in the other room.

By Steve 4 min read
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A familiar sequence: the founder has been closing everything for years, capacity runs out, a salesperson is hired. Six months later the numbers are thin. The hire is articulate, organised, well-liked by prospects, and losing deals the founder would have won. The instinct is to question the hire. It is usually worth questioning the handover first, because what the founder was selling was rarely the pitch. Three things transfer. One usually doesn’t. Break founder-led selling into its components and most of it is genuinely teachable. The narrative about why the…

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