We have countless conversations with founders who find themselves at a critical crossroads: they’ve landed their first few customers but now need to transform their sales process from a founder-led hustle into a repeatable, scalable engine.
Let me tell you the story of how one B2B startup navigated this exact journey, growing its customer base from zero to over a hundred in just 18 months. Their path wasn’t linear, but it was strategic, and I believe it offers a powerful roadmap for any founder or GTM leader looking to build a sustainable sales motion.
(FYI: The average deal size was around $14,000)
Stage 1: Founder-Led Sales (0-10 customers)
This is the scrappy, “roll-your-sleeves-up” early-stage hustle. At this point, the founder is the chief salesperson, using a combination of personal networks, early design partners, and any angel investors’ networks to land the first 10 customers.
- GTM Strategy: Leveraging personal networks and “design partners”—early customers who help shape the product.
- Key Focus: The goal isn’t just to sell, but to learn. This stage is all about experimenting with messaging to validate product-market fit and build the foundational elements of a sales funnel.
- Tools: Basic CRM and sales engagement platforms.
- Team: It’s a founder-driven show, with early team members offering support where they can.
Stage 2: Transition to a Salesperson (10-30 customers)
With the initial customers secured, the focus shifts to bringing in professional sales expertise. A dedicated salesperson is hired to test the founder’s initial sales process and begin building on it. This is often a hunter with the skills to hone in on what has worked for the founder. This stage is still scrappy!
- GTM Strategy: The founder and sales hire work together to extend the company’s reach, often through targeted email sequences and LinkedIn outreach.
- Key Focus: The main objective is to test if the initial sales process can be replicated by someone other than the founder. The sales hire refines the messaging and sales process based on real-world feedback.
- Tools: The company adds more advanced lead generation tools. The concept of RevOps appears as it’s now needed to ensure some data integrity and process efficiency.
- Team: The founder and the new sales hire form a two-person sales engine.
Why Repeatability Is the Only Path to Scalability
Imagine you have two sales teams:
- Business 1’s sales team has to sell to four different Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), solve for four different use cases, use varying messaging, and follow multiple sales processes.
- Business 2’s sales team has to sell to one single ICP, solve one use case, with one clear message and one well-defined sales process.
Which team do you think is going to be more successful?
SaaS 2’s model is built on repeatability. They solve one problem, for one ICP, with one solution. This focus makes it infinitely easier to build an early GTM engine that can actually scale.
Stage 3: Seller-Led Sales, Founder Support (30-60 customers)
At this point, the initial processes have been validated. Now it’s time to add more fuel to the fire, gently. A sales leader is hired to build and manage a small team, with the founder moving into a support role.
- GTM Strategy: The sales and marketing teams begin to implement a more robust, omni-channel approach and focus on building inbound strategies to supplement outbound efforts—a concept we call “Allbound.”
- Key Focus: This stage is about validating the sales team’s ability to independently hit targets. Initial playbooks and processes start to become more defined, and the team begins to prove that the model is repeatable.
- Tools: Sales automation, process documentation, and a more established RevOps function become critical to support a growing team and ensure consistency.
- Team: The sales team’s capabilities grow, with the founder still involved but no longer the primary seller.
Stage 4: Fully Seller-Led, Sales Leader Driven (60+ customers)
The final stage of this evolution is a sales machine that is repeating processes and consistently closing deals. The founder has successfully stepped away from day-to-day selling, and the sales team is leading on customer acquisition.
- GTM Strategy: The focus shifts from developing new strategies to optimising existing ones for repeatability and efficiency.
- Key Focus: The founder’s role is now to focus on the company’s vision and product, while the sales leader ensures the team hits its numbers.
- Tools: The GTM tech stack is growing to cover the full acquisition lifecycle. This helps the team grow, optimise processes, be data-driven, and have access to feedback loops for fast iteration when required.
This 18-month journey shows that building a repeatable sales process isn’t a single event – it’s a systematic evolution. It requires a willingness to experiment, a strategic approach to team building, and a deliberate transition from a founder-led hustle to a team-driven machine. As a founder, you have to know when to step in and, more importantly, when to step out.
If you’re a founder or GTM leader on this path, this roadmap can offer valuable lessons. What stage are you in? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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