Is your business ready for a sales hire?

Sales is the beginning of the client relationship. And when you treat it like anything else, it stops working.

Your superpower as a founder has always been that you care about the people you serve. Your potential client knows they are talking to the owner. You are ultimately the person accountable. That accountability automatically comes with a level of trust that is felt before a single word is spoken.

When you hand that role to someone else, that perceived accountability disappears, along with the trust. Most business owners had no idea it even existed.

I know this because I lived it from the other side.

At one point I worked with a client in a part-time sales capacity. A handful of hours a month. Enough to get started, not enough to move fast. Which, as it turns out, is exactly how many founders bring someone on. Low commitment, low risk. A chance to see if it works before going all in.

Month 3: We were still figuring out the best ways to plug me in. And right around that time I landed her first client. I was confident. This was going to work.

Month 6: I was starting to sweat. Was I doing enough? Did I need to pivot? I made some adjustments and told myself results were coming.

Month 9: The adjustments weren't doing it. The pipeline was dry. I had a few potentials floating around but nothing converting. 

I am not going to sugarcoat it. I was dealing with some serious imposter syndrome. This is what I do. So I dug in harder. Followed up more. Reminded myself that relationship sales is the long game and that sometimes you cannot see the seeds growing under the surface.

Month 11: The client was ready to make a change. And it was only then, stepping back with my coaching hat on instead of my sales hat, that I finally understood what had been happening the whole time.

I had gone into that role without the full picture. And by the time I could see it clearly, it was too late to fix.

What I finally saw was this. She had been building something for years that she could not see and had never named. Every event she attended, people already knew her. Every email that went out carried her reputation ahead of it. Every referral that came in was someone vouching for a person they had watched show up consistently for a long time. The whole ecosystem was built around trust in her specifically, and none of that transferred to me.

I was not starting from scratch. I was starting from behind. Because I was asking people to trust a stranger in a business they associated entirely with someone else.

Here is what this means for you as a founder.

You have likely built the same invisible infrastructure without realizing it. The clients you have attracted, the referrals that seemed to just appear, the conversations that converted without a hard close, those were not accidents. They were the result of who you are and how people know you. That is your sales system. It just lives in you instead of in a document.

And that is exactly the problem. Because you cannot hand someone a system that only exists on your reputation.

Before you hire anyone to carry your sales forward, the most important work you can do is understand what your process actually is. Not what you think it should be. What it actually has been. Where did your best clients come from? What did they know about you before you ever spoke? What happened in the conversations that converted, and what was different about the ones that didn't?

That is where we start. And if you are considering hiring someone to handle your sales, you need to understand what exactly you’re handing them.

Take the Trust Style quiz