From founder-led selling to the first sales hire

Founder-led sales is the normal start: founders sell because they know the product and the buyers best, and often the buyers personally. At Teams, half of the small clients came through people Leo knows; he knows whom to call and what to say. It works early. It stops working when the founders' calendars are full and nobody else knows the moves.

So before the first sales hire, write a short playbook that passes on judgment, not a script:

• whom Teams sells to, and the signs a company is not a fit;
• why clients buy;
• the questions that qualify a deal;
• common objections with honest answers;
• prices, and which discounts need Marta's approval;
• proof stories from real clients.

Two things stay out. Personal details of the founders' contacts, such as home addresses or birthdays, have no business purpose there. And a word-for-word script breaks the moment a buyer says something unexpected.

The weekly argument between marketing and sales is almost always about one word: is this lead "good"? Agree the word before the hire. A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that sales should work on now, and for Teams it means four facts:

1. the company fits the profile (enough staff working with foreign partners);
2. a named person with a real training need;
3. a known route to the budget owner;
4. a start within six months.

Every criterion is something either side can check, not a feeling. "The HR manager sounded keen" is not on the list; "she described the dispatchers' carrier calls and said the finance director approves training" is.

A lead that misses one criterion isn't rubbish; it isn't ready. It stays with marketing for nurturing until the missing fact is there. That way the new salesperson spends time on deals that can move, and marketing knows exactly what to bring.

Shared words go beyond the lead. Two more matter as soon as two people sell.

Stages end with something the buyer did, not with how the seller feels. "Proposal sent" means the buyer agreed what the proposal must cover and received it, not that the seller emailed a PDF and feels hopeful. Defined this way, the pipeline means the same thing whoever updates it.

The handover decides what travels with a lead, so nobody asks the client the same questions twice. Marta's template for the handover note: who (contact and role), which company, what need in the client's words, budget owner if known, what was promised (a sample lesson, a price), and the next step with a date.

And when sales doesn't take a lead, it becomes a returned lead: sent back within a week with a reason, for the monthly review. All four terms are built from facts both teams can check. That's what ends the weekly argument about whether a lead was "good".

Shared definitions say what a good lead is. A marketing–sales SLA (service-level agreement) says who owes what to whom, with times, so both sides can see when a promise is broken.

At Teams it is one page:

• Marketing promises leads that meet the agreed definition, each with the handover note filled in.
• Sales promises to contact each lead within one working day, and to accept or return it within a week, with a reason.
• Together, once a month, both look at the returned leads and fix either the definition or the campaign that produced them.

The agreement is two-sided on purpose. Each side has a promise the other can check: quality and context from marketing, speed and feedback from sales. Clauses like "marketing will deliver as many leads as possible" reward volume over fit; "sales decides alone which leads are good" isn't an agreement; "both teams will try their best" can't be checked by anyone.

Leo's objection, "isn't that bureaucracy for a team of three?", deserves a straight answer. The SLA is one page, and its purpose is not paperwork: it makes a broken promise visible before it turns into blame. Without it, a lead that waited four days for a call is just a vague grievance; with it, everyone can see which promise slipped and fix that.

The specific numbers, one working day to respond and one week to accept or return, are Marta's choice, not an industry rule. Another team might pick two days, or five working days for the return. Pick numbers your team can actually keep, write them down, and mark them as your choice so nobody mistakes them for a law of nature.

Then review them. If the new salesperson routinely misses the one-day response because leads arrive in bursts after events, change the number or the way leads are released, rather than quietly ignoring the agreement.

The right first salesperson is the one who has done your kind of sale. Teams sells programs over two to three months, through a buying committee, with procurement and legal at the end. One of Marta's candidates sold phone plans, forty calls a day; the other sold software to HR teams, slowly, through committees. Energy helps, but call volume fits a fast transactional sale. The second candidate fits.

Test with a work sample, not interview charm: a role-played discovery call and the follow-up email afterwards. You see how the person asks questions, listens and writes, which is the actual job.

Three tempting shortcuts fail. Hiring the most confident interviewee rewards presentation over skill. Handing all leads, or the Veloria account, to a newcomer on day one risks the biggest client. And skipping the hire to let Leo keep selling "in his spare time" is exactly the founder bottleneck the hire is meant to remove.

Even the right hire shouldn't take new leads alone in week one. A long committee sale is learned by watching it, then doing it with help. Marta's four-week plan:

1. Week one: read the playbook and two clients' stories in depth, so the new person knows whom Teams sells to and why they buy.
2. Weeks two and three: sit in on Marta's calls, discovery and proposals, and write the follow-up notes.
3. Week four: run calls with Marta listening, and get feedback after each one.
4. Then take new leads alone, under the SLA.

The order moves from knowing to watching to doing with a safety net. Skipping straight to solo calls makes the first real prospects the training ground, and when good-fit companies are few, every burned lead is expensive.

Marketing and the key accounts stay with you: the new person sells new business.

AI tools save a salesperson hours: drafting emails, summarising calls, researching companies from public sources. Use them for that, with two rules on the playbook's last page.

A person reads and edits every message before it goes out. These tools can invent facts, numbers, promises and even people that were never in the notes. A follow-up email that promises a discount nobody agreed, or names the wrong budget owner, costs more than the time it saved.

Care with data. No client contracts, employee names or call recordings in tools the company hasn't approved. Record or transcribe a call only with the client's consent. And the consent rules for outbound still apply when a tool writes the email.

How it fits together: a playbook passes on Leo's judgment, shared definitions and a two-sided SLA stop the lead argument, the right hire and a stepped start protect the pipeline, and clear rules keep AI tools useful. The case brings the module together: Veloria at 38 % of Teams' lessons.