You Closing Deals Doesn’t Mean You Have PMF Yet

For founders, closing your first few deals feels like validation. It must be working.

So you start hiring. Step back. Hand off leads to your first AE with high expectations.

But the deals stall.

Founders too often assume their success will translate to others. It won’t.

Founders sell differently. You have context. Urgency. Authority. You can bend the pitch to the room. Your reps can’t.

Before anyone else can close and you can step out of the day-to-day sales process, your motion has to be ready and our process has to be clear.

You have to prove the system works without you.

How to start?

First off, always hire two initial reps vs one.

Why? Because one rep isn’t enough to learn what you need to learn.

Two gives you signal. If both can close, your system might be working. If only one can, you’ve got something to build on. If neither can, and you were closing? The system’s not ready yet.

Continue improving the system until three reps are consistently beating quota. Not scraping by. Not getting lucky. Beating it. On repeat.

That’s when you can start taking a step back.

To get there, you need to stay close. Be rep zero. Run your own pipeline. Chase no-shows. Write follow-ups. Feel what breaks.

That’s how you find the bottlenecks. That’s how you learn what’s repeatable.

Until others can close without you, you’re not done.

You’re still the system.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation about this on the focal podcast with a seasoned sales leader who helped scale Intercom, Box, and Envoy through every stage of growth plus has advised and worked with companies such as Airtable and LaunchDarkly since they were sub $1M in ARR.

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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