Conventional wisdom suggests founders should step back from sales as quickly as possible. This approach misses a fundamental dynamic: the founder’s unique advantages in B2B sales environments.
Academic research demonstrates that founder-led companies consistently outperform their peers, particularly in the critical early-stage sales process. Not necessarily because of superior sales technique, but because of their position as a problem-solver invested in customer success.
Strategy 1: Leverage Authentic Passion as Social Proof
Research on emotional contagion reveals that genuine enthusiasm spreads unconsciously between people. Founders communicate with what’s “authentic credibility”—prospects perceive reduced agency risk when a CEO stakes their reputation on a solution.
This dynamic becomes particularly powerful in B2B environments where buyers must justify decisions internally. The founder’s presence inherently validates the purchase decision, providing social proof that extends beyond product features to encompass organisational credibility.
Strategy 2: Master the Consultative Paradox
Founders possess a unique advantage: they can afford to be genuinely consultative, even when it means walking away from revenue. This “costly signaling” demonstrates trustworthiness through actions that appear contrary to immediate self-interest. Research shows prospects develop deeper trust when salespeople acknowledge limitations or suggest competitors might be better fits.
This authenticity paradoxically increases close rates by positioning the founder as trusted advisor rather than vendor, fundamentally altering the buyer-seller dynamic.
Strategy 3: Transform Product Roadmap Discussions into Strategic Partnerships
Customer co-creation research reveals that involving buyers in product development significantly increases purchase likelihood and retention. This approach creates “psychological ownership” through the IKEA effect—people value things more highly when they’ve contributed to their creation. When founders invite prospects into product development discussions, they’re creating this psychological ownership that significantly influences purchase decisions.
Strategy 4: Weaponise Intellectual Humility
Social psychology research reveals that admitting uncertainty in non-expertise areas actually increases credibility in expertise areas. Founders who acknowledge gaps in their sales process or market understanding create “authentic leadership presence” that paradoxically strengthens their authority when discussing technical solutions.
Research on founder personality suggests successful entrepreneurs exhibit high intellectual humility, adapting strategies based on market feedback. This translates to more effective discovery conversations and stronger prospect relationships built on mutual learning rather than one-way pitches.
Strategy 5: Create Asymmetric Value Through Vision Sharing
Transformational leadership research shows vision-driven narratives create stronger emotional connections than feature-focused presentations. Founders possess exclusive access to the origin story—the authentic “why” behind their solution that hired salespeople can only approximate.
Research on entrepreneurial narratives demonstrates that founder-led stories about company purpose create “meaning-making” for prospects—connecting solutions to broader organisational goals. When founders share their authentic problem-solving journey, they provide prospects with compelling stories to champion internally, creating advocates within the buyer organisation.
The Founder’s Competitive Edge
These strategies work because they leverage inherent founder advantages. Each strategy represents a foundation for deeper exploration—from emotional contagion neuroscience to consultative selling behavioural economics providing a robust framework for understanding why founders can excel as chief sales officers. Much of which comes down to understanding founder weaknesses and using them counter-intuitively as sources of strength.
Over the weekend, we observed Eid ul-Adha, honouring Prophet Ibrahim and the spirit of sacrifice he displayed in obeying Allah’s command.
Religion isn’t considered the best place to derive business inspiration, especially in sales. Yet for believers, it provides a framework guiding their actions. Our beliefs—whether religious or secular—profoundly influence how we act professionally, affecting business outcomes.
Academic research supports this. Weber’s Protestant work ethic showed how religious values influenced capitalist behaviour. Weaver and Agle demonstrated that ethical foundations lead to greater business integrity. Thornton and Ocasio’s institutional logics research reveals how belief systems shape organisational practices. Of course, not all who act religious are ethical in business. The idea is to learn from where we can.
Can we learn from Eid ul-Adha for business? Honestly, not directly. What matters is learning from how Prophet Ibrahim lived.
I can think of three lessons for B2B sales leadership.
1. Take Full Ownership
For modern sales leaders, accountability extends far beyond hitting quarterly numbers. Yes, meeting quotas matters, but how you achieve those targets matters even more.
Too often, sales teams resort to questionable practices to close deals—overselling features that don’t exist, making promises the company can’t keep, or pressuring clients into decisions they’re not ready for. These shortcuts might deliver short-term wins, but they invariably backfire. Clients discover the truth, relationships sour, and the long-term cost far exceeds any immediate gain.
True accountability means taking responsibility not just for the numbers on your dashboard, but for the methods you use to achieve them. It means having the courage to walk away from deals that require compromising your integrity. It means being transparent with your team about what’s working and what isn’t, and owning your mistakes rather than deflecting blame.
2. Invest in Your Team
Creating a culture where your team knows you have their back isn’t about being their friend or avoiding difficult conversations. It’s about being genuinely invested in their growth and success. It means providing them with the resources they need to succeed, shielding them from unnecessary organisational politics, and advocating for them when they deserve recognition or advancement.
When sales representatives know their leader will support them through challenges, they’re more likely to take calculated risks, pursue ambitious targets, and maintain their integrity even when facing pressure. They’ll also be more honest about pipeline challenges, client concerns, and personal development needs because they trust that this information will be used to help them improve, not to penalise them.
This approach builds loyalty that transcends compensation packages and job titles. Team members who feel genuinely cared for become advocates for your leadership and the organisation’s mission.
3. Never Compromise
In B2B sales, the temptation to take shortcuts is constant. When deals stall, when competition intensifies, when pressure from above mounts, the easy path often seems attractive. True success comes from staying the course with integrity intact.
This means continuing to provide value to prospects even when they’re not ready to buy immediately. It means being honest about timelines and capabilities even when it might cost you a deal. It means investing in long-term relationships rather than optimising for quick wins.
The sales leaders who build lasting success are those who understand that every shortcut carries a hidden cost. They persist through difficult quarters, maintain their standards during challenging negotiations, and never compromise their values for temporary gains.
The Compound Effect
These three principles work together to create something powerful: trust.
When you demonstrate accountability, genuinely care for your team, and persevere with integrity, you build trust with clients, colleagues, and team members alike.
And in B2B sales, trust is the ultimate currency.
In a world where quarterly pressures often overshadow long-term thinking, these timeless principles offer a foundation for sustainable success that transcends any individual deal or sales cycle.
Following the collapse of Builder.ai, one of the most commonly mentioned quotes by its founder is where he said about wanting to make building an app as easy as ordering pizza.
Could it really become that? Possibly so, for there is no dearth of “make your own pizza” options around the corner of any London high street. Or a lack of imagination among pizza aficionados when thinking of pizza toppings.
You can’t fault a startup founder for building a vision. Outrageous as it may be. On the contrary, the more the better. There are numerous examples throughout startup history. We thrive on, enable and reward a “fake it till you make it” culture.
The product is being pulled apart for being more human than AI, as was being claimed. The approach in itself isn’t wrong to begin with – how else does a startup validate, build and refine its value proposition? But a line needs to be drawn where the MVP needs to become the product it set out to become. A few hundred million in investor money later, and you can’t still be cranking up the machine by adding more horses to pull the cart. It needs to transform into the swanky car that was promised.
The Recurring Nightmare: Five Ways Sales Culture Destroys Startups
Builder.ai’s implosion isn’t some freak accident. It’s a pattern repeated across the startup landscape, driven by the same systemic failures that infect companies like a virus.
Leadership Skills
Founders, many of whom come from purely technical backgrounds, often lack the understanding of building a sales org. Sales ends up becoming a black box which should magically conjure sustainable revenue. Unrealistic revenue targets become the norm. The processes aren’t supportive, and feedback to and communication with various teams like product and customer success doesn’t happen.
Misaligned Incentives
Sales teams get bonuses for closing deals, not creating customers who’ll stick around. This creates a perverse dynamic where success is measured by signatures rather than value delivered. The rep who overpromises gets promoted while the one who sets realistic expectations gets questioned about their “hunger.”
Investor Pressure
Venture capital has turned exponential growth from nice-to-have into must-have-or-die. The pressure becomes so intense that sustainable practices get sacrificed on the altar of hockey stick projections.
Product Hype
Startups market products as revolutionary breakthroughs without sufficient proof they actually work. The gap between marketing copy and product reality becomes so wide, an elephant could walk through. Everyone becomes complicit in maintaining the illusion because admitting the truth feels like defeat.
Toxic Culture
A culture that prioritises revenue above all else inevitably becomes one that justifies cutting corners, bending truths, and burning people out. What gets called “high performance” is often just dysfunction operating at scale.
The Question That Matters
Any company’s sales organisation is the most visible manifestation of what a company actually believes about itself. When sales culture is grounded in reality and focused on genuine customer value, it becomes a force for sustainable growth. But when it becomes corrupted by hype and misaligned incentives, it metastasises and kills everything else.
The question every founder, investor, and operator should be asking isn’t “How fast can we scale?”
Instead, it should be: “Are we selling something that actually exists, delivers real value, and can be delivered as promised?”
You can promise the world’s greatest pizza, but if what you deliver is cardboard with ketchup, no amount of wizardry will save you.
The Builder.ai story isn’t just about one company’s failure. It’s about an entire ecosystem that has lost sight of the difference between ambition and delusion, between growth and sustainability. Until we acknowledge that difference, we’ll keep creating conditions for the next Builder.ai to rise and fall in exactly the same way.
In the summer of 2021, two B2B SaaS startups launched within weeks of each other. The world had started emerging from the global pandemic, but its effects were still reshaping how we work. Remote work had become the new default, and companies were scrambling to adapt to this fundamental shift.
Sensing opportunity, countless startups began building solutions for remote workforce management and employee well-being. Among them were RemoteAB* and TeamXY*—both founded by driven teams of consultants and technologists who saw the same market gap and had similar visions for filling it.
The timing seemed perfect. The economy was rebounding, funding was flowing, and both teams easily secured seed rounds. They built solid MVPs that gained early traction and hired their first sales reps within three months of launch.
By the end of Year 2, one had hit $4M ARR and closed a Series A.
The other folded quietly after burning through its seed capital.
This is the story of how two seemingly identical startups took radically different paths—and what every B2B founder and sales leader can learn from their journeys.
1. Strategic Focus vs. The “Everyone is Our Customer” Trap
RemoteAB’s Approach: Cast the widest possible net. Software, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services—if they had remote workers, they were a prospect. Size didn’t matter. Geography didn’t matter. Industry vertical didn’t matter. The philosophy was simple: more leads equal more revenue.
TeamXY’s Approach: Ruthless focus. They targeted software and IT services companies with 100-200 employees and operations across exactly three countries. This wasn’t arbitrary—it was the sweet spot where their solution delivered maximum value and where buyers had both the pain and purchasing power to act quickly.
The Results:
RemoteAB generated 3x more demos but struggled with conversions. When deals did close, customer fit was poor and churn was brutal.
TeamXY had fewer leads but achieved a 40% higher close rate and 60% lower churn in their first year.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects Michael Porter’s concept of strategic positioning—the idea that competitive advantage comes from choosing to perform different activities than rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways. TeamXY chose differentiation through focus on a narrow niche, while RemoteAB fell into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone.
Lesson: A tighter ICP doesn’t shrink your addressable market—it sharpens your go-to-market motion and amplifies your value proposition.
2. Building Systems vs. Being the System
Both founders were natural salespeople who could close deals through sheer force of personality and market knowledge. But they approached scaling in fundamentally different ways.
RemoteAB’s Founder: Became addicted to the rush of closing deals personally. Every important prospect call included the founder. When the first sales reps were hired, he continued leading most conversations, believing his presence gave prospects confidence in the company.
This approach worked initially—deals closed faster when he was involved. But it created an unsustainable bottleneck and prevented the development of repeatable processes that others could execute.
TeamXY’s Founder: Used early sales conversations as a laboratory for building institutional knowledge. Rather than dominating every call, they meticulously documented each interaction, analysing what messaging resonated, which objections surfaced, and how successful deals progressed.
Over six months, this research became a comprehensive sales playbook that enabled consistent rep onboarding and performance.
The Results:
RemoteAB’s revenue plateaued at $500K ARR as the founder became the constraint.
TeamXY scaled from founder-led sales to a five-rep team generating $300K monthly.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects Henry Mintzberg’s research on effective managerial roles—specifically the tension between operational involvement and strategic system-building. TeamXY’s founder understood that scaling requires transitioning from performing operational tasks to designing the organisational capabilities that enable others to perform those tasks effectively.
Lesson: Your early sales success should generate processes, not dependencies. Build a machine that works without you.
3. Intelligence-Driven Optimisation vs. Activity Theatre
RemoteAB: Operated on volume assumptions. More emails, more calls, more LinkedIn connections would inevitably lead to more revenue. Success was measured in activity metrics, not outcome insights.
TeamXY: Approached sales as a hypothesis-testing exercise. They tracked granular data: which personas responded to specific messaging, which objections consistently stalled deals, which CTAs drove engagement. Weekly reviews focused on pattern recognition and continuous optimisation.
The Results:
RemoteAB exhausted themselves and their prospects with spray-and-pray tactics that generated noise, not signal.
TeamXY achieved compound improvements by turning small insights into systematic advantages.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects the lean startup methodology’s Build-Measure-Learn cycle, applied to sales operations. TeamXY treated their sales process as a product that required continuous iteration based on data-driven feedback.
Lesson: You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t scale what doesn’t work consistently.
4. Customer Success as Revenue Insurance vs. “Set It and Forget It”
RemoteAB: Treated the signed contract as the finish line. New customers received login credentials, a PDF user guide, and reactive support when they reached out. No structured onboarding, no success milestones, no proactive engagement. Within 60 days, 40% of customers had churned or gone completely silent.
TeamXY: Recognised that the sale was actually the beginning of the revenue relationship. Every new customer received a customised 30-60-90 day success plan. Customer Success Managers joined hand-off calls. Usage patterns were monitored proactively, and outreach was triggered by both positive and negative behavioural signals.
The Results:
– RemoteAB haemorrhaged customers before they could realise value, creating a leaky bucket that no amount of new sales could fill.
– TeamXY achieved 90%+ activation within 30 days and expanded 25% of accounts within six months.
The Strategic Principle:
This aligns with the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) optimisation. TeamXY understood that retention and expansion revenue from existing customers is significantly more profitable than acquiring new ones—typically 5-25x more cost-effective according to research by Bain & Company.
Lesson: Revenue doesn’t end at signature—it begins there. Design your onboarding as carefully as your sales process.
5. Building Winning Culture vs. Grinding Through Dysfunction
By Year 2, the cultural differences between the teams were stark.
RemoteAB: Sales reps were burned out and demoralised. Without a clear ICP, they chased unqualified leads. Without proven processes, they couldn’t replicate the founder’s success. Without proper onboarding support, their deals often fell apart post-signature. Compensation plans were confusing, career progression was unclear, and morale was toxic.
TeamXY: Cultivated a tight, collaborative culture. Reps shared insights from their calls, celebrated both individual wins and team milestones, and had clear guidelines for success. The sales organisation felt like a learning laboratory rather than a pressure cooker.
The Results:
RemoteAB experienced 80% sales team turnover, creating constant disruption and knowledge loss.
TeamXY promoted two SDRs into AE roles and maintained zero attrition while consistently hitting team targets.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects Daniel Pink’s research in “Drive” about intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive performance more effectively than external pressures alone. TeamXY created an environment where reps could develop mastery within clear boundaries and see how their work contributed to customer success.
Lesson: The sales culture you build early becomes your competitive moat. Invest in it deliberately.
The Strategic Framework: Your Two Playbooks
Sales success in B2B startups isn’t about luck, charisma, or market timing—it’s the result of intentional, strategic decisions compounding over time.
The TeamXY Playbook (Do These):
1. Define and defend a tight ICP early—specificity creates clarity and competitive advantage
3. Track outcomes and patterns, not just activities—intelligence beats intensity
4. Design proactive customer success as revenue insurance—retention amplifies acquisition
5. Cultivate a culture of learning and growth—great reps attract great reps
The RemoteAB Playbook (Avoid These):
1. Chasing every lead—bad-fit customers kill momentum and morale
2. Founder dependency beyond seed stage—you become the bottleneck
3. Measuring motion instead of progress—activity without insight is waste
4. Treating signature as finish line—revenue starts with successful onboarding
5. Neglecting team culture—dysfunction compounds faster than growth
What This Means for You
If you’re building or scaling a B2B sales organisation, the path forward is clear. The difference between RemoteAB and TeamXY wasn’t talent, timing, or luck—it was strategic discipline applied consistently over time.
The question isn’t whether you’ll face these decisions—you will. The question is whether you’ll recognise them as strategic inflection points and choose the path that builds sustainable competitive advantage.
Further Reading
To deepen your understanding of the strategic principles underlying successful B2B sales organisations:
My sales career started selling what we used to call dabbe. Originating from the Hindi word dabba which means box, it was a pejorative for cartons of a dumb product. Even in the naive cocksureness of youth, the irony of the term wasn’t lost on me.
Those boxes were computing equipment – Desktop Computers (or PCs, one of the most coveted acronyms at the time), servers, networking equipment — the physical building blocks of tech. I was an Account Executive at one of India’s biggest homegrown IT companies. It was B2B sales, though it would still be a few years before it would be commonly called that.
I was selling to enterprise, mid-market, government, banking, education – everything that fell under my territory. You see, I was the first AE to be assigned that particular geography, so I pretty much had an open field to run across. Not very different from selling for a startup. Very different from B2B as we know it today. Somewhat like B2C, not how we know it now, but the old-school door-to-door salesman type.
Tech Sales, not so Techie
It was the early 2000s and we had just emerged from the shadows of the Y2K bug. We were selling technology. The way we did it was anything but high-tech.
Email existed, but that’s not how you communicated with clients. Bandwidth was expensive, and only accessible through a 56 kbps dialup modem. No WhatsApp, just Yahoo and ICQ chat rooms. In a few years, Blackberry was going to take over. No Zoom or Meet. In fact, shortly after, I would be selling WebEx, which had created a huge buzz for transforming boardroom and C-suite communications at multinationals.
We found leads in Yellow Pages, business directories, and through word on the street. Customers were contacted on landline phones. Mobile phones were expensive; incoming calls had to be paid for too, so we used them essentially as pagers. Dot matrix printers churned out our mailers.
The Magic in the Sales Process
So how did we make sales happen?
By simply showing up.
As salespersons, we were supposed to be out in the field. Finding customers, meeting them, closing deals. Hitting a daily quota of sales calls, which would distill into hitting the quarterly sales quota. Mind you, the sales call wasn’t a call on the phone or over Zoom, but physically, in person, at the customer’s office. That was way, way before Covid. Everyone would be found in their office. Except the sales person, of course.
There were days when we literally camped out at the customer’s office. Waiting in the lobby, avoiding the searing gaze of the receptionist, hoping to bump into someone who mattered. Building relationships has always been a matter of time, patience, and in our case, a bit of nerve.
It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t easy. You needed that fire in the belly burning to keep going.
At my age now, fire in the belly has taken on a different meaning. It can still keep me up at night.
CRM? What’s That?
Never once do I recall the word CRM being uttered during my first sales training. We were a batch of dreamy-eyed graduates who had been handpicked from the best engineering colleges across India. Our first week at our first job was spent at the company headquarters being trained on product and the selling game. Everything from prospecting to closing, and beyond, but there was nothing about where all the data lived.
The records and contracts lived in box files – perhaps the most literal manifestation of the dabbe culture of the time. Orders would be faxed to regional HQs. And most of the sales reps’ data lived in their precious notebooks. Or in their heads. We remembered addresses, phone numbers and contract information, in between everything else that mattered to the deal. Keeping track of all those deals and contacts was a mental game, largely.
Then one day, I was told to start using Excel. The original CRM. Probably the only thing to have survived and remained relevant till now.
Every few months, management would pass down a new spreadsheet template and declare it the best way to track deals. I would spend Friday evenings filling in fields so my manager had something to talk about on the Monday morning sales conference call. We made it work.
The Sales Tech Stack Overload
Since those low-tech early days, we have come a long way. Today, we’ve got more tech tools for sales reps than they know what to do with. Things have become so high-tech that now we have tech tools to help work with tech tools.
You can reach thousands of prospects with one click. Know how many opened your messages. You don’t have to remember sending follow-up emails. You don’t even have to check your calendar for scheduling meetings. You can log every interaction with precision. Get insights on what went on during a sales meeting, what to do next.
Every step of the process is a data point now.
Has this made life easier for the sales rep?
The Future of B2B Sales Evolution
Once a salesperson, always a salesperson.
Over the course of my career, I have seen enough cycles to know a few things about sales. The most important one being that the fundamentals will remain the same. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that people buy from people. This is as true today as it was when I started working, as much as it was when someone first sold something. That underlying arch of trust is what supports and enables any sales transaction. Tools will change, markets will shift and products will evolve.
With the ascent of AI in every aspect of our lives, it becomes imperative to examine how it can help sales teams maintain the human element. What I see happening instead is the proliferation of AI-enabled tools working with sales teams at every step. Making workflows more complex, instead of simplifying them. Often forgetting the human element that belongs to the sales rep.
It feels like perfecting the science at the expense of killing the art.
Yet, AI is here to stay. B2B sales is at an incredible juncture, as AI continues burrowing into workflows and processes. The near future is going to be an exciting period to witness how the life of the salesperson changes.
I believe the most successful sales professionals won’t be those who resist technology, nor those who embrace it blindly. It will be those who master the balance – using tech to handle the dabbe (the commoditised parts of the job) while preserving their uniquely human ability to connect, understand, and build trust.
