{
  "id": 14237487,
  "title": "This is the one role founders should absolutely outsource",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/13/this-is-the-one-role-founders-should-absolutely-outsource",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-10-13T15:46:18.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91615987/founder-selling-doesnt-scale-founders-technology-sales-marketing-scaling"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Founders should outsource their sales responsibilities as their company grows. Initially, founders serve as the sole salespeople, but they often excel at it since they first identified the need for the product. However, as the sales force expands, founders may struggle to maintain their effectiveness. In a case study, a CEO of a rapidly growing enterprise software startup faced challenges with his expanding sales team, missing revenue targets for two consecutive quarters. The CEO sought help to understand why his team couldn't replicate his success, leading to the creation of a sales playbook. This playbook serves as a framework for salespeople, enabling them to learn from the founder's successful strategies and tactics. Once the playbook is in place, the CEO and his team analyzed and refined the key phrases used in successful sales to create consistent narratives for customer calls. By following this process, salespeople became more efficient, closing deals without the founder's direct involvement. Founders should focus on replicating their success by documenting and sharing their winning strategies. They should avoid relying on intuition and instead establish formal, repeatable processes. Scaling the sales organization should only be done after proving that new salespeople can reliably hit their targets using the established playbook. Once the initial growth phase is complete, founders should consider upgrading their executive team by bringing in a chief revenue officer (CRO) to handle the increased demands. As the sales team grows, specialized teams should be formed based on factors like customer size or industry. High-performing leaders should be hired or promoted for each specialized team, and pipeline meetings should be conducted at the team level, with the VP of sales only overseeing the overall performance. While giving direct reports more autonomy, founders must maintain oversight of key metrics to ensure the sales team remains aligned with the company's goals.",
  "summary": "In a startup’s earliest days, founders are the only salespeople by default. And founders who don’t have any previous sales experience are often surprised to find that they’re very effective at it. But this makes sense; after all, they’re the one who first saw the need for the product and drove its creation. A few years ago, I received a call from the CEO of a nascent but fast-growing and…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}