B2B Startup? Start with Sales!

Why product-led dreams need a sales-led foundation, but staying sales-only will eventually sink your startup.

If PLG was a perfume, it would be niche in scent, minimalistic yet psychedelic in design, with advertising that hints at exclusivity and belonging, while staying affordable price-wise.

It seduces founders into daydreaming about people lining up at the gates of their B2B castle in the sky, frantically waving credit cards and shouting "Shut up and take my money!" while golden coins rain down from the towers onto prancing pink unicorns.

There’s a seed of truth to this, only it becomes reality much later in a startup's lifecycle.

To get there, you need mundane, old-school sales. And no, not only for enterprise-focused products — the whole concept of attributing certain growth motions to market segments, while generally true, is an idea "with an asterisk" — too nuanced to be taken at face value.

Regardless of market focus, early B2B startups need human-led sales to reach PMF.

Here's why:

1. Market Intelligence

While the product team takes care of building product value with the help of insights they get from talking to the product users, founders need to grasp the bigger picture around the problem their software solves, such as:

• Who finds it most pressing

• What outcomes they want to achieve

• How they prefer to learn about solutions and how they evaluate options

• What they're willing to pay

• What conditions they expect

• What holds them back & what they fear

• Which words resonate with them

This is a different level of abstraction - think population sampling versus individual data points.

Prospecting, outreach, demos, and sales conversations are by far the best ways to study your market and gather intelligence that will lay the groundwork for scaled distribution and marketing, all while staying flexible and responsive to customer context to help secure those crucial early wins.

And let's be real — in B2B, the product itself is rarely the real driving force for customer acquisition, especially in the early days when many product-led acquisition approaches aren't even viable yet.

2. Foundation before Automation

Early startups are fluid by nature.

If we imagine a business as an equation, an early-stage startup would contain mostly variables, not constants. In order to solve the equation, the task is to determine the values of the variables to lock them in, turn into constants.

To give a product the ability to handle certain aspects and milestones of the customer journey autonomously (i.e. without human intervention), it must rely on carefully designed and programmed product flows that can't be built on shifting sands.

This doesn't mean everything needs to be figured out with 100% confidence to create self-serve flows, but product development isn't magic — it relies on concrete knowledge about the product user, their ecosystem of needs, problems, tasks, actions, and expectations.

​Until reaching stable market traction and product usage, a startup doesn't have the luxury to fully settle with these definitions — attempting to fixate them too early could mean solving for the wrong equation entirely.

This flexibility allows for rapid response and value building based on emerging customer and market insights.

​​

The Growth Sales Generalist

Who should be doing this work?

It all starts with founders, but at some point, there's more clarity about the market, some things start coming together (even though still messy), and in real life, founders have plenty of other responsibilities. Eventually, they need to delegate.

The challenge is that a typical salesperson might not be very effective at this stage — their value typically lies in scaling proven tactics through proven playbooks. Moreover, their motivation is linked to predictability of their pipeline, which is far from a given in a startup.

On the flip side, PMs and UXRs usually don't understand sales dynamics or relationship building with potential clients, viewing customer conversations purely as data collection opportunities rather than actual sales opportunities.

What the startup needs is a one-person orchestra who combines multiple roles: doing prospecting and outreach like an SDR, showing demos and talking price like an AE, helping with product training and coordinating problem-solving like CS.

This person should be driven to experiment — not just find 100 leads and email them, but try different templates, communication channels, materials, styles, and tones of voice. They need to work closely and transparently with other functions like marketing and product, not afraid to step on each other's toes, sharing and incorporating new knowledge from all available sources, united by a shared purpose.

​A Growth Sales Generalist, if you will. This person will develop the first version of the sales playbook that will repeatably earn that first million(ish) in ARR, only after which the startup can begin proper scaling and automating its sales function.

The Sales Breaking Point

The B2B software landscape is changing.

Before, the only way to sell software to a company was to find someone authorized to make purchasing decisions, and convince them of a dire necessity to use your product.

Today, employees and subordinates of that authorized person independently find products to solve their individual and team problems, and champion the purchasing decision in their company.

In the early startup days, this isn't a top of mind because nobody comes knocking. But upon achieving some degree of traction, you must open the gates to individual end-users and build infrastructure for them to explore, adopt and champion your product in their company, if you want to harness this Bottom-Up adoption force.

This is when human-powered sales breaks down, because salespeople are the wrong tool to drive end-user-driven adoption, and it would be a waste of money.

This processes must be delegated to product automation: convincing users of your solution effectiveness, turning them into signups, gathering their data, engaging them and their teams with the product, and translating this engagement into money.

By this time, the experimentation-fueled early sales has paid off — critical constants in the PMF equation are defined, making the startup ready for this transition.

The "Everything for Everyone" Startup Death Trap

Product-led growth is challenging and requires investment.

Some companies choose to focus on their sales growth motion and leave end-users unattended— not necessarily preventing usage, just not proactively investing in it. After all, the business is still shaky and needs those high-ACV clients to survive, so the product centers around their needs and wishes, leaving no time for anything else.

Eventually, the product becomes too complex, with too much unnecessary and unclear functionality, requiring even more human support to help existing customers make sense of it all.

While one client, for whom a new feature was just rolled out, stays — that previous one, neglected for six months, churns away. Then another.

​What do sales-led B2B companies do in this case?

They try to compensate by attracting new clients with redoubled effort. So what if the product has low ratings and clients complain? This is Product’s problem — they need to pull themselves together and start doing their job! Except product teams can't, because they're busy developing absolutely necessary features that must be done yesterday to land that promising prospect (who, predictably, doesn't land after all). No worries — we'll market these features to other customers and spend a great deal of human-hours convincing them they need these features.

​Meanwhile, sales pushes marketing to expand into adjacent markets (forcing product to create a new strategy to serve them — in the best case; in the worst, product remains unaware), which naturally brings in unqualified leads that now need to be converted with tripled effort. No worries, we can do it, we’re great at Sales! We just need to expand the CS team so that they have capacity to retain current clients through incredible effort (just for another quarter!)

And so the company falls into the trap of becoming Everything for Everyone which I deem to be one of the top reasons for B2B companies demise: it becomes impossible to turn down another sale that doesn't fit the ICP profile ("To hell with ICPs, they're limiting us!"), and money is now needed for more marketing, more sales, more customer support. ​

Product teams end up confused and burnt out, while product, design, and engineering leaders get replaced because they can't motivate their reports to deliver results - unacceptable given their salaries

So What?

Start with conversations with the market, find the best currently available way to reach and sell through creative, smart experiments, build a temporary sales system to earn the necessary capital for growth, and start investing in a long-term product-led growth system.

Good luck!

Subscribe to not miss my 0-1 PLG guide for B2B Startups to help you avoid the death trap and set up yourself for Product-Led Growth success!