Your product won’t sell itself

How to build a world-class sales team

America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts

Editor’s Note: Today’s piece is from a16z Crypto’s Jason Rosenthal, on the essentials of setting up a sales team—send it to every early-stage founder you know. Prior to a16z Jason worked with Ben Horowitz at Opsware. You can read more from Jason and the a16z Crypto team in their excellent newsletter.

Founders obsess over product details: features, UX, performance, reliability, and documentation. Now imagine applying that same intensity to sales and go-to-market.

Technical founders sometimes have an aversion to investing in go-to-market and sales, believing that the best products sell themselves — but that’s not the case. And it’s especially true now that we’ve entered the enterprise adoption era of crypto. So building an effective enterprise sales organization is one of the most powerful motions for scaling a company after finding product-market fit. A world-class sales team can be just as important and effective as an outstanding engineering team, and it can unlock new levels of growth and operational excellence that competitors can’t replicate.

It can also be surprisingly exciting and satisfying — even for deeply technical, product-oriented founders — to build a sales organization. The reason is simple: success here is tangible and metrics-driven. You can literally count the number of marquee account wins and losses, see how this translates into increased revenue, and quickly separate the 100x performers from the also-rans.

Here’s a step-by-step playbook to help you build a world-class enterprise sales organization.

Step one: Build the right team

Sales Leader

The first and most critical hire is your sales leader. They lead all revenue efforts across the company and design the sales playbook: how the organization goes to market, how it operates day to day, and how deals are won. This role shapes the processes by which campaigns are fought and victories are secured.

You must give this leader a seat at the table. They should report directly to the CEO and participate in executive staff meetings alongside other senior leaders so they are fully integrated into company strategy and decision-making. Otherwise you’re not signaling that sales is a priority in the organization, or are siloing it too much as a function.

Founders often make two mistakes when building a sales organization. The first is starting by hiring junior sales talent to “explore the market” before bringing in a sales leader. This strategy almost always fails. The main reason is that any enterprise sales leader who’s worth their salt will want to hire and shape their own team.

The second mistake is waiting too long to hire this role because founders believe they themselves are the best salesperson for the company. Early on, it’s true that a CEO can be the company’s most effective salesperson. They know the product intimately, they have “the divine flame” of the company burning brightly inside of them, and customers love to talk to a founder and CEO.

But if the CEO remains the primary salesperson for too long, it prevents the company from moving quickly enough to capture the market opportunity. So the best time to make the first critical sales hire is once a founder believes that they’ve achieved product-market fit or are on the cusp of doing so. Waiting too long to fill this seat risks competitors getting ahead and defining the market on their terms, potentially boxing you out.

When searching for a sales leader, it’s critical to find someone who has previously written a playbook for selling new technology into a new market, rather than someone who may have successfully executed a playbook that was designed by someone else. This role requires both creativity and experience to design the right plan and process for your company.

Ideally, this experience includes bridging frontier technology and selling it to new customers and markets. Other core competencies: operating in regulated environments; and the ability to translate technical innovation into enterprise outcomes like ROI, performance, compliance, and reliability. These are all key criteria enterprise buyers often use when making purchase decisions.

Sales leaders also need the discipline to build an auditable, repeatable sales process — and the judgment required to recruit strong enterprise sales talent. The best sales leaders are missionary leaders who attract like-minded, hardcore enterprise sellers.

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Account Executives

The next most important role is the Account Executive (often referred to as an AE or account exec). The AE interfaces directly with prospective customers and introduces your technology into enterprise accounts. The AE maps the customer organization. They must identify the true decision makers and communicate the value proposition in a way enterprise buyers understand and will respond to.

Successful account execs typically have prior experience selling similar products into related markets. Because they often come with a deep rolodex, founders often assume that the right account executive will unlock doors through their pre-existing relationships. But this rarely works in practice. Enterprise decision makers change frequently.

What matters far more is demonstrated ability to close large deals, navigate complex organizations, and win against strong competition. You can easily assess this in interviews because salespeople have clear metrics and outcomes, and treat these wins as their scoreboards.

Account executives are commonly organized either by vertical or geography. How many AEs you should hire depends on two factors: the number of potential accounts that require active outreach, and the number of deals each AE can manage simultaneously.

One helpful tool for determining this is to run a bottom-up analysis: Estimate how many active deals you expect over the next twelve months and how many deals a single AE can realistically handle. From there, calculate how many account executives you need. While the exact number is market- and product-dependent, this approach usually produces a reliable first-pass coverage model.

Some words of caution: First, don’t let your closest competitors out-cover you. If they’re the first to reach the most important accounts in your market, they’ll shape the customer’s requirements and define the rules of engagement — leaving you stuck competing against their playbook, from messaging to positioning, instead of your own. Second, avoid hiring account executives before finding product-market fit. Otherwise most AEs will struggle to sell products customers do not yet understand.

Solutions Architect

Solutions Architects, sometimes called sales engineers, are the next essential role in building a winning sales organization. Their role is to translate the company’s technical capabilities into the customer’s business and operational outcomes. They serve as a bridge between customer needs and the product and engineering teams. Through this feedback loop between product, engineering, and customer needs, solution architects surface product gaps, identify future requirements, and ensure the product evolves in the direction leading customers’ demand. This virtuous cycle strengthens both the product and the sales motions.

Since the CEO knows the product better than anyone, they often end up spending a significant amount of time translating the product and value proposition to customers. But upon hiring a solutions architect, the CEO can offload a significant amount of early sales process and sales calls. For this to succeed, the CEO must train the solutions architect directly so they can communicate value as effectively as the founder; this sometimes involves shadowing the CEO in initial sales meetings, or sharing sales training decks

A strong Solution Architect paired with a great AE and a compelling product is a lethal combination.

Solution Architects work closely with enterprise customers to determine how your company’s product can integrate new capabilities into their existing technology stacks. In the case of crypto, where significant amounts of money and value are transferred across blockchains, institutional customers almost always rely on complex existing infrastructure. The solution architect plays a critical role in helping enterprise customers understand how everything fits together, as well as relaying product requirements back to the company — ensuring that the right interfaces and integrations are built.

It may seem obvious, but successful solution architects must have strong communication skills. They spend roughly 70 percent of their time with customers and 30 percent translating insights internally. Solution architects should also be technically oriented, although they do not need to be hardcore developers.

I recommend hiring the first solution architect at the same time you bring on board your first account executive, since they often work closely together. Don’t worry about having one-to-one mapping between a solution architect and an AE; one solution architect can often support multiple AEs at the same time.)

Sales Development Representatives

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) generate qualified leads for account executives through email, social, and phone outreach. They perform early qualification — triaging, basically — before passing leads downstream to the account executives.

As a company starts to scale revenue, sales development reps become an increasingly important source of new leads. Historically, SDR roles were populated by junior sales hires aiming to become AEs. But with the advent of AI-assisted sales tools , the SDR role now has a more quantitative dimension. SDRs can use data to understand which outreach channels and specific messages are converting best, and adjust their approach accordingly.

The first SDR should be hired only after the head of sales, first AE, and first solutions architect are in place – again, all after product-market fit. Because even if SDRs generate leads, without a mature process to convert them, those leads will be wasted.

Sales Operations

The head of sales operations ensures the machine runs efficiently. This role ensures the team follows processes, maintains accurate forecasts, and designs the sales funnel so leadership can allocate resources based on data rather than just intuition. This role usually reports to the head of sales.

The head of sales ops should be hired only after you’ve already filled the positions covered above (head of sales, sales rep, solution architect, sales development). This person’s role is to scale and tune the machine — not to build it. If you don’t already have the essential capabilities in place for lead generation, technical selling, and relationship management, then the machine your head of sales operations is meant to optimize will be incomplete.

The sales ops role is usually interrupt-driven: There’s always a fire somewhere in the pipeline. It’s essential to hire someone who can parallel-process multiple streams of incoming data and information, yet also dive deep into the details when necessary. Throughout all of this, they must remain calm under pressure.

Sales ops will not fix a broken sales motion or weak product. If deals are consistently lost due to weak differentiation, late entry, or product gaps, the root cause lies elsewhere. If you’re losing deals versus the competition; or are second or third into the accounts that matter; or have a value proposition that isn’t resonating with the market, then don’t fool yourself into thinking that investing in sales ops is going to solve those problems.

Customer Success

Once you’ve won a hard-fought deal, it’s critical to ensure the product is properly implemented and hitting the key business metrics for which the customer purchased the product in the first place. The customer success function ensures customers achieve the outcomes that justified their purchase.

The customer success goal is retention, expansion, and referenceability: ensuring customers stay with your product; upselling and expanding their use of the product as fitting; and serving as references when the customer is highly satisfied over time

A customer success associate will also regularly channel deep product insights back to the product and engineering teams. They identify product gaps and critical third-party integration needs, like which external systems the product must connect with to ensure customer success. They also surface sources of implementation friction that you can address through ongoing product development, making future deployments faster and more seamless.

Successful customer success associates must be very customer service oriented, taking on a client-facing approach each day with a can-do attitude. They also must be excellent multitaskers, juggling multiple issues and clients simultaneously. When finding customer success associates, there’s a huge talent pool to draw from in B2B SaaS — basically every software company from Box to Oracle to Salesforce and so on that has a recurring revenue vs. on-premise software model. Employees from these kinds of organizations will have seen all kinds of escalations and team configurations so will have lots of experience to bring.

Hire the first customer success employee once you’ve landed your first lighthouse customer — not just any paying customer but the one that is aligned best with your product/ market and future growth — and that deployment starts to scale. Otherwise, you risk your product and engineering team getting sucked into a full-time customer support and satisfaction role, which is not the highest investment of their time.

Step 2: Building a repeatable sales process

Sales organizations, like software development processes and factories, perform best when they are built on a clear, repeatable process. Each member of the sales field organization viscerally understands the playbook and knows the role they need to play. Doing so is what separates good sales teams from great sales teams.

Ask yourself:

What exact steps should your business development reps, account executives, solutions architects, and customer success associates follow to give your company an unfair advantage in winning deals?

This question covers everything from how you first approach a customer, to the written and presentation materials required at each stage of the sales campaign. The goal is to ensure your company is setting the agenda, defining the requirements, and boxing out the competition.

Once you’ve defined this process, it must be instrumented. Monitor its health at every step, including in your weekly forecast calls, so you understand where each deal stands and what the true win probability is. At the early stage of a sales buildout, companies often fail to distinguish which deals matter most. Not every deal is created equally, and understanding this can be helpful for sales forecasting and then building your pipeline to your customers.

You should invest significant effort in winning the deals that shape the market and influence future buyers, especially in enterprise sales where later customers look to early, sophisticated buyers for validation. Winning these lighthouse accounts early on is critical, both for your revenue goals and company evolution — losing them also creates openings competitors are eager to exploit.

Frame the decision as either a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or an existential threat to avoid, prompting urgency and a clear motivation to buy today. This requires a deep understanding of your prospective customer’s strategic business priorities and the ability to map your product capabilities directly to solve those problems. That might mean reducing existential competitive threats, improving audit and compliance posture, cutting costs, or enabling a high-return new line of business.

If you’re in a competitive dog fight with another company, lay traps and landmines for them. If you possess capabilities competitors lack, ensure those capabilities become central to the customer’s decision-making process. Your competition will find themselves unable to achieve the same results or demonstrate that capability. You can even define terminology and key metrics on your terms, so that when the competition sells after you, you’ve biased the customer to your worldview.

Creating internal champions for your product is equally critical. In most enterprise deals, there are at least three key decision-makers: the end user (who will encounter your product day-to-day); the manager accountable for results; and the executive sponsor. If you can become the preferred choice for all three of those buyers, your chance of winning the deal is close to 100%. If, however, you have a great relationship with the executive sponsor, but the end user and the manager prefer another product, that’s a much more difficult deal to win. You must think about what steps you can take to win each one of those parties.

You may also encounter detractors within an account — someone who prefers a competitor’s product because they have a relationship with that company, or someone who has worked with a sales rep from the competitor before. In this case, it’s important to think through how you can turn them into a champion. If that’s not possible, attempt to neutralize their influence and impact on the overall decision by finding other champions, sharing data or references they can’t argue with, and so on.

Every enterprise sales organization experiences the pain of lost deals. When this happens, it’s important that you run an after-action review process where you review the deals that you lost, and try to understand what went wrong. Were there product gaps that caused the loss that you previously didn’t know about? What are the steps that you can take to fix them? Understand whether the loss stemmed from product gaps, late entry into the sales cycle, or execution failures, and feed those insights back into product and sales processes.

Finally, you must ensure that your entire sales organization is well trained on your sales process. The best way to do this is to put every new hire through a training boot camp, where you drill them on the key attributes of the product and the technology. Walk them through the sales process so that they know what to do and when. Most importantly, every single member of the team should walk through a simulation of a competitive deal. This way they know what it feels like to operate under pressure and competitive tension, and have responses and strategies in place.

Step 3: Avoiding common mistakes

I’ve already mentioned a couple of common mistakes: believing that your technology is so great that it can sell itself. It won’t. Get over it. Second is making your first sales hire a junior sales account executive who can “explore opportunities” rather than focusing on a strategic high impact ahead of sales.

Next? Assuming that a bottom-up, developer-led approach to sales will work within large enterprises. Many of the last generation’s successful companies — including Stripe and Twilio — were able to gain early momentum by selling to developers first. The same has been true in crypto. But to penetrate the largest and most complex accounts, relying solely on a developer-led approach simply will not work. Focusing on developers can be amazing for developing early technical champions within an account, but it’s still an absolute requirement that you master the process of selling to managers, executives, and navigating complex procurement processes.

Finally, you can’t allow the competition to be first into the most important and strategic accounts. When this happens, you’re giving your competition the opportunity to define the rules of engagement and the key feature requirements and capabilities for a given sale. You must be first into the most important accounts so that you’re able to set the rules of engagement and make everybody else follow them.

Step 4: Creating a culture of improvement

Creating a culture of continual improvement is crucial in building a winning sales organization. With constantly changing technology and market cycles, the best sales teams relentlessly incorporate new data and learning into their processes. If a sales organization isn’t improving, it’s falling behind.

At the core of improvement are three questions:

1. Why should the customer do anything at all?

2. Why should they act now?

3. Why they should choose you?

The organizations that consistently refine and strengthen their answers to these questions win disproportionately. Continual improvement also requires not just winning but retaining the lighthouse customers who set the tone for the rest of the market. The largest and most sophisticated buyers create the signals that future customers follow, positioning your company for long-term success.

Another critical element is a rigorous win-loss analysis each quarter. Understanding exactly why deals were won or lost allows insights to compound across sales execution, product development, implementation, and positioning. The questions to ask:

• Over the past quarter, which deals were won and which were lost?

• For the deals you won, why did you win them?

• For the deals you lost, why did you lose them?

• What improvements can you make to increase your win rate?

• What improvements do we need across the company to improve the sales process?

• What changes should we make within the sales team to improve outcomes?

• What product improvements would help increase the win rate?

• How do we improve implementation?

• How can we improve market strategy and positioning?

• Are we incorporating learnings from these win-loss analyses into our process?

• Are these learnings helping results compound quarter over quarter?

• How strong is our sales hygiene?

• Is the team consistently following the sales process?

• Is the team executing the sales plan with force and precision?

These questions may seem basic, but many sales organizations never bother asking them in any consistent way. These learnings compound over time and steadily improve results. Maintaining strong sales hygiene is equally important: Ensure your team is following the process with discipline rather than assuming their compliance.

Finally, continual improvement means studying how your smartest customers use your product. Reducing friction and increasing ROI for them creates insights that feed back into product, marketing, and sales motions: a virtuous circle for both your customer and your company.

***

The first lesson is accepting that technical products don’t sell themselves. The second is figuring out sales. But it’s these details in between — the right hires; the best lighthouse customers; continual improvement feeding back into your sales process, product, and people — that will really help you win.

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