Building a sales team for the first time isn’t easy. I’ve seen plenty of businesses struggle with it, and over the years, I’ve pinpointed key strategies that separate successful teams from those that flounder.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur launching your first team or a sales leader scaling an operation, these core principles will help you build a strong foundation for long-term success.

1. Start With Founder-Led Sales

Before hiring your first salesperson, you need to establish a clear, repeatable sales process. The best way to do that is founder-led sales.

As the founder, you know your product inside and out and care more about its success than anyone else. You also have firsthand insight into your customers’ pain points and how your product solves them.

During this phase, experiment with different messaging, refine your pitch and figure out what resonates most with your ideal customers. But don’t just sell—document everything.

I recommend documenting the following:

  • Prospecting tactics: How do you find and qualify leads? What tools do you use?
  • Sales scripts and messaging: What talk tracks work best? What email templates convert?
  • Objection handling: What are the most common objections, and how should reps respond?
  • Sales cycle stages: What steps should be followed from first touch to close?
  • Key metrics and benchmarks: What does success look like at each stage?

This hands-on experience helps validate your sales strategy and ensures that when you bring in your first hires, they have a proven playbook to follow.

2. Structure Your Sales Team for Success

Once you’ve nailed down your process, it’s time to build your team. One of the best structures I’ve seen for SMB and mid-market sales is the SDR and AE split model as these two roles require different skill sets:

  • SDRs focus on prospecting, list-building, and lead qualification. Their job is to identify and initiate conversations with potential customers, ensuring AEs have a steady pipeline of warm leads.
  • AEs handle in-depth discovery calls, product demonstrations, and closing deals. They take the qualified opportunities from SDRs and turn them into paying customers.

Trying to combine these roles often leads to problems. You might get someone great at prospecting but weak at closing or an AE who prioritizes closing deals while prospecting takes a backseat.

Separating these functions ensures a consistent flow of new opportunities and a more efficient sales process.

3. Focus on Sustainable Growth

I get it. You want to grow your sales team as fast as possible. But scaling too quickly can do more harm than good. If you expand without the right foundation, you risk sacrificing customer satisfaction, overextending resources, and creating inefficiencies that slow you down in the long run.

If you invest too heavily in hiring and training before your foundation is solid, you might neglect other crucial areas of your business. Onboarding new salespeople takes time, and until they’re fully ramped, your overall performance could take a temporary hit. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize quality over quantity.

Once you’ve nailed your product-market fit and built a repeatable sales process, you can scale your team in a way that’s both strategic and sustainable.

Final Thoughts

Yes, you’ll be wearing multiple hats, but use this time to refine your pitch, document your process, and truly understand what makes your customers buy. No one will sell your product better than you in the early days—your passion, knowledge, and conviction are your biggest assets.

Only once you’ve built a repeatable, scalable process should you bring in your first sales hire.

Explore Further: Recommended Resources

  • Podcast: Implementing Rules of Engagement with Joe Venuti

In my interview with Joe, he explains that rules of engagement (ROE) are a set of principles that guide how sales teams operate, and how their absence can lead to major pitfalls.

If you’ve made your first hires and are working on building your team structure, it’s important to understand how to implement them.

Give it a listen here:

  • Webinar: Building a Sales Team from Scratch: David Kreiger on Lessons for New and Growing Agencies

Tim Condon, CRO at Clutch, invited me to share strategies for owners on building their first sales team. You can find my tips in detail here.