Founders Don’t Need to Be Great Salespeople. They Need to Be Great at Hiring Them.

I recently came across a piece by Aaron Dinin in the Entrepreneurship Handbook titled “A Simple Question That Somehow Stops Every Founder From Being Good at Sales.” His diagnosis of how founders fumble the deceptively simple “What do you do?” question is sharp, and I agreed with much of it in a comment I left on the article. But the subtitle of the piece — the implicit assumption that founders need to be good at sales in the first place — is where I had to push back.

Here is my take: founders do not need to be great salespeople. They need to be honest about the fact that they aren’t – and then become great at hiring people who are.

The myth of the founder-as-superseller has done real damage to early-stage companies. We have romanticized the image of the charismatic CEO who can close any room, and as a result we have pressured technical, product-obsessed, or operationally minded founders into roles they are temperamentally and skill-wise unsuited for. The result is months — sometimes years — of slow pipelines, mispriced deals, and customer feedback filtered through a founder’s hopes rather than a buyer’s reality.

To be clear, founders absolutely need to sell at the very beginning. No argument there. The first ten or twenty customers are almost always sold by the founder, because there is no one else, no proof, and no playbook. But that early environment is far more forgiving than people admit. The first buyers are often friends, former colleagues, or technical peers who already speak the founder’s language. They forgive clunky pitches because they care about the founder’s success, or because they understand the technology well enough to fill in the gaps. That is not a representative sales motion. It is a tolerant one.

The trouble starts when founders mistake that early traction for sales aptitude. A founder who can sell to ten sympathetic insiders is not necessarily someone who can sell to a skeptical procurement team, a busy mid-market buyer, or a competitive enterprise account. Those audiences require pattern recognition, discipline, qualification, and emotional steadiness under pressure that are usually built over a career, not a quarter.

So, what should founders actually be great at? Identifying that gap, respecting it, and closing it with hires. The most underrated skill in early-stage leadership is the willingness to hire someone who is genuinely better than you at a function you secretly believe you can do. Great founders develop a clear-eyed view of what world-class looks like in a sales leader, recruit accordingly, and then give that person the authority, information, and air cover to win.

Surrounding yourself with people who are far better than you at things you are merely competent at is not a sign of weakness. It is the entire job. Sales happens to be one of the cleanest places to test whether a founder believes that or just says it, because the scoreboard is unforgiving and the feedback loop is short.

If a founder takes one thing from Dinin’s article and from this response, let it be this: getting better at the “What do you do?” question is useful. Getting better at hiring the person who never has to be coached on it is transformative.