The answer is very easy: just get the sales function handed over to someone outside your core teams.

There’s a seductive temptation to outsource the messiest, toughest function in business: sales. It’s not hard to see why. You’re battling product development, raising funds, managing a team, and building infrastructure, so why not hand sales to the “experts” while you focus on what matters, right?

Wrong!

Sales: The heart of your startup

Outsourcing sales in a startup is like outsourcing your soul;  it’s an integral part of your business, your culture, and your lifeblood. You give it away, you lose touch, and you’re left with little control over the single most important metric: growth.

When you’re in the early stages of building a business, your product is a moving target. It’s evolving, iterating, and refining with every user interaction. Sales is the frontline of feedback.

Your core team needs to be embedded in this process to understand customer pain points, needs, and preferences. This isn’t something you want to delegate to someone whose only stake is a paycheck and who has sold only standard easy-to-sell packs of banner inventory. When you outsource, you risk missing the unfiltered, raw insights that lead to better product decisions.

Also Read: How to use the psychology of gamification to grow e-commerce sales

If your team isn’t hearing customer objections, pricing concerns, and product feature requests firsthand, you’re disconnected from reality. That detachment slows progress. Salespeople aren’t just closers; they’re data gatherers who are essential to product development.

The dangers of outsourcing sales too early

Outsourced sales teams thrive on process, repetition, and predictability. But startups, especially in the early stages are messy, full of unknowns and pivots. Your product isn’t standardised yet, your customer base is still being defined, and your positioning is evolving. Outsourced teams excel at selling standardised packages, not fluid concepts that are in the experimental phase.

Outsourcing before you’ve hit a point of inflection, before your product has matured, can result in poor customer experiences and lost opportunities. Sales is more than just pitching; it’s about teaching and evangelising. You need people who know the company inside and out, people who are passionate about the mission, not mercenaries who are just passing through.

Outsourcing can often attract gravy train artists – people who’ve spent their careers selling established products, with clear price tags, to clients who already know what they want. They’re used to hopping on the train after it’s left the station, and they’re not the kind of people you want on your team. You’re in the trenches, grinding it out, and they’re just trying to make a quick buck by riding your coattails.

Startups demand hustlers who are comfortable with uncertainty, people who can roll with the punches and think on their feet. The gravy train artists are uncomfortable with ambiguity and friction; they don’t understand the hard work of creating something from nothing.

Then there are the “advisors” who promise to bring in big deals or land major clients if you just give them a few percentage points of equity. Here’s the truth: if someone is willing to trade their time for a sliver of your company, they’re not betting on your future; they’re hedging their bets on you doing the hard work. These promises are almost always smoke and mirrors. No one will sell your company as effectively as you and your core team will.

Your equity is sacred, and giving it away to anyone who says they can deliver isn’t just dangerous — it’s reckless. Save your equity for those who are in it for the long haul and who actually contribute to your growth in a measurable, tangible way.

Also Read: How to attract the first thousand users to your marketplace

Sales isn’t just another function, it’s a core strategic lever in your business. Handing it off too early is like outsourcing your product development or your culture. At the heart of every great startup is a deep connection between the team and the customer, and sales is the bridge that holds it all together.

Until you hit a point where your product is standardised, your customer base is defined, and you have repeatable, scalable processes in place, sales belong to the founders and the core team. Only then, once the foundation is solid, can you think about bringing in an external team to scale the operation.

Final thoughts

If you’re building a startup and are not hell bent on killing it in the first 12 months, keep sales in-house. Own it. Live it. Breathe it.

Sales is more than closing deals — it’s about learning, adapting, and pushing your company forward. You can’t outsource that. Not until you’ve hit that magical point of inflection where the sales process is so refined that it practically runs itself. You will know when you get there.

Until then, keep it close and beware of those who promise shortcuts, they’re almost always detours.

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This article was first published on September 16, 2024

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