Going from 1 → 10 needs a sales engine.
Every founder here already knows that.
You got to 0 → 1 by selling yourself.
Through your network.
By closing the first customers personally.
That worked. But it doesn’t scale.
To grow beyond you, sales needs a system.
A GTM motion that runs even when you’re not in the deal.
So you hire an in-house sales team.
It’s too early for a full-time VP of Sales.
You step in as the VP, and bring in a sales consultant to set direction.
The plan is simple:
Build the sales engine
Hire a VP later to take it forward
Here’s where most founders get surprised.
As a founder, hiring a sales consultant won’t take you out of sales.
It pulls you even deeper into it.
Why?
Because the job of a sales consultant is to give advice on how sales should be done.
Execution still sits with the in-house sales team, and with you, the founder leading it.
(Hard to swallow that pill, right?)
At the 1 → 10 stage, sales doesn’t fail due to lack of advice.
It fails because there’s no single operator owning execution end-to-end.
Someone still has to:
Design the sales motion
Build playbooks
Run pipeline reviews
Coach reps week after week
Fix what’s breaking in real time
When no one owns this fully, it quietly falls back on the founder.
So instead of stepping out of sales, you get pulled deeper into:
Closing deals
Managing reps
Translating strategy into action
Holding revenue together
If you want to move from 1 → 10, you don’t need more advice.
You need a sales operating system;
owned by someone accountable for revenue, not recommendations.
One that reduces your dependence on hero selling
and builds a machine your team can actually run.
If this feels uncomfortably familiar, you’re not alone.
Most founders hit this wall at 1 → 10.
The fix isn’t more strategy decks.
It’s ownership.
→ Build a sales engine that runs without you.
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