What Did Early-Stage Sales Leaders Exactly Sign Up For?!
I’ve spent the last 5 years (since early 2020) working with VPs of Sales and early-stage sales leaders, mostly in SaaS companies or other tech-driven organizations.
The biggest problem early-stage sales leaders face is: Burnout.
When you step into an early-stage company, you’re expected to figure everything out from scratch. There’s no playbook, no scalable process, and often, no support. You’re the strategist, the prospector, the closer, and the nurturer—all rolled into one.
The reality is early-stage sales leaders rarely walk into a well-oiled machine. Instead, here’s what Early-Stage Sales leaders face in their new roles:
- Inheriting the Founder-Led Sales Process
The founder’s been doing all the selling. They’re booking meetings, closing deals, and nurturing relationships. It’s messy, undocumented, and 100% reliant on the founder’s intuition. - A Blank Slate
There’s nothing. No pipeline, no playbook, no established process. The sales leader has to build everything from scratch.
3 Critical Tasks Every Newly Hired Sales Leader Faces
Whether taking over from a Founder or starting from scratch, every early-stage sales leader faces these 3 critical tasks:
- Generating Leads (Without Marketing)
Most early-stage companies don’t have a marketing department—or if they do, it’s a design team, not a lead generation engine. The sales leader must figure out how to generate leads with limited resources. - Closing deals
Closing deals is essentially why the sales leader is brought in. They need to find a way to leverage existing pipeline and successfully close high-value opportunities, in the shortest time possible in order to show that the investment in their salary is worth it. - Nurture and Upsell Existing Clients
For companies with an existing customer base, sales leaders must immediately build relationships, gather feedback, and find upsell opportunities to drive growth.
After quickly exhausting the little pipeline that exists and going through their rolodex, Early Stage Sales Leaders often find themselves with a thin pipeline. They quickly realize they need more meetings and this is where the biggest trap of early stage sales is sprung.
The Biggest Mistakes Early-Stage Sales Leaders Make
Here are four biggest mistakes early-stage VPs of Sales make in their new roles:
- Spending time on low leverage activities like cold outreach
- Overwhelmed by ineffective cold outreach tactics
- Relying on Field sales and events to drive demand
- Scrappy, Ineffective Hiring
1. Spending time on low leverage activities like cold outreach
With the Founder and investors breathing down their necks, Early Stage Sales leaders often dive into cold outreach themselves. They spend hours upon hours prospecting, sending cold emails, doing cold calls, sending LinkedIn DMs, trying to build relationships as fast as possible in a new industry.
Some success gets made, a few meetings get booked, but every single sales leader asks themselves: “Am I the best person for this task?”
Because every minute spent on prospecting is a minute not spent doing sales.
There are those who are experts in cold outreach, or have fairly recently transitioned from a prospecting role, but in reality, sales leaders doing prospecting just leads to them getting overwhelmed by realizing the tactics they used to know are not producing results.
Which leads us to the problem number 2:
2. Overwhelmed by ineffective cold outreach tactics
Most VPs of Sales come from a background as Account Executives or sales managers, where they relied on SDRs or marketing teams for pipeline. Now, they’re expected to do everything themselves.
The problem?
- The Game Has Changed: Old call scripts and email templates from 10 years ago no longer work. Most attempts land in spam folders or get ignored.
- They Waste Precious Months: Struggling to book meetings using outdated tactics delays results and drains their energy.
The outcome: wasted 3 to 6 months of building lists, doing cold outreach with little to no results.
Most folks at this point decide to go old school:
3. Relying on Field sales and events to drive demand
Many early-stage companies rely on in-person events to drive leads. But these events rarely deliver immediate results. You can spend months attending them and end up with nothing to show for your efforts.
Take a VP of Sales I worked with recently: after months of attending events, it hadn’t generated any tangible pipeline. The ROI? Awareness, not revenue.
4. Scrappy, Ineffective Hiring
Realizing that everything in their books has not produced results, early stage sales leaders often decide to hire an SDR in house. Here’s where they go very wrong:
- Hiring juniors reps: They bring in entry-level reps, expecting them to figure everything out on their own.
- Hiring reps from well established companies: A rep selling Salesforce has a significantly different skill set than someone who’s supposed to sell a product without a clear product market fit.
- No GTM Playbook: They skip the hard work of building a go-to-market strategy or a detailed sales development playbook.
*Avoid hiring mistakes. Use our SDR Interview Guide to identify the right candidates for your team.
Eventually this strategy burns through another 3 to 6 months, with the pipeline still dry and the revenue numbers painfully lagging behind the projections.
Why Delegating Lead Generation is Critical
Here’s the hard truth that every early stage sales leader falls on eventually: one person can’t do it all. Not for long, anyway.
The best sales leaders I’ve worked with understand the importance of prioritization. They focus their energy on closing deals, building relationships, and scaling processes—not cold outreach.
But if you must prospect, here’s a Quick and Dirty Prospecting Activity List for Early Stage Sales Leaders that you can use as a sales strategy for early-stage companies:
- Ask existing customers for referrals. A simple question like, “Do you know anyone else who might benefit from this?” can open a lot of doors, especially if the product is actually good.
- Tap into your rolodex. Identify contacts from your past roles or professional network who might align with your ICP and reach out: “Just made a change to this awesome {{companyType}} company. We’re selling {{product}} to {{ICP}}. Considering you fit the bill, would you help me out and check out the product – I’d love your feedback?”
- Post on LinkedIn. Announce your new role and share the problems you’re excited to solve. Try to drive reach and attention to your post by focusing on the pains and problems your new solution solves.
- Reach out to your whole first-degree connection network on LinkedIn. Find people who are relevant to what you’re selling and simply ask them: “Do you know someone who might need this?”
- Reconnect with closed lost opportunities. Dig into existing CRM or spreadsheets to identify deals that fell through. Reach out with updated messaging to revive those conversations.
However, the most successful Early Stage Sales leaders quickly find ways to delegate their lead generation process.
3 Ways for Sales Leaders to Delegate Lead Generation
Sales leaders generally have three options when it comes to delegating lead generation in order to scale lead generation in startups:
- Hire SDRs In-House
This gives you direct control, but it’s painfully expensive. Recruiting, onboarding, and training take time—and in early-stage companies, time is money. - Use a Cold Outreach Agency
Agencies are great for quick wins, but they often struggle without clear ICPs or a refined GTM strategy. Without those, you risk wasting money on unqualified leads. Even if they figure out the ICP and start generating qualified leads, those insights remain with the agency, making you reliant on their services. - Outsource to an SDR Provider
Outsourcing is one of the most efficient options for early-stage sales leaders. SDR outsourcing partners like SDR Hire deliver trained SDRs who ramp up quickly, align with your ICP, and generate high-quality meetings—all without the overhead of in-house hires.
Benefits of Outsourcing SDRs for Early Stage Companies
Early stage companies and their sales leaders delegate sales development tasks to outsourcing companies because it solves three key problems:
- Speed
Outsourced SDRs are ready to go. No hiring delays, no long onboarding periods. You can go from 0 to the first meeting in as little as one week. (Check out the SDR Onboarding Workbook) - Cost Efficiency
You save on salaries, commission, benefits, and infrastructure costs. - Expertise
Top providers hire SDRs with experience in cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn outreach, social selling, making them just as effective—if not more so—than in-house teams. - Scale
The Outsourced SDR model allows sales leaders to hire and fire as quickly as needed. They can exchange reps in a matter of days, bring on board more reps as they open up new markets or fire reps who are underperforming without the usual hassle of dealing with Legal and HR.
*Get immediate access to experienced SDRs. Explore our list of SDR candidates ready to be hired and to deliver results.
Prerequisite For Hiring SDRs: You Need a GTM Strategy
Outsourcing SDRs works best when your GTM (go-to-market) strategy is solid. If you’re still figuring out your ICP, messaging, or process, you’ll struggle to see results.
That’s why I recommend starting with a GTM assessment. Check out our free First-SDR Readiness Checklist. It’ll help you evaluate whether your organization is ready to hire SDRs and what gaps need to be filled first.
How SDR Hire Helps Early-Stage Sales Leaders
At SDR Hire, we specialize in helping early-stage companies:
- Define their GTM strategy.
- Access high-quality global SDR talent.
- Scale their sales process without burning out.
We’ve worked with 20+ companies over the last 5 years building their outbound sales motions and hiring SDRs for their teams. Our 7-step SDR Recruitment Process ensures you get SDRs who align with your goals and start delivering results immediately.
If you’re ready to scale your SDR function, book a call with our team today.