CEO = Chief Salesperson

Because a successful entrepreneur ultimately must build a business that profitably sells a product to meet a sufficiently sized group of customers’ unmet needs, selling is one of the keys to success.

There are many elements to a successful startup, including the following incomplete list:

• Insights into unmet needs that lead to innovative products.
• Technical skills that enable novel product solutions.
• Leadership talents that attract a team to be part of the adventure.
• Operational skills that can translate one-offs into reliable and scalable systems.

However, for a founding CEO, the ability to sell is foundational. Do not despair technical founders who would much prefer to avoid persuading people to follow your lead! The essential competence, passion, integrity, and communication skills can be packaged alongside many personalities. Make no mistake, however, in thinking that cultivating sales skills is something that a startup CEO can skip over or just delegate to someone you can hire to fill a box on your organization chart.

Given how vital selling effectiveness is for a startup leader, if the startup CEO cannot do that initial selling, someone else likely should lead that startup.

The startup CEO is the face of the startup – and needs to be prepared to clearly and passionately sell ideas to various stakeholders, including potential investors, team members, and customers.

• At its most essential, fundraising is a form of selling. Fundraising is selling the company to potential investors. It involves all of the core sales elements, such as identifying an unmet need in the marketplace, articulating an innovative solution to that need, describing a value proposition that supports a future exit (such as a sale to an acquiring company), and handling the endless objections (aka potential investor questions) that will emerge in the fundraising process.
  
  
• Building a team involves another sort of selling. Recruiting dynamite team members willing to take a chance on a startup requires selling the vision, articulating emerging roles, and overcoming objections. At the earliest startup stages, the founding CEO will be involved in recruiting co-founders, employees, advisors, and service providers – and their authentic sales skills will be pivotal to the startup’s success.
  
  
• Once the product has been crafted, the startup CEO is typically the tip of the spear for closing the first sales, especially for B2B startups. In other words, for the very first phases of product launch/commercialization, the startup CEO is also the “Chief Salesperson” and “Chief Marketer” until the startup grows to a point where there is the capacity to expand the marketing and sales teams with dedicated professionals.  
  
  
• Ultimately, building a high-potential business will require strong CEO leadership. Leadership heavily relies on listening to understand needs, problem-solving to find workable solutions, and then selling to get others enrolled in executing well. These are all elements of effective sales.

Potential investors will understand the expectation that a startup CEO can sell. So well understood that one of the key characteristics that potential investors look for during the fundraising process is how well the startup CEO does at selling them on the opportunity. While, of course, they are evaluating the totality of the opportunity, they are also considering the CEO’s selling skills. The reasoning is that if the startup CEO cannot sell potential investors, they won’t be able to sell potential team members or carry the startup through its essential first commercialization steps. A lack of CEO sales skills is a significant risk factor for a startup. Therefore, when fundraising, remember that the startup CEO’s sales skills,  including the timeliness and effectiveness of their communication cadence as well as their persistence and follow-up – will be scrutinized carefully and considered a proxy for their ability to sell commercially in the future. Do not hesitate to demonstrate strong follow-up, objection-handling, and “proposal” crafting. In addition to how promising your “product” (a.k.a. startup) is, your sales skills also matter.