Why Founders Need to Run Sales Before Hiring SDRs

Introduction

Before a startup can scale revenue, the founder has to sell.

In the early stages, outsourcing sales too soon is one of the most common mistakes we see across Lithuania and the wider EU SaaS ecosystem.

At GrowTech, we’ve seen both sides: startups that hired SDRs before understanding their buyer, and founders who built a repeatable sales motion themselves first. The difference isn’t just in revenue — it’s in clarity, positioning, and long-term scalability.

In 2025, founder-led sales is no longer a “bootstrap phase.” It’s the foundation of a go-to-market engine that data, AI, and automation can only accelerate after it’s been tested by the person who knows the product best.

1. Founders Who Sell Understand the Market Faster

In Lithuania’s growing startup scene, speed is everything. But speed without feedback is chaos.

When the founder runs the first 50–100 outbound conversations, they get real data — not surveys, not assumptions, but reactions from paying customers.

Why this matters:

• Founders learn which messages trigger interest or objections.
• They uncover who actually makes buying decisions (rarely who they first expected).
• They identify pricing thresholds and emotional triggers that SDRs later can’t guess.

This early sales activity becomes the foundation for everything: pitch, ICP definition, content strategy, and eventually, automation logic.

2. Early sales is a product test, not a revenue test

Every cold email, call, or demo run by the founder is a live usability test for the product.

It reveals what resonates, what confuses people, and what needs to be fixed before scaling the team.

Founders who avoid this phase often end up hiring SDRs to “fix” poor messaging — and spend months training them to explain features that even users don’t fully understand.

At GrowTech, we’ve seen the opposite approach win repeatedly:

Founders use early outreach to validate value propositions, document objections, and feed product iterations. When SDRs are finally hired, they’re not guessing — they’re executing a validated system.

3. The first 100 sales Conversations are your GTM blueprint

For Lithuanian and EU SaaS founders, those first outbound cycles are more than prospecting — they are the groundwork for scalable growth.

Here’s what a founder-led GTM phase should include:

1. ICP Mapping: Identify patterns in company size, roles, and industries that respond best.
2. Message Testing: Run 5–10 variations of outreach sequences to find the highest reply and conversion rates.
3. Objection Database: Document the top five reasons prospects hesitate — and how to handle each.
4. Feedback Loop: Feed insights directly to product, marketing, and operations.

These learnings form your sales playbook — not a theory, but a blueprint proven by real conversations.

4. When you hire SDRs too early, you hire confusion

Hiring sales reps before the founder has achieved message-market fit almost always creates noise. SDRs end up following unclear instructions, testing random value props, and losing motivation when results don’t follow.

Early hires fail when:

• The founder can’t explain the buying journey in detail.
• Messaging and ICP aren’t validated.
• The company expects SDRs to “figure it out.”

The cost isn’t just payroll. It’s brand damage and lost months of traction.

Founders who lead sales first protect their brand narrative and ensure that when SDRs come in, they’re scaling something real — not searching in the dark.

5. How founders can structure the first outbound cycle

Founder-led sales doesn’t mean random outreach. It can (and should) be structured and measurable.

Here’s a simple 4-week framework used by top-performing Lithuanian startups:

Week 1–2: Define your ICP and write three short value-driven outreach templates (email, LinkedIn, phone).

Week 3: Reach out to 100 targeted companies manually. Track every reply, objection, and sentiment.

Week 4: Analyze patterns—what messaging opened doors, which industries converted, and what feedback repeated.

The outcome isn’t just leads. It’s a validated narrative that can be scaled by SDRs later.

6. Data Turns Founder Sales into a Repeatable System

Once the founder sees clear patterns (winning copy, objections, pricing sensitivity), it’s time to operationalize the process.

This is where GrowTech’s data-driven approach helps—mapping activities into metrics and systems.

Use simple metrics like:

• Reply rate (%) per sequence
• Meeting booked rate (%) per 100 messages
• Conversion rate (%) from demo to closed deal

These KPIs become your first predictable revenue system—proof that the market responds. Only after these numbers stabilize should you invest in automation or hiring.

7. Founders who sell build stronger teams

Founders who’ve done sales themselves hire differently.

They understand what good conversations look like, what real effort means, and what kind of mindset SDRs need.

They don’t measure performance by “activity volume” but by measurable learning per iteration.

Their teams grow on experimentation, not fear.

By experiencing the grind firsthand, founders build empathy—and that empathy drives better training, stronger culture, and faster adaptation when markets shift.

8. From founder-led to system-led

The goal of founder-led sales isn’t to stay in it forever. It’s to transition from intuition to structure—from founder energy to system energy.

The ideal path looks like this:

1. Founder runs early outreach manually.
2. Market data shapes the playbook.
3. SDRs and AEs join to scale the process.
4. Automation and RevOps support efficiency, not replace insight.

This shift ensures the founder’s understanding of the buyer remains baked into the company DNA — even as sales becomes a team sport.

To sum up:

• Founders must sell before hiring SDRs—it’s the only way to validate the market.
• Early sales uncover real buyer psychology, not assumptions.
• The first 100 conversations create the GTM blueprint.
• Hiring too early leads to confusion, wasted time, and poor messaging.

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