Shifting from Founder-Led Sales to Founder-Led Marketing in B2B SaaS: A Guide for Early-Stage CMOs
The early days of a B2B SaaS company can be exciting, especially if you have an ARR between $0.5Mn and $5Mn. The issue is that sales often rely so heavily on the founder. They, the founder, carry all the authority, expertise, and deep understanding of the product and the market to resonate with potential customers. But, if the company is looking to scale, it’s essential to transition from Founder-Led Sales (FLS) to a more Founder-Led Marketing (FLM) approach. Here’s a good way to prioritize the shift.
Why The Transition?
Yeah, this is a good starting point…
Founders Sell Best, But It Doesn’t Scale
There’s no doubt that a founder, who knows the product or offering inside out, would sell it the best. Outside of their product knowledge, they’re also passionate. However, their passionate belief isn’t scalable in the long run. Sales is inherently one-to-one, limiting the founder’s capacity to take sales calls daily. To push growth to the next level, the founder needs to pivot towards activities with a broader reach and higher leverage.
The Sales Team Needs Your Authority: When a founder takes a step back from direct sales, win rates can take a hit. The founder's title and deep market understanding hold a lot of authority, which makes sales pitches highly effective. FLM will allow the founder to share thought leadership content, building trust and credibility at scale. This shift provides the sales team with “air cover,” making the brand’s reputation solid and keeping the founder’s authority visible to prospective clients.
Timing is Critical: This is probably the case with every transition that happens: timing will greatly impact your growth. Moving away from FLS too early can slow momentum, but waiting too long creates a bottleneck, stalling expansion. Based on the ARR mentioned in the intro and market dynamics, we see this shift happen between the $500L and $8Mn ARR mark.
How to Make This Transition
- Founder/Audience Fit: The goal of the FLM approach is to make the founder the #1 resource for your customers. They need to be relevant and have relevant insights that resonate with the target audience. As a quick example, if your ICP just so happens to consist of VPs of Engineering, the founder better have a background or knowledge of engineering. That means deep technical expertise or a strong market knowledge, not that they did AP Physics 1 and 2 in High school.
- A Content Engine MUST Exist: You can either make the decision to just pump out content that’s crap, or you can generate high-quality, founder-driven content that resonates across all channels. Try out some of these:
- Host Weekly Live Events: A weekly live session could be one of your best performers when it comes to engagement. All you have to do is share current market insights, interview industry experts, or just talk about the industry as a thought leader. This will generate unique content and build the credibility you need.
- Internal Founder Interviews: Let’s say you can’t make it to a live event or you’re just not that committed. Having someone from within your company interview the founder for some weekly thoughts can also work. Topics can be product updates or even some insights from prospects. The goal here is to get the founder to share their expertise.
- Quality Over Quantity is Still True: There’s a massive tsunami of content nowadays and AI hasn’t made our lives any easier – in this sense at least. With all of the content, only the best posts tend to stand out. Instead of looking to post daily, try focusing on producing one or two truly impactful posts each week. These posts should be insightful, thought-provoking, and directly relevant to the audience’s needs rather than bland, generic advice on topics like work-life balance (Do you know how many books exist on the topic? Exactly, too many.)
Analyze Performance and Double Down Where It’s Working
Using any social media platform or tool, whether it’s native to the platform or some third party tool, you can track which posts are performing the best. For a top-performing content type, you can leverage the insights in a slew of ways:
- Expand on Winning Topics: If you have a popular topic which is constantly performing well, create more like it!
- Run Paid Ads: If a piece of content is already performing well, try promoting the post to target accounts.
- Repurpose Content: Top-of-funnel content can usually be repurposed. For example, a blog post can be transformed into a podcast, a webinar, or multiple social posts. This is important to reach people across multiple platforms and formats.
- Use for Outbound: Whatever messaging is working the best on social can also be highly effective for outbound emails as well as on your website.
Takeaways
With your new, solid FLM strategy in place, you’ll be able to effectively leverage the founder’s authority and market expertise in order to provide sales with ongoing support. By building trust and demand through thought leadership and consistent, high-quality content, we lay the foundation for sustainable growth in the market and it’s done AT SCALE.
