Hone your process

Founder-led sales is about discovering the best sales process for your product, your market, and you. After you see some positive returns and close your first 10 customers, you can start to tinker with your process.

This is why you need a process to adjust from, as well as a way of capturing your assumptions so you can constantly tweak.

Change when (and how) the demo happens

One lever you can pull is the difficulty your prospects have getting their hands on your product. You want it to be easy enough to get feedback, but not so easy that you end up chasing down people who were never going to pay.

"Freemium and self-serve things didn't work for us,” says Bobby Pinero, co-founder of Equals. “The thing that clicked was having everybody take an onboarding sales call with us, no exceptions. We had to understand what you were trying to do with the product and why you wanted it."

On the other hand, you may find your product is compelling enough that you want to do the opposite. Lorikeet found that “closed/won” deals had a five-day turnaround from qualifying call to demo. While the “closed/lost” deals averaged 21.

Meanwhile, Marty from Pylon told us the average deal length was 29 days.

“The faster and deeper we get a prospect interacting with a product, the better our win rate is,” says Steve Hind, co-founder of Lorikeet. “So we try and frame our sales process about accelerating to a demo.”

Recall.ai did a “trial refundable deposit”—requiring prospects to pay a refundable $500 while trialing. It was the right mix of friction and ease, and co-founder Amanda Zhu says that the conversion to paying customers was 99%.

Get good at disqualifying

A worse fate than having no customers is having a handful of demanding, not-quite-right customers. Middling customers give you the illusion you’re progressing.

Yoodli’s mission of leveling the communication playing field via online training lent itself to a B2C approach at first. But then the cracks started to show.

“Consumers will have upcoming speeches and interviews. They have a ‘hair on fire’ event to come and practice. But then what you find is that speeches and interviews are not always happening,” says Esha Joshi, co-founder of Yoodli. “You have this episodic behavior pattern, which can lead to inconsistent usage and unpredictable feedback, revenue, etc."

They have since successfully adjusted their sales process to focus on B2B providers, such as people teams and speech coaches.

"For a company that's really trying to scale and be like a generational company, you need to have faster loops of feedback and revenue to be able to get there," Esha says.

She doesn’t see it as a deviation, just as a step to the ultimate goal.

Go up (or down) market

June started out selling their product analytics software to startups like them. That didn’t last long.

"This market was terrible,” says Enzo Avigo, co-founder of June. “Their willingness to pay was super low. Churn was high because companies got out of business. It took us almost two years to decide that we wanted to move from pre-seed or seed to series A. And once we did that, everything was much better."

The company found its footing and eventually sold to Amplitude in August 2025.

"Better activation, better businesses that are more serious when they get started with you, paying more money, sticking around for a longer time because they don't die or they're less likely to die," Enzo says.

You’ll never stop honing your sales approach, but you will start to see diminishing returns.

When you can anticipate what each prospect is going to say before they say it and your calendar is starting to buckle at the number of sales calls you’re on, you’re ready to scale.

Until then, do it yourself.