I don't want to be the best salesperson in my company

I don't want to be the best salesperson in my company.

Partly because it's not hard. There are two of us.

But mostly because, if I am, the company has a problem with my name on it.

The founder sells, until he can't

In a small company, the founder sells. It's almost a law of nature. Nobody knows the product better. Nobody cares more. Nobody else is available.

I've done my share. Cold prospecting from Olot. Emails. Calls. Explaining for the hundredth time what we do and why it's worth it.

And it works. Up to a point.

The point is your own calendar. A founder who sells is a founder who isn't building, answering clients or thinking. Every hour you sell is an hour you take from somewhere else. Usually from the product. Sometimes from sleep.

It also has a nastier side. If sales depend on me, then on any week I'm tired, busy or simply somewhere else, sales stop. The company doesn't have a sales process. It has a founder with good weeks and bad weeks.

If only the founder can sell it, you don't have a product. You have a founder with a side job.

What a product has to say on its own

I've come to think the real test of a product isn't whether I can sell it. Of course I can. I'm the one who built it, and I'm biased.

The test is whether someone else can sell it without me in the room.

That forces uncomfortable questions. Can you explain it in one sentence? Is the price clear enough that nobody has to improvise a quote? Does the promise survive being repeated by someone who doesn't know how it works inside?

If the answer is no, the problem isn't the salesperson. It's the product, or the way we talk about it.

That's the question I keep asking about PagoCRM. Not how to sell more of it myself. How to make it simple enough that, one day, the sale could be handed over. Because to hand something over, it first has to fit in someone else's hands.

Letting someone else talk about your baby

I suspect the hard part won't be the money. Sharing a margin is easy to accept on paper.

The hard part will be letting someone else describe what you built. They'll use different words. They'll stress things you wouldn't. They'll skip the part you're proudest of.

Just imagining it stings a bit. I think that's healthy.

Because the alternative is a company that can only grow as fast as I can talk. And that's a ceiling, not a strategy.

There's also the freedom angle, as usual. No investors means nobody forces us to build a sales team. It also means nobody pays for one. So the only way to sell without it costing my whole week is to make selling not depend on me.

I don't want to be the best salesperson in my company.

I want to be the one who isn't needed for the sale.

P.S. I'll still take the call if you ring. I just hope by then someone else picks up first.