Sales · Partnerships · Leadership
When to build your own sales team: ours beat our biggest partner in five months
For our first years, partners did all of Finest Future's selling, and they took us into 15 countries without a single salesperson on our payroll. Then their attention drifted and our numbers stalled. We built our own sales team in Vietnam, and within five months it was out-selling our biggest partner. This is when to make that move, and how.
Short answer
- Do not hire salespeople first. Every salary makes the clock tick. Sell through partners until about ten partnerships have taken you past a million a year in revenue.
- Build your own team when partners have shown you what sells, to whom and at what price, and when their focus starts drifting to other products.
- Another sign: customers know your partners' names but not yours. You have to own the customer.
- Our team won its first direct customers within one or two months, and in five months it was beating our biggest partner.
- Keep the partners. We moved towards franchising and branded partnerships, so our own brand travelled with every sale.
Why not hire salespeople from day one?
Because hiring makes the clock tick. Every month you pay salaries, your fixed costs go up, and you give yourself a deadline by which you have to succeed. Partners are paid from the revenue they bring in, so they let you try, fail and learn without betting the company on it. That is how we grew without a sales team, and the method is in the partnership playbook.
My rule of thumb: ten good partnerships should take you past a million a year. At that point you have a bankroll that lets you make hiring mistakes and survive good and bad sales months. Now you can start building your own sales army.
What are the signs it's time to build your own team?
Your partners' attention is drifting
Working only through partners has one big downside: you depend on their performance. When a new shiny product comes along that makes them more money, they stop focusing on yours. We saw that happen more and more. Results stalled, and in some cases they started to fall.
You know what sells
Years of partner sales had taught us what worked in which market, to which customers, at which price. That knowledge is what makes a direct team work quickly. Without it, you are paying salespeople to run the experiments your partners already ran for free.
Your customers don't know your name
Partners sell under their own company names. That is a fair trade: you spend nothing on marketing, they spend on their own brand. But it means every sale builds their brand, not yours. We had students in our programmes who did not know they were in our programmes. They thought they had joined one of our partners'. As a CEO, that upset me. I was happy with the revenue and unhappy with the branding.
The customer should know who they are dealing with. If something goes wrong, they should come to you, and you should fix it. If they thank the partner and call you only when there is a problem, you have a problem. You need to own the customer.
How did we build the team?
We set up our own sales office in Vietnam. My background is in sales; I have sold since I was 21, in companies known for their sales culture. So on top of running revenue operations, I took on building a sales team and a marketing team in-house.
- People: we recruited salespeople and moved some of our own people from other roles into sales, people who already knew the product.
- Training: I did the first training myself.
- Commission: I built the whole commission structure before we launched.
The goal was to keep bootstrapping: grow the company without outside funding by adding sales offices of our own, instead of raising money to buy growth.
What happened next?
It took one or two months to win our first direct customers. Within five months our own team was selling more than our biggest partner. Student numbers grew, and so did the brand, because every sale now carried our name.
If it's your product, you know best how to sell it. Nobody should know better than you how to sell your own product.
What happens to your partners?
We did not drop them. A partner network is still a free sales resource with more people behind it than you have. What we changed was how our brand travelled. We built a franchise network and branded partnerships: partners use our brand and our proven concept, we earn a royalty, and the customer knows whose programme they are in.
Partners need looking after as much as customers do. Are they happy with how you treat them? Are they trained well? Do they feel included in decisions? Write the rules down, agree them early, and remember that business is business: things go wrong, and clear rules are what you fall back on.
A checklist before you hire your first salesperson
- Revenue first: are partners already bringing in enough that a bad hire will not sink you?
- Proof: do you know what sells, to whom and at what price, from real sales rather than plans?
- Scope: which markets or customers will your team sell to, and which stay with partners?
- Training: who trains the first salespeople? It should be the person who has sold the product.
- Commission: is the structure built and written down before the first day?
- Brand: will every customer know they are buying from you?
How the whole company was bootstrapped, from the first municipal deal to this point, is in the bootstrapping story.
Questions
When should a startup hire its first salesperson?
When you can afford to get it wrong. For us that meant selling through partners until revenue gave us a bankroll, roughly the point where ten partnerships take you past a million a year, and until partners had shown us what sells. Before that, the founder sells.
Should you stop working with partners once you have a sales team?
No. Partners are still sales capacity you do not pay salaries for. Change the terms instead, so your brand stays visible: franchising and branded partnerships did that for us.
How long does a new sales team take to deliver?
Ours won its first direct customers in one or two months and out-sold our biggest partner within five. We started with a proven product, years of partner data and people who already knew the product, which is why it was that fast.
What does "own the customer" mean?
That the customer knows they are dealing with you. They credit you when things go well, and they come to you when something goes wrong. If your partners get the thanks and you get only the complaints, you do not own the customer.
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