A few years ago, I met a SaaS CEO running a company at about $3M in ARR. He had built it without a sales team and was proud of it. When investors pushed him to hire his first salesperson, he resisted. He didn’t like “sales-y” behavior, and he didn’t want outbound activity. He told me selling wasn’t how his company was going to grow.
That company is still sitting around the same revenue level today. The first sales hire came and left. So did the second. The CEO kept telling candidates to “join me” without being willing to lead the part of the business he was hiring them to run.
After 22 years of recruiting software sales talent and more than 12,000 interviews, I see a version of this CEO in many product-led growth companies. The product gets the company to a few million in ARR without a sales team, the founder concludes sales isn’t how growth happens, and the next stage of growth stalls while he keeps hiring and replacing the same role.
“Follow me” is what you say to customers when you ask them to use your product. It’s also what you ask of candidates when you recruit them, and what you require from employees who invest years of their careers with you. The CEO I met couldn’t say it about sales because he didn’t believe in it himself. The reps he hired understood that the moment they walked in.
Leading means proving you’re worth following. Get that right and turnover drops, hiring gets easier, and your sales team performs at a higher level. Get it wrong and you end up like the CEO at $3M, hiring the same role every 18 months and wondering why it never sticks.
Here’s what the leaders who get it right do differently.
In companies worth joining, leaders show up in deals. They help move opportunities forward. They make it clear that selling matters to the business, not just to the people carrying a quota.
The CEO I described did the opposite. He treated sales as a function he tolerated rather than a discipline he respected. Candidates read that during the interview. The strong ones pass on the offer. The ones who accept end up managing up to a leader who doesn’t understand the work.
The best companies make selling part of how the business operates. Leaders sit in on calls, review pipeline with curiosity instead of suspicion, and know the names of the top three deals in the forecast. None of this is heroic. It’s the baseline for being someone a salesperson would follow.
Culture gets talked about often, but few leaders build it on purpose. The reps I interview can tell within two conversations whether a company has a sales-friendly environment. They ask the same questions every time. How does commission get paid? Who’s the top rep, and are they still here? What happened to the last person in this role?
A sales-friendly culture is not complicated. People know how they win, how they get paid, and what good performance looks like when it’s recognized. Commission plans are clear. Payouts don’t get changed at the end of the quarter. Top performers have meaningful upside.
The CEO at $3M didn’t have any of this because he didn’t think he needed it. Most companies say they value sales, but fewer build the conditions that prove it.
Most companies hear feedback. Few act on it. Customers, employees, candidates, and the data are all telling you something. The hard part is evaluating what matters and changing behavior in response.
Glassdoor is a useful test. Most company responses fall into three buckets: dismissive, acknowledging but vague, or silence. Only one of those has a chance of producing improvement, and even that depends on what changes behind the scenes.
The CEO I met read his Glassdoor reviews and concluded the salespeople who left didn’t fit his culture. He was half right. They didn’t fit because he had built a culture that couldn’t support the role he kept trying to hire. The feedback was there. He chose not to use it.
When you say “join me,” what are you asking people to join? What would a strong salesperson see when they look at your team? What feedback have you decided isn’t worth acting on?
Candidates are more visible to recruiters than they have ever been, and they change companies faster than most leadership teams expect. The reps you want are the ones with the most options, and they evaluate leaders before they accept an offer.
The CEO at $3M is still hiring. He has been hiring the same role for years. That isn’t a motivation problem on the part of the candidates. It’s a leadership one. “Follow me” only works when the person saying it has shown they’re worth following.
