How to make your first B2B and B2C sales as a founder

How do you make your first B2B and B2C sales as a founder? Today we'll look at how to make your first B2B and B2C sales as a founder. The first sales should almost always be closed by the founder personally, not by a hired sales manager. The reason is simple: no one in the world sells a company's vision better than its creator, and the first deals are not yet sales in the pure sense, but a form of CustDev. You are testing who really feels the pain, which objections keep coming up and what turns “interesting” into “I'll buy.”

Let's look at a practical approach using Brex as an example. Former Brex CMO Sam Blond shared his main rule with YC cohorts: on the first call, right after presenting your solution, ask, “How high a priority is it for you to solve this?” and focus only on those who answer “high.” If you keep hearing “low priority,” that's a sign that you haven't found Product-Market Fit yet, not that you need to improve your sales script. The second important principle is to always end a call with a specific next step that has a fixed date in the calendar, rather than a vague “I'll send over the information and we'll get back to this.” According to SaaStr, in 95% of cases the founder should personally close the first 10–20 customers before handing sales over to new hires, because only then does the company get a repeatable sales process rather than a random one.

Sources:

1. Y Combinator — The Sales Playbook for Founders
2. Sam Blond (Founders Fund) — How to succeed with founder-led sales
3. Techstars — Why Your First Sales Hire Is Probably a Mistake