Reader - There's a pattern I keep running into with technical founders at the $1M to $3M ARR stage.

The pipeline is thin. The founder is in every deal. They know it's not sustainable, so they hire a sales rep. And then, about three months later, the rep can't close without the founder in the room, and nothing has actually changed.

What's frustrating about this, and I mean genuinely frustrating, is that the founders I'm talking about are actually great at sales. Pacific Crest data puts founder win rates at 60 to 70% on direct deals. The product works. The ICP is right.

The problem is subtler than that. Everything that makes the founder great at closing, knowing who the right lead is, which objections to handle, which three stories build the most trust, that knowledge never leaves their head. It never gets turned into something a system or a team can run without them.

And that gap is what stalls growth… the architecture around the knowledge.

I prepared a blog post for this week which walks you through the data behind this, the three mistakes I see founders make when they try to fix it, and the three-step system for actually getting out of it.

​Read It Here >>​

I also share two client cases from my own work. One went from 5 users to 1,100 in 90 days. Another went from zero enterprise contracts to a $750,000 contract in 4.5 months. Same expertise in both cases. Completely different infrastructure around it.

I wrote a companion piece to go alongside the video. It adds some framing and context that I think makes the whole thing land differently than just watching the video alone.

If any of this sounds familiar in your own business, start there.

All the best,

Lillian Pierson

Fractional CMO & GTM Engineer

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