Part 1 of a series on the ZERO to 1 stage.
Here’s a pattern I’ve watched play out dozens of times, from both sides of the table.
A founder raises a seed round. The product is in decent shape. The founder has been doing the selling themselves up to this point, closing a handful of early customers through sheer force of will and founder charisma. It works, but it’s exhausting, and it doesn’t scale. So the founder does the “responsible” thing: they go hire a VP of Sales. Preferably someone senior, with a name-brand company on their resume, who “closed $10M in ARR” somewhere else.
Three months later, not much has happened. Six months later, the founder is having an uncomfortable conversation with their board about pipeline. A year later, that VP of Sales is gone, and the company is back to founder-led selling, except now it’s also out a year of runway and a six-figure salary.
I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve made this hire. I’ve also been brought in afterward to help clean it up.
Why the senior hire doesn’t work here
It’s not that the person was bad at their job. It’s that the job didn’t exist yet.
A VP of Sales is built to run a process: qualify leads, work a defined pipeline, close deals using an established playbook, and manage a team doing the same. At pre-seed, none of that exists. There’s no proven ICP. There’s no repeatable pitch, because the pitch changes every time you learn something new from a prospect. There’s no established buying process to plug into, because you haven’t yet figured out who your buyer actually is, what they need to hear, or how they make the decision.
You didn’t hire a salesperson. You hired someone whose entire skill set assumes a machine already exists, and then dropped them into a company with no machine.
At pre-seed, the buyer is often really buying the founder. A hired rep, no matter how good, can’t borrow that credibility. They can open a door. They usually can’t close what’s behind it.
What “fractional GTM” actually means
Fractional isn’t “cheaper sales help.” It’s a different job entirely, and it’s the job that actually needs doing at this stage.
Figure out who the real buyer is, not who you assumed it would be. Build the first version of a message that survives contact with an actual prospect. Design the process that gets a deal from first call to signed contract inside an enterprise buying cycle, including the security reviews and procurement steps nobody put in the pitch deck. Build the collateral, the demos, the use cases — the stuff that doesn’t exist yet because nobody’s had time to build it while also trying to close deals.
And critically: keep the founder in the room for sales calls, because at this stage, that’s still the highest-leverage thing they can do. Fractional GTM support isn’t there to replace the founder in sales conversations. It’s there to make sure the founder isn’t also the one building the pipeline infrastructure, writing the one-pagers, and chasing procurement paperwork at 11pm.
When a full-time VP of Sales does make sense
This isn’t an argument against ever hiring salespeople. It’s an argument about sequencing.
Once you have a repeatable process — you know your ICP, your pitch holds up across a dozen prospects, you have a defined sales motion that isn’t “whatever the founder improvises this week” — that’s exactly when a VP of Sales becomes valuable. Now you’re hiring someone to scale a machine that exists, not build one that doesn’t. That’s a completely different, much easier job to succeed at, and it’s the job senior sales hires are actually good at.
The mistake isn’t hiring a VP of Sales. It’s hiring one before there’s anything for them to run.
Next in this series: what the first 90 days of a fractional GTM engagement actually look like — the specific deliverables, in order, before a single cold call gets made.