Outsource Responsibility Not Accountability
In my very first startup as CEO, I personally closed the first five customers, as is the norm in most early stage companies. The CEO generally knows the product, the customer and the use case better than anyone else. There wasn’t much formal process involved. It was more about personal relationships with the prospects and a very hand holding approach to shepherding those first few deals across the finish line.
You may outsource the responsibility to someone else, but the board will always hold you accountable as the CEO.
Once we were confident that we had figured out product market fit and had $1M in revenue behind us, we did a retained search for a sales exec. Within a couple of months we had landed a VP of Sales with great pedigree from a very successful unicorn and I thought that I no longer had to worry about revenue. The candidate came from a larger company with a proven reputation for driving revenue in a related space as a regional VP. He had an excellent track record in leading an already established sales team, but this would be the first time he would be the one to develop and own the entire sales org. He was a great doer, but not not a great thinker and he struggled to break the sales process down into repeatable steps. Deals were closing on a one off basis, but not at the pace that we needed or the board expected. After four months he quit out of frustration and I was left high and dry with a revenue shortfall and a very upset board.
Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about sales at all in the last few months as I hired someone else dedicated to oversee it. I had immersed myself in the next most pressing issue and figured that someone else was watching revenue the same way I would. This was one of the biggest mistakes of my early CEO career. You may outsource the responsibility to someone else, but the board will always hold you accountable as the CEO. Responsibility is a task, and tasks need to be completed by individuals, who may not be you.. Accountability is all about ownership of outcomes and is what the board will look for from the CEO, regardless of who completes the task.
You need people who are frankly better at you in their specific discipline. You also need to manage the outcomes from those people if you want to be a CEO that can leverage that expertise to scale your business. Learn to delegate responsibility, not accountability.
There is a happy outcome of this story as we later hired a new VP of Sales that was even better than the first. I took a very different approach to managing revenue and while not hands on, I never took my eye off the ball. Read more about it in Hire Above Your Level
