Hire a VP of Sales only after crossing the Discovery-Execution Divide — the point at which your sales motion is proven, repeatable, and ready to scale. Before that point, you don’t have an execution problem. You have a discovery problem, and a VP of Sales will not solve it. Why
You probably aren’t. You’re on what Reditus calls the founder-sized hamster wheel: cycling through reps, burning time and money you can’t afford to waste. The problem isn’t the people you’re hiring. It’s that you’re hiring before you’re ready. Without a validated ICP, a message that works on strangers, and a
Before hiring a sales rep, a B2B SaaS founder needs to complete the work a sales rep cannot do: find a committed beta customer, deploy the product in a real workflow, and prove that a specific ICP, persona, and message combination produces consistent response from strangers. A sales rep is
No. According to the Reditus Startup Lifecycle (RSL), not in early-stage B2B. Commission-only sounds like a way to avoid cost. It is actually a way to transfer unresolved risk onto the person least equipped to absorb it. In the Reditus Startup Lifecycle, the variables that determine whether a rep can
Not in complex B2B sales. The Reditus B2B Buyer Model defines complex B2B purchases as decisions shaped by multiple stakeholders, each running private calculations about what the outcome means for them personally. The conventional wisdom is that founders should lead every early sales conversation because they know the product and
At Reditus, we define the go-to-market process for a B2B startup simply: systematically execute what you learned in the stages before it. That is the process. The reason most founders struggle with it is not that GTM is complicated. It is that they arrive at it without having done the
Reditus defines the difference between product-market fit and early adopters as repeatability. Early adopters are not a repeatable signal. They are noise. Most PMF definitions leave this distinction fuzzy by design, which works for consumer products but fails in complex B2B where buying is structured and signals need to be
There are two reasons a full B2B pipeline stalls. The first is that it was never truly qualified. The second is that closing complex B2B deals requires a kind of selling most founders have never had to do. Every person in that buying committee is running a private calculation about
Prospects ghost early-stage B2B founders because the startup hasn’t earned the right to sell yet. Not because the pitch was wrong, the follow-up was too aggressive, or the timing was off. Because the foundational work that makes a sales conversation worth having hasn’t been completed. The Reditus Startup Lifecycle defines
Because early customers are not a pattern. They are a result of founder effort, personal network, and the natural momentum of something new. The Reditus Startup Lifecycle defines this as the most common GTM failure: founders scaling before they have proven a repeatable motion exists. The early customers came. The
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