Everyone Says to Get Out of Sales (Here’s Why You Might Not Want To)

For the first four or five years of my agency, I led most of the sales conversations or at least played a decent sized part in them.

I was quite good at it, I think. I had a good team around me, I enjoyed the work and whilst we weren’t perfect, we had a solid conversion rate. Sales wasn’t a chore I was stuck with. It was one of the parts of the job I actually looked forward to.

Then we got some advice.

It came from our advisors, it was well intentioned and on the face of it, it made complete sense. Let go of certain parts of the business. Hand them over to senior members of the team. Make sure the agency isn’t relying on you as founders. It was part of a bigger conversation about potentially exiting one day and everything about what they said sounded reasonable. The same idea applied to other parts of the business – finance, delivery, hiring, HR etc.

So I stepped away from sales. Not completely – but just enough to show the team that they were leading things more than I was and that they could use me if they wanted to.

I’d love to tell you that sales immediately crashed and I was proven gloriously right. That’s not what happened. The team did fine. We invested in some additional sales training later on and our conversion rate actually improved.

By every measure the advice was judged on, it worked.

And yet I’d handed over one of the parts of the job I most enjoyed and was genuinely good at, because the standard playbook said that’s what a maturing founder does.

The advice exists for good reasons (let’s be fair to it)

Before I push back on “get yourself out of sales”, I want to frame it properly, because it’s not bad advice. It’s incomplete advice.

The reasons it exists are real:

1. If every deal needs you to close it, your pipeline stops when you stop. A holiday, a bad month. The revenue engine has a single point of failure and it’s you.
2. If you ever want to sell the agency, a buyer will look very hard at founder-led revenue. An agency where all the winning depends on the founder is worth less than one where it doesn’t, because the buyer knows what walks out the door after the earnout.
3. It’s a version of the ceiling problem. I’ve written before about how the work only you can do caps your growth. Sales is often the clearest example. If new business is limited to the hours you personally have, that’s your growth rate, full stop.

All true. I’ve sat with founders on the wrong side of every one of these.

So the advice isn’t wrong. But notice what it optimises for: the business as an asset. The “hit by a bus” factor and the valuation.

Notice what it leaves out entirely: you.

The variable the playbook pretends doesn’t exist

Delegation advice treats the founder’s enjoyment of the work as worth nothing. It’s not argued against. It just never appears in the equation. The advice weighs revenue risk and valuation and quietly assumes that what you actually like doing has no value worth protecting.

But you’re going to run this agency for years. Possibly decades. If you systematically strip out every part of the job you enjoy, in the name of not being relied upon, what you’re left with is a business that runs beautifully and a job you don’t want.

I see versions of this with the founders I work with and not just in sales. Each individual handover is locally sensible. The sum of them can be a role the founder would never have applied for. The standard line is “work yourself out of a job”, but if you love the day-to-day, chasing that can gut the thing you enjoy. Redundancy should be an option you hold, not a target you chase.

And with sales specifically, there are two more things the standard advice glosses over.

First, you might genuinely be the best closer you have. Not because your team is weak, but because you’ve done it longer, you carry the founding story and you can make decisions in the room that nobody else can. Pretending that’s not true, in the name of scalability, has a real cost in the deals you don’t win whilst the capability catches up.

Second, with some clients, you are part of what’s being bought. Founder involvement in the sale isn’t a failure of process. Sometimes it’s the product – especially when you’re small to medium sized.

The real question isn’t whether you do sales. It’s whether you chose it.

This is the reframe I want you to consider.

“Founder still doing sales” describes two completely different agencies.

In the first, the founder does sales by default. Nobody else could close if they vanished. The pipeline is their personal network. Nothing has ever been written down. They’re not choosing to be in sales, they’re trapped in it and every piece of the standard advice applies to them with full force.

In the second, the founder does sales by design. The team can qualify, run the process and close smaller deals without them. Marketing generates a pipeline that doesn’t depend on the founder’s contacts. The founder stays on sales because they’re brilliant at it and they enjoy it and stepping back is an option they hold rather than a fantasy.

Same calendar. A completely different situation.

The standard advice can’t tell these two founders apart, because it only asks “are you still doing sales?” The better question is “could you stop tomorrow and have you decided not to?”

If the honest answer is “I couldn’t stop, so the question is irrelevant”, you don’t have a strategy. You have a dependency with good numbers.

Again, the same applies to other parts of the agency – delivery, strategy, HR, finance etc.

A quick self-test (four questions)

If you’re a founder still leading sales, ask yourself:

1. If I disappeared for a month, would any deal close without me?
2. Does the pipeline exist beyond my personal network and reputation?
3. Is how we sell written down anywhere, or does it live entirely in my head?
4. If I could hand sales over tomorrow with zero revenue dip, would I actually want to?

The first three tell you whether you’re in sales by design or by default.

The fourth is the one almost nobody has asked themselves. It separates “I do sales because I must” from “I do sales because I want to” and the honest answer can surprise you in either direction.

If you’re staying on sales, here’s what it requires

Choosing to stay in sales isn’t a free pass to change nothing. It’s a strategy and strategies have requirements:

Build the capability underneath you anyway 

Your team should be in the room, running discovery, handling parts of the process. Not because you’re leaving, but because “I close, alone, forever” is the default position that can keep your team from developing capabilities.

Get pipeline off your personal network

Your network will carry you for years and then quietly stop. Marketing and referral systems that generate demand without you are what make staying on sales a choice rather than a life sentence.

I flagged this to an agency who I worked with on a short-term project. The vast majority of their sales were via their own personal networks and most worryingly, closing because of how much the sales leads liked the owner. 

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. But it can pose a risk for the reasons outlined above.

Write down how you sell 

You need to think about and commit to paper:

• What a good qualification process looks like.
• How you price, what you say when a prospect pushes back on it.
• How you tend to handle common objections.

If it only lives in your head, you haven’t chosen to be the closer. You’ve made yourself the only possible one.

Do those three things and you can stay on sales for as long as you like with the risks of doing so mitigated.

When you genuinely should hand it over

To be fair to the other side, there are situations where stepping back is simply the right thing to do.

• You hate it. Some founders find sales draining and always have. If that’s you, none of this issue applies. Build the team and get out with a clear conscience.
• You’re the bottleneck and it’s costing you sales. If prospects wait weeks for a proposal because you’re buried, your enjoyment is being funded by your pipeline.
• You’re seriously close to a sale process. If an exit is genuinely on a two-to-three year horizon, founder-led revenue is a real valuation problem and the transition takes longer than you think.

That last one matters, because it’s the exact reasoning we followed. And it was sound reasoning. My only note, looking back, is that we treated it as urgent when the exit it was preparing for was probably years away. That’s the part worth questioning: how many years of doing a job you enjoy less are you trading for a readiness story whose date keeps moving?

Nobody handed me a bad plan. The advice worked. Sales held up, the training improved things and the agency was less dependent on its founders. If you judged it purely as a business decision, you’d file it under success.

But a founder’s job isn’t purely a business decision. It’s also the thing you spend most of your waking hours doing. Giving away the parts you love, without ever putting your enjoyment on the scales, is how you end up with an agency that could run without you and a founder who no longer wants to run it.

After all, it’s your business – there comes a time when you do get to choose what you work on and what you want to let go of.

Staying on sales because you’re brilliant at it and you’ve built the capability to make it a choice, is a strategy.

Staying on sales because nothing works without you is a problem.

They look identical from the outside. Make sure you know which one you’re in. And whichever it is, make sure somebody actually chose it.