Some Sales Teams Are Killing Their Company

If some founders or C-suite execs ever saw how their sales teams actually operate, they’d lose it.

Most founders I’ve known in their early stages worked like crazy to keep the lights on, land customers, and make the company worth celebrating. Building anything from scratch takes pure grit. You fight for every client, every partnership, every inch of progress.

But then you meet some sales teams… and it’s hard to understand why processes stall or communication breaks down.

We once had to email the CTO just to get their sales team to respond to a deal we were ready to move forward with. Another time, we followed up endlessly, no reply until we reached someone at the VP level. And in one case, the rep couldn’t even answer basic questions or connect us to someone who could. Then disappeared.

These were Series B/C stage companies.

I’ve never been one to create tension by escalating issues relationships matter deeply to me and to our company but we've had to take radical steps just to move the needle and keep things moving forward.

If someone ever had to reach out to me in our later growth stages because my sales team wasn’t responding, it would signal a serious problem that needed immediate attention.

Now, maybe this is a leadership issue. Maybe the team’s attitude reflects what’s happening at the top. But what this really highlights is a pattern I’ve seen in growing startups: when urgency and accountability slip, they undermine the very work that built the company.

A similar pattern appears in some government agencies: despite their focus on accountability, slow responses and bureaucracy can sometimes create the same kind of friction and inefficiency.

I don’t share this to trigger salespeople their job is already hard enough. I’m sharing it from a founder’s and builder’s perspective: a perspective shaped by the long hours, the stakes, and the grind of building something from nothing.

Have you experienced this too? Please, no company or government agencies names, just perspectives