Picture this. You’ve just raised your first round. Maybe friends and family, maybe a small seed. The vision is bold, the prototype’s promising, and the team is deep in product mode. Then someone says, “Let’s bring in sales to help shape the roadmap. After all, they’ll be selling it, right?” Wrong. One of the most common missteps I see in early-stage startups is pulling sales into the product development process before the product is ready to sell. It sounds collaborative on the surface, but it usually creates confusion, misalignment, and—ironically—slows down both functions. Here’s why.<h3> </h3><h3>🛠 Product Development Is for Solving, Not Selling</h3>At this stage, your team should be obsessing over one thing: solving the right problem in the most efficient, scalable way. You’re validating core functionality, not features for a specific client. You’re searching for product-market fit, not customer appeasement. Sales, on the other hand, is wired to sell what exists and close the gap between what a buyer wants and what’s available. That pressure to win deals, to tailor language, to request features—it’s real. And if you inject that too early, your product becomes a Frankenstack of mismatched promises.<h3> </h3><h3>🧠 Sales Can’t Be the Compass Before You Have a Map</h3>Founders sometimes hope early sales input will help define market demand. But without a clear MVP, what’s being sold? Hypotheticals. And that sets you up for bad data, false positives, and pipelines full of tire-kickers instead of traction. The better move: treat your product team like a strike team. Isolate. Iterate. Build for one clean, undeniable use case.<h3> </h3><h3>✅ When to Bring Sales In</h3>Once you’ve validated your MVP—and you’re starting to see repeatable use, clear user feedback, and evidence of real value—that’s when sales becomes indispensable. At that point, let your sales team do what they do best:<ul><li>Test messaging in the wild</li><li>Pressure-test pricing</li><li>Uncover buying triggers</li><li>Identify objections you never imagined</li></ul> But let them react to the product, not influence its DNA.<h3> </h3><h3>🧭 Final Thought from the Field</h3>I’ve been in the rooms where founders blurred the line too soon. Sales asked for a dashboard; engineering built it; nobody used it. A quarter later, churn. And trust me—when you’re burning runway, that lesson stings. Resist the urge to sell what doesn’t exist. Respect the sequence: Solve → Validate → Sell → Scale. Sales isn’t the starting line. It’s the accelerant after ignition.

Nels Toriano

🚫 Don’t Put Sales in the Product Room (Yet) - Why Founders Need to Respect the Timing of Sales Involvement

More in marketing sales

Topics

Industries