What Are You Actually Scaling?

There is a familiar moment in the growth of a technology company. A new market opportunity starts becoming real, perhaps through early customers, inbound demand or increasing board attention, and the conversation quickly turns towards hiring. Do we need our first salesperson, a founding commercial hire or someone senior to build the function?

Whether the opportunity is entering a new geography, moving upmarket, launching a new proposition or transitioning beyond founder-led sales, building the commercial organisation can quickly become synonymous with building the market.

Having spent a reasonable part of my career building and scaling technology businesses, I'm increasingly convinced that this can start the conversation one step too late. Not because the commercial hire isn't important, but because there is normally a body of work required to understand what you are actually trying to scale.

The ICP, proposition, customer problem, buying process, competitive environment and route to market may all look relatively clear from the outside. The reality often becomes much more nuanced once you start engaging seriously with customers.

When the playbook doesn't travel

International expansion is perhaps one of the clearest examples. A US technology company may have a product that works, an established ICP, messaging that resonates and a commercial model producing predictable growth. Europe looks like the obvious next market, so the natural instinct is to hire a strong regional leader, give them the existing playbook and ask them to reproduce the model.

The challenge is that apparently similar customers can behave very differently across markets. Regulation such as GDPR can fundamentally change how European customers think about technology and data. The economics of the market can be different, particularly where the scale of the underlying data assets is materially smaller than in the US. European enterprise buyers can also apply significant scrutiny to technology investments, changing both the evidence required to support the business case and the breadth of value a proposition needs to demonstrate.

Simply taking something that has sold extremely well in the US and reproducing the same motion in Europe doesn't necessarily create the market you expect.

I've seen businesses use their first strategic customers extremely effectively during this stage. Rather than treating those wins simply as proof that the existing proposition travels, they have used them to understand how the proposition needs to evolve. In one case, what began as a relatively narrow point solution developed into a much broader strategic platform proposition. New use cases emerged, ecosystem relationships became more important and individual customer relationships grew to several times their original value.

Those early customers weren't simply validating the GTM model. They were helping to create it.

Traction isn't always repeatability

There is an important distinction, however, between proving that a customer will buy and proving that you have found something the wider market will buy repeatedly.

I've also seen the opposite pattern. A small number of significant enterprise customers can create confidence that a market has been validated when those relationships may have been built through considerable individual effort over a number of years. This is particularly relevant in founder-led sales, where conviction, relationships and sheer persistence can produce impressive early customers without necessarily proving that the same motion can be repeated by the commercial organisation that follows.

In a fast-moving technology category, there is another complication. The market itself doesn't stand still while you're proving the hypothesis. By the time a business starts putting a repeatable enterprise GTM around those early successes, the underlying architecture, buyer expectations or competitive landscape may already have moved. The customers were real, but the commercial hypothesis being scaled still needed testing.

The purpose of early commercial work isn't simply to prove that somebody will buy. It's to establish whether you've found something that can be repeated and scaled.

This is why I don't think commercial discovery is simply a stage that ends once the first few customers arrive. Particularly in fast-moving technology markets, the product, proposition and market need to be tested continuously against each other. A strategic customer can tell you a great deal, but repeatability comes from understanding whether the same problem exists across enough customers, whether the proposition continues to resonate and whether the product remains aligned with where the market is heading.

The same pattern appears well beyond international expansion. A founder-led business moving towards a structured enterprise GTM can face exactly the same challenge. So can a company moving from mid-market to enterprise, introducing a new product or expanding from a point solution into a broader platform. In each case, there is a temptation to treat commercial headcount as the mechanism through which the next stage of growth will happen.

Sometimes it is. But adding people before understanding enough about what they are being asked to scale can simply add cost without resolving the underlying uncertainty.

Who does the work?

This raises what I think is the more interesting question about the first commercial hire. Not whether you should make one, but what you are actually hiring that person to do.

One answer is to bring in a commercial leader capable of doing the discovery themselves. That requires a particular type of person: someone comfortable operating without a finished playbook, willing to get close to customers, roll their sleeves up and win the first strategic accounts, challenge assumptions around the proposition, work across product and partnerships and then build the team around what they have learnt. The job is as much about building the commercial model as it is about leading the commercial organisation.

There is another route. A company can deliberately do more of that work before making the permanent leadership investment. That might mean working with a small number of strategic customers, testing the proposition and ICP, developing the ecosystem and establishing enough commercial evidence to understand the opportunity more clearly. The eventual leader then arrives into a business with greater conviction around what needs to be built and can focus more quickly on creating the organisation and repeatability required to scale it.

I don't think either approach is inherently right or wrong. The answer depends on the maturity of the business, how much is already known about the market, how quickly the market itself is changing and the type of leader the company is prepared to hire.

What matters is recognising the distinction between discovering a commercial model and scaling one. Some leaders are exceptional at the first, others at the second, and relatively few are equally comfortable doing both.

Perhaps that is the more useful question to ask before making the hire.

Not simply who do we need to lead sales, but what commercial work still needs to be done, and who is best placed to do it?