The Delicate Dance Between Sales and Operations

Because ultimately, what matters is not whether the entrepreneur is a brilliant salesperson or an exceptional operator, but whether they can build a company that sells well and delivers on its promises even better.

And returning to the dance between sales and operations, perhaps we don't need to learn every step ourselves or commit to a lifelong dance partner. Sometimes what we need is someone who can help us find the rhythm, teach us the moves we haven't yet mastered or accompany us for part of the journey. And the beauty of this approach is that the support can evolve as we learn, grow and the needs of our business change.

Of course, this approach is neither free nor without risks. We need to choose the right people, define responsibilities clearly and make sure they understand the business. But I see it as an intelligent way to access experience that many young companies could not otherwise afford, while preserving something that matters enormously to many entrepreneurs: the freedom to make decisions about their own business.

These arrangements also have an advantage that I consider particularly relevant for young businesses: flexibility. We can begin with a limited commitment, increase it during a period of growth, scale it back when the business stabilises, or change the type of support as our needs evolve. We can align financial commitments with available cash, bring in capabilities for as long as we actually need them, and end a collaboration without facing the complexities of dissolving a business partnership or reducing a permanent organisational structure.

The point is not to replace the specialist or to pretend that a mentor has all the answers. In fact, I believe one of the most valuable contributions of good mentoring is helping someone recognise when they need to go deeper into a specific problem and when they need to broaden their perspective. And, when appropriate, acknowledging that the best solution may be to bring in another professional with more specialised expertise.

And this is where I see the value of a mentor or advisor with broader business experience. Someone who, without claiming to know more than the entrepreneur about their product or technology, can help them step back, zoom out and look around. Someone who can challenge certain decisions, connect issues that may initially seem unrelated and explore alternatives that are difficult to see when you are completely immersed in the day-to-day running of the business.

These questions go well beyond improving a sales presentation or learning negotiation techniques. They concern priorities, strategy, resource allocation and, ultimately, how the business is being run.

We could quickly conclude that he needs to become better at selling, and that would probably be a reasonable conclusion. Yet as we talked, other questions emerged that deserved just as much attention. Was he spending too much time perfecting a product that his existing customers already considered good enough? Had he clearly defined which types of companies he wanted to target? Did he really understand the value his solution created, and how to reflect that value in his pricing? Did it make sense to keep developing new features before establishing whether there was sufficient demand for those already available?

But sometimes the problem we think we have is not necessarily the one holding us back the most. And this brings me back to that conversation with the young entrepreneur.

Sometimes the problem is clearly identified, and what we need is someone who can go deeper into it. If we lack commercial capabilities, we might work with a sales specialist to build a sales process, generate opportunities or negotiate particular contracts. If the difficulty lies in execution, we may need someone with technical or operational experience to help organise the work, plan resources or improve processes. We could call this a zoom-in approach: bringing in specialist expertise precisely where we know there is a gap.

There is an important distinction here, though, because we do not always need the same kind of support.

I am not necessarily talking about hiring full-time employees or engaging large consulting firms. Today, there are much more adaptable arrangements available, from sales professionals who help open new markets and may be compensated partly on results, to technical specialists, fractional executives and advisors who contribute their experience for part of their working time. These are ways of bringing capabilities into a business before it can justify a permanent structure, without having to give away a share of the company.

There is, however, a third alternative that I find particularly interesting for entrepreneurs and that I don't think receives enough attention: bringing in external talent and experience flexibly, according to the real needs of the business and the resources available at each stage.

Another possibility is to bring in a co-founder or business partner with complementary skills. Combining a commercially oriented founder with someone who has a technical or operational background can work extremely well, and there are plenty of examples of successful companies built on that balance between their founders. But sharing a business involves far more than filling a skills gap. It means sharing ownership, decisions and future returns, accepting that different views about how to run the company will emerge, and recognising that personal priorities may change over time. It is also worth considering the less pleasant scenario: what happens if the relationship stops working and a business divorce becomes inevitable? Something best anticipated from the outset in that all-important founders' agreement.

One option is to develop the capabilities we lack ourselves. A technology-focused founder can learn sales, improve their negotiation and communication skills, or become better at building commercial relationships. Equally, someone with a predominantly commercial background can learn project management, team leadership, pursue an MBA or develop a better understanding of the processes their business needs. I have always been a strong believer in continuous learning, but I also think we need to be realistic: learning takes time, money and effort, and we are not all naturally talented at everything. Besides, every hour we spend becoming reasonably competent at something we don't master is an hour we are not spending on something at which we could potentially be exceptional.

Once the imbalance has been identified, there are several ways to address it, and I don't believe any one of them is inherently better than the others.

That is why I believe one of the most useful exercises for any entrepreneur is to take an honest look at their strengths and, more importantly, at which parts of the business they may be neglecting. It is not always easy to distinguish between what the company actually needs and what we personally prefer spending our time on. Acknowledging that difference can be uncomfortable, because it means accepting that some of the activities most critical to growing our business may not be the ones we are naturally talented at, or particularly enjoy.

In a large company, that tension can be distributed across departments, managers and teams with different areas of expertise. In a young business, however, many of those responsibilities fall on one person: the founder, who is sometimes also the company's only employee. This creates an additional difficulty, because it is rare to find someone with equal talent, motivation and experience in both selling and building or delivering. Most of us have a natural inclination towards one side, and almost without realising it, we end up devoting more attention to the very things we are already good at.

I have always thought of sales and operations as two partners on a dance floor. They don't need to perform the same movements or take the lead at the same time, but they do need to understand each other, anticipate each other's moves and find a common rhythm. When sales moves too fast, operations starts stumbling; when operations cannot keep up, sales opportunities are lost. And when both go their separate ways, it is usually the customer who pays the price.

During my years leading operations, I experienced this tension first-hand. I have seen sales teams frustrated because operations could not keep pace with the growth they were generating, and operational teams overwhelmed by commitments made without a proper understanding of what delivering them would involve. I have also learned that neither side is automatically right. Sometimes we need sales to push harder and force the organisation to evolve; at other times, operations needs to set boundaries to protect quality, margins or customer trust. The challenge is finding the right balance, particularly when each function sees the business through its own lens.

I have also met entrepreneurs with almost the opposite profile. People with exceptional commercial instincts, capable of generating enthusiasm, building trust and securing significant customer commitments, only to discover later that their organisation is not ready to deliver what they have promised. Projects fall behind schedule, costs escalate, teams operate constantly under pressure, and the founder ends up spending much of their time dealing with problems that should have been anticipated.

As we talked, I found myself reflecting on how curious it is that someone willing to take so many risks to start his own business can feel so much less confident when it comes to selling what he has built. It has nothing to do with intelligence, and certainly not with a lack of effort. His talent and motivation are simply much more focused on building solutions than on selling them.

Yet there is one part of running the business that comes much less naturally to him: selling. He can spend hours analysing code, exploring new technologies or imagining improvements, but he finds it much harder to go out into the market, attract the attention of potential customers who have never heard of him and convince them to place their trust in him. Explaining the value of his solution without getting lost in technical details, establishing credibility or negotiating with a large corporation without feeling at a disadvantage are challenges for which he feels far less prepared. And although he is aware of this, whenever he has a few spare hours, improving the product is invariably more appealing than calling prospective customers.

This entrepreneur is passionate about technology. He loves learning, exploring new tools, building solutions and discovering smarter ways of doing things. He knows he doesn't want bosses or rigid corporate structures dictating his decisions, he is comfortable taking risks, and he devotes an extraordinary number of hours to a project he genuinely loves. He has been refining his product, adding new features, automating processes and continuously improving what he offers. Most importantly, he already has a handful of customers who confirm that what he has built works and delivers real value.

Last week, a conversation with a young tech entrepreneur, not yet 30, got me thinking again about a challenge I have encountered many times throughout my career: how difficult it can be to keep sales and operations moving forward in balance. It is one of those challenges that affects both large corporations and small businesses, although the consequences, and the resources available to deal with them, can be very different.