What does it take to build a B2B sales function from scratch?
Most advice on building a sales team comes from theory. This doesn’t.
Leigh Jasper is the co-founder of Aconex, one of Australia’s first B2B SaaS companies, which grew from zero to over 1,000 people and $250M in revenue before being acquired by Oracle in 2018. He then co-founded Firmable, APAC’s leading B2B sales intelligence platform, where he’s applying everything he learned the first time around – only faster.
In episode one of B2B Sales Blueprint, Firmable’s co-founder and Co-CEO Paul Perrett sat down with Leigh for an unfiltered conversation about what it really takes to build a sales function– from making the first cold call to having a fully functioning go-to-market engine.
Here are the five lessons every B2B sales leader and founder should take from the conversation.
1. Should the founder be the first salesperson in a B2B startup? Almost always, yes
When Leigh looked around at Aconex and realized someone had to go out and sell, the answer was him. No sales training. No playbook. No data platform. Just a phone and a list of construction sites he’d identified by looking for cranes on the skyline.
“That was probably the toughest six months professionally for me in my career. Just trying to work out how to sell.”
Why founder-led sales builds an irreplaceable foundation
The direct answer: Yes, founders should sell first. Not because it’s efficient, but because it’s irreplaceable. Founder-led selling builds the product conviction, customer empathy, and sales narrative that no early hire can develop on your behalf.”That was probably the toughest six months professionally for me in my career. Just trying to work out how to sell.”
Why this matters for your business: Skipping founder-led sales is one of the most common and costly mistakes in early-stage B2B startups. If you don’t understand how your product sells, you can’t hire, coach, or build an SDR team that scales.
What you should do: Commit to personally closing your first 10–20 customers before hiring your first salesperson. Document every objection, every question, every reason a deal was won or lost. That becomes your playbook.
2. When should a founder stop selling and start building a sales team?
Here’s the trap most founders fall into: once they’ve figured out how to sell, they hold on too long.
Leigh admits Aconex made this mistake. The transition out of founder-led sales happened slower than it should have – and it cost them time they couldn’t get back.
“It made sense for me to go, ‘You know a lot more about this than I do – so why don’t you lead it?'”
The signs It’s time to transition out of founder-led sales
The direct answer: Transition as soon as someone on your team can sell better than you. Not when you feel ready – but when the evidence says it’s time.
Why this matters: The skills that make a great founder-seller are not the same skills that build a scalable sales function. Staying too close to the sales motion beyond that point stunts your team and pulls you away from the strategic work only a founder can do.
How to set a clear handover trigger
What you should do: Set a defined trigger for handover – a revenue milestone, headcount number, or a clear performance benchmark. At Firmable, the team built the full SDR and AE structure almost from day one, drawing directly on the lessons learned at Aconex.
3. What matters more in a B2B sales hire – experience or attitude?
This is one of the most debated questions in sales hiring, and Leigh has a clear answer shaped by hard experience.
“Some of the biggest hiring mistakes I’ve made has been hiring sales leaders where we’d hire somebody who looked amazing on paper, amazing track record, maybe worked at a big company – and they just weren’t a fit.”
Why Attitude Beats Experience in Early-Stage B2B sales The direct answer: Attitude almost always beats experience, especially in a high-growth startup environment. People conditioned by large enterprise sales often struggle to adapt to the pace, ambiguity, and scrappiness required early on.
Why this matters: At Firmable, SDRs were already being promoted to AE roles within 18 months of the company’s launch. That’s not luck – it’s the result of hiring for hunger and building a culture where learning is constant.
The three questions to ask before every sales hire
The hiring filter to use: Ask yourself three questions before every sales hire. Do they treat sales as a profession? Are they genuinely curious about getting better? Do they have the discipline to run a process, not just chase a deal? Skills can be taught. That mindset can’t.
4. Why sales intelligence matters more than your CRM in B2B sales
Most sales teams over-invest in CRM and under-invest in the data that feeds it. Leigh’s framing of this is one of the clearest in the industry.
“Your sales intelligence tool – which gives you the external data to feed your sales team – that’s the first step of a sales process. So if you get that wrong, you pretty much get the whole rest of your process wrong. It doesn’t matter how good your CRM is.”
Why poor data undermines your entire sales process
The direct answer: Sales intelligence is the foundation of your entire go-to-market process. A world-class CRM built on poor data will always underperform a more basic CRM built on accurate, high-quality data.
Why this matters: The global sales intelligence providers have historically underserved the APAC and Australian markets. Firmable was built specifically to solve this – providing businesses in the region with a higher quality, more precise local data set than anything previously available.
How to audit your outbound data quality today
What you should audit today: Pull your last 100 outbound contacts and check how many bounced, went to wrong numbers, or reached people who had already left the company. That percentage is costing you pipeline you don’t even know you’re losing. If your CRM data is silently undermining your outbound, it’s worth understanding the full cost before you scale.
5. Will AI replace salespeople? What evidence actually shows
Few questions are generating more noise in the sales world right now. Leigh’s answer is grounded in both experience and the product Firmable is building.
“Does AI replace a salesperson? I don’t think so. Most people want to buy from a person.”
How AI is already changing B2B sales in APAC
The direct answer: AI will not replace salespeople – but it will dramatically separate high performers from the rest. The salesperson who uses AI as a co-pilot will outperform the one who doesn’t, by a widening margin.
How AI is already changing B2B sales: Firmable pulls in 60–70 different signal types – job changes, new hires, funding announcements, product launches, social activity – and maps them across its entire database. This means salespeople know not just who to contact, but when the timing is right. That shift from reactive to proactive outreach is one of the biggest changes in how modern B2B sales operates.
What to automate first in your sales process
Why this matters: Research that used to take hours now takes minutes. Preparation that used to be skipped is now automated. The salespeople who embrace AI will show up to every conversation as strategic advisors. Those who don’t will keep losing deals to people who do.
What you should do this week: Identify the three most time-consuming research or admin tasks in your sales process. Find an AI-assisted way to compress each one. That’s where you start.
The bottom line
Leigh Jasper has built B2B sales functions twice – once with nothing but a spreadsheet and a list of building sites, and once with every modern tool available. The fundamentals haven’t changed: hire hungry people, get your data right, and move faster than feels comfortable.
What has changed is the ceiling. With the right sales intelligence, the right signals, and AI handling the grunt work, the best salespeople today can operate at a level that simply wasn’t possible five years ago.
That’s what B2B Sales Blueprint is here to explore – the real stories, the real lessons, and the honest conversation about what’s actually working in go-to-market right now.
If you’re building or scaling a B2B sales function, explore how Firmable helps sales leaders identify their ICP, map territories, and increase team win rates with smarter prospecting.
Listen to the full episode with Leigh Jasper on B2B Sales Blueprint, available now. Hosted by Paul Perrett, co-founder and Co-CEO of Firmable – APAC’s leading B2B sales intelligence platform.
Frequently asked questions about building a B2B sales function
When a member of your team consistently outperforms you at B2B sales. Use that performance benchmark as your trigger for transitioning out of founder-led sales, not how comfortable you feel letting go.
Attitude over experience, especially early on. Hunger, curiosity, and discipline are harder to teach than sales technique. The best B2B sales hires treat selling as a profession and are genuinely motivated to keep improving.
Critical. Your sales intelligence data is the first step in your B2B sales process – poor quality data undermines everything downstream, regardless of how sophisticated the rest of your stack is. Start by auditing your last 100 outbound contacts for bounce rates and outdated records.
No – but AI will amplify the gap between strong and average salespeople. Those who use AI to handle research, signals, and prep will significantly outperform those who don’t. The shift is already happening in APAC across SDR and AE roles alike.
Sales signals are events or changes at a prospect account – a new hire, a funding round, a product launch – that indicate a potential buying moment. Acting on the right signal at the right time is one of the highest-impact things a salesperson can do. Learn more about how to use sales signals to spot real-time buyer demand.
