Why Most Innovative Products Shouldn't Launch with a Sales Team
- Bohdan Lytvyn
- April 22, 2026
RECOMMENDED READING FOR A BETTER CONTEXT:
KEY TERMS:
Let’s take the example to the contrary — a product that started with Sales. It’s a B2B marketplace “in making”, online directory acquired by the leadership with an eBay provenance, who started steering the company in the direction of a marketplace business model. In effect, the new leadership started with two core things: SEO and Sales.
The background
The online directory contained a wealth of companies that obeyed a strict industry and activity-level taxonomy. The taxonomy was expanded to span main products — proceeding from the activity — and so there appeared two distinct silos of content: company profile pages (CPP) and Category pages. Organic traffic traffic was built off company name related queries, for example, Tradex LTD and product category-related queries, e.g. laser cutters. Yet, as the “laser cutters” search terms is too competitive, “manufacturer” — a qualifying term — has been appended to it (echoed through titles and headers), so — laser cutters manufacturers.
The destination pages contained, respectively:
CPPs
Yellow page style information sourced by the company representatives who would register on the directory for free and filled in their profile data hoping to get hold of new B2B prospects
Category pages or SERPs
Results of categorization of companies — a taxonomy work — presented as a listicle of manufacturers, wholesalers or distributors of the certain industry category products
What sales did
Sales requested access to a keywords positions tracking tool. They built their strategy on explaining the complex concept of a marketplace-in-making through a simpler concept of visibility. So, would jump on a call with a B2B-focused prospect and said:
“You need more exposure to potential clients and you know it. So, there are two options for you: jump on Google Ads alone (or invest in SEO) or get listed on our platform and received your potential clients for less”
Effectively, they built their proto-product or a selling proposition on a GTM signal of unbundling the complex offers of Advertising agencies and Google, as one of them.
Basing themselves upon the force of unbuilding the complex (expensive and time-consuming) offer, the sales team intuitively understood and, thus, tried to widen a breach in clients defense — they are small and medium manufacturers in Europe who want more export. Therefore, the export connection was seemingly the promise of easy sales — sellers who want to sell abroad confront an even more complex bundled deal, connected to localization and understanding of a local search demand, etc.
This is how the SLG or Sales-led growth motion has framed itself:
- Unbundling marketing agencies’ offers
- Focusing on export-oriented SMEs
The logic of SLG motion suggested them to capitalize on two things:
- Making the bundle's inefficiency visible (before anything else) — negative argument
- Demonstrating how their cost is lower — positive argument.
In fact, the positive argument required a combination of two things:
- Proof that they even have the thing — SEO traffic — and how many of it do they have (a traffic per a group of customer-relevant keywords)
- A simple calculation of customer traffic projection and traffic cost under two scenarios: the old (bundled) and new (unbundled).
Here we go back to the first sentence of this chapter — sales requested access to Semrush, a keywords positions tracking or visibility tool. Sales thought it was a definitive argument: they would — as a part of sales preparation — check the prospect’s visibility against the category-type keyword, e.g. “laser cutter manufacturer(s)” and compare it with their own. Where the opportunity to persuade was in place, for example, the client’s site was not visible while their site was in the top-5, they made a call.
This cemented the role of Sales in the organizational structure — the leading role. SEO acted as the feeders for Sales and Product’s role was not even significant. Sales got it right:
The client negotiations were complex and the contract yearly value is significant, so leveraging on Sales as a GTM motion — inevitable.
Misreading the GTM signals
The problem was the GTM strategy built on unbundling poorly fits to the Sales-led growth motion. In reality, the SMEs were not frustrated with the bundle — it was an imaginary unbundling in fact. No actual bundle was in place because the customer never used the marketing agencies, some of them didn’t even have the site at all!
This became evident quite early but — as a result of misattribution — blamed on the market education ("the market isn't ready yet"). Sales took it seriously and positively, saying “we’re slightly ahead of the market, but it’s even better”. So, they pushed in the direction of product investment.
Literally, SLG motion pushed for more investment in the product to better educate the clients, which was seen as key to more sales.
In effect, this only produced waste that delayed the actual fix on the level of the strategy. Likewise, the product created dashboards visualizing traffic and RFQ data to help better educate clients on the frustration they actually never had — frustration from Google as a principal traffic gatekeeper.
Also, in addition to:
- misreading the market structure and
- aligning to the imaginary GTM signal that SMEs are frustrated with a Google traffic buying bundle (which never existed in such terms),
the SLG overlooked the GTM goals and OKRs embedded in their strategy. Instead of focusing on the early eager adopters who are fast to capture the value, they concentrated on the other side — the long massive tail of SMEs.
This re-focusing was quite inevitable if you look at it through the implications of a misfit between the unbundling and the SLG. This created a GTM motion survival dilemma:
Early and fast adoption in the narrow segment — the OKR of the unbundling force — does not require sales, while the education of the fat tail of buyers who didn't know they were overpaying does not immediately fit into the unbundling idea.
It is the right time to ask — so what? What is the problem with that? The problem is the Sales or SLG motion hijacked the whole GTM strategy. But how?
Sales started out as an inevitable link that explains the complex idea of a traffic cost efficiency while building the “marketplace in making” off what used to be a business directory. Along the way they realized that clients were generally ok with the traffic cost of Google (while possibly not ok with the accessibility of Google Adwords services). So, this was mostly an imaginary problem, and, thus, an imaginary unbindling. And the sales started to lead a transition or, better to say, a split —
- selling “unbundling” to the qualified clients (easy but “thin” head),
- education the “fat tail” and, finally, selling them the same old agency services built on their own premises (because that’s what they understand best) and
- spreading the value of “marketplace” that was yet to emerge (based on the totally different idea of “connecting” parties).
SLG and its structural waste pattern
In this context, SLG was fast to evoke its inherent waste pattern — that has emerged in the sequence though.
First to emerge was the waste of concentrating GTM intelligence in the sales team. The sales concentrated the market navigation experience and client knowledge that ended up in dictatorship. Sales started to lead the GTM in the manner of self-preservance foremost — they tacitly qualified as beneficial only that was beneficial to their role in the organization.
The second to emerge was confidence maintenance cost. As lately appeared, the weakest part of their GTM design was a promise of a better value for money of the traffic the company never owned — in fact, it was totally dependent on Google, whom — ironically — they tried to “unbundle”. So, when the Organic search traffic to the company's website began to fall — as a result of competition and the companies own overreliance on good old CPP and SERP pages (without investing in enhancing their quality) — the Sales began continuously engaged in calming the customers' doubts. Not so much selling, as investing in recurring confidence maintenance. This waste accumulated invisibly as the cost of retention and expansion. So they started to do double work: running a confidence treadmill alongside their sales treadmill. This ended up in engineering a lock-in one year duration contract, which, combined with a steady decline in traffic, sparked a storm of outrage and negative feedback from customers — a serious blow to the brand’s reputation.
As a response to a lead drought (that followed up), the Sales broadened their prospects net — widened their qualification criteria to maintain pipeline volume, the third waste type. This started a cascading effect when
- non-ICP clients enter the pipeline and consume sales resources through longer cycles and more complex negotiations
- Churned clients generate a retention waste signal that is attributed to product fit rather than qualification failure
The addressable ICP pool was simultaneously being depleted by genuine acquisitions and polluted by near-miss acquisitions that consume resources without generating sustainable revenue.
What should have happened instead?
What you may see above is a sign of premature scaling: the team fills the pipeline with noise to justify its existence, then pulls the product and strategy in the direction of that noise.
Things worth doing instead:
Try to align the GTM force with the Go-To-Market strategy — if there’s a place for unbundling, then, find a real price predator — and use a motion that suits this underlying force.
Reveal the imaginary unbundling before it became an organizational doctrine — run a founder-led sales motion instead: a deliberate, low-volume, high-observation process where the goal is not revenue but signal.
Instead, by institutionalizing Sales early, the company locked in the wrong reading. The sales team's survival depended on the unbundling narrative remaining true, so it remained true — in internal communications, in OKRs, in product roadmaps — long after the market had signaled otherwise.
This is the core risk of launching with a sales team on an innovative product: Sales does not just execute a GTM strategy. It defends one. And in the early stage, when the strategy most needs to be questioned, that defense becomes the single most expensive line item on the balance sheet — not in salaries, but in the cost of the correct answer arriving too late.
Why growth systems break and how to fix them?
Growth rarely fails because of lack of effort.
It fails when value becomes distorted across the system and waste accumulates unnoticed.
If you want to discuss your GTM or growth strategy, let's chat.
About the author
GTM strategy consultant, author of the Go-To-Market FOMO newsletter with 17 years experience in Growth Systems Design.
Bohdan Lytvyn
"WASTELESS GROWTH" BOOK AUTHOR