Most founders do not think they are avoiding sales.

They think they need marketing. They think they need a better brand, more visibility, a sharper pitch deck or a bigger audience.

Sometimes they do. But for early-stage companies, those things can also become a way to skip the harder work: talking directly to potential customers.

That is where sales starts.

Not with a perfect script or a polished campaign, but with a founder explaining what they are building, asking honest questions and learning whether the problem they think they are solving is one customers actually care about.

Amber Hamilton, CEO of Redwood Rise, has spent more than 25 years in sales. Today, she works with founders on sales strategy, messaging, go-to-market planning and business operations. Again and again, she sees the same pattern.

Founders come in asking for marketing help. Hamilton often tells them they are not ready for marketing yet.

“You don’t know what your brand messaging is,” Hamilton said. “You don’t know who your client is. You don’t know how to do regular sales.”

For Hamilton, sales is not just about revenue. It is how founders learn. It is how they test the market, understand the customer, refine their message and figure out whether the thing they built solves a problem people are willing to pay for.

“You have to do actual founder-led human-to-human sales before you can even build a marketing strategy,” Hamilton said.

One of the biggest obstacles is discomfort. Many founders associate sales with being pushy, aggressive or dishonest.

“I think when people hear the term or the word sales, they think used car salesman, real pushy, kind of sleazy,” Hamilton said.

But good sales does not have to look like that. It can be helpful. It can be relationship-driven. It can fit the founder’s personality. If a founder truly believes they are solving a problem, the conversation becomes less about pressuring someone and more about understanding whether there is a real fit.

Another common issue is that founders are often too close to the product.

They know how it works. They know every feature. They know why the technology is interesting.

The customer usually cares about something else.

“I don’t really care how it works,” Hamilton said. “Tell me what it does. Tell me what the end result is going to be for me, for my company, for my life.”

Hamilton uses a simple example in workshops: people do not care how a clock works. They care that it tells time.

That is where many founders struggle. They explain the product from the inside out. The market wants to understand it from the outside in.

What problem does this solve? Why does it matter now? What gets better if the customer uses it? What happens if they do nothing?

Those are sales questions. They are also business strategy questions.

Hamilton said founders can also become too attached to the market they expected to serve. They build with one customer in mind, then keep trying to force the product into that market even when the feedback points somewhere else.

That is why sales conversations matter. They reveal signals founders cannot get from theory.

For founders who want to improve immediately, Hamilton’s advice is simple: start with your personal network.

Write down everyone you know. Former coworkers. Friends. Parents you see at a ball field. People from a book club, place of worship or professional circle.

Then reach out to three to five people a week. Tell them what you are working on. Explain what you are trying to sell. Ask whether they, or someone they know, might benefit from it. If so, ask for a warm introduction.

“A lot of times people try and bypass sales by doing marketing,” Hamilton said. “But they don’t know who they’re talking to.”

That is the work Hamilton helps founders do through Redwood Rise: clarify the customer, sharpen the message, test the market and build a sales process that gives the business a real chance to grow.

At some point, every founder has to face the same reality: no one understands the business better than the person building it.

That does not mean the founder has to be the company’s salesperson forever. But early on, the founder needs to hear the objections, learn the customer’s language and understand what creates interest or confusion.

Founder-led sales is not just about closing deals.

It is how a company finds the truth.