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WEBINAR: From Founder-Led Sales to Scale 

Capital Strategy (14)

 How to build and scale a GTM function

 

Founder-led sales is often the engine behind early startup success. 

In the early days, founders know the customer better than anyone, making them the best people to tell the story, navigate objections and close deals through sheer determination and relationship-building. But as businesses grow, what once drove success can quickly become a constraint. 

The challenge isn't simply hiring more salespeople. It's building the systems, structure and operating rhythm that allow growth to scale without the founder being involved in every deal. Most GTM challenges aren't people problems, they're structural problems. 

This webinar explores what it takes to make the transition from founder-led sales to a scalable, repeatable go-to-market function that can support long-term growth. You'll hear directly from founders and Chief Revenue Officers who have navigated this journey, the mistakes they made, what worked, and what they'd do differently. 

 

 

Time & Location

 

  • Date & Time: 11am - 12pm AEST,  Tuesday 25th August
  • Location: Online (Microsoft Teams)

 

Who should attend?

 

 

This session is designed for growth-stage B2B SaaS and technology businesses beginning to build a GTM function for the first time. Particularly relevant for:

  • Founders and CEOs transitioning from personally closing deals to building scalable revenue teams

  • Founder-led businesses generating growth but lacking repeatability, structure or confidence in forecasting

  • Leaders hiring their first Head of Sales, Sales Manager or CRO and unsure what good looks like

  • Revenue, commercial and growth leaders responsible for scaling pipeline and building GTM capability

  • VC and PE-backed portfolio companies transitioning beyond founder-led execution 

Particularly relevant if you're experiencing:

  • Significant reliance on founders or key individuals to close deals

  • Challenges hiring and scaling sales teams successfully 

  • Pressure to build a more scalable revenue model without slowing momentum 

     

Event description

 

Moving beyond founder-led sales is one of the most important transitions a scaling business will make. 

While hiring sales talent is often seen as the answer, sustainable growth requires far more than adding headcount. It requires clear customer segmentation, consistent messaging, structured processes, defined ownership, reliable forecasting, and the systems that enable a team to succeed without relying on individual heroics. 

Join KPMG High Growth Ventures and a panel of experienced founders and CROs as we unpack what really changes when startups begin building a GTM function, the foundations required for success, and how to avoid the common mistakes that derail growth. 

 

We’ll unpack:


  • How founders can step out of sales without losing control: Learn practical approaches for maintaining visibility and confidence while reducing day-to-day involvement in the sales process. Explore how founders can reposition themselves from primary seller to strategic asset focused on enterprise relationships, product insight and business growth.
  • Building the foundations for scalable growth: Learn the critical building blocks required before scaling a revenue team, including ICP development, messaging consistency, pipeline management, performance benchmarks and GTM infrastructure.

  • Hiring the right sales leadership at the right time: Understand how GTM leadership evolves as businesses scale, from founder-led selling to Sales Managers, Heads of Sales and CROs. We'll discuss common hiring mistakes, what capabilities matter most at each stage, and how to avoid solving structural issues with people decisions.

  • The systems and operating cadence that support scale: Discover what effective GTM systems look like, when technology and AI create genuine value, and how to build the visibility, accountability and forecasting discipline required for sustainable growth.

  • Why most GTM challenges are structural, not people-related: We'll unpack the common failure points that limit growth, including founder dependency, poor qualification, weak pipeline quality, sales and marketing misalignment, and lack of process discipline. 

Our Panelists

 

Ben Sharp, GTM Advisory, KPMG High Growth Ventures. Ben is a senior go‑to‑market and revenue leader with 20+ years’ experience building and scaling B2B businesses, primarily in SaaS and technology‑enabled services. He has operated as a CRO and commercial leader in VC and PE‑backed companies, helping founder‑led teams transition to predictable, scalable revenue models. At HGV, Ben works with founders, executive teams and boards to diagnose GTM constraints, design revenue operating systems, and embed best‑practice sales, marketing and customer success motions that improve forecast confidence, revenue quality, and investor readiness. 

 

Joshua Nu'u-Steele, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Ideally. Josh Nu'u-Steele is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Ideally, the market research platform putting real human insight into every creative and commercial decision. Based in New York, Josh leads Ideally's commercial strategy across APAC and the US, having built the go-to-market engine from the ground up. Under his leadership, the platform has grown to 250+ enterprise clients, and he established the company's New York presence as it scales in the US market.
Josh brings more than a decade of revenue leadership to the role. Before Ideally, he was Vice President of Global Sales at Parkable. There, he drove a fourfold increase in ARR and led the company's expansion into the US and UK. Outside of work, he serves as Chairperson of AKC Autism Kids Collective, a role he took on in 2025.

 

Jared Kristensen, Founder, Audience Republic. Jared Kristensen is the Founder/CEO of Audience Republic, a marketing platform for the events and entertainment industry acquired in an eight figure transaction by a US private equity backed company. Under his leadership, Audience Republic raised over $10 million in venture capital, grew to a team of 55, and expanded across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. As the company's first salesperson, Jared led its GTM strategy from inception, building a repeatable engine that enabled international growth and scaled beyond founder led sales.