Inside Socially Determined’s Sales Evolution: How They Moved Beyond Founder-Led Sales in Healthcare Tech

If you’re going to make mistakes in hiring salespeople, you might as well make them trying to build something extraordinary. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Trenor Williams shared how Socially Determined transitioned from founder-led sales to a scalable sales organization while creating a new market category in healthcare analytics.

The Reality of Building a Sales Team

“You are likely if you don’t make any mistakes in hiring salespeople. One, I think you’re ridiculously lucky. And two, you may not be trying hard enough,” Trenor explains. The company’s journey through different sales leaders revealed a crucial insight: even exceptional people might not fit if the timing, resources, or market positioning isn’t right.

This year marked a significant shift in their sales organization. “This year we turned over and really doubled down on a new sales team,” Trenor shares. They brought in new leaders for their two primary markets – payer and life science – with the payer leader six months in and the life science leader at one year.

Creating Systems Beyond the Founder

The biggest challenge wasn’t just hiring – it was creating systems that could work without the founder’s constant involvement. “Because this is all I think about. It’s all I’ve been doing, like two years before I started the company. We’re seven years into this. There’s nobody that’s going to be able to tell the story in the same way,” Trenor notes.

The solution? “How do you continue to invest in creating the processes, the materials, the support for people that aren’t you as the founder?” This systematic approach to sales enablement became crucial for scaling beyond founder-led sales.

Accepting Different Styles

One of the hardest lessons was accepting that new salespeople would tell the story differently. “It’s not going to be the same. There are going to be parts that they’re going to do better than parts that they don’t. And you’ve got to get comfortable that’s okay,” Trenor admits.

The Market Creation Challenge

The sales transition was further complicated by their position as a market creator. “Maybe I’m crazy, because I knew it from the beginning,” Trenor shares about creating a new market category. “It was really seen as not part of the business. It was part of what the foundation did… it was not integrated into the business operations and strategic decision making of systems or plans or life science or employers.”

Evolving the Sales Process

Today, Trenor’s role has shifted from running sales to supporting key deals: “I am much less involved. I still probably get involved in most deals. I still end up telling the story. What’s nice is I’m not running a lot of the commercial process in that sale, as opposed to, again, it’s more you up building than anything else.”

This evolution was essential for scaling in an industry where “the average sales cycle was twelve to 15 months” and has “gotten even longer” since the pandemic. The extended cycles aren’t due to technology resistance but rather the “tyranny of the urgent” in healthcare organizations.

For founders navigating the transition from founder-led sales, Socially Determined’s journey offers crucial insights: expect hiring mistakes, invest heavily in systems and processes, accept different sales styles, and remember that in creating new markets, the founder’s story remains valuable even as the organization scales beyond founder-led sales.