We recently sat down with executive coach Piper Moore on our podcast, Whiskey Is for Closers, and she said something that stopped us cold.

We’d asked her how often a founder comes in thinking they have a sales problem — only for her to discover something else entirely.

“I think it always happens,” she said. “People come with what they think is the problem. But when you start asking those probing questions to get a little bit deeper into what it may be, you realize — maybe it’s not the salesperson. Maybe it’s your approach. Maybe it’s your tone. Maybe it’s what you’re bringing into the room.”

We’ve been building sales teams for founders at Altezza for years. In that time, we’ve placed talented, experienced sales professionals into growth-stage companies — only to watch some of them struggle, stall, and sometimes leave.

Not every one of those was the salesperson’s fault.

In fact, more often than we’d like to admit, the root cause traces back to something Piper talks about constantly: the leadership gap.