Code Brain | Xianglu Technology CEO Kevin Guo: How to Find the Right Sales Leader?

Preface

In late September, we specially invited Kevin Guo — founder and CEO of Xianglu Technology and a member of MaHui — to join us in Beijing for a private "Code Brain" salon. He sat down with Li Lulin, Investment VP at Source Code Capital, and over 20 fellow MaHui CEOs and executives from various industries for a two-and-a-half-hour face-to-face conversation.

The occasion was Guo's first book, Sales Lead, published in June this year, which drew significant attention across the startup community. Through the book, the outside world began to systematically understand Guo's legendary career trajectory and his deep, practical thinking on sales.

— Guo was once a member of Meituan's highest decision-making body, the S-team, and served as executive chair of Meituan's Sales Committee. Internally, he was known as someone who could win tough battles, having achieved the legendary feat of five promotions in eight years. He led Meituan's hotel business to become the world's largest by room nights in Q2 2020 — a sales lead with truly distinguished war records. After leaving Meituan, he founded Xianglu Technology, a company focused on robotics products for the food and beverage industry...

In this conversational exchange, Guo shared his understanding of the sales lead role, how to find the right person for it, and his own psychological journey from sales lead to founder. He also answered numerous practical sales questions from entrepreneurs — covering team building, goal setting, incentive mechanisms, capability development, SOP formulation, and more.

We've selected some of the most universally resonant questions to offer another perspective for your consideration.

The following Q&A is a transcript of the live session, edited for length:

1

The Sales Lead Is the Gas Pedal; the CEO Is the Steering Wheel

Question 1: You recently published your new book Sales Lead, a role critical to both startups and mature companies. How should we understand and define the sales lead's role and responsibilities in a startup?

Kevin Guo: Someone who hasn't been a sales lead might disagree, but objectively speaking, sales isn't that important at many companies. At a certain internet company, for example, there are roughly 50,000–60,000 sales-related employees, yet the S-team — the highest decision-making body — has rarely included anyone from a sales background. So while there are many salespeople, there are hardly any sales-born executives at the top. That says something.

Sales is an amplifier, but for many companies, the most important thing is choosing the right path. If you ask me the biggest difference between a sales lead and a founder: the latter has both the right and the duty to choose the road — they hold the steering wheel. The former is more like the gas pedal, making the company go faster.

If we map this out: speed on the x-axis, value on the y-axis, creating four quadrants. The worst outcome for a company is sprinting in the wrong direction — wrong value, foot on the accelerator, burning through fuel and investors' money. That's tragic. The best is sprinting down a high-value, correct path. The second-best is going slower while value remains unclear, finding the path first, then accelerating. Both Meituan and other companies have followed this trajectory.

So we can't ignore the sales lead's value, nor can we inflate it. We need to be objective. And you need to clearly signal this to the CEO and whoever you're talking to about the sales lead role — otherwise you'll get misalignment, friction, distrust between the sales lead and the company leader.

At many companies, the sales lead is either unqualified or extremely aligned with the CEO. If it's the latter, the CEO must think carefully: how to design mid- to long-term incentive mechanisms? Especially for B2B companies, risk control is essential, because once a sales lead becomes truly excellent, they amass enormous resources. If they leave, the damage can be fatal.

Question 2: Finding a good sales lead seems to be a major headache for many CEOs. Are there traits or labels to look for?

Kevin Guo: Sales leads are genuinely hard to find because supply is limited. I don't think there's good or bad — only fit. The most important thing is: don't assume someone from a big company is automatically right for you. First, clearly identify your company's core problems. What do you need a sales lead to solve? What goals should they achieve? That comes first. You also need to understand your customer type — are they scattered accounts or key accounts? Is your model direct sales or channel-based? Telesales or field sales? Clarify all this before searching; don't hunt blindly. Any company's survival depends on putting customers first.

Second, when selecting a sales lead, understand the distinction. Many CEOs can't tell the difference between a regional general manager and a sales lead. These are fundamentally different roles. All regional GMs are order-takers. In fact, from frontline sales to city manager to regional manager to regional GM, there's no essential difference — just headcount. They're all execution units.

By contrast, the sales lead, the organizational lead — these roles do planning and strategy. How to set this year's sales targets? What organizational structure makes sense? Which market to attack first? What's the budget? How to design performance and commission structures? Big-company managers never handled any of this. It wasn't in their job description; they weren't trained for it, never even seen it.

If you're hiring a sales lead, you must ask in the interview: have they worked at headquarters? If you bring in a big-company regional GM as your sales lead, the failure rate is above 80% — the roles are fundamentally different. Typically, a sales manager's career path is: first work in the field as a regional GM, then spend two years at headquarters. Then they understand the real battlefield and customer dynamics, while also having some abstraction ability, policy-making capability, and organizational design skills — more well-rounded.

My advice to entrepreneurs: when looking for a sales lead, prioritize people with this profile — they've worked in the field and at headquarters, but currently lack a direct path to sales lead at their big company. These people can hit the ground running and have comprehensive capabilities.

Of course, another scenario: if the CEO just wants an execution proxy, it's simpler. Find someone with whom you can build deep mutual trust, who will deliver on your targets on schedule.

2

Startup CEOs Should Not Serve as Sales Lead Long-Term

Question 3: Do you think startup CEOs should simultaneously serve as sales lead?

Kevin Guo: My advice is: don't do it long-term. Note — "long-term," not "never." If a CEO serves as sales lead for too long, two negative effects emerge. First, from the CEO's vantage point, what truly determines how far a company goes in the long run isn't sales. Sales is an excellent channel for quickly understanding customer needs and achieving阶段性 commercial goals faster and better. But over the long term, company development depends on product. From China's internet era to the mobile internet era to the new energy wave, not a single CEO has been sales-born — most came from product or tech backgrounds. For tech-leaning companies, the CEO is usually product-oriented: Tencent, Meituan... Li Auto is the same. Sales is an important support function, but not the most fundamental one.

Second, a CEO serving long-term as sales lead creates internal resource imbalance. When the sales lead clashes with product and R&D, and you're the CEO representing the sales lead, the product and engineering teams will defer to you. This creates lopsided internal development; over time, no one dares to speak up. So these two roles cannot be combined long-term.

The CEO definitely needs customer contact. Meanwhile, developing or hiring a sales lead takes time, and during any gap, the CEO must step in personally. So my conclusion: it's fine for the CEO to serve as sales lead, but not long-term — it's likely unfavorable for the company's long-term development.

Question 4: At what stage should a company recruit and bring in a sales lead?

Kevin Guo: Recruiting and making an offer are two different things. Recruiting must start early, because finding a suitable sales lead takes at minimum six months, and up to two years — that's the brutal reality.

I think once the business enters an offensive phase, it's time to recruit a sales lead. In other words, when the company needs to rapidly expand market scale and capture market share, the sales lead's value becomes critical.

In the early startup phase, product definition and R&D teams matter most, but even then the CEO should start loosely networking with promising sales leads. Don't wait until the need is urgent — you'll lose roughly half a year.

Question 5: When a company has multiple product lines and sales teams, is it better to have one sales lead oversee everything or separate them?

Kevin Guo: Three preconditions need clarification: First, do the new and old business lines serve the same customer base? Second, do they have the same sales cycle? Third, from the company's overall development perspective, is the new business line in exploration phase or offensive phase?

First, if the customer bases are completely different, it's best to separate from the new business line's early stages. For any sales leader, monthly考核 is on total revenue — they'll naturally prioritize existing business that generates more income. New business is messier, requires pathfinding; they'll likely pour time and energy into the old business, causing the new line to fail.

So new business lines should achieve closed-loop independence before entering the offensive phase. Don't burden them with capability dependencies — otherwise they generally won't succeed. Meituan's businesses basically all achieved self-contained independence. Synergy doesn't work; no company has succeeded through synergy.