Congrats! You’re ready to make your first sales hires.
By now you’ve got actionable feedback from your first users, they love the product enough at this stage to pay for it and you have some sort of market traction.
Now you want to add a teammate who can really boost your growth:
- WHAT DO I NEED IN PLACE TO ENSURE THEY’RE SUCCESSFUL?
- WHO IS THE MOST APPROPRIATE HIRE AND AT WHAT LEVEL?
- HOW DO I ATTRACT GOOD TALENT?
HOW DO I MAKE SURE THEY’RE SUCCESSFUL?
Having worked within start-ups as the first boot on the ground multiple times, we have a unique view on what it takes for a person to be successful.
You MUST have closed paying users outside of your own personal network. If you can’t do it as a founder, you CANNOT expect someone else who’s much less invested in the success of the business to do it on your behalf
- From your closed users, case studies and interviews should be conducted on what successes they’ve achieved with your product. This will help guide your new salesperson on how to position the product
- You should have clearly refined your ICP. You should be able to fill in the blanks of this sentence: Our product helps {Job titles} with this {pain(s)} when these {trigger(s)} occurs to achieve {outcome}.
- Your product should have some sort of edge against your competition and ideally you should have won a company from another org using this. Having a clear reason why you win will help your salesperson in competitive engagement
- Can you generate consistent pipeline? This sales hire could be made or broken based on if there is enough pipeline. Do you have enough come inbound or do you need them to create their own. The latter in paper is easy but so many companies have failed with poor outbound execution.
HIRING FOR THE CORRECT GTM LEVEL!
It can be tempting to hire a big shot sales director on day 1 from one of the large SaaS orgs. Trouble is, especially in very lean start-ups, they struggle.
They are used to having multiple teams support their efforts, vs being scrappy and nimble.
In a nutshell, they’re probably the person you want when you hit $10M ARR, and not the person you want or need from 0-$5m ARR.
The image above outlines in a broad sense the types of roles you should be looking to add at each particular stage.
However, there’s another nuance which is as you move through these stages, the risks of bad hires or unsuccessful set up
This is where we suggest looking for fractional help, whether it be setting up sales stacks, advising against the correct hires, and starting to create predictable pipeline.
When you don’t use fractional help through these transitional moments, it becomes challenging to gauge whether your newest hire will be successful, as by the time you’ve realized there's something wrong 4-6 months will have flown, and your runway will be significantly impacted
Supplementing you FTEs with plug in and play expertise helps a tonne.
P.S We do this 😉 click the button at the bottom if you want to chat!
HIRING FOR THE CORRECT GTM LEVEL!
Salespeople notoriously care about one thing - commission 💸
Now if you don’t have predictable pipeline and some sort of deal flow, hiring a seasoned salesperson will be difficult.
Experienced sellers want historic proof that their OTE (On target earnings) are achievable
If you want to attract high quality talent these points will help:
- Ensure that there is a self-development budget, or access to some sort of training/upskilling
- Hire in two’s if possible. It de-risks you in case one hire fails, and creates healthy competitiveness
- Keep the basic salary competitive especially when considering they are unlikely to hit commission targets from day 1
- Set up a tech stack (get a consultant - if you want your seller to move faster) or give a budget for the seller to purchase a stack that works
- Give meaningful options / equity
- Set clear milestones that lead to a promotion (sellers may be willing to sacrifice salary for faster progress!)
If you need any support or advice on your making decisions around your first sales hire and don’t want to wait months until they get up and running for results, we can help.
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