Always Be Hiring: Why Your First Sales Hire May Not Actually Be a Salesperson

Early Hires

In the early days of your start-up, both you and your co-founders will likely have hired technical, engineering and product people that you have either worked with before or that have come to you via trusted connections in your network.

This makes total sense, as in amongst the chaos of building your product and company, you need people you can trust to get on with whatever is needed with minimal supervision and management.

GTM Hires

All being well, you will eventually become increasingly busy with sales activities and this is where founders like you often hit a problem – you get to a point where you need additional help and resources to support you with your sales work but you don’t have a network of GTM talent to tap in to in the same way you can for technical and engineering hires.

The temptation at this stage can be to advertise for an Account Executive (or even a VP of Sales), but this is fraught with significant risks –

• If you do not have an Ideal Customer Profile that you are already repeatedly selling to, you will not be able teach an Account Executive enough about your sales motion to make them successful
• If you do not have enough pipeline and qualified leads yet, an Account Executive will struggle to hit target, resulting in them not getting paid well enough to stay
• If there is no consistent way for an Account Executive to make money closing deals at your start-up, you will likely only attract poor to middling performers. Or to put it another way, why would a high-performing Account Executive who is consistently hitting or exceeding target in their current role take the financial and career risk of leaving their current job to join you?

These risks significantly increase if you do not have first-hand experience of “what good looks like” for an Account Executive and unlike other roles where poor performance may become apparent in a month or two, poor performance in Sales is lagging, taking a minimum of 6 (but more likely 9 to12 months) before you realise your Account Executive is not working out.

The missed revenue opportunity and burning of time and runway during this period is often un-recoverable and can ultimately prove fatal to your start-up’s viability.

Find Juliana

If you are approaching the liminal space of needing help with sales but not having enough repeatability or pipeline to risk hiring an Account Executive, a profile that can work very well and that is materially far less risky for you to hire is –

• Someone earlier in their career who is highly motivated to learn how to sell your solution, and who, with your help can steadily move from doing the “leg work” of supporting you on sales activities to eventually leading on some deals. For simplicity, let’s call this person Juliana.
• Juliana may not be in a commercial role now and is not someone you are likely to find by posting a job description, however she may be someone you already know directly or via mutual connections. She may even be someone already working in your company in a different role.

The key is that Juliana needs certain motivations and behaviours to successfully support you with sales work, specifically she’ll need to be –

• Highly motivated to work in tech especially the GTM side of tech
• Intelligent – tech savvy and hungry to learn everything there is to know about your solution and how to sell it
• Hard working – be willing to come in early, stay late, work weekends – whatever it takes to learn and further her GTM career, whether that is generating pipeline, doing product demos, researching prospects, making cold calls or building sales decks
• Confident – not arrogant, but with enough self confidence that you would be happy to put her in front of prospects, initially alongside you and eventually on her own
• Resilient – sales involves a lot of obstacles, rejection, disappointment and failure so being able to move forward with positivity and drive would be key to success
• Organised – with a level of professional experience where she knows how to organise her time, prioritise, and keep track of and on top of things
• Competitive and driven – sets a high bar for herself with an innate desire to push herself to learn and do more
• Mature & collaborative – this is not about age but rather about having a sensible, level head with the ability to communicate clearly, work well with others and to call out early if there is a problem

Always Be Hiring

If you are struggling to identify a person like Juliana, then that is a sign that you and your cofounders may need to invest time in building your GTM network.

And “investing” is exactly how you should look at it, because even if you are 6, 12 or 18 months away from shipping a MVP, doing the work to make connections and build relationships with potential GTM talent long before you may need them ensures you do not become the bottleneck to revenue growth.

Building your GTM network starts with one simple question that you and your co-founders should get used to asking everyone you know and meet –

“Who do you know that’s smart, hardworking and motivated to learn that I should speak to?”

In particular, get into the regular habit of asking this question to your –

• Existing network
• Peers
• Advisors
• Current employees
• New hires
• Investors (both current and prospective)

This simple question is one of the most effective ways to start building a network of GTM talent that you can tap into when needed – and the earlier you start asking it the better.

Once introductions are made, be sure to track them in a simple spreadsheet (your “talent pipeline”), and be disciplined about setting aside time every week for an informal 15 minute chat with them, noting down if they are worth keeping in touch with, and if so putting a reminder in your calendar for when you will next reach out to them.

As a significant added bonus, not only will investing time to do this early help you to find someone like Juliana, it will also help you to build a pipeline of potential Account Executives and Sales leaders that you can engage with at speed (and with no recruitment costs) when you are ready to move on from founder-led sales.

The performance of any business can be dramatically increased by improving the quality of talent in its workforce, but talent is always in high demand.

Investing time to build your GTM network early and making hiring a “habit”, even when you don’t have an immediate need will ultimately pay dividends for you in the long run.

If you have any questions about GTM hiring, please feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or drop me an email at rav@crane.vc