Founder-led sales to a team · 7 minutes
From founder-led sales to your first sales hire: when and how
Hire your first salesperson when your sales are repeating and you can no longer follow each deal yourself, not when you are tired of selling. Before they start, write down how you sell, hand deals over one at a time, and stay close to the early ones. A first hire needs a method to follow, not your personality to copy.
Signs it is time
A common rule of thumb is to hire when selling takes about a fifth of your time. The share matters less than what sits behind it: you can see a pattern in who buys and why, and you can no longer follow each deal as closely as you want to.
- You can say, in one page, who buys, what problem they have and how the conversation usually goes.
- Deals come in faster than you can prepare for them, and product or hiring is paying for it.
- The same objections and the same stalls come back, so a person could learn to handle them.
Signs it is too early
Founders who look back on a sales hire they regret more often say it came too soon than too late. A rep cannot find a market that the founder has not found. If you still change the pitch every week, or you cannot describe the buyer, the first months of a hire will go into finding that out at a salary.
Who to hire first
The first salespeople are not the same people you will hire later. They are comfortable without structure, willing to do several jobs, and happy to work close to the founder. That profile rarely fits a larger team later, and that is fine: hire for the stage you are in.
If you sell to executives, a junior seller rarely wins those deals alone. You will need seniority or deep experience in your market, or you will stay in the deals yourself. Whatever the profile, one test is useful: would you buy from this person?
What you cannot hand over
Your vision, your energy and the trust customers place in you do not transfer. A new rep will not win the way you win, and expecting them to is how good hires get blamed for a gap that belongs to the stage. What you can hand over is the method: who buys, why, how a deal moves, and what proves that a step has really happened.
How to hand over: four steps
- Write down who you sell to, the pitch and the stages of a deal. Notes are enough. The point is to get it out of your head before the person arrives.
- Move in three steps on the first deals: they listen to your calls, then you listen to theirs, then they run the deal and you review it afterwards.
- Review each early deal on what it proves, not on how it feels. What has the customer done? Who decides? What is the dated next step?
- Agree what stays with you for now, such as the largest deals or key relationships, and set a date to revisit it.
Do not hire a manager first
A head of sales scales a method. They do not invent one. Wait until you have a repeatable way of selling and the first reps are reaching their numbers, then hire someone to take you from a few reps to a team. Until then, you are the person who knows what a good deal looks like, and the first reps need to hear it from you.
Where this fits The question behind it: How to know what to do next on a deal
More in this category
- Why the founder closes more than the reps, and how to close the gapBecause the founder applies judgment that the reps have not been given. The gap is a gap in method, not in talent. You close it by writing down what the founder does at each step and the evidence they rely on, until your weakest rep can run a deal close to the level of your strongest.
- What to write down before you hire your first sales repWrite down three things about the deals you have already worked: where each one came from, how long it stayed in each stage, and how it ended, with the reason when you lost. Most founders can say how many deals they closed but not why. If the why stays in your head, the first rep starts with nothing and builds a process from scratch. A plain record of past deals gives them something to work from on day one.
- Before you hire another sales rep, look at your reps' calendarsHire another rep when three things are true: the reps you have are at or above their quota, their calendars are full of conversations with buyers, and there is enough pipeline to keep one more person busy. If one of the three is missing, another rep adds a salary and not revenue.