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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
At this point, it’s usually a good idea to hire someone to handle the day-to-day work of managing the sales team so you can move on to other parts of the organization that need your assistance.
However, before you progress to professionalizing your sales organization, it’s key that you’re ready to do so, and that you’ve met the exit criteria for moving to the next stage of your company. Remember how the exit criteria for knowing that it was time to hire dedicated sales staff was that you had successfully sold to a statistically significant number of customers? Well, the exit criteria for knowing that you’re ready to hand the reins off to a dedicated sales leader is that you have a set of sellers who are successfully selling your solution at least as well as you were.
This isn’t to say everything will be humming like a fine-tuned machine, because startups are chaos and that will likely never be the case. However you will want to know that you have successfully gotten one, two, or three sellers to the point of repeatability. If you have, you should definitely congratulate yourself. That’s a very powerful thing. SaaS sales orgs “scale up via scale out,” which is to say that revenue growth comes from more sellers selling more deals—not from a small number of sellers magically selling bigger and bigger deals more quickly. So proving that you can bring new salespeople into your organization, and that they can generate ~$30k, ~$50k, ~$100k, and up in revenue a month, is a momentous occasion in the development of your company. It’s also something that investors will likely be very excited by. You’ve now proven that you can take the money an investor gives you and turn it into salespeople who, just a few months out, will start bringing cash into the organization. That’s a good return on investment!
If you haven’t proven this quite yet, well then you’re probably not ready to move on to professionalized sales management. While it’s tempting to make it someone else’s responsibility to own the management and enablement of your small band of experimental sellers, it’s a rather dangerous exercise. Having proven the ability to sell this repeatedly yourself, you are now the most expert person in the world at selling your solution. You’re the one who cracked the code, so you’re also the best-positioned person to teach others how to sell your solution. Having someone else do it would be engaging in a high-risk game of telephone—with you teaching the new leader, who would then teach the reps—and that’s a situation that your company likely doesn’t have time for. So this is your warning that prematurely adding a sales leader before you’ve systematized your sales process is likely a losing proposition in all but the rarest of cases.
If you have indeed met the exit criteria for professionalizing your sales leadership, the next question of course is what type of person should you be looking for?
Just as it was when you were converging on a hiring profile for your reps, it’s important to understand the difference between varying candidate characteristics, and what is stage-appropriate for your organization. People throw around the term “VP of Sales” quite a bit (and boy, people LOVE to spill it all over LinkedIn profiles), but please be clear about what you’re actually hiring for.
For the most part, assuming that you’re hiring a sales leader to slide in on top of a handful of AEs and SDRs to stabilize that team—and then likely double it in the short term, and maybe even double it again shortly thereafter—what you’re looking for is a hands-on tactical sales leader. That person is currently probably running a single sales team (for example6 AEs), or perhaps a director who sits on top of a handful of teams (such as an 8-person SMB AE team, a 4-person mid-market AE team, and a 6-person SDR team). And this tactical sales leader is probably working at a similar organization to the ones we used to target our AE candidate profile: a scaled startup that’s in your space, or a tangential space, with a similar sales motion and average selling price, and that’s scaled up to dozens or maybe low hundreds of sellers but isn’t a doddering dinosaur. If you’re a new business intelligence (BI) company, hiring a sales manager or director from Looker, Mode, Domo, etc., is the better bet than hiring one from Tableau, SAP, or Oracle. If you’re a new recruiting solution, it’s the better bet to hire from Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, etc. than from, say, Oracle, Taleo, SAP, or SuccessFactors. Whatever your space, you should be able to figure out the set of companies to consider.