Who Should You Hire?

You’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.

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.

I won’t get much more into this, as this is something that I haven’t done enough times to speak authoritatively on (whereas the stuff earlier in the book I’ve done the hell out of). Suffice it to say, this is an extremely critical hire, and the key is to reference, and back-channel reference, the heck out of any candidates who get down to the finish line. Once they’re on board, your job is to help this new sales leader ingest your well-documented sales process and quickly get up to speed successfully managing the team. Congratulations! You are no longer the Sales Manager. You are now the manager of the Sales Manager.