Who Should You Hire?

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Updated August 22, 2022

Youโ€™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, itโ€™s important to understand the difference between varying candidate characteristics, and what is stage-appropriate for your organization. People throw around the term โ€œVP of Salesโ€ quite a bit (and boy, people LOVE to spill it all over LinkedIn profiles), but please be clear about what youโ€™re actually hiring for.

For the most part, assuming that youโ€™re hiring a sales leader to slide in on top of a handful of AEs and SDRs to stabilize that teamโ€”and then likely double it in the short term, and maybe even double it again shortly thereafterโ€”what youโ€™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 thatโ€™s in your space, or a tangential space, with a similar sales motion and average selling price, and thatโ€™s scaled up to dozens or maybe low hundreds of sellers but isnโ€™t a doddering dinosaur. If youโ€™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 youโ€™re a new recruiting solution, itโ€™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 wonโ€™t get much more into this, as this is something that I havenโ€™t done enough times to speak authoritatively on (whereas the stuff earlier in the book Iโ€™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 theyโ€™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.

In Conclusion

That was quite a journey, eh? For those of you who are reading the end of this book because youโ€™ve advanced your organization through all the steps described in previous chapters: Congratulations! Youโ€™re at a stage that very few get to, and should be very proud of your work. And for those of you who are reading this conclusion while still partway through the journey: Keep at it. While acquiring knowledge is important, having the perseverance and grit to put it to work is paramount. This book is set up to be a constant companion for you as you go from step to step. Itโ€™s less a one-time read, and more a handy desk reference thatโ€™s here for you as you hit challenges along the way. And you will.

Either way, acquiring the skills of selling is an important arrow in your professional quiver. Far too many startups have floundered for want of being good at sales, and the same is true of individual startup executives and operators. Deciding to get good at sales is the first step, the next step is learning about it (this book!), and the step after that is honing your craft through ongoing effort. Having internalized whatโ€™s presented in this book, youโ€™re well on your way.

Further Reading

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