The Founding Sales Team. How and Who to Hire First For Your Early-Stage Startup.
Today, I want to discuss the most critical aspect of building a sales team.
Hiring your first team. The Founding Team.
Let's define the founding team: the first SDR and AEs you will hire for your startup.
Why it matters?
Because these hires can sink or ship your startup.
You can either do it very well and take off, or you will be stalling where you are for another 9 months. (3 months to hire, three months to evaluate, three months to re-hire).
Unfortunately, hiring your founding team is one of the most challenging hires.
For different reasons.
But today, I want to give you a quick playbook to avoid failure and remove some risks.
Who to Hire
The most asked question is, shall I bring an SDR or an AE?
Well, that depends.
Suppose you have sold your first ten customers yourself as a founder. Now you spend 20-30% of your time prospecting, engaging with leads, delivering demos and closing. You may need an SDR.
They can take over some of the sales cycles from you, and you can train them to become prospects and book discovery calls for you.
This way, you will still sell with more time focused on the demo and closing.
When to hire an AE?
When you already have an SDR and a (sort of) repeatable sales process, CRM and inbound and outbound leads are in place. At that stage, an AE would help and start closing on your behalf. (though with a slower pace at the beginning).
Must-Have Skills
Write down the three skills this person must have.
Here's an example I wrote back when heading the sales team at a scaleup in Italy and was hiring my first SDR.
Business Acumen
Curiosity
Track record of a high level of activities.
The interview process has to be tailored around behavioural questions that would tell me more about these skills. Prep your co-founders or whoever will be with you in the interview to seek those skills.
Bonus point: most founders hire their first teams based on logos these candidates have worked in the past, the big corporations or the shiny universities. Have you read my newsletter about the Golden Spoon and the Scrapper? Check this out.
Spoiler: find the Scrapper.
Hiring & Interview Process
The biggest mistake I see here is poor structure and process. I understand this is probably one of the first hires of your career, but you need to be structured. You can be a 3-person startup or a 50-100-person scaleup you need to hire like a corporation.
Don't be scared about taking too much time. It's good to invest time; losing time with mis-hires is terrible.
Screening Interview - 30 min.
Salary
Employment Status
Cultural fit
Role Play + Hiring Manager Interview - 60 min
Role Play
Chronological Interview
Motivational / Founders Interview - 30/60 min
Offer
RAL
Bonus / Commission
Onboarding & Ramp-up
Now that you have them in, are you thinking of spending 2/3 hours per day in live calls with you to onboard them?
Think again.
Onboarding is even more crucial than sourcing and hiring.
Make sure you have a sales playbook live on your shared Notion or Drive of Microsoft.
Structure the onboarding as follows:
Week 1
Sales Playbook
Product Training.
Quick catchup with the founder at the beginning of the day and the end. (30 mins max).
Week 2
Shadow Live Calls and Attend Live Meetings
Get a demo account and play around
Product Training
Quick catchup with the founder at the beginning of the day and the end. (30 mins max).
Week 3
Role Play discovery call
Role Play demo call
Role Play closing call
Start building outbound lists for prospecting within a given territory.
Week 4
If Role plays have passed successfully, you can start:
Start rerouting some inbound leads
Prospecting
Product Training
Inbound Training
Summary
The first thing you can see is the structured process I have lined up.
Again, it's crucial to make this hire very effective. You need to be structured and to have a process in place.
Hiring your founding sales team member is like hiring your first engineer.
They can ship or sink your startup.
Rooting for you. 💪
See you all next week, at the same time, in the same inbox.
