Not Everyone Needs a Tiger — Hiring your first salesperson @ a start-up.
In 2012 I wrote “How to hire a great salesperson”. While these same principles hold up in 2018, there’s a renewed urgency to hiring a company’s first seller. For this story I’ll focus on the early- to mid-stage tech startup.
Hiring your first seller is an important milestone for the company. This stage ideally means you’ve established product market fit. It can also mean you’ve received your first real cash injection, some customers, and now ready to scale. It’s important to pull the trigger on your first sales hire once you’ve established a track record with a dozen or so customers and identified your “sweet spot”– the industries, categories and needs your best customers have in common.
First, though, you need to understand the basic differences between types of sellers. The corporate enterprise seller typically has great experience from a large software entity but may lack the hustle and grind required to scale a new brand. The entrepreneurial seller may have a mix of large and small company experience teaching them how to be scrappy with less name recognition and essentially to do more with less.
Given the nature of today’s overcrowded technology start-up marketplace, your first hire needs to be an entrepreneurial seller unless your founders have considerable experience in opening new customers and markets.
Entrepreneurial sellers come in different types. Before you even consider hiring anyone, it’s key to understand the five types of entrepreneurial sellers. I’m going to lay out each type’s relative strengths and weaknesses.
The developer. (Check)
Not all sellers are adept at market development. If you hire someone you have no experience working with in the past, chances are you won’t really know this skill until down the line. Many sellers, especially coming from mid to large companies, can be great at the hustle, but may lack the customer discovery phase. As you go to market, it’s easy to get caught up in a sea of potential customers. To the average eye, everyone can look like a customer. While it may be true that your addressable customer base is wide, focusing on the select categories & sales channels is key. If not you will be burning time, energy, and money. Find someone who can access the market and put their focus on the best customers for the business.
The cold call. (Check)
One of the hardest jobs for any seller. A sure sign to better understand if you’ve made the right hire. Cold calling is a necessary skill-set to have no matter how senior you get if you are planning on a career in the start-up world. As a new company, no business will know your name. The company you work for will be defined by the website, public articles, key execs/founders, etc. A crafty seller can break through into key relationships based on their own creativity, perseverance, and squeeze as much as they can out of the company to make an early customer impact.
Stealth selling. (Check)
Stealth selling is the unique challenge of keeping a low public profile while reaching out to customers capable of changing your business trajectory. This is a key skill for the founding team to establish product market fit (whether the one that sticks long term or provides a strong thesis). Once the first sales hire is made, this person can learn from the client profiles you’ve spent time with.
The home run hitter. (Be careful)
When first getting off the ground, it’s important to have a blended focus on singles and doubles to balance out the time it will take a company to hit a home run at early stages. At a start-up, realistically whale hunting will be a lonely mission until further down the road. Great sellers may be able to tap their network to find the larger customer prospects — but relationships alone will not close a deal in the tech space. Many factors need to click at once including product and customer experience, business owner buy in, etc. That’s why it’s important to have daily communication with all customer types within your sweet spot. Some of your best learning will come from your smallest and first customers, preparing you for when a larger company presents itself.
The pursuit of perfection. (Be careful)
Action and smart strategy will move new customers from strangers to paid product believers. The perfect email, powerpoint slide, etc doesn’t matter. What matters is taking action consistently, frequently, and creatively to connect with potential customers. Even if your product is a home run, know your odds. Research shows it takes on average eight communications to get a response from a new customer. The vast majority of sales require at least 5–6 follow-ups after the meeting to close. How many sellers do this? About 50% of sellers bail after 1 follow-up.
Next
Hiring your first salesperson can certainly be a tricky. At least a few of the factors above are bound to come into play.
Now that you know some of the key qualities to look for in your first sales hire, you may ask yourself at what point do you need these types of seller? How do you hire them? Where do you find them? I’ll tackle these questions in my next post.
Adam Chandler
