Should You Hire a Sales Rep First, Or a Sales Manager?
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Dear SaaStr: Should I Hire a Sales Rep First, Or a Sales Manager First?
The ideal flow is:
- You founder-CEO close the first batch of customers, say the first 10 or 20. If you don’t, you’ll never really know how it’s done. Or be able to help anyone else, really.
- Then, once you know how to do it yourself, you hire 2 sales reps. Not just 1, or you won’t know why they do well, or don’t. You need to run an A/B test. More on that here: When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two | SaaStr
- After you have 2 reps hitting quota, you hire a head of sales. This is generally after $1m-$2m in ARR. Because then their #1 job is hiring reps 3–300, and getting them to hit quota. But if your hire the VP of Sales before that, you are asking them to figure out product-market fit. Not to accelerate an engine that’s working, albeit at a very small scale.
Sometimes, you can get away with hiring a great head of sales as your first sales hire — especially if you have a freemium product that already has revenue going. Or if the CEO has gotten the company pretty far (say that same $1m-$2m ARR).
But 99% of heads of sales will do better if there are already a few reps proving it can be done. Then, their job is to do it better, again and again. And again. Not figuring it out from scratch. That’s not their job.
A related post here: Should Your VP Sales Start Off as a Player-Coach? | SaaStr
(note: an updated SaaStr Classic answer)
