Founding Sales · GTM

📖 Book

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

The most detailed free writeup of an actual sales hiring process: the profile, artifact-based screening before you spend live time, the mock pitch stage, and what to pay. Free to read online, no signup.

Founding Sales, Chapter 11: High-Impact Sales Hiring

From Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy 50 min read

Staffing agencies take 20 to 30 percent of the candidate's first-year salary.
Bay Area SDR roles run 45K to 55K base with 65K to 75K OTE; new-business AEs sit at a 50/50 base to commission split.
Keep total cost of sales under about 20 percent of the revenue it closes.
Pay a 2,500 to 5,000 dollar referral bonus, and run agencies one resume in, one out to hold quality.

Open foundingsales.com →

Answers What does a good first sales hire actually look like, and what should I not fall for? I have been offered the first sales hire job at a startup. What should I check before I say yes? How do I interview a salesperson when I have never sold for a living? What did HubSpot learn about which sales candidates actually succeed, and does it hold up?

📖 Book

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Names the two ways founders get the timing wrong, scaling too early and scaling too late, and walks the progression from founder selling to pods to a real team. Useful precisely when you are deciding whether it is time.

Founding Sales, Chapter 10: Early Sales Management and Scaling Concepts

From Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy 35 min read

A good B2B win rate is 15 to 30 percent, and hitting it is the signal you can add reps.
Sales cost should stay at 20 to 25 percent of the revenue closed; a 100K rep needs to bring in about 500K.
A dedicated sales ops hire pays for itself around 10 reps, adding roughly 50K in bookings per rep.
Metrics-driven management moves manager ratios from 1 per 5 reps to 1 per 8, cutting cost of sales by about 40 percent.
Baseline SDR output is about 10 new qualified meetings a week.

Open foundingsales.com →

Answers When do I stop selling myself and hire my first salesperson? I am the first AE and my founder still runs half the deals. How do we split it? How do I know whether a new rep is going to work out before six months have gone by? How many reps should I hire next quarter, and in what order? One of my reps is at 40 percent of quota. How do I move fast without wrecking the rest of the team? How do I actually get out of founder-led sales instead of just talking about it? How do the best-run sales orgs decide someone is not going to make it, and how fast do they move?

📖 Book

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

A concrete onboarding curriculum you can copy: cohorts, drilling, peer sparring and shadowing, with the argument that practice matters more than the live calls. Exactly what a first ramp plan should contain.

Founding Sales, Chapter 12: High-Impact Sales Onboarding and Training

From Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy 30 min read

Sales management's traditional expectation is losing 30 to 50 percent of each hiring class within six months.
Run a one to two week boot camp, preceded by about ten hours of pre-work spread over two weeks.
Onboard in cohorts: it takes about the same effort to onboard four reps as one.
The real cost of a slow ramp is opportunity cost, 50K to 200K a month of revenue not being sold.

Open foundingsales.com →

Answers What should a new rep's first 90 days actually look like? How do I hire SDRs in India and keep them past four months? What does a genuinely elite onboarding and ramp program look like, and what does it buy you?