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Founding Sales

3 resources from Founding Sales we point people to, and the questions each answers.

📖 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?
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