Hiring and ramping GTM people

When do I stop selling myself and hire my first salesperson? Not when you are tired of selling. When you can predict it. The honest test is whether you can write down who buys, what makes them buy now, the th... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What does a good first sales hire actually look like, and what should I not fall for? You want someone who will do their own button clicking. The single most common mistake is overshooting seniority: hiring a person whose last three ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I have been offered the first sales hire job at a startup. What should I check before I say yes? Ask how many customers the founder closed personally and what the last five deals looked like. If the answer is under ten, you are the experiment, ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I interview a salesperson when I have never sold for a living? Stop trying to judge charisma and start judging evidence. Write a scorecard first: three or four outcomes you want in twelve months and the handful... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → What should a new rep's first 90 days actually look like? The first 30 days are absorption: product, market, recorded calls, and shadowing you on live deals until they can pitch it back without notes. Days... Doing the work 4 resources → I am the first AE and my founder still runs half the deals. How do we split it? Split by stage, not by account, at least at first. The founder stays on the parts only they can do, the vision framing, the pricing exception, the ... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I know whether a new rep is going to work out before six months have gone by? Watch leading indicators, not bookings, because bookings arrive too late to act on. By week six they should be able to run the demo without you and... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I hire SDRs in India and keep them past four months? The India SDR pool is deep and trained on US outbound tooling, and it costs roughly a fifth to an eighth of a US hire, but attrition is the tax you... Doing the work 4 resources → How many reps should I hire next quarter, and in what order? Do the arithmetic backwards from the number. Take next year's new ARR target, divide by realistic per rep yield, then divide again by the attainmen... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → When do I hire a VP of Sales, and what happens if I get it wrong? Roughly 70 percent of first VP of Sales hires do not make it, and a bad one costs you about a year, so the timing rule matters: hire when you have ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → One of my reps is at 40 percent of quota. How do I move fast without wrecking the rest of the team? First establish whether it is the rep or the territory, because firing someone who was handed a dead patch teaches the team that the number is rigg... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I actually get out of founder-led sales instead of just talking about it? You get out by writing things down, not by hiring harder. Build a sales operating model on paper: leads, conversion rate by stage, deal size, win r... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How did Freshworks build a global sales team out of Chennai when that talent did not exist yet? They stopped looking for the resume and started looking for the raw material. Girish Mathrubootham's rule was bet on people, not pedigree, so they ... How the best do it 4 resources → What did HubSpot learn about which sales candidates actually succeed, and does it hold up? Mark Roberge scored every hire against a list of traits and then went back and checked which ones correlated with performance. Five held up: coacha... How the best do it 3 resources → What does a genuinely elite onboarding and ramp program look like, and what does it buy you? It looks like a school, not a buddy system. Cohorts rather than one-offs, a written curriculum split into market, product, process and tools, certi... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best-run sales orgs decide someone is not going to make it, and how fast do they move? They decide against a written bar that existed before the person joined, and they decide early. The mechanism is a ramp scorecard with dated gates,... How the best do it 4 resources →