Hire when you have closed roughly ten to twenty deals yourself, can describe who buys and why in one paragraph, and are spending more than a fifth of your week on sales you no longer learn anything from. Do not hire a VP first. Hire a scrappy individual contributor who will happily do the unglamorous work and who you would personally buy from. The most common failure is treating the first hire as your exit from sales: the founder who checks out at this moment usually loses both the hire and a year.
5 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 5 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it A concrete checklist for the first closer hire: close 10 to 20 yourself first, hire scrappy over pedigreed, and expect a deal within one sales cycle. The 'would you buy from this person' test is the one most founders skip.
From SaaStr by Jason Lemkin ~6 min read
Open saastr.com →Why we picked it Short and blunt: about two thirds of founders step out of sales when the VP starts, and it fails almost every time. Read it before you make the hire, not after the first bad quarter.
From SaaStr by Jason Lemkin ~6 min read
Open saastr.com →Why we picked it Names both failure modes of the founder-to-first-hire handoff, holding on too long and letting go too early, with input from eleven operators at Stripe, Figma, Coda and Loom. Directly useful when you are deciding on the timing.
From First Round Review by Meka Asonye ~20 min read
Open review.firstround.com →Why we picked it Compares direct sales, channel and marketing-led entry for an Indian company going abroad, and makes the case that the US may not be your best first market. Honest about the cost of a wrong first sales leader hire in a new geography.
From Inc42 by Sandeep Chawda ~12 min read
Open inc42.com →Why we picked it Practical on the first US sales hire, hiring for adaptability rather than a quota record at a big brand, and on testing localised pricing instead of one global number. Note the publisher sells revenue-based financing, so read the funding section with that in mind.
From Efficient Capital Labs ~10 min read
Open ecaplabs.com →How what gtm actually is reads from a different seat.
