How do I hire a great salesperson early when I've never sold or managed sales myself?
Don't hire a senior sales leader as your first sales hire, you can't manage or evaluate them yet, and you'll overpay for someone who needs a machine you haven't built. Do founder-led sales until you've personally closed enough deals to know what a repeatable pitch looks like. Then hire a hungry, coachable early rep (an 'account executive' type), not a VP. In India, watch for candidates who sold a hot brand with air cover versus those who actually hunt cold; you need the hunter.
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Lemkin gives you the exact sequencing this question needs: close 10 to 20 customers yourself first, then hire two reps (not one, so you can tell talent from luck), and do not touch a VP of Sales until those reps are already hitting quota. His one-line filter, do not hire someone you would not buy your own product from, is the sharpest gut-check an untrained founder can apply in an interview.
Your early rep has to hunt cold, not coast on warm inbound, and this piece hands you the concrete tells: the true hunter chases the follow-up unprompted, leans into rejection, and has a track record of turning cold prospects into paying accounts rather than growing accounts someone handed them. That is exactly how you separate a genuine hunter from a candidate whose big numbers came riding a hot brand with air cover, which is the trap in Indian enterprise sales where a marquee logo does half the selling.
A hunter reveals themselves in the process: they follow up on the interview without being asked, the same persistence they will show your prospects
Read the resume for new-logo wins and cold-to-close stories, not account growth, which is a farmer's game and inflated by an existing brand
Early-stage teams should skew heavily toward hunters; a farmer who never had to open a door cold will stall when there is no inbound and no brand behind them
