Profile for your first Sales hire

Liam H. Mulcahy

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Profile for your first Sales hire

Profile of your first sales hire

Since Design Partner installs are focused on product usage and feedback before you can even contemplate converting them to paying customers, it would be impossible to give a sales hire a quota to hit since 1.) that's not your focus at the moment 2.) your pricing model hasn’t been figured out yet.

This is why we advise founders to look for a sales hire that has the skill set and functions more like a revenue-generating product manager.

This profile should:

  • Have had success in sales roles where they are responsible for a quota and closing deals (even though this is secondary at the moment for your startup)
  • Are comfortable without a sales playbook or sales enablement, and would see creating/owning those as a benefit
  • Can learn your product, competitors, and market inside-out, almost like a solutions engineer without the deep technical aptitude.
  • This is not a given with sales reps, since the majority can memorize a qualification and demo script, but rarely have deep knowledge beyond those.
  • Can listen for feedback on the market, competition, product, pricing, and will tag this in your CRM to discuss with the rest of the GTM team
  • Can prioritize design partners to target those with the highest probability of first installing, then converting to a paying customer
  • Understand that you need to prioritize adoption first, then revenue, and will work towards those metrics for how they will be measured until you jointly determine what a reasonable quota would be post-Design Partners.

Most sales hires you’ll interview will only be comfortable in a role where they have a playbook they can learn, sales enablement to bolster that learning, warm leads to start working, and a clearly defined quota they have a decent chance to hit if they work hard. This is not the environment of a Seed or Series A startup in the Design Partner phase.


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