Who Should a Startup Hire First?
shift.newco.co
shift.newco.co
trend: startup founders who have never done sales want to hire a sales expert
problem: there is no sales script, the product is too infant to sell for a seasoned sales person. the sales person doesn't know what they can and can't promise to dictate the roadmap and vision of the company as a whole.
solution: as painful as it is, founders need to do all the selling until the product is mature enough and there is a repeatable sales process that doesn't require a crazy amount of dev work for each new customer
After building a MVP with a handful of businesses and people with industry experience we learned through the sales process that there was a vast amount of differences between each individual business.
We (the founders) had to be the initial salespeople to gain knowledge from several hundred businesses to identify the commonalities and weed out the crazies and formulate a dev plan on how to cover these differences.
I guess my point is that you don't know what you don't know until you do something. Having this knowledge funnel down through a non technical salesperson would have been detrimental.
It gets better! 18 months in and we are successful with having a dedicated salesperson with limited product knowledge backed by a technical onboarding team.
Each of these needs their own messaging crafted for them, and these messages will need to be aligned with the product roadmap.
Important to align with the product roadmap as particularly if the sales cycle is long, companies will typically sell ahead of what the product is currently capable of, with the intention of the product being able to do that by the time the deal is completed.
'part time secretary needed, light admin duties, possibility of position growing to full time' is a completely normal job ad. Any temp agency in any city you happen to be in can give a hundred applicants if you're hesitant about hiring someone too early.
I'm not sure if this is too optimistic or too pessimistic, but I definitely don't buy it in general. Founders want to be building the product and talking to users. I can only imagine there's all kind of other crap that would be smart to hire someone to take care of.
The idea is to find the things where there's not a lot of value in having the founder do the work and find the cheapest way to get it done.
There's a few options for how to do that. You can go to a temp agency, or you can get a recent university graduate with generalist skills pretty cheaply.
That's not true for all startups, nor even most, but I've seen startups where the founder was spending more than a day a week doing data entry.
That said, I hear where he's coming from. It's nearly impossible to build a great sales team if you, yourself, don't know sales. Ditto for ops, product, business development, fundraising, etc.
But you don't have to do it all yourself. One of the valuable things you should look to early investors to bring to the table (besides money) is connections and deep expertise. In my last founding experience, we delegated the hiring of our first top salesperson to an investor, then did the same thing for marketing. It could not have worked out better.
Consider the difference between my dad telling a joke at dinner and a standup comedian doing a 2 hour set to a sold out arena. They both technically are "just telling jokes", but there's a lot more that goes into the latter – pacing, rhythm, crowd control dynamics, an extensive repertoire, so on and so forth.
Similarly, great salespeople have 'advanced interpersonal skills'. They have a great understanding of human motivations, how people think about how to make decisions, and they're great at systematically breaking through worries and concerns and so on. They also typically have great networks and relationships with others, which can be very useful.
But yeah, I wouldn't hire a sales person until much later either.
It's a full time job to do well, and your technical people's time is too valuable to have them half-assing it.
Good points. I always think to myself, "what product are you selling and to whom?" In the case of startups selling technical users, are advanced interpersonal skills required where a demonstration trumps talk. Can the most verbal hacker do the sales ... or are we talking post VC or startup at the 20-30 ppl scale?
but what about an average sales person. He might just have 'normal interpersonal skills', by 'sales pro', I meant an average sales person though. For average salesperson, their difference from normal developer's interpersonal skills might not be that much.
And no way to convince them to work for a small startup? You really think that? Why does anyone good join a small startup then?
This requires some knowledge of the product, but it requires far more knowledge about the customer, their line of business, what people make purchasing decisions etc.
(sarcasm)
Do I deserve an exact answer and not just a reply telling me how much of an idiot I am? Am I hazy on the value of women or am I just an idiot?
The question was demeaning. He deserves to be told how wrong he is. You would be dis-servicing society by not telling him how wrong he is.
- Existing relationships - the old 'who you know'. This can really be a game changer, or at the least speed things up.
- Pricing expertise - sales should be financially savvy and work closely with finance to work out what is the most profitable products they can sell, how they can add/reduce for greater over profit or for leaders how to best stimulate sales teams.
- Product knowledge from the field - The can be a great source of feedback. A good sales person will separate what matters at the core vs why the latest client didn't buy.
- Business knowledge and lateral thinking - so many sales turn up and pitch what expect to sell. Really good sales people get to a business and offer solutions. The need to understand your business fast. When I'm on the customer side I find this most important. You quickly know the people that are trying to sell a product vs those with businesses savvy looking where their solutions can benefit your outcomes. Often they will find new ways to utilise their product to offer benefits.
- Internal fixer/project manager: for many products the person selling hands deliver off to another team. The better ones ensure your happy ongoing and make sure any down the line problems get resolved internally even when they get involved outside of their sales area and have to become temporary project managers etc.
Off the top of my head that's the other value add. Interpersonal is important but is a smaller component than most people give it credit for with the 'fast talking' sale image that is often displayed.
tl;dr don't be a dick.
They leverage their network to connect to the right people for a sale. For example, imagine you are B2B and want to sell your product to Box. Who are the decision makers, and who has money at Box to buy your product? How do you get in the door with those folks and have a conversation? What are the needs of the customer and how can you map existing solutions to these problems? These are hard questions to answer but with a good network you can get in the door, and has less to do with interpersonal skills and more on strategy and execution.
All this talk of "who to hire first" is totally case-sensitive, but if you're dealing with entreprise or high-value things, a great sales person can make your company.
I don't discriminate in hypothetical situations though.
I know a company trying to solve this. Expert Interview - http://expertinterview.com/ . I've used them for hiring specialty technical areas and I was about 90% happy with the result. Disclosure, I know the CEO personally because we have a common investor.
You're definitely describing a B (or a C) :)
The game is dead...long live the game.
Of course, once a startup grows to teens of employees, then you start hiring more based on your business' needs, but initially you'd want someone who can (and are willing to) do everything.
But is willing to do it for a 0.1% equity stake...
I personally think sales should be done by the founders until there is a solid & predicable sales process and business model in place.
I've always said that to properly automate/outsource something, you need to be capable of doing it yourself. This applies regardless of the business, although there may be exceptions.
One company I work for has taken about 18 months to get rid of some technical debt from the origins of the company, which didn't have a senior-level techie. The database still has seven different ways of representing a timestamp in it from those early days.
then it's either an engineer or a designer.
I'd fire that guy first.