How and when to hire your first salesperson.

Hiring a salesperson is one of the most expensive and risky early hires a tech startup makes. When it goes well, the founder is freed up and revenue grows. When it goes wrong, months of salary and pipeline are lost, and the founder concludes, often wrongly, that the market is not there. Most failures come from hiring too early or hiring the wrong profile.

Step 1: check you are ready

A sensible test is whether you can answer yes to most of these:

• You, the founder, have closed a meaningful number of customers who were not friends or existing contacts.
• You have a written process: ICP, qualification, demo flow, objections, pricing and proposal template.
• You know your stage conversion rates and sales cycle.
• Your CAC payback and unit economics can support the cost.
• Your runway covers the hire’s ramp-up period, which is often several months.

Step 2: choose the profile

The first hire is usually best as someone comfortable in early-stage ambiguity who can prospect and close, sometimes called a full-cycle account executive. Look for experience selling to your buyer at a similar deal size and sales cycle. Someone from a large company with a strong brand, inbound leads and a support team may struggle without them. Some tech founders hire two salespeople at once, so they can tell whether a problem lies with the person or the process.

Step 3: design the pay plan

Sales pay usually combines a base salary with variable pay tied to results. A common rule of thumb for account executives is a split between base and variable pay, with on-target earnings achievable by a good performer, but the right split depends on your sales cycle and market. Keep the plan simple, pay commission on cash received or contracts signed (be explicit), and put it in writing. Use the hiring and team cost planner to see the full cost, including employer National Insurance and pension contributions. Employment matters such as contracts and PAYE are covered in the people playbook, and GOV.UK on employing staff is the official starting point; this is general information, not advice.

Step 4: interview for the real job

Ask candidates to run a discovery call role-play and a short demo of your product after a briefing. Ask them to walk through a deal they lost and what they learned. Check references on numbers: quota, attainment and deal sizes.

Step 5: onboard and ramp

Give them the playbook, have them shadow your calls, then reverse it so you shadow theirs. Set activity targets for the first month, pipeline targets for the second and revenue targets after that. Hand over a fair share of live pipeline so they can learn on real deals. Review weekly.

Worked example

Ledgerkite, the fictional Leeds tech startup, had its founder close around 25 accountancy firms over a year before hiring. She documented the process, then hired a salesperson who had sold software to accountancy practices before. The hire shadowed for two weeks, ran calls with the founder listening for two more and closed a first deal in month two. By month five he was meeting his targets and the founder had moved her time to partnerships.

Common mistakes

• Hiring a salesperson to find product–market fit.
• Hiring a big-company manager to be a hands-on seller.
• Complicated commission plans nobody understands.
• No onboarding, then judging performance after a few weeks.

What to measure

• Activity, pipeline created and deals closed against ramp targets.
• Stage conversion rates compared with the founder’s.
• Time to first deal and to full productivity.
• Fully loaded cost of the hire against new revenue generated.