- Being a founder is a sales job. You are going to be selling to customers, employees, candidates and investors forever.
- You need to sell, because as the founder, customers want to hear from YOU. If you can't sell the product, a salesperson won't fix your problems.
- Delegating away sales is the #1 reason early stage companies fail. Until you are at $500k or more in ARR, you need to be the one who does the selling
- B2B Salespeople exist because customers don't want to self checkout. Big companies intentionally add friction into their purchasing cycles.
- "Our sales cycle is long and we deal with enterprises" is an excuse founders try to give themselves as an out for not doing sales. It is an invalid excuse.
- If we think about Naval's 4 types of leverage (labor, capital, code and media). Sales is labor leverage, which means it doesn't scale nearly as well as marketing or engineering can.
- Salespeople ≠ entrepreneurs. Even the first salesperson is not necessarily an entreprenuer (in terms of risk tolerance etc).
- Engineers are motivated to solve hard problems. Salespeople want to sell the something that prospects buy. You are punished financially for selling something people don't want to buy!
- Your first salesperson should probably be a mid-market account executive, and you should probably hire 2
- Hiring a VP of Sales as your first salesperson is almost always a terrible idea
- It is much harder to sell without a big brand behind you. Hire the rep who's crushing it at a mega corp at your own risk.
- You shouldn't need to sell a rep on joining an early stage startup. It should be a hell yes or hell no on their behalf
If you are running an early stage startup and are trying to work out if you're ready to make your first sales hire, I've put together a document for you
If you are a sales rep who is trying to advance your career, I have put together an hour of my best hiring advice in the form of a video course