There's a moment in most growing businesses when the call is made to move away from Founder led sales to a specialist. Often it arrives with pressure attached: following a raise, a board expecting growth, or cash flow that needs revenue sooner rather than later.
The brief typicaly becomes 'we need to hire a sales leader, and we need them to 3x'.
Research suggests most first sales leader hires don't work out, and the average tenure is around 18 months. In our experience, we see similar challenges here in New Zealand. More often than not, it isn't about the person. It's that the expectations of the role were never clearly aligned.
So whenever we take a brief for a first sales leader, we...
Start by looking at how you've been selling
Before you write the brief, take an honest look at what founder-led sales has really been built on.
- Is it relationships? If customers bought because they know and trust you, that doesn't automatically transfer to a new hire
- Do you know your ideal customer? Can you clearly describe who buys, why, and who doesn't?
- Do you understand the sales cycle? How long deals take, who the decision makers are, and what typically stalls them
- Is any of it repeatable? Is there a process someone else could follow, or does it live in your head?
If founder-led sales has been driven by your network and your credibility, we typically expect there to be a longer ramp-up.
Be clear on which problem you're hiring for
This is the most important question, because it leads to two very different candidates.
Do you need someone to run a proven playbook? If you know your customer, your process works and there's enough market to go after, you need someone who can execute it, build a team and scale it.
Or do you need someone to work the playbook out? If the process is still being discovered, you need a builder. Someone comfortable with ambiguity, who will test, learn, refine the messaging and help shape the product along the way.
Hiring a scaler when you need a builder (or the reverse) is one of the most common reasons these hires fail. Both can be great. They're just not the same person.
Set realistic expectations
A new sales leader needs time to learn your product, your customers and your market. If they're building a team, hiring and ramping new reps takes months before revenue follows. Agree what success looks like in the first six and twelve months, and make sure the targets are achievable with the product, resources and market you actually have.
Think in stages
The person who takes your sales from founder-led to repeatable may not be the person leading a large sales team in three or four years. That's okay. Growth happens in stages.
Hire for the stage you're in, and the next step you're realistically trying to reach.
