Get the hire right and you will likely accelerate your revenue growth for the next few years. Get it wrong and it may sink you. So, who do you hire?

What are two of the most common mistakes we see founders make when hiring their first sales leader?

1. Overweighting industry experience and under evaluating sales leadership experience. Often, with minimal domain knowledge on selling, product founders base this hiring decision largely on the candidate’s industry experience. However, this lens is extraordinarily insufficient. We end up with a poor sales leader from our industry. We would have been much better off with a great sales leader from outside of our industry.
2. Hire a leader appropriate for 10 years out vs. 2 years out. The other common mistake we make as startup founders is hiring a leader too far beyond our current stage. Even though our goal is to scale from $5 million to $20 million over the next two years, we are pressured by our investors to hire someone that has taken a company to$100 million. By pursuing this strategy, we struggle to convince candidates join us, over-pay for what we need, and end up with a leader that implements processes appropriate for a $100 million company into one that is at $5 million.
   

After working with dozens of early stage companies to help them hire their first sales leader and hiring over 100 directly, here are 3 steps to hiring a rock star first sales leader that we’ve outlined in the Hiring the First Sales Leader Playbook.

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