Since Design Partner installs are focused on product usage and feedback before you can even contemplate converting them to paying customers, it would be impossible to give a sales hire a quota to hit since 1.) that's not your focus at the moment 2.) your pricing model hasn’t been figured out yet.

This is why we advise founders to look for a sales hire that has the skill set and functions more like a revenue-generating product manager.

This profile should:

• Have had success in sales roles where they are responsible for a quota and closing deals (even though this is secondary at the moment for your startup)
• Are comfortable without a sales playbook or sales enablement, and would see creating/owning those as a benefit
• Can learn your product, competitors, and market inside-out, almost like a solutions engineer without the deep technical aptitude.
• This is not a given with sales reps, since the majority can memorize a qualification and demo script, but rarely have deep knowledge beyond those.
• Can listen for feedback on the market, competition, product, pricing, and will tag this in your CRM to discuss with the rest of the GTM team
• Can prioritize design partners to target those with the highest probability of first installing, then converting to a paying customer
• Understand that you need to prioritize adoption first, then revenue, and will work towards those metrics for how they will be measured until you jointly determine what a reasonable quota would be post-Design Partners.
  

Most sales hires you’ll interview will only be comfortable in a role where they have a playbook they can learn, sales enablement to bolster that learning, warm leads to start working, and a clearly defined quota they have a decent chance to hit if they work hard. This is not the environment of a Seed or Series A startup in the Design Partner phase.

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