Podcast episode
How to Build the Perfect Sales Team, Role by Role | Mark, Nick, & Armand
30 Minutes to President's Club30 Jan 202551 min
Description
Nick, Armand, and Mark Kosoglow talk through how and when you should make different sales hires as your sales team grows. ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Hire Builders First: Early sales hires should create processes, while later hires follow them. CEO Sales Involvement: Founders should sell until they define the product and process, then transition to AEs. Scaling Key Roles: Maintain a 1:1 AE to SDR ratio early, shifting to 2:1 later. Hire RevOps early; SE and enablement depend on need. Manager & Director Timing: Keep managers at 8 reps max, stretching to 10-12 if needed. Delay director hires until managing at least three managers. RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Stages of Sales Leader Episode Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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I have never had a false positive with someone who aced the mock discovery twice. Never. Talk to me about right versus wrong time of hiring first aid. Let's start there. It depends on what type of founder you are. “If you're a product and engineering founder, you shouldn't hire a salesperson until you” have done a couple deals yourself and actually understand what does it take to sell this kind of product. And the reason for that is simple. Product and technical people at times can sit in a room and figure out what something's like and they're not getting that direct customer feedback. Someone like me, I don't even know what the heck to build or how to build it until I've
the right direction. If we're talking about 20 or 30% tweaks, that's something where you continue to have the AE give feedback back to your engineering team and work with you. But if it's like every single time the complete thesis of your product is changing for every single sales cycle, you need to continue to spend time with your customers as a founder. That's number one. “Number two, you do not need a fully perfectly baked sales process, but you should at least” high level know the steps and the people in your sales process. So for example, when I'm working with founders at the beginning, we're like, all righty, we need to like figure out like what are the problems we're even bringing up in a discovery call. And then if we're starting at a director of people ops, let's try to go laterally to the director of compensation.
of 10, it blows up the deal. We got to figure out a different direction that we're going in. As long as we're in that iterating mode where we don't even like know the direction we should be taking our sales cycle and the key people that need to be involved in. To me, that's still the founder's job. But once you get a general sense of like, all right, these are the people who are typically involved in my sale. “And if I keep running these steps in my sale, I might not be perfect at it, but I can semi” predictably close a deal if I get 10 at bats. To me, that means you might be ready to bring on your first 80. I tend to focus less on the ARR milestones and more focused on the predictability. There's something that you have to be very careful of is depending on the type of rep
and then can put on that Swiss Army hat every once in a while when we need some help in other areas of the business. I would say half the time is spent selling, half the time is spent building. When you think about the selling side, what makes it different is if I ever see an AE who is asking me about inbound lead flow as the first AE, or if they're asking about “SDR support, it's like you are the SDR.” You are the sales engineer. You're running all of your demos, all your own prospecting, all of that stuff. You are a true full cycle AE. So on the sales side, that's what I expect. On the building side, to Mark's point, I expect you to be coming back and being like, hey, we've tried to get in front of finance three times. It seems like that's a dead path in our deals.