I think this is a bit roundabout but mostly true. Here's what I see and the right conclusion, in my experience / my humble opinion.
trend: startup founders who have never done sales want to hire a sales expert
problem: there is no sales script, the product is too infant to sell for a seasoned sales person. the sales person doesn't know what they can and can't promise to dictate the roadmap and vision of the company as a whole.
solution: as painful as it is, founders need to do all the selling until the product is mature enough and there is a repeatable sales process that doesn't require a crazy amount of dev work for each new customer
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds like there really was no MVP that solved the pain point of multiple potential customers (that the startup has identified)?
We sell a business management SaaS that aims to cover 80% of business operations in a niche space.
After building a MVP with a handful of businesses and people with industry experience we learned through the sales process that there was a vast amount of differences between each individual business.
We (the founders) had to be the initial salespeople to gain knowledge from several hundred businesses to identify the commonalities and weed out the crazies and formulate a dev plan on how to cover these differences.
I guess my point is that you don't know what you don't know until you do something. Having this knowledge funnel down through a non technical salesperson would have been detrimental.
It gets better! 18 months in and we are successful with having a dedicated salesperson with limited product knowledge backed by a technical onboarding team.
For any sale of a reasonable size, it will go beyond (or not even involve) selling to the end user of the potential customer, but selling into enterprise stakeholders at various levels.
Each of these needs their own messaging crafted for them, and these messages will need to be aligned with the product roadmap.
Important to align with the product roadmap as particularly if the sales cycle is long, companies will typically sell ahead of what the product is currently capable of, with the intention of the product being able to do that by the time the deal is completed.
First person to hire is a admin/someone who could take of simple tasks eating pie of your time. Figure out what is time consuming and find someone to delegate it.
When the startup is starting and there is only a couple of founders what is it going to do a secretarial? Bring you coffee in the morning? When you have a team and you have your secound round of investment, then a secretarial is a must for the reasons you said, but at the beginning I don't see it.
If you're at a point where it's actually hiring and not 'talking some one into spec work by calling them a founder' some one has to answer phones, schedule appointments, file old shit, start looking through health plans, make sure bills get paid etc. It can be you, or you can work on your product.
'part time secretary needed, light admin duties, possibility of position growing to full time' is a completely normal job ad. Any temp agency in any city you happen to be in can give a hundred applicants if you're hesitant about hiring someone too early.
If you are 2-3 on your team and you feel you need someone to care about all those things, something is wrong in your company (for most companies). You probably receive a phone call and a couple of emails a day for customer support or other things, and probably don't have so many bills to pay. So you don't need someone full time or part time for this, unless you are a special case that need 4-5 meetings a day with different people.
> probably receive a phone call and a couple of emails a day
I'm not sure if this is too optimistic or too pessimistic, but I definitely don't buy it in general. Founders want to be building the product and talking to users. I can only imagine there's all kind of other crap that would be smart to hire someone to take care of.
Maybe not a first hire, but a lot of startups hire them too late. There's a lot of extra stuff that gets done to run even a small office or team. The right admin can do an immense amount of things. Interview support, basic book keeping, office logistics, food, basic HR & payroll, fielding phone calls, scheduling calls, etc.
I think it depends a lot on the nature of the startup. If you're doing things that don't scale, then you might have enough work for a part-time general admin/support person quite early on.
The idea is to find the things where there's not a lot of value in having the founder do the work and find the cheapest way to get it done.
There's a few options for how to do that. You can go to a temp agency, or you can get a recent university graduate with generalist skills pretty cheaply.
That's not true for all startups, nor even most, but I've seen startups where the founder was spending more than a day a week doing data entry.
You are 2-3 founders and you move customer support to another person? You have more chances to fail. Founders need to deal with their first customers to understand their needs and find the product-market fit.
Early hires should be solely dictated by the needs of the business.
That said, I hear where he's coming from. It's nearly impossible to build a great sales team if you, yourself, don't know sales. Ditto for ops, product, business development, fundraising, etc.
But you don't have to do it all yourself. One of the valuable things you should look to early investors to bring to the table (besides money) is connections and deep expertise. In my last founding experience, we delegated the hiring of our first top salesperson to an investor, then did the same thing for marketing. It could not have worked out better.
Do sales people have something important other than their interpersonal skills? Like if I am just a 1 person startup, I am pretty sure the 2nd guy to hire would always be some confident full-stack guy. I am not going to go and find some sales pro. There would be no way to convince that guy to work for a small startup.
> Do sales people have something important other than their interpersonal skills?
Consider the difference between my dad telling a joke at dinner and a standup comedian doing a 2 hour set to a sold out arena. They both technically are "just telling jokes", but there's a lot more that goes into the latter – pacing, rhythm, crowd control dynamics, an extensive repertoire, so on and so forth.
Similarly, great salespeople have 'advanced interpersonal skills'. They have a great understanding of human motivations, how people think about how to make decisions, and they're great at systematically breaking through worries and concerns and so on. They also typically have great networks and relationships with others, which can be very useful.
But yeah, I wouldn't hire a sales person until much later either.
it's not just the skills, but the dedicated time. Cultivating leads and developing marketing plans takes time that you as a tech lead shouldn't have and skills that you probably don't either.
It's a full time job to do well, and your technical people's time is too valuable to have them half-assing it.
A big part of the value a successful salesperson brings to the table isn't "I can talk well," but being adept at
A) determining who is valuable to talk with
B) finding out how to speak to them
C) in the language they use to make decisions
and we should add that the technical people have probably under average interpersonal skills so it's really a bad use of their time to put them to sales. An average sales guy would do better.
"Similarly, great salespeople have 'advanced interpersonal skills'. They have a great understanding of human motivations, how people think about how to make decisions, and they're great at systematically breaking through worries and concerns and so on."
Good points. I always think to myself, "what product are you selling and to whom?" In the case of startups selling technical users, are advanced interpersonal skills required where a demonstration trumps talk. Can the most verbal hacker do the sales ... or are we talking post VC or startup at the 20-30 ppl scale?
> great salespeople have 'advanced interpersonal skills'.
but what about an average sales person. He might just have 'normal interpersonal skills', by 'sales pro', I meant an average sales person though. For average salesperson, their difference from normal developer's interpersonal skills might not be that much.
Firstly you clearly don't know what sales people do if you think it's simply interpersonal skills. That would be like saying a dev just needs typing skills. I say this Not as a sales person, but someone that has sat in rooms with some very good sales people and seen what they can do both on the business level and making a pitch happen. And I see how valuable a good sales person is and know I can't do what they do.
And no way to convince them to work for a small startup? You really think that? Why does anyone good join a small startup then?
Could you have just answered OP's question instead of telling them how wrong they are? From "Do sales people have something important other than their interpersonal skills?" it seems clear to me they are hazy on the value of good sales personnel and want someone who knows to elucidate it.
I can try: As far as I can see, a good sales person sees the needs of the customer and presents the product in such a way that it is clear to the customer that it will fulfill a need. Or, in other words, a B2B salesperson's job is to say "buying our product will offer a very good return on investment" in a way that sounds true to the customer.
This requires some knowledge of the product, but it requires far more knowledge about the customer, their line of business, what people make purchasing decisions etc.
I was actually looking for a sincere answer since I don't know a lot of about what sales people, and what they do. Sorry If I might have worded that in a wrong way.
I'll try to answer from my non-sales POV about what good sales people bring;
- Existing relationships - the old 'who you know'. This can really be a game changer, or at the least speed things up.
- Pricing expertise - sales should be financially savvy and work closely with finance to work out what is the most profitable products they can sell, how they can add/reduce for greater over profit or for leaders how to best stimulate sales teams.
- Product knowledge from the field - The can be a great source of feedback. A good sales person will separate what matters at the core vs why the latest client didn't buy.
- Business knowledge and lateral thinking - so many sales turn up and pitch what expect to sell. Really good sales people get to a business and offer solutions. The need to understand your business fast. When I'm on the customer side I find this most important. You quickly know the people that are trying to sell a product vs those with businesses savvy looking where their solutions can benefit your outcomes. Often they will find new ways to utilise their product to offer benefits.
- Internal fixer/project manager: for many products the person selling hands deliver off to another team. The better ones ensure your happy ongoing and make sure any down the line problems get resolved internally even when they get involved outside of their sales area and have to become temporary project managers etc.
Off the top of my head that's the other value add. Interpersonal is important but is a smaller component than most people give it credit for with the 'fast talking' sale image that is often displayed.
Sometimes folks say otherwise blunt, insulting things out of ignorance and not malice or spite. Take the charitable view and give them an honest answer to expand their worldview, don't shit on them.
Sure, good sales people have good interpersonal skills. But great sales people are doing business strategy as well. They understand where their product is great and deficient, which provides a better interface to marketing, business development, and engineering. It helps to avoid some of those deals which require more cost for the service provider than the client.
They leverage their network to connect to the right people for a sale. For example, imagine you are B2B and want to sell your product to Box. Who are the decision makers, and who has money at Box to buy your product? How do you get in the door with those folks and have a conversation? What are the needs of the customer and how can you map existing solutions to these problems? These are hard questions to answer but with a good network you can get in the door, and has less to do with interpersonal skills and more on strategy and execution.
Forming and maintaining relationships is more difficult and important than commonly assumed by non-sales people. Developing a pipeline, knowing the industry, the right people to talk to, negotiating contracts... I am not in sales, btw, but I have worked closely with them.
Great sales people have great networks. They know how to maintain those networks to discover more clients. They also understand timing and "pain" from potential accounts. One of the best sales people I ever met started working for a 4 person startup because he knew he could bring in about $1mil in sales in the first year. He ended up doing $1.9mil in sales that year.
All this talk of "who to hire first" is totally case-sensitive, but if you're dealing with entreprise or high-value things, a great sales person can make your company.
Sales people make the company money. You can have the greatest product of all time but if you dont know how to find people who need it or how to sell it to those people after you find them than your startup is dead on arrival.
Seems reasonable. You want to hire what you don't know, but you will likely suck at it (unless you are lucky). So hire for what you already know, so you can do more.
Many people have commented about how to hire a skill you don't know about, and it was a top highlight in the article.
I know a company trying to solve this. Expert Interview - http://expertinterview.com/ . I've used them for hiring specialty technical areas and I was about 90% happy with the result. Disclosure, I know the CEO personally because we have a common investor.
Me. They should hire me first. Then somebody else like me to support me, but not as important as me. And then the people who do various other unrelated jobs that aren't as important as my job. Then, and only if they are doing well and only if they have enough parking and private office spaces should they hire people who are both not like me and whose jobs I do not entirely understand and who are therefore much less important to me (and the company).
If it is a tech startup and you are already the tech person then you want to get a good technical project manager to help you organise and prioritise everything. However you want a TPM with good general admin skills over expert technical skills. Someone who can understand technical issues but can also deal with all the other crap you don't want to have to deal with as it is just a distraction.
Company is default alive. No outside money (yet). Growth was slow so any interested investors first complement on the profitability milestone the ask why growth is not some exponential curve. I just point back to our profitable company. Pick one: "explosive" growth, requires funding. A small, profitable and growing company may not, founders get more action and customers get more focus. And I get more time with the family than my last "growth" oriented gig.
I think as a founder you would want to hire someone who is a clone of you - someone who, like you, are able to tackle most if not all areas of running a business, willing to work as hard and as long as you to get your first X users. Someone who is as passionate as you are in your business / industry / niche. Someone who can offer second opinions on things like tech, product, sales, and work with you on the roadmap.
Of course, once a startup grows to teens of employees, then you start hiring more based on your business' needs, but initially you'd want someone who can (and are willing to) do everything.
If you can get someone who is, why not? :D But more than likely you'd have to fork out a bit more. All about sacrifices. Rather give up a slightly bigger chunk of equity and grow 10x, than not hire and end up in the deadpool after a while.
This is solid advice if you want your company to grow linearly at the rate you acquire knowledge. Hire people who are verifiable more knowledgeable than you in areas you seek to grow.
After working 3 years each in 2 tech startups with mostly tech people, the missing link were in both someone to take care of the design, usability and user research of the products. Design was an afterthough ("Not enough work for a designer"), and usability was a not a known concept. Kind of hard to become a "viral" success when there's no feedback loop from the people you want as your users.
Customer support and administration. Both of these will suck up the founders time and can more easily be hired for vs software dev or sales. This will also free up the founders time to focus on other things such growth.
I personally think sales should be done by the founders until there is a solid & predicable sales process and business model in place.
I've always said that to properly automate/outsource something, you need to be capable of doing it yourself. This applies regardless of the business, although there may be exceptions.
This doesn't work in reverse for me. A founder who is good at business and sales should hire a sales staffer first? The tech side of a business generally moves a lot slower - and recovers a lot slower - than sales. The longer you have poor technical decisions being made, the greater the tech debt.
One company I work for has taken about 18 months to get rid of some technical debt from the origins of the company, which didn't have a senior-level techie. The database still has seven different ways of representing a timestamp in it from those early days.
Having spent too much time with Biotech CEOs the old maxim that accountants are "first to be hired and last to be fired" is statistically valid. Their awareness of the raison d'etre of any business should be available to guide all the decisions.
Nobody knows who better to hire than the founder of a super early stage startup (< 5 people). The founder knows exactly what issues need to be tackled, has the most information about the product/service being sold, and knows what kinds of people they mesh well with. Bringing in a recruiter at this stage is not only wasting vast amounts of precious startup capital but could also thoroughly damage or kill the startup because wasted time, effort, and improper direction.
trend: startup founders who have never done sales want to hire a sales expert
problem: there is no sales script, the product is too infant to sell for a seasoned sales person. the sales person doesn't know what they can and can't promise to dictate the roadmap and vision of the company as a whole.
solution: as painful as it is, founders need to do all the selling until the product is mature enough and there is a repeatable sales process that doesn't require a crazy amount of dev work for each new customer