Are You Ready to Hire Your First Salesperson? A Test You Can Run This Afternoon
Most founders hire their first salesperson for the wrong reason. Revenue is flat, the founder is tired of selling, and a hire feels like relief. Six months later the rep has quit or been let go, and the founder concludes that salespeople don't work.
Usually the hire wasn't the problem. The timing was.
Revenue and funding are the wrong signals
The real question isn't whether you can afford someone. It's whether someone else could repeat what you do. Here's the test I use, and you can run it this afternoon with nothing but your own deal history.
The test: look at your last 8 to 10 closed deals
Write them in a table. For each one, note what triggered the buyer to look for a solution, who the buyer was and who else was in the room, what objection came up and how it got resolved, what proof convinced them, and how long it took.
Then check for a pattern.
- If most deals share a trigger, a buyer type, and an objection, you have something a new person can learn. You're ready to hire, or close to it.
- If every deal looks different, you're not selling a repeatable product yet, you're selling you. A new hire will fail because what closed those deals was your relationships and your improvisation, and neither can be handed over.
In the second case, the work is to find the pattern first, not to hire. That usually means narrowing your ICP and writing down how deals actually close, before anyone else is asked to run that process.
Want to run this test against your own deal history?
Request a free 15-minute consultation.What this looked like at Proton
I joined Proton as its first account executive for business customers. There was no playbook. The job wasn't just to sell, it was to work out who we were actually selling to. Figuring that out came before any process existed for someone else to inherit, and the team grew from 1 to 10+ across eight consecutive quarters over target once that pattern was found and written down.
That order matters: find the pattern first, hire second. A hire made before the pattern exists is being asked to replicate something that isn't repeatable yet, and that's not a fair position to put someone in.