What I Learned Doing Product Research as a Startup's First Salesperson
When there's no playbook yet, the first sales hire's job isn't only to sell. It's to find out who the company should be selling to, and that work looks nothing like a normal sales role.
The job was half selling, half research
I joined Proton as its first account executive for business customers. In the early months, most calls weren't pitch calls, they were discovery conversations with prospects and early customers, trying to understand who actually had the problem we solved, how urgently, and what they'd tried before. Some of those calls closed. Many didn't, and that was fine, because the point wasn't only the close, it was the pattern underneath it.
What actually got fed back
Recurring objections, the specific language customers used to describe the problem, the features they assumed existed and were surprised not to find, all of that went back into weekly notes shared with product and leadership. Not every piece of feedback changed a roadmap. But a feedback loop that only runs one way, sales reporting up with nothing coming back, teaches a sales team to stop reporting. The loop has to be real for people to keep feeding it.
Figuring out who to sell to before you've hired anyone?
Request a free 15-minute consultation.Why this matters more at the early stage than later
Once a company has a defined ICP and a repeatable sales motion, a new sales hire's job is mostly to execute it well. Before that point exists, whoever is selling is also the company's best source of ICP data, because they're the ones in the room hearing, deal after deal, what's actually true versus what the founding team assumed. Treating an early sales hire as purely a quota-carrier wastes that.
If you're building toward a first sales hire and don't yet have a written ICP, that's the gap worth closing first, not the headcount.