People who have been successful as first sales hires at a start up, what process did you focus on establishing first?

7 year old start up but always had great inbound leads, recent growth ambitions and a round of funding has led to hiring the first sales team for outbound as well as responding to inbound.

Never been somewhere with so little established processes, and would love to hear what you pros who have started in the sub 50 employee stage and crushed it while establishing long term growth for the org

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braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

Set up the CRM to help you get organized and make data accessbile to management. This may require working with marketing, unfortunately.

Build a pricing and proposal template in Excel & PowerPoint. Something you can reuse and revise.

Establish ideal client profile and ruthlessly prioritize based on it.

Remember to keep an abundance mentality. If something isn't working, you have plenty of room to iterate and try again. You're the only salesperson so the world is your oyster.

Automate what you can, email templates are your friend.

Full_Send

Opinionated

Mid Market AE

Appreciate the response, and completely agree on the ICP portion.

My first focus and I’m trying to build a 25 account Must Win hit list.

Luckily I’m not the FIRST hire, my manager has been there closing deals but it’s been entirely inbound and not a ton of process around it. I do have a lot of creative freedom tho

have hubspot which is nice but new to me.

With it being inbound mostly, I feel like the ICP could missing some huge opportunities due to lack of data, how do you create messaging for entirely new personas?

for example, mainly HR purchases our solution, but it’s meant for the entire company to use, that’s just usually the route of the land and expand, but I think there’s a huge opportunity for Sales and Support teams, however we don’t really have any material geared towards them.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Was the 5th overall hire, first sales hire, and ended up building the sales org from the ground up.

First order of business: build a CRM. I chose HubSpot because...free..and we used it to scale up our business.

Second-order of business: Whip marketing into shape. Seriously, no better time to start building a solid relationship than when you are getting something off the ground. We actually built our growth over the first 2 years through Facebook ads...back when you could manipulate the shit out of the algorithm.

Third-order of business: Once you have a flow of leads, meetings, demos, and closed business from your outbound channel--think 2-3 months--you can start to build a KPI system that highlights growth from all channels (outbound, inbound, referral, partner, etc). This will help with scaling as you go forth and conquer.

After you get those down it's all about hiring a solid team, documenting the shit out of EVERYTHING, and adjusting your plan to solve for scale. In the end, everything is going to scale up quickly, so anything you can do to enable it without having to be the defacto mover of mountains. Build a system that can function pretty much without you...but not fully.

SADNES5

Politicker

down voters are marketing spies

Firstly, it sounds like you are having success currently. Make sure the new hires share in your passion and desire to keep building. Hire for fit for the majority, with a strong leader with current connections to your must win accounts. IMO

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People who have been successful as first sales hires at a start up, what process did you focus on establishing first?

4 comments

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