Before you hire your first salesperson

A first sales hire fails most often because they inherit a motion that only existed in the founder's head. They are given a quota, a CRM nobody maintains, and the instruction to do what the founder did.

Before hiring, write down who to target and why, what qualifies an opportunity, what happens in a discovery call, what the pipeline stages mean, and what has to be true to move a deal forward. If you cannot write it, the hire cannot repeat it.

Then instrument it. Required fields, stage exit criteria, and activity capture are not bureaucracy — they are the only way to tell whether a new rep is struggling with targeting, messaging, or closing.

Hiring into a documented system is a management problem. Hiring into ambiguity is a gamble.