
How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups - jhchen
https://www.entrepidpartners.com/sales-hiring-guide
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lanstein
My colleague and I started the sales team at PagerDuty. We were both
engineers. Happy to meet for coffee in SoMa if anyone with revenue would like
a short 1:1. I've done this a number of times over the years and hopefully
those folks have found it helpful.

Sorry, no remote/phone calls. I don't do calls with clients either - face-to-
face only - lesson one :)

Email is in profile.

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pc86
Any tips for a developer who would like to move into Enterprise tech sales?

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scoot
You might find a move into enterprise technical pre-sales easier (or perhaps
that's what you meant).

Moving from tech support to pre-sales within the same organization is not
uncommon - support have deep technical knowledge of the product, have customer
facing (at least telephone) skills, are used to juggling multiple ongoing
conversations, etc.

Moving from engineering, if you are in a role that requires you to understand
the whole product, you are part way there. Communication skills perhaps less
so (unless you run engineering TOI presentations for other parts of the
business or within engineering), and customer facing skills possibly not so
well honed.

A move from engineering to profession services (which adds a customer facing
element) to pre-sales, to (if that's what you're aiming for, and is still
attractive having worked with sales people while in a pre-sales role) sales,
might be a better path.

Enterprise sales is less about the product, and more about developing
relationships ("people by from people they trust"), constructing a deal that
works for both organizations, and closing the sale.

Technical pre-sales is a question of mapping the customer's business
requirements to the product's capabilities, and demonstrating that your
company can solve their specific needs better than the competition.

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ghaff
That's all good advice. I see a lot of movement among solution architects
(pre-sales), support, technical marketing managers, developers (although less
so), etc. Sales is, as you say, a largely orthogonal skill set, and often,
personality. I won't say someone can't transition between the two worlds but
I'd be hard put to name an example off the top of my head.

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a13n
Worth mentioning that this guide assumes your SaaS startup is doing enterprise
/ high-touch sales. If you're doing low-touch SaaS, you probably don't want to
hire a salesperson at all.

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christudor
This looks really interesting ... but I'm not going to download some random
PDF when you could just have easily put the information directly on the site.

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pbiggar
I hope the irony is not lost on you.

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dandare
> Additionally, you should be able to answer most of these questions—all of
> which a candidate is likely to ask you: • How long is the sales cycle (from
> first conversation to closed contract) on average? • What is the typical
> deal size (in terms of ARR)? • How is your product priced? • What are the
> steps of the sales process? • How do you define success in this role? • How
> are you getting new leads and generating conversations?

As a technical founder, these are exactly the questions I need to ask someone
with sales experience!

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landon32
I think there are 2 common cases for SAAS startups here:

1\. The founding team is very technical and doesn't want to make sales/talk to
customers themselves. In this case, it will be difficult to achieve success
without taking on a non-technical cofounder to do customer development and
then early sales.

2\. The founding team has technical talent but also at least one person who's
happy to go out and do customer development and then make sales. In this case,
they should probably wait on hiring someone with Sales experience until they
feel that they have product market fit, which means they've probably made
enough sales to answer these questions.

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verdverm
a16z has an article I read and liked recently:
[https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-sales-why-
what/](https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-sales-why-what/)

Content tagged with sales:
[https://a16z.com/tag/sales/](https://a16z.com/tag/sales/)

~~~
bharris315
Bryan from Entrepid here. We disagree with the advice of hiring a head of
sales as your first sales hire. You are better off finding a someone with 3-6
years of experience to be the first hire as an IC. This hire (and maybe a few
others) will help you grow the company to a point where you can attract a
badass VP of sales / head of sales

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mbesto
This all depends on the capabilities of the current exec team. Generally my
experience has been:

Exec team with mature sales presence/leadership = hire less experienced (3-6
years).

Exec team with immature sales presence/leadership = hire more experienced
(6-10 years with opp to become a VP of Sales).

Good guide - thanks for putting together.

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TAForObvReasons
I'd love some advice for startups that do traditional non-SaaS software sales.
However it seems that everything is catered to high-growth SaaS startups. Is
there a dearth of material because no one will invest in traditional software
businesses or because everyone else is building SaaS these days?

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briandear
Are there actually startups selling “traditional” software? An actual serious
question. The follow up would be: “why?” It seems like recurring subscriptions
would have a much better LTV than selling one-time software. If updates and/or
support is part of the product, then you’re essentially still selling SaaS
even if it doesn’t seem pedantically correct.

Let’s say you are selling a $5000 piece of software and you update every 2
years. If you are counting on selling updates as part of your projected LTV,
you are pretty much a subscription business, subject to the same churn
considerations as a “normal” SaaS might be.

My point is that unless you are selling a one-time product with no paid
updates or paid ongoing support, then SaaS strategies should work for you.
Unless you happen to be selling something esoteric such as avionics or
infrastructure software, it would seem most SaaS sales strategies would tend
to be applicable.

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jon-wood
Where I work we sell an IoT platform to big corporates, which is much closer
to traditional software sales than it is to SaaS. There’s big upfront cost,
and then rolling maintenance costs.

Pre-sales is a really long and drawn out process when dealing with big
corporates, doubly so when you’re selling what will become core
infrastructure. We’re currently a year into what is effectively pre-sales with
one client, involving a full due diligence process, in depth conversation with
their corporate security department, and a (paid for) trial involving several
hundred of their customers.

