GTM 134: When to Hire Your First Sales Reps (And How to Get It Right) with Joe DiMento
Feb 18, 2025
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Joe DiMento, Head of Go-To-Market & Industry Partnerships at Bain Capital Ventures, shares his wealth of experience in sales strategies. He discusses the critical timing for hiring your first sales reps and what traits to look for, such as grit and adaptability. Joe emphasizes structuring simple yet effective compensation plans and the value of hiring multiple account executives simultaneously. He also delves into the importance of aligning candidates with company mission and highlights how AI is transforming sales and revenue generation.
Founders should establish a strong understanding of market patterns before hiring sales reps to ensure alignment and effectiveness in efforts.
Candidates who demonstrate a strong desire to learn and adapt significantly improve early-stage sales performance through quick adjustments in strategy.
Hiring multiple Account Executives simultaneously fosters experimentation and collaboration, enhancing the team's morale and refining the overall sales process.
Deep dives
Understanding Market Response
Founders must learn how the market responds to their vision before hiring sales team members. Closing initial deals is essential to identify patterns in customer behavior and needs. A strong understanding of these patterns allows founders to effectively onboard and guide their sales hires, ensuring they focus on the right target segments. This foundational knowledge helps prevent the hiring of sales personnel too early, which could lead to misaligned efforts and wasted resources.
The Importance of Learning Agility
The speed of learning is crucial for success in an early-stage sales role. Candidates who exhibit a strong desire to learn and adapt, as well as embrace new processes and ideas, tend to perform better. For instance, leveraging resources like podcasts, online courses, and industry-related literature can greatly enhance their understanding of the market and product. This learning mindset ultimately contributes to better performance and enables quick adjustments in the sales strategy.
Hiring Multiple AEs for Success
Hiring more than one Account Executive (AE) at a time provides valuable insights and fosters experimentation within the sales team. Different sales approaches can be tested concurrently, allowing the team to identify the most effective strategies and methodologies. Additionally, having a cohort of AEs prevents feelings of isolation in individual sales roles, creating an environment for collaboration and peer learning. This dynamic ultimately helps to refine the sales process and boost overall team morale.
Documenting the Sales Process
Fostering documentation of sales processes is vital for scaling operations and supporting new hires. Founders should prepare onboarding materials and recordings of sales calls that capture key insights and strategies. This documentation not only aids new salespeople in their training but also encourages a culture of continuous improvement within the team. By developing resources that outline successful sales techniques and customer interactions, organizations lay the groundwork for sustainable growth and effectiveness.
Balancing Compensation and Equity
Compensation structures for sales roles are nuanced and should be designed to incentivize performance while being fair to employees. Early-stage companies need to offer competitive on-target earnings (OTE) based on market benchmarks, typically ranging from $200,000 to $350,000, depending on the stage and industry. Additionally, incorporating equity is essential to motivate and align the interests of AEs with the company's goals. Flexibility in compensation plans, including the option to adjust terms based on the company's growth and the employee's performance, can create a motivating environment for new hires.
Joe DiMento is the Head of Go-To-Market & Industry Partnerships at Bain Capital Ventures. Previously, he was an operating partner at Fractal Software, helping launch vertical software companies and find product-market fit. Before that, he was the first non-founder seller at three startups, turning early traction into a repeatable sales motion. He began his career at Google and Bain & Company and holds an MBA from Stanford GSB.
Discussed in this Episode:
When to hire your first account executives
Key traits to look for in early sales hires
Structuring compensation for first sales reps
Should you 'hire the buyer' to be your sales rep?
Highlights:
05:03 When to hire your first sales reps.
13:17 Characteristics of top early-stage sales reps.
The best talent isn’t actively job hunting. Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. As a key GTMfund partner, they equip sales and marketing teams with top performers.
The GTM Podcast The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Scott Barker, GTMfund Partner, featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.
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