How to hire your first salesperson without handing over guesswork

Name the work before naming the job title#

Write down what your first sales hire will take responsibility for. Finding relevant conversations, advancing opportunities, demonstrating a technical offer, managing accounts and leading a team are different jobs. A title such as “Head of Sales” does not decide which work your business needs.

Look at a recent week. What did the founder actually do? What could another capable person repeat with support? What still depends on the founder's expertise, relationships or untested assumptions?

Your first output is a role brief. It should make the work understandable to a candidate and to the people who will support them. Peter Kazanjy's founder-led-sales interview provides context for developing a motion before asking others to execute it.

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Check whether the motion can be handed over#

Prepare a minimum useful sales kit: the audience, a specific offer, proof you can share, discovery questions, common objections, stage definitions and a next-step process. Include what remains uncertain.

A rough but honest kit can be useful. A beautiful deck cannot compensate for an offer nobody understands or a buyer the business has not yet identified. If the hire's job is partly to develop the motion, describe that work and the founder support explicitly rather than promising an established pipeline.

Keep actual customer examples private unless you have permission to use them. Prepare an anonymised exercise for interviews.

Match experience to the selling task#

Choose role criteria around relevant work rather than prestige or a previous title.

These are questions to investigate, not automatic applicant filters. Use job-relevant criteria consistently. Avoid protected characteristics, personal circumstances or unsupported inference about an applicant.

Write a role brief people can work from#

Include the primary responsibility, customer type, current offer, typical work, available support, decision authority and how progress will be assessed. Be transparent about what the business knows and what it is still learning.

Agree the appropriate employment, compensation and recruitment arrangements for your jurisdiction before hiring. A role worksheet does not replace those obligations. Set expectations using your actual business and budget rather than a universal salary or quota from an article.

State who helps with product questions, proposals, delivery estimates and escalation. Do not make a new colleague responsible for commitments they cannot approve.

Use an interview exercise that resembles the work#

Give candidates the same anonymised customer situation and a clear task. For example: identify the decision the customer needs to make, propose discovery questions, explain an offer and write a next-step note.

Ask how they would handle missing information and a mismatch. Discuss why they chose the approach. Use a consistent rubric for relevance, listening, clarity, judgement and follow-through. Let a human review the evidence; do not outsource real applicant selection to an autonomous score.

Avoid requesting unpaid client work disguised as an assessment. Explain the exercise and keep it bounded.

Support the first weeks and the handoff#

Plan time for learning, shadowing, supported conversations and reviewing actual work. Start with observable progress: can the person explain the offer, ask relevant questions, record unknowns and carry a decision forward? Revenue matters, but it can lag the start of a role and depend on work done before the hire arrived.

Use your weekly sales routine to make ownership clear. Review the motion together and update the kit when evidence changes.

Kite can help businesses meet prospective employees relevant to a goal. Prepare the role and required criteria first; your business owns applicant evaluation, employment decisions and offers. Keep introductions, recruitment conversations and an actual hire distinct.

Reference: https://kitegtm.com/university/guides/hire-your-first-salesperson. Read the current guide and cite its section URLs and version. If the reference is unavailable, state that limitation instead of inventing its instructions.

Help me prepare a first-sales-role brief from my offer, buyer, stage and responsibilities. Return the work to delegate, unknowns, founder support, role criteria, an anonymised interview exercise/rubric and onboarding plan. Do not evaluate real applicants, infer protected characteristics, rank candidates, contact people, offer employment, decide compensation or spend money.