Build the sales process before you hire salespeople

The sequence most companies run is: revenue plateaus, the founder is the bottleneck, so hire a salesperson. Six months later the hire has not hit target, the founder is still closing the meaningful deals, and the conclusion drawn is that it was the wrong hire. Sometimes it was. More often the role was never a job, it was a hope.

Founder-led selling works because the founder carries the entire process in their head and improvises the parts that are missing. They know which enquiries are worth time, what to ask, what to concede, when to walk. None of that is written down, because it never needed to be. Hiring transfers the activity without transferring the judgement, and judgement is most of the job.

What has to exist before the first hire

The minimum is smaller than a sales playbook and much larger than a CRM login.

• A written definition of a qualified lead, with the disqualifying criteria stated explicitly. If a new hire cannot tell which enquiries to ignore, they will work all of them and close few.
• A discovery structure: the questions that must be answered before a proposal exists. Not a script to read, a list of things you refuse to quote without.
• The pipeline stages, with an entry condition for each. A stage without an entry condition is a feeling, and a forecast built on feelings is noise.
• A standard proposal or quote format, and who signs off on deviations from it.
• A defined follow-up cadence with an end point. Most lost revenue in early sales functions is not lost to competitors, it is lost to a follow-up that quietly stopped.
• The three or four objections you already know are coming, and the answer the business is willing to stand behind.

This is a document you can write in a week, largely by transcribing what the founder already does. The exercise itself is useful independent of hiring, because it exposes the steps that only work because one specific person is doing them.

Why this changes who you can hire

With no process, the only person who can succeed is someone senior enough to build one, which is an expensive and scarce hire, and they will build it their way and take it with them. With a defined process, you can hire for execution and coachability, evaluate candidates against how they handle the process rather than how confident they sound, and know within weeks whether the problem is the person or the process.

It also changes what a miss tells you. When a hire misses target inside a defined process, the pipeline data shows where: not enough qualified conversations, conversations not converting to proposals, or proposals not closing. Each of those has a different remedy and only one of them is a hiring decision.

The first ninety days

Onboarding should be deliberately narrow. Have the hire run the defined process without permission to redesign it, on a defined slice of the pipeline, with the founder reviewing calls and proposals weekly. After a quarter they will have opinions about what does not work, and by then the opinions are worth having because they are grounded in the same process everyone else can see.