<aside> 💡 Conventional wisdom indicates that when you are roughly 3 to 6 months ahead of achieving $1M in ARR then you should begin to hire for their first sales and account management teams.

</aside>

📚 To read

Startup Sales: Everything You Need to Know About Building Your First Sales Team

Practical Prospecting | Jed Mahrle | Substack

New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development

Home - Building Momentum

High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

Hire a Head of Sales | Andreessen Horowitz

https://whatshot.substack.com/

https://a16z.com/2016/04/08/sales-why-how-when/

When to scale 🚀🚀🚀

• Part 1 Product Maturity: When we are fairly sure of P<>M fit (product appeals to users who are not just early adopters)
• Part 2 Metrics: When the Unit Economics work
• Part 3 Know Your Customer: Who they are? Where to find them?
• Part 4 Attracting / Training the Team: When we have a playbook for expanding leads (efficiently), hiring/training sales people / SDRs etc

Unit Economics

<aside> 💡 In order to understand how we should go about hiring → we should understand the unit economics

</aside>

They tell the core story of our business - whether it is designed in a way that ultimately works.

• How do we get a new customer without spending very much money
• Why might we need to spend increasing amounts of money to get people to sign up?
• What if you spend a lot of money but they don’t stay?

How to build out sales-assist motion in addition to enterprise and how to build enterprise teams?

1. Build a sales playbook 📙

   • 5 P's of building a sales playbook
     • People
       • Expectations
       • Attributes
       • Stories
       • Standards of excellence
       • Goal setting sheets
     • Prospect
       • Customer interviews
       • Case studies
       • Buyers Matrix
       • Industry deep dive
         • History
         • Terms
         • Key players
     • Problem
     • Process
     • Product
       • What it does
       • How it does it
       • Proof that it actually does
       • Why that even matters
       • Take this further feature by feature

   <aside> 🏗️ How to build

   • Document everything that’s already being done
   • Record all trainings
   • Record yourself work (whoever is currently doing any selling or speaking / demoing customers)
   • Block 1 day a week for 4 weeks - delegate and record everything. </aside>

2. Understand our enterprise AE hiring profile 👧🏿

   • What is our current & forecasted revenue attainment and what % will we expect an ENT AE to provide?
   • What is their quota?
   • Expected deal cycle?
   • Average contract value?
   • Inbound to Outbound ratio?
   • Comp plan?
   • SDR resources?
   • ENT AE PROFILE
     • Has the Enterprise AE ever worked in an early stage company selling ENT deals? How do they define “enterprise deals”?
     • Can they provide an example of the strategic selling they’ve done in the past?
     • Can they put together a 30/60/90 to educate the hiring team on how they will approach their role?
     • Will they be able to speak to past partnerships, existing relationships with customers, their experience working cross functionally with exec leadership, partners, marketing, etc?