Welcome to Decoding Sales, a podcast we're a engineer, that's me, Alex, and a salesperson.

That's me, Peter.

Talk about the art and science of sales

as it relates to life and engineering

and everything else.

In this episode, we going to focus on the startup founder who is

looking to make their first sales hire. Almost every company unless you have a totally

self-served business is going to need this person.

But what does it look like to hire this person?

How do you actually interview them?

And how do you get them to join your little startup?

So Peter, let's kick this off. I think the first question is actually

when everyone knows they need to hire their first salesperson, but when is the right time to do it?

Yeah, I think that the earlier the better in my opinion, obviously you do need to have

product market fit in your product. You need to have some traction in terms of

potential companies that might buy your product and I do think

having some sort of pricing mechanism that's already thought through in a way to

actually charge customers is important before you hire for a salesperson.

If you're a technical founder, don't try and do everything on your own or at once.

Hire a thought partner on the sales side, somebody who can really lead the efforts so that you can focus on the product

and the technical challenges and you have again that partner that can go to market and really

sell the platform at scale.

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