Jason M. Lemkin says hire your first sales reps based on whether they'd personally buy your product, not their resume or big-company experience. Look for scrappy people who treat limited leads like gold, not polished reps trained on abundant pipelines.
Almost every first time founder hires someone because they worked at Twilio or Cloudflare or wherever and they talk the talk and they can say ACV and NRR and none of which matter. So just wait and interview 30 sales reps however you find them. There's one cheat code. Those first couple reps have to be people you would buy your own product from. That's it. We're looking for pirates and romantics in the early days. We are not looking for folks with massive sales operations teams and enablement team. You hire this perfect person from Snowflake and you have three leads a month and you give two and he doesn't close them. Oh your company's gonna die. Leads are so precious. That's what folks don't get. And I know it's painful and I know most founders have hired this person with the right LinkedIn that they wouldn't buy their product from. Just keep interviewing. You need that quirky pyromatic that loves your product and can sell it.
