Jason M. Lemkin offers a simple hiring test for sales reps: would you buy your own product from this person? If the answer is no, they won't succeed at selling it. This screening catches reps who can actually scale the company.
You have to trust them to build up a playbook, to build up a system, to handle, again, a more heterogeneous type of rep. But to kind of wrap this up, whenever I talk with founders where their first reps aren't working out, or often reps three through six aren't working out, when when they found one or two to work out, I always ask them this question. Well, those reps that didn't work out, would you have bought your own product from them? And the answer is always, no, I wouldn't have. So that ultimately is the most important screening test of all. Get that right, and you'll probably hire a couple of great reps to take you to the next level.
