Which VP Should You Hire First? Sales? Marketing?

So here's the one that everybody gets a little bit wrong, which is which VP? I finally got to a million or even 2 million in revenue. Which VP should I hire first? 90% of you in the audience will want to hire the VP of sales first, right? You'll finally figure out how to get customers. You'll get tired. You'll feel like, if I can find this great VP of sales, she'll be a magician. I'll sell more. It's true. Absolutely. If at a million in revenue, you're ready a million two at the latest, you are absolutely ready for a VP of sales. Once you even have two reps at quota, as soon as you have two, a great VP can take you from three to 300. That's her job. She can do it. But what people don't get is that you should hire actually any great VP you can find at a million. This is the mistake we get. We fixate on this magician that's going to magically bail us out. But here's the magic. Once you get a million, you're trying to go to 2 million or 3 million in the next year. That means that all of these VPs, if they're all awesome, will be accretive. So yes, you want the VP of sales, but what about a VP of marketing? Imagine I hired my. I wrote this post years ago because I didn't get it. I hired my VP of marketing at $20,000 a month in MRR. And she was not only great, she was accretive. Like, why would she be accretive? Let's imagine you hire a VP of marketing even later at a million, and she brings more leads in. I just invested in a company at a million of revenue. It has 40 leads a month. It's doing well. And the next thing we're going to do is hire a VP of Demand Gen. You want to know why? If she gets them just from 40 to 50 leads a month, and those leads are worth 20,000, 40, $50,000 each, isn't she going to more than pay for her salary? Of course she is. Right? Of course this VB of marketing can get. If she gets you 50% more leads, and instead of going from 1 to 2 this year, you go from 1 to 3. An extra million, even an extra half million, she's going to more than pay for herself right then and there, at least, probably in two quarters. So absolutely, anyone that can get you more good leads is worth their salary and their weight in gold, even at 20k a month. So hire her early. Don't just wait for this VP of Sales. Same thing with customer success, right? You heard Todd before talk about hunting that first great customer he was talking about. Even if you have 10 big customers, 20, 30, and you hire this VP of Customer Success at a million and she grows just a couple of those accounts bigger than you could because you don't have time or. Or some junior person does, she can more than pay for herself. I over time had accounts that we grew from 20,000 to millions of dollars at Adobe Sign and Echo Sign. You bring this person in to handle, let's say you're doing a million and ten of those customers are half million of your revenue. Can this person grow that Half million to 6000-007000-00800,000 if she or he does nothing 50 hours a week but make these customers happy, of course she can. So don't wait. If you find the world's best VP of Customer success at a million, hire her tomorrow. Hire the VP of Marketing, hire the VP of Sales and then the last one. And I think Todd might have touched on this, but we don't get it. We all wait for the VP of Product late. Why wait? What if this VP of Product spends 50 hours a week figuring out what's that magic feature that's gonna get you that 50k deal, that 100k deal. And what if each quarter she reprioritizes your roadmap because you've run out of time so that you can make that ge, that Google that Facebook, the Schneider Electric, the whatever, Happy. And just once a quarter you close that bigger deal. That VP of Product is accretive. They're beyond free. So hopefully I've convinced you at least some of these are true and you're all going to be fixated. VP of Sales. VP of Sales. VP of Sales. VP of Sales. Hire her if you can find her at a million. But also hire any of the VPs if they're great at a million. They're all accretive and that value will just compound over time. This is my perfect order. The VP of Marketing early. Because just more leads means more revenue. You literally can afford a VP of Demand gen at even 20k in MRR because she'll more than pay for herself. VP of Sales at a million. Maybe the VP of Sales see us after that product at 4 or 5 engineering after. This is like in a perfect world if you came to traction, you met all your great executives here. Life was perfect. You could maybe do this. But I would reorient any of these if I found a great one. Any of them. Hire them. The second you hire a great one, they're all accretive.