What Is The Right Profile Sales Leader For Your Stage?

So you need to hire a new sales leader?

The implications of getting this hire wrong can be massive. The wrong leader can alienate your current team, generate turnover, reduce revenue and leave you carrying the bag. We breakdown how to mitigate this risk by stage of company and talk about some common mistakes so you can avoid them in the future.

Early Stage ($0m to $15m)

• The common mistake with early stage businesses is that they often try to hire too senior of a candidate way too early. While it may seem like a great idea to bring in a VP or C-Level candidate from a $100m+ company because they've "done the journey" it can backfire. You need to think about 1. do they want to do the journey again? 2. How long ago was it that they were at your stage? Do they have the ability to do the day to day consistently? This can be very hard to tease out during an interview and often the answers to the above questions are "yes" until month 3 in the role. To be clear, these types of hires can work, but it's imperative to ensure alignment around budget, headcount, resources, and to a certain extent, talk them out of the role before joining.
• Our recommendation from previous roles that we've completed is that you need an executive who’s strong at operating in a non-structured environment and can create something out of nothing (0-1). You need to hire people who are very much think like you, as a founder. You are looking for hungry generalists who are uncomfortable being bored and secretly enjoy a little chaos. These candidates tend to go to early stage companies consistently and can talk to you tactically about what they actually did themselves to move the needle. If they left a large public company to go to a series A business once and then went back, it's probably not the right fit.

Mid Stage ($15m to $75m)

• As you get to this stage, you need to think differently about your hiring profile. You change from hiring someone who’s great at executing, to hiring someone who’s able to take something that’s already happening, create repeatability and build systems/processes. This profile can be your early stage leader, but usually isn't.

• We get brought in a lot at this (inflection!) point to help identify the person who can scale your business. Most early stage candidates in the role already aren't built for this stage and there tends to be a mutual parting. These mid stage candidates can see where processes are weak or inefficient, and can fix it…they can spot points of failure and build process around it. They get that what worked before may not work anymore.
• Similarly to the above, these candidates will have worked at this stage multiple times and seen success.

Late Stage ($75m+)

• At this stage, you are no longer hiring executives who do the work themselves; you’re hiring people who are good at delegating. Their superpower is based on hiring other leaders.
• At late stage, bureaucracy kicks in. People have to be good at advocating and communicating business strategy with clear business cases/justification. There’s a lot of managing up/managing sideways/managing down. Decision making gets slower and the business becomes more siloed, you need some who has patience and some diplomacy, it's a very different skillset.

Final Thought

• It can be very difficult to say goodbye to candidates who helped build your company. However, recognizing where skills gaps are and putting people in the right positions for them (whether it's with your company or not) is the hallmark of a great leader. While it may be difficult in the moment, done correctly it can strengthen the relationship further and help the candidate thrive in a better environment.

“ At early stage, you need to hire people who very much think like you, as a Founder.”

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