So you’re hiring a Founding Account Executive….
Every founder both loves and fears this day. You get to step back (a little) from being the tip of the sales spear. You can delegate away some of the daily grind that it takes to run sales. You can secure hours of precious time back to focus on the long list of ideas that you have to drive the company forward.
But we all know with this first sales hire there is huge risk. No one sells like the founder. No one. Most first sales reps are set up to fail because founders expect that they will hit or exceed the metrics that are already being set.
The reality for most teams is that the numbers will go down in the short term. They will lose deals you would have won and unfortunately waste precious pipeline as they begin to grasp how to sell the product.
Rather than going from 0 to 1. So many teams end up at -1.
So what actually changes in a sales org the moment the founder stops being the main seller?
It’s decision making.
The new hire gets to call all the shots on:
- Which pains matter
- Which deals to chase
- Which prospects feel real.
Founders often think they are delegating:
- Calendar load
- Call volume
- Follow-ups
- Pipeline management
- The grind
But in reality, they are handing over the first filter: what “good” looks like and when a deal is even worth being called a deal.
Too many founders then default to activity measurement, (more calls, more demos, more pipeline!) to ensure that the rep performs but this often leads to inflated pipelines, unqualified demos, lost deals and weeks of wasted time.
Often in this stage founders then spend a bunch of time writing out what their process is, what they do on calls, what they do afterwards etc. But in our opinion its more important to create a decision framework that empowers the new rep to be able to keep the qualification bar as high as the founder would.
So what should founder do instead?
Start with decisions not call scripts.
- What makes a deal worth chasing?
- When should you walk away?
- What makes you confident a deal is real?
Give them playbooks by all means, these tell them what to do.
But set a standard bar that you want to hold them to. This bar should tell them when a deal is good enough to work and progress.
The Founding AE role usually fails when their bar is lower than the founders. It’s your job to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
The litmus test: If your Founding AE ran the entire funnel for a month without you, would you trust the pipeline they handed back?
If the answer is no, the problem is often not effort. It is that they do not yet have your filter.
Hiring your first rep? Auditory helps you keep the bar high while they ramp.