You're the bottleneck, and you can feel it. You can deliver for the clients you have, or you can take on three new ones. Take the three and your weekend is gone. So you take one, and growth waits.

So you post the job: hiring a salesperson. And a new kind of headache starts. Who do you hire first? How do you pay them? And what do they actually do on Monday morning, when the whole sales process still lives in your head?

I talked this through with Charlene Thompson on The Sales and Rev Ops Effect (June 2024). Listen to the full conversation: Sales with Simon Severino

Not being a salesperson is your edge

Most founders I coach are not salespeople. They're passionate about something, they built a solution, and now they have five or ten people and want to grow.

That's an advantage. As I told Charlene: "people don't want to talk to salespeople, they want to talk to somebody who has intimacy with their world and with their problem."

Think about how you buy. You read reviews, you watch a video, you read an article from someone who's used it. Then you want to talk to an expert. The salesperson comes last, because you can smell the target they need to hit.

So your first hire isn't there to replace your expertise. It's there to get more buyers in front of it. 🐬

Hire the role that frees your calendar first

"Hiring can cost you so much time and nerves and can give you so much headache." It can turn into a full-time job, and a bad one.

So start with the right role. If you still want to close the deals yourself (most founders do, at first), hire an appointment setter. Their job is simple: fill your calendar. You wake up, the calendar is full of qualified calls, and you do what you're best at.

Then the pay question: full commission, base salary, or a mix? There's no perfect answer. My recommendation on the show: "I recommend full commission for appointment setters at the very beginning for their very first month."

The six-week ramp

Don't throw a new setter at your hottest leads on day one. Walk them through the stages, from cold to hot.

1. Week one: ICP and anti-ICP. Give them a lead list. They sort it and show you they understand who your ideal client is, and who it isn't. No calls yet.
2. Week two: start conversations. They call people and open real conversations.
3. From week three: warm leads. People who already downloaded something from your website.
4. Weeks five and six: hot leads. People who are actually asking to work with you.

By the time a new seller touches a lead that wants to buy, they've had a month of practice on lower stakes. Nobody burns your best leads while learning. And your new hire walks in thinking: this company has its act together. 🐯

Why new sellers quit in week one

Here's the bitter math. To find three great setters you probably scan 100 people, talk to 40, and pick the top three. In my experience, without solid processes two of those three jump off in the first week.

Good sellers can smell whether they walked into a well-oiled sales machine. If they didn't, they think: "oh my god, I have to build my own processes here". And they leave.

Charlene put it well: it's like going to a restaurant and being told to get in the kitchen.

Write the cookbook in the order of the money

Writing everything down sounds overwhelming. That's where most founders fail: they start, it gets boring, they stop. The fix is order. We call it the cookbook, and you follow the money.

1. Payment. How a client pays you. Standardize it first.
2. Closing. What happens right before payment. Not a script: talking points, tested until they work.
3. What happens before closing. Discovery, follow-up, the steps that lead to the closing call.
4. Then up to marketing. How buyers find you.
5. Last: hiring and leadership.

Start anywhere else and you lose the founder. It feels like homework, and nobody has time for homework.

Train for the small problems

Getting a call on the calendar sounds easy. Then the small problems show up. The number is wrong, so how do you find the right one? A gatekeeper whose job is to keep you out. A decision maker who gives you ten minutes, then cuts it to five, then to two because the board is walking in.

So train three versions of your talking points: ten minutes, five minutes, two minutes.

And remember what the job really is. "B2B sales is much more about consultancy." It's aligning the leadership team on where they want to go and how to get there. Get that right and they take your product along. Get it wrong and even the right product won't sell.

That's why the talking points matter more than charisma. A seller who knows the steps and their order leads the call. One who doesn't ends up chasing, sending proposals into silence and discounting to get a reply.

Shape the culture with one Monday question

New sellers copy the culture they walk into. If nobody follows up, they won't either. You shape culture by shaping structure.

Start the week with a pipeline meeting and one question for everyone: which opportunities did you create this week? Even people outside sales answer it: which opportunities did you notice, and did you tell the sales team? Then pick two opportunities and rehearse them together later in the week.

Start this week

1. Decide the first role. Still closing yourself? Hire a setter to fill your calendar.
2. Write the payment and closing steps. Talking points, not a script.
3. Prepare a week-one lead list for the ICP and anti-ICP sort.
4. Map the six-week ramp from cold to hot leads before the hire starts.
5. Run Monday's pipeline meeting with one question: which opportunities did you create?

Picture week six. Your new setter is booking qualified calls from hot leads, using steps they found on day one. Your calendar is full of buyers who want to talk, and your weekend is yours again. That's Sprintlife: control of the sales conversation, and the time freedom it buys you. 🌴

Listen to the full conversation with Charlene Thompson: Sales with Simon Severino

Get the checklists and ramp your first sales hire with other founders in the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆