When and how to hire the first sales person

Discussions
#1

Hi guys,

I’m in the lucky position to have more and more traffic and leads on my product but I’m struggling to close more deals. With the current numbers revenue wise I would be able to hire (at least a part time) sales person.

Has anybody any experience with this? I’m talking B2B sales only mostly to bigger clients (not necessary) enterprise but still with some of the usual ‘demo/sales’ dance.

To be more specific the following questions come to mind:

  • Where to find a decent sales person?
  • How to compensate? Base salary? Commission?
  • What ‘things’ should be in place for a sales person to work with?
#2

Around the middle of this weeks podcast we talk about this a bit and what we’re doing at UserScape http://bootstrapped.fm/bootstrapped-episode-58/

Finding a decent part time one is going to be really hard. No advice there :smile:

We do base salary plus commission. We have a large existing customer base so we have 2 commission tiers. X for support renewals and license sales to existing customers 2X for new business to fully new customers or new divisions/departments of existing customers.

We’re using Close.io for sales CRM. It’s a little rough in spots, but overall we like it. You need something like that and GoToMeeting or similar. We also use a product called Schedule Once to let people select demo times and it automatically creates a GTM meeting and sends them the info.

#3

Hi Ian,

thank you for the answer. Any tips on where to find a decent sales person? Unfortunately I’m not able to hire somebody out of my support team like you guys :smile:

#4

Yeah, no idea :slight_smile: Part time seems like it would be hard but can start by putting out some ads. Maybe authentic jobs, maybe wherever sales people hang out???