Before you hire your first AE
Most founders hire their first account executive after closing the early deals themselves. The founder has been the whole sales team, the hire is meant to take that work over, and the founder expects to step back.
The hire itself is usually not the hard part. The harder part is what the new AE finds when they arrive, because in most early companies the sales process exists only in the founder's head.
Signs you are ready
A few things tend to be true when a first AE hire works out.
You can describe who buys and why in two or three sentences, and the description holds across most of your recent deals. Deals have closed without a personal connection to the founder doing the heavy lifting. And you can point to the step where deals usually stall, even if you have not fixed it yet.
If none of those are true, the company may still need the founder selling for a while longer. A new hire can repeat a pattern that already works. Finding the pattern for the first time is a much harder job to hand to someone in their first month.
What a first AE usually walks into
The most common situation looks something like this. Pipeline is thin, because the founder was selling to their own network and that network has mostly been reached. The CRM holds partial records that nobody fully trusts. Notes from past calls live in a notebook, an inbox, or nowhere.
A capable AE can work through all of that. It takes time, though, and the first few months of a new hire are expensive months to spend rebuilding context the founder already has.
Five things to have in place before day one
A written picture of the buyer. One page covering the companies that bought, the people who signed, the problem they were trying to solve, and the reasons that came up most often when deals were lost. Use the customer's own words wherever you can.
A short list of target accounts. Fifty to a hundred companies that look like your best customers, each with a named contact. That gives the AE something to work on in the first week while they learn the product.
A CRM that reflects how deals really move. A handful of pipeline stages with clear definitions, the fields that matter filled in on open deals, and closed deals marked won or lost with a reason. This is usually a day or two of cleanup, and it pays off every week after that.
One outbound channel already running. Even a small one, such as a steady cold email campaign to the target list, means the AE starts with conversations coming in. Hiring someone and then asking them to build their own pipeline from scratch slows the first quarter considerably.
Notes from your own calls. Recordings or written notes from five to ten recent sales conversations, including the questions buyers asked and the objections that came up. Those notes will teach a new AE more about your sale than any product walkthrough.
The first 90 days
It helps to agree in advance on what you will look at, so the conversation at day 90 is about evidence.
In the first month, look for activity and learning. The AE should be running calls on their own and asking sharp questions about the product and the buyer.
By the second month, look at pipeline. Are new opportunities being created at a steady rate, and are they the right kind of company?
By the third month, look at progression. Deals should be moving through the stages, and the AE should be able to explain why the stalled ones have stalled.
Closed revenue in the first quarter depends heavily on your sales cycle, so treat it as one signal among several. A long cycle can hide a strong hire, and a lucky early deal can hide a weak one.
Where to start
If you are planning a first sales hire in the next few months, the most useful thing to do this week is write the one page buyer picture. It will sharpen the job description, it will help you interview, and it will be the first document your new AE reads.
If you would like help putting the rest in place, we set up outbound and the CRM behind it for early teams, often alongside a first sales hire. Book a call and we can talk it through.