The Top 8 SaaStr Tips to Building an Effective First Sales Team
The most important tips and best practices for founders when building out their first sales team:
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Get sales experience yourself first
- Close the first 10-20 customers yourself to understand the sales process
- This will give you critical insights to effectively train and manage your first sales reps
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Structure compensation to incentivize early sales reps
- Consider letting new reps take home 50-100% of what they close in the first 1-3 months
- This helps them “eat” and get motivated, before scaling back to a more standard 20-25% commission
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Hire sales reps you would buy from yourself
- Since no one has heard of your product yet, each lead is precious
- Hire reps that you would personally trust to sell your own product
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Hire at least 2 reps to start
- Having a “control” group allows you to better understand what drives success
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Provide hands-on training and support
- Be available to help your first reps all day, as they learn the product and sales process
- Formal training processes can come later, but initial on-the-job learning is key
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Prioritize smarter, more experienced reps
- The learning curve will be steep, so more capable reps are better
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Use a simple “round robin” lead distribution
- Split leads evenly between reps at first, to keep things simple
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Hire reps with some relevant SaaS experience
- Look for reps who have sold products at a similar price point before
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I asked Perplexity AI search to summarize the best saastr articles on building a first sales team. I think it did a pretty good job The summaries we do might be better, but this is a great place to start.
