Startups should try to hire salespeople in pairs. This is particularly important when spinning up a new channel (e.g., launching in a new market, opening up a partner channel, or kicking off outbound sales). Hiring in pairs is helpful for a number of reasons:
First, knowing if a new sales recruit will succeed is difficult. Even salespeople with fantastic experience are unsuited to sell certain products in certain markets. Hiring the wrong person can be a serious setback when it takes a month to find out if they can do it, a month to recruit a replacement, and another month to find out if your second hire will make it. If you hire two people, you have a greater chance of landing at least one effective salesperson.
Second, when trying something new, like launching in a new market, opening up a partner channel, or kicking off outbound sales, it’s hard to know what your salespeople should achieve because there are factors outside of their capability that impact sales results. Suppose you hire one person to launch your product in a new geography, and they fail to deliver results that match your success in your initial geography. Many leaders will blame and replace the salesperson, only to fail again because the problem wasn’t the salesperson. In these situations, problems with the product, economic or cultural differences between your old and new markets, pricing, or other variables could cause poor traction in a new geography. When you hire two people, you can compare their results and, therefore, more clearly see whether traction challenges are people-related or otherwise.
Third, competition fuels sales performance. Salespeople notice when their peers book more meetings, close more deals, and earn more money than them. A lone salesperson is almost always less motivated than one with a competitive peer.
If your team is big enough to have well-defined departments, but you don’t have a few engineers scattered throughout these teams, you’re probably under investing in AI deployment. If you’re building an AI-enabled product, this should be especially embarrassing. You should hire some more engineers.
Is Australia destined to become a training ground for world-class founders and engineers, only to see them move to the US as their careers take off? This is not our destiny, but we need smarter, industry-friendly policy to build an alternative path, where startups start, thrive, and therefore stay in Australia. Let’s be the beneficiary of brain drain, not the victim.
Your software product today is a tool, and it might already be possible for you or a competitor to build an AI-first product that does the work for your customers without any ongoing effort on their part. If not, it’ll probably be possible soon. Either way, a level of disruption that was not possible a few years ago is now possible in almost every software category.
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