Author: Josh Bunce

How long did your last AE hire actually take, from the day someone said “we need another rep” to the day that rep closed their first deal?

If the honest answer is “longer than we planned”, you’re not alone. Most SaaS revenue plans treat hiring as a line in a spreadsheet, when it’s really a chain of roles, timelines and costs that all depend on each other.

This blog breaks down the core revenue roles, how long each one realistically takes to hire and ramp, and where the real costs sit, so you can plan headcount around reality rather than hope.

Let’s Dive In!

The roles that make up a SaaS revenue team

A revenue team is more than a group of closers. In most B2B SaaS businesses between Seed and Series C, you’ll see some version of the following:

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs/BDRs) create pipeline through outbound prospecting and qualify inbound interest. They’re often the first hire after founder-led sales starts to creak.

Account Executives (AEs) own the deal from discovery to signature. Depending on your motion, you might split them by segment: SMB, mid-market and enterprise.

Sales Engineers or Solutions Consultants carry the technical side of the sale. In complex or technical products, they’re often the difference between a stalled deal and a signed one.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Account Managers protect and grow the revenue you’ve already won. In a world where net revenue retention matters as much as new logos, they’re not an afterthought.

Revenue Operations (RevOps) keeps the machine running: CRM hygiene, territory design, comp plans, forecasting and reporting.

GTM leadership, whether a Head of Sales, VP Sales or CRO, sets the strategy and builds the team that delivers it.

You won’t need all of these at once. The skill is knowing which one unlocks the next stage of growth.

Realistic hiring timelines by role

Hiring timelines vary by market, seniority and how prepared you are, but these are the windows we typically see for a well-run process:

SDRs: four to six weeks from brief to offer. The candidate pool is larger, but strong SDRs with a track record still get snapped up quickly.

AEs: six to ten weeks. Add notice periods (often one to three months in the UK) and you’re looking at a quarter before they start.

Sales Engineers: eight to twelve weeks. The talent pool is smaller and the best people are rarely on the market.

RevOps: six to ten weeks, longer if you need someone senior enough to build systems from scratch.

VP Sales or CRO: three to five months, plus notice. Senior searches need careful calibration and usually involve the board.

The part most plans miss is ramp. An SDR might be productive within two to three months. An AE selling mid-market or enterprise deals can take six to nine months to hit full quota. If you need revenue in Q3, the hire needed to start in Q1, which means the search needed to start in Q4 of the previous year.

Where the real costs sit

Salary and on-target earnings are the visible cost, and they’re significant. But the true cost of a revenue hire includes a lot more than the offer letter.

Ramp cost. You’re paying full base salary while the person builds pipeline and learns your product. For an AE, that’s potentially two quarters of salary before meaningful return.

Management time. Every new hire pulls on a sales leader’s calendar for onboarding, deal coaching and call reviews. That time comes from somewhere.

Tooling and enablement. CRM seats, sales engagement platforms, data tools and training all add up per head.

Recruitment cost. Whether it’s agency fees, internal recruiter time or job board spend, filling a role is never free.

Vacancy cost. This is the one people forget. An empty AE seat is lost pipeline and lost revenue for every month it stays open.

Mis-hire cost. Get it wrong and you pay all of the above twice, plus the knock-on effect on team morale and customer relationships.

When you add these up, the cost of moving slowly or hiring the wrong person usually dwarfs the cost of doing it properly.

Sequencing your hires

Order matters. A common mistake is hiring three AEs before anyone is generating pipeline for them, or hiring a VP Sales before there’s a repeatable motion for them to scale.

A sensible sequence for many early-stage SaaS businesses looks something like this:

1. One or two AEs who can sell without a playbook, often alongside the founder.

2. SDR capacity to feed them, once you know which messages and segments convert.

3. A first-line sales leader or Head of Sales once the team reaches four to six reps.

4. RevOps support as soon as forecasting and CRM data start to feel unreliable.

5. Customer success capacity in step with your customer base, not as a late addition.

Your product, deal size and market will shape the exact order, but the principle holds: hire for the bottleneck you have now, while planning for the one you’ll have in six months.

How to plan headcount with fewer surprises

A few practical habits make revenue hiring far more predictable:

Work backwards from revenue targets. Start with the number, then factor in ramp, attrition and hiring time to work out when each seat needs to be filled.

Build in attrition. Sales teams lose people. Plan for it rather than treating every departure as a crisis.

Agree the profile before you start. Be clear on segment experience, deal size, sales cycle and stage fit before the first CV lands. Vague briefs lead to long processes.

Keep the process tight. Three or four well-designed stages over two to three weeks keeps strong candidates engaged. Drawn-out processes lose them to faster competitors.

Track the right metrics. Time to hire, time to ramp, quota attainment by cohort and twelve-month retention tell you far more than headcount alone.

Getting it right the first time

Revenue team hiring is one of the biggest investments a SaaS business makes, and one of the easiest to get wrong. Understanding the roles, being realistic about timelines and counting the full cost puts you in a much stronger position to grow on plan.

So, when you look at next year’s revenue target, does your hiring plan start early enough to hit it?

Invest in a SaaS Sales Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.

Reach out to a member of the team here about Getting it right the first time, or see more about how we can support your growth here about Getting it right the first time.

Who was your first Marketing hire, and what was on their business card?

Now the harder question.

Did that title match what you actually needed them to do in their first six months?

For most SaaS companies the honest answer is no. The title said Head of Marketing. The job was building pipeline from nothing, on their own, whilst the sales team asked every Monday where the leads were.

That gap between the title and the work is where most SaaS Marketing hiring falls over.

Not at interview. Not at offer. At the point somebody decided what the role was.

Let’s Dive In!

Why Sequencing matters more than Seniority

Sales hiring has a fairly well understood order. You hire AEs, you add SDRs when there is enough inbound and outbound to split, you hire a Leader when there are enough people to need managing.

Marketing does not get the same treatment. It tends to get hired as one lump called “Marketing”, usually late, usually after somebody notices the pipeline is thin.

The result is a role that has to be everything at once. Brand and demand and content and product marketing and events and the website. No one person does all of that well, and the people who claim they can are generally the ones you should worry about.

Sequencing fixes this. Not by hiring more people, but by being clear about which single part of marketing is actually the constraint right now.

Stage One: One Person who does the work

Before there is repeatable pipeline, you need one senior individual contributor who can generate demand and is genuinely happy doing it themselves.

Hands on keyboard. Writing the emails, running the campaigns, fixing the landing pages, sitting close enough to sales to hear the objections first hand.

This is the hire that gets mistitled most often. Calling it Head of Marketing feels generous, and it helps at offer stage. It also creates two problems. You attract people who want to build a team rather than build pipeline. And when you do hire an actual Leader eighteen months later, you have a title collision and a difficult conversation.

What good looks like at this stage is someone who can point at pipeline they created and tell you how. Not someone with a lovely deck about brand architecture.

Stage Two: Split Demand and Product Marketing

The signal for this one is usually sitting in your sales pipeline already.

When deals start going quiet late in the cycle, and your AEs describe the losses as pricing, it is worth checking whether it is really positioning. Buyers rarely say “your story was weaker than theirs”. They say the budget moved.

That is the point Product Marketing stops being a nice-to-have. Positioning, competitive, the messaging your sellers use in the room, the enablement that makes a new AE dangerous in month three rather than month seven.

Splitting Demand and Product Marketing also gives your first Marketer a decision to make. Some want the demand half, some want the product half. Asking them is more useful than assuming, and it tells you a lot about what you have.

Stage Three: Hire the Leader

Hire Marketing Leadership when there is a function to lead.

If Marketing is one or two people and the constraint is execution rather than direction, a VP or CMO will spend their first year doing a job they did not sign up for. They will do it, because good people do. Then they will leave, and you will have lost a year and a salary.

The better signal is when the Channels work, the specialists are in place, and the real bottleneck has become trade-offs. Where does the next pound go. Which segment do we stop serving. What are we not doing next quarter. Those are leadership problems, and they only appear once the basics are running.

The Two Questions to settle before you open any Marketing search

This matters more than the sequence, honestly.

What is Marketing accountable for? Pipeline, sourced revenue, or something softer like awareness and brand. There is no wrong answer, but there is a wrong process, which is not deciding and then arguing about it at the first quarterly review. Candidates will ask this in the second conversation. If you and your Revenue Leader give different answers, the strong ones walk.

Who does the Hire report to? If Marketing reports into Sales, say so early. Plenty of excellent Marketers are completely fine with it, especially at the demand end. The ones who are not will tell you in the first call, which saves everyone a month of process.

Most stalled marketing searches I see are not a supply problem. The market is not empty. The remit was just never agreed, so every shortlist satisfies one Stakeholder and fails another, and the Agency gets blamed for the calibration nobody did.

Back to the Business Card

If you are about to open a Marketing role, try writing the first six months of the job before you write the title.

What does this person do in week one. What do they own by month three. What would make you say, at the end of the year, that this was the right hire.

Then pick the title that fits it. Not the other way round.

We wrote more about how this works across Demand Generation, Product Marketing and Marketing Leadership on our SaaS marketing recruitment page, including the bits that tend to go wrong at each stage.

And if you are staring at a brief right now and cannot decide whether the role is a doer or a Leader, that is a short conversation and usually a useful one.

Book a call and we will talk it through.

Revenue leaders are measured on a number, but the lever that most reliably moves that number is not pricing, territory design or enablement – it is who sits in the seats.

Hiring is the largest single investment most SaaS revenue organisations make, typically consuming half or more of the go-to-market budget, and yet it is the area where CROs and VPs of Sales are given the least structural support. Recruitment is treated as an HR process rather than a revenue process, and the cost of that framing shows up two quarters later as missed coverage, unproductive headcount and a forecast built on people who will not ramp in time.

Here is what revenue leaders need to understand about hiring in SaaS – the numbers, the trade-offs, and the decisions that are genuinely theirs to own.

Let’s Dive In!

Hiring is a capacity model, not a headcount request

The first shift is to stop thinking in roles and start thinking in capacity. Your number is a function of productive selling capacity multiplied by expected productivity, adjusted for attrition and ramp. Each of those variables is knowable. If your average AE carries a £700k quota, attains at 75% on average, ramps over five months and you lose one in four reps a year, the arithmetic of what you need to hire – and when – is not a guess.

Revenue leaders who present hiring plans in these terms get better outcomes with their boards and their CFOs, because the conversation moves from “why do you need three more AEs” to “here is the coverage gap and here is what closes it”. It also exposes the uncomfortable truth that late hiring is the most common cause of a missed year, and that a hire made in month nine contributes almost nothing to that year’s number.

Ramp is the variable everyone underestimates

Ramp time is the quiet killer of revenue plans. In mid-market SaaS, a realistic time-to-full-productivity is four to six months; in enterprise it is often eight to twelve, longer than many sales cycles. Yet plans are routinely built on three-month ramps because that is what the model needs to work.

Two consequences follow. First, hiring decisions must be made at least two quarters ahead of the revenue they are meant to deliver. Second, ramp is an investment you control – structured onboarding, early shadowing, a defined first-90-days plan and an assigned owner can compress ramp meaningfully, and the difference between a four-month and an eight-month ramp across five hires is a material amount of ARR.

The cost of a bad hire is larger and later than it looks

The direct costs of a failed sales hire – salary, commission draw, recruitment fee, onboarding time – are the smaller part. The larger part is opportunity cost: a territory left uncovered for the time the person was in seat plus the time to replace them, typically nine to twelve months of lost coverage on that patch. Add the damage to pipeline in accounts they mishandled, the management time consumed, and the effect on team morale, and the true cost of a mis-hire at AE level commonly runs to several multiples of first-year OTE.

This is the argument for rigour over speed – but only up to a point. A process that takes eight weeks and loses the two strongest candidates to faster competitors is also expensive. The discipline is to be fast and structured, not to trade one for the other.

Own the scorecard, delegate the search

The part of hiring that is irreducibly the revenue leader’s job is defining what good looks like. That means a scorecard: the outcomes the hire must deliver in year one, the competencies that produce those outcomes, and the small number of genuine non-negotiables. Written down, agreed with the hiring panel, and used consistently in debriefs.

Almost everything else — market mapping, sourcing, screening, scheduling, offer management – can and should be delegated to an in-house talent team or a specialist partner. Revenue leaders who involve themselves in sourcing but not in defining the profile have the delegation backwards.

Interview panels need calibration, not consensus

Unstructured panels default to consensus on likeability. The strongest processes assign each interviewer a specific competency to assess, require written scoring before the debrief, and use evidence-based questioning throughout. Debriefs should surface disagreement rather than smooth it over; a panel that unanimously likes every candidate is not assessing, it is socialising.

Structured interviewing is also the most practical defence against bias, which in sales hiring tends to favour candidates who resemble the interviewer’s own successful past. Pattern-matching on background is not the same as predicting performance.

Retention starts at the offer, not the exit interview

Sales attrition in SaaS has historically run at 25–35% annually, and a meaningful share of it is voluntary departure within the first year – which is a hiring failure, not a retention failure. The causes are consistent: quota set without evidence, territory smaller than described, pipeline support that did not materialise, or a manager the rep never met before signing.

Revenue leaders can address all four before an offer goes out. Be specific and honest about territory and pipeline; set quota at a defensible multiple of OTE; introduce candidates to their direct manager during the process; and resist the temptation to oversell. Candidates who join with accurate expectations stay longer and ramp faster.

Build the bench before you need it

The best revenue organisations treat talent pipeline the way they treat sales pipeline – as something maintained continuously rather than built under pressure. That means keeping warm relationships with strong candidates who were not right at the time, tracking who is performing at competitors and adjacent categories, and knowing where the next three hires would come from before the requisition opens. Hiring under time pressure is where standards quietly slip, and it is almost always avoidable.

Invest in a SaaS Sales Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.

Reach out to a member of the team here about Build the bench before you need it, or see more about how we can support your growth here about Build the bench before you need it.

Germany combines two of the hardest things in go-to-market hiring: a scarce, in-demand role and a market with its own distinct rules.

Solutions Engineers (who must be both genuinely technical and genuinely commercial), are difficult to find anywhere, and in Germany that challenge is layered on top of long notice periods, a de-centralised talent market, risk-averse candidates and specific cultural expectations.

For SaaS companies building a Rre-Sales function in the DACH region, success depends on understanding both the role and the market. 

Here is how to approach it.

A scarce role in a de-centralised market

Germany’s technical talent is spread across several hubs – Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg – each with its own sector strengths and salary norms.

Munich and its surrounding deep-tech and enterprise scene is a particular centre of gravity for technical talent. Combine that geographic spread with the inherent scarcity of strong Solutions Engineers, and you have a market where the right person may not sit where you expect.

Decide early which hub best matches your product and buyers, and calibrate expectations city by city rather than running a single national search.

Technical Depth and Communication both matter – in a considered market

As everywhere, a great SE must run credible demos, handle technical objections and translate business problems into technical solutions while communicating clearly with customers and internal teams.

German buyers tend to be especially rigorous and detail-oriented, which raises the bar for technical credibility: an SE here needs genuine depth to earn trust in a considered, evidence-driven sales process.

Weight your assessment towards real technical substance alongside clear communication.

Plan for long notice periods

German professionals routinely work three-month notice periods – far longer than the two weeks common in the US or the month typical in the UK.

A Solutions Engineer you offer this quarter may not start until the next one. Build this into your hiring timeline and your ramp planning, start searches earlier than feels comfortable, and keep offered candidates engaged through what can be a long gap between signature and start date.

Expect risk-averse, thorough Candidates

German candidates typically do more due diligence before moving and expect you to earn the switch.

Technical professionals in particular will scrutinise the product, the engineering culture and the realistic trajectory of the business before committing.

Treat this diligence as a strength – the same rigour that makes them cautious makes them committed once they join. Come prepared with technical proof points, a credible roadmap and the space for candidates to satisfy themselves the product genuinely works.

Competition, Culture and Engagement

AI and infrastructure companies are competing hard for technical pre-sales talent in Germany as elsewhere, so a clear technical vision and differentiation matter.

At the same time, respect local norms: German candidates value clarity, structure and honesty over hype, and response rates to standard outbound are typically lower, with longer time-to-hire.

English is usually fine for outreach, even with German-native candidates in international roles – but personalised, patient engagement and warm introductions consistently outperform high-volume approaches.

What Good looks like in Germany

The strongest German SEs pair deep, credible technical expertise with the communication skills to build trust across a considered, multi-stakeholder sale.

Look for engineers who can own technical wins in complex, enterprise-grade cycles, who bring genuine substance rather than surface polish, and who thrive in a methodical, evidence-driven environment.

Patience and technical credibility tend to matter more here than pace alone.

Learn more about hiring SEs in Germany here. 

Why a specialist partner matters here

Germany is a market where local knowledge pays for itself — and for a role as scarce as Solutions Engineer, doubly so.

Knowing which hub to target, how to position an unfamiliar foreign brand to technical candidates, what compensation is genuinely competitive, and how to keep an SE engaged through a three-month notice period is the difference between a hire that lands and a search that stalls.

If you are building a pre-sales function in the DACH region, this is a market we strongly recommend having specialist support in.

Invest in a SaaS Sales Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.

Reach out to a member of the team here about Why a specialist partner matters here, or see more about how we can support your growth here about Why a specialist partner matters here.

London’s SaaS and AI sectors have created significant demand for experienced Solutions Engineers – and a persistent shortage of the people who can genuinely do the job.

The role sits at the intersection of technology and commerce, and candidates who combine deep technical expertise with strong customer-facing skills remain relatively scarce in the market.

For SaaS employers, that makes London SE hiring competitive, specialised and often slower than expected.

Here is what you need to know to get it right.

Demand for Solutions Engineers keeps growing

As London’s SaaS and AI ecosystem has expanded, so has the need for technical pre-sales talent.

Companies are competing for professionals who can pair technical depth with commercial and customer-facing ability – a profile that is in short supply.

The practical effect is intense competition across the city’s technology sector, and a market where strong SEs are approached constantly. Plan for a candidate-short search rather than an employer-led one.

Balancing Technical and Commercial skills is the core challenge

A Solutions Engineer is expected to support technical evaluations, run product demonstrations and handle customer conversations while understanding the commercial objectives behind a deal.

Many candidates are strong in one dimension but not the other, and finding people who operate confidently across both technical and business environments is genuinely hard.

This is the single biggest reason SE searches take longer than AE searches – and why a well-designed technical assessment is so important.

SaaS and Enterprise Experience are highly valued

London employers increasingly prioritise SEs with experience supporting enterprise sales, complex implementations or infrastructure-focused products.

Candidates who understand Cybersecurity, AI, cloud platforms or Developer Tools are especially sought after, which makes experienced technical pre-sales talent difficult to secure.

Be deliberate about which domain experience is essential versus learnable; strong engineers with high slope can often ramp on a new domain faster than a narrow search assumes.

AI companies are raising the Competition

The rapid growth of AI and infrastructure companies in London has intensified competition for Solutions Engineers.

Many of these businesses offer strong compensation, meaningful equity and the appeal of working on cutting-edge technology.

To compete, SaaS vendors need to communicate their technical vision, product differentiation and career opportunities clearly – giving candidates a reason to choose your problems and your product over a well-funded AI alternative.

Hiring Speed and Candidate experience matter more than ever

Top London SEs are often progressing through multiple interview processes at once.

Slow timelines, inconsistent communication or an unclear technical assessment will cost you candidates quickly.

The companies that win are decisive, organised and able to demonstrate both technical innovation and long-term career growth throughout the process. A rigorous but streamlined assessment respects the candidate’s time while still protecting your bar.

What Good looks like in London

The strongest London SEs combine genuine technical credibility with the commercial awareness to move a deal forward and the communication skills to earn trust from technical and business buyers alike.

Look for evidence of owning technical wins in complex, enterprise-grade sales cycles, comfort with sophisticated products, and the curiosity to master a new platform quickly. In London’s competitive market, that blend is what separates a good hire from a great one.

Learn more about hiring SEs in London here. 

How Strive helps

Hiring Solutions Engineers in London rewards specialist knowledge of a scarce, in-demand talent pool.

We help SaaS businesses define the right technical-plus-commercial profile, benchmark compensation accurately, and run a fast, well-structured process that secures strong SEs before better-funded competitors do – turning one of the hardest GTM roles to fill into a repeatable hire.

Invest in a SaaS Sales Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.

Reach out to a member of the team here about How Strive helps, or see more about how we can support your growth here about How Strive helps.

New York City has rapidly become one of the most active markets in the world for SaaS Account Executive talent.

High-growth startups, enterprise software vendors, fintech businesses and AI companies are all competing for experienced commercial professionals, creating a fast-moving and highly competitive hiring landscape.

For SaaS employers, the opportunity is enormous – New York offers deep, diverse commercial talent – but winning it requires a sharp value proposition, competitive economics and a process built for speed.

Here is what SaaS companies should know before hiring AEs in NYC.

New York is now a major SaaS Hiring Hub

Once seen primarily as a finance and media town, New York has evolved into a genuine technology centre. That evolution has drawn a broad, deep pool of commercial talent – but also intense competition for it.

When you hire in NYC, you are up against a dense field of well-funded companies targeting the same people. A strong, clearly-articulated value proposition is essential just to earn a candidate’s attention.

Compensation expectations are rising

Sustained demand for experienced SaaS AEs has pushed New York compensation expectations higher year after year.

Candidates assess opportunities on base salary, commission potential, equity and long-term career growth – usually across several offers at once.

To secure top performers, your package needs to be competitive and current. Going to market with dated benchmarks is one of the most common ways employers lose strong candidates late in the process.

Sector experience is increasingly important

Many New York employers want AEs with experience in specific verticals – Fintech, Cybersecurity, AI or Enterprise Software – and a track record in complex, high-value sales.

Candidates who can demonstrate success in those environments are heavily targeted.

As competition rises, weigh how tightly you define your requirements: an overly narrow brief can leave you competing with everyone for the same handful of people, while a slightly broader lens on transferable skills often surfaces stronger, more available candidates.

Candidates weigh more than Compensation

In a market as competitive as New York, employer brand carries real weight.

AEs increasingly consider company culture, leadership quality, product-market fit and long-term stability before accepting an offer.

A clear mission and a compelling growth story frequently tip the balance in your favour – sometimes against better-funded competitors. Make sure your interview process actively sells the opportunity, not just filters candidates.

Fast processes create an Advantage

Top New York AEs move through the market quickly and typically juggle multiple interview processes simultaneously.

Employers who delay decisions or run lengthy cycles lose talent to more decisive competitors. The teams that win align internally early, keep communication tight and consistent, and move quickly once they identify the right person.

In NYC, a well-run, fast process is itself a competitive differentiator.

What good looks like in New York

The strongest New York AEs combine polished, consultative selling with the drive to thrive in a fast, demanding market.

Look for consistent quota attainment, disciplined pipeline management, and the versatility to sell across the diverse buyer types the city contains – from Fintech to Enterprise Software. Adaptability and resilience matter as much as raw numbers in a market this varied and this quick.

Learn more about hiring AEs in New York here!

How Strive helps

New York rewards employers who understand its pace and its talent pool. With a US presence and deep commercial networks, we help SaaS businesses benchmark NYC compensation accurately, position their opportunity to stand out, and move fast enough to secure top AEs before the competition. The result is a shortlist of genuinely strong candidates and a process built to convert them.

Invest in a SaaS Sales Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.

Reach out to a member of the team here about How Strive helps, or see more about how we can support your growth here about How Strive helps.