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  • Who should be the first Marketing hire at a Cybersecurity Vendor?

    Who should be the first Marketing hire at a Cybersecurity Vendor?

    Is your Founder still writing the website copy?

    Are your AEs building their own slide decks the night before a pitch?

    Does every sales call describe the product slightly differently?

    If any of that sounds familiar, you probably need a Marketer. The harder question is which one.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    Why the first marketing hire is so easy to get wrong in Cyber

    Most security vendors get to Series A on the strength of the founders and a handful of good AEs. The founders know the problem inside out. They have worked in a SOC, or built the detection engine, or sold into CISOs for a decade. The early customers bought them as much as the product.

    Then the company raises, the sales team grows, and suddenly the story has to work without the founder in the room.

    That is usually when the first marketing job spec gets written. And it is usually written as a wish list: someone who can do positioning, run paid, manage events, write content, rebuild the website and eventually hire a team. That person rarely exists. When a vendor hires the closest match on paper, it tends to get a generalist who is good at a bit of everything and not quite good enough at the one thing the business needs most.

     

    Start with what is actually broken

    Before you write the spec, ask your sales team two questions.

    First, when you lose a deal, why? If the honest answer is “they did not get what makes us different” or “they went with the vendor that explained it better”, your problem is positioning. You need product marketing.

    Second, how full is your pipeline? If the message lands when you get in front of people, but you are not in front of enough of them, your problem is volume. You need demand generation.

    Most Series A security vendors have a bit of both, but one is almost always louder. Hire for that one first.

     

    The case for Product Marketing first

    Security buyers are sceptical, and with good reason. Every vendor claims to stop everything, and CISOs have learned to ignore most of it. A vendor that can explain clearly and specifically what it does, who it is for and why it is different has a real advantage.

    A good first product marketer will spend their first ninety days talking to customers, sitting in on sales calls and working with your sales engineers. They will come out of it with a positioning the whole company can repeat, a competitive view sales can use in live deals, and materials that do not need rewriting by an AE at midnight.

    It is also far easier to run demand generation on top of a clear message than to fix the message once the campaigns are already running.

     

    The case for Demand Generation first

    Sometimes the positioning is already sharp. The founders have done the hard work, win rates are healthy once a deal is in play, and the real problem is simply that the pipeline is thin.

    In that case a product marketer can feel like a delay. What you need is someone who will take a pipeline target, build a programme across events, email, paid and partners, and be measured on it from the first month.

    The trap is hiring someone whose experience is running large budgets at an enterprise vendor. At Series A your demand generation hire has to build from scratch, often with a small budget and no marketing operations support.

     

    What to look for either way

    Whichever route you take, a few things matter more in cyber than in general SaaS.

    Credibility with a technical buyer. Ask candidates to explain your category back to you as if you were a CISO. If they reach for fear, buzzwords or vague claims about AI, that is what your buyers will hear too.

    A good relationship with sales engineers. In security the SEs often hold the most accurate version of the product story. Marketers who seek them out produce better work.

    Comfort with a long cycle. Proof-of-concepts, security reviews and procurement all slow deals down. Marketing has to support the whole cycle, not just the first meeting.

    Stage fit. Your first marketer has to do the work themselves. Someone who has only ever run a team of ten may struggle without one.

     

    When to hire a Head of Marketing instead

    Some founders want to start with a VP or head of marketing and let them build the team. That can work, particularly if you are about to expand into the US or are preparing for a bigger round and need someone senior to own the plan.

    But a senior leader with no team will often spend their first six months hiring rather than doing. If the business needs positioning or pipeline now, a strong hands-on hire first, with a leader added later, is usually the quicker route.

     

     

    Back to the Founder writing the website

    If that is still you, it is a sign the business has outgrown the founder doing everything. The first marketing hire is what lets the story travel without you in the room.

    We recruit marketing, sales and customer success teams for cybersecurity vendors, and we are always happy to talk through what your first or next marketing hire should look like. You can  book a call if you would like to talk it through.

     

  • How Do You Know When Founder-Led Sales Is Ready to Hand Over?

    How Do You Know When Founder-Led Sales Is Ready to Hand Over?

    Could someone else close your next deal? Not someone brilliant, not someone who has sold for twenty years. Just a good seller, given what you have already got.

    If the honest answer is “not yet”, the plan to hire five sellers next quarter may be a few steps ahead of where the company actually is.

    Founder-led sales is the right way to start. The founder knows the product, the buyer and the awkward questions, and every call teaches the company something. The hard part is knowing when to hand it over, and what you need to have in place first.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    The test is not revenue, it is repeatability

    A founder who has closed a lot of deals has proved that the product sells. What they have not necessarily proved is that anyone else can sell it.

    The clearest sign that you are ready is that you can describe the sale. Who the buyer is, what problem gets them to take a meeting, what the three or four stages look like, what usually kills a deal and how you answer it. Not in a slide, in plain words a new seller could act on.

    If you cannot do that yet, the answer is not to hire faster. It is to spend a few weeks writing down what you already do.

     

    Five questions to ask before the first hire

    Ask yourself these, and try to answer with examples rather than feelings.

    Has anyone other than the founder closed a deal, even a small one? A CS lead, a solutions person or an early employee who ran a deal end to end is worth a lot of evidence.

    Do your best customers look alike? If they do, a new seller has somewhere to aim. If every customer is a one-off, they will spend a year finding out.

    Can you say why you win, and why you lose? Not “our product is better”, but the specific reasons you have heard from buyers.

    Is there enough pipeline to keep another person busy? A new AE with no leads is an expensive way to find out that the founder was generating all of them.

    Are you ready to let someone else run a deal differently from how you would? This is the one founders skip. If you will step in the moment a call goes off script, the new hire will never learn to run it.

    Three or four honest yeses and you are probably ready. Mostly “not really” means the next job is the process, not the hire.

     

    Who to hire first

    A common instinct is to hire a VP of Sales, on the theory that a leader will build the machine. It can work, but it is usually the wrong first move. A leader with no team and no defined process spends their first months building both, while the founder waits and the number stays where it was.

    More often, the first hire is one or two experienced Account Executives who have sold in a similar environment and can run a process once it exists. They do not need to be famous. They do need to have done the early version of the job and be comfortable without much structure.

    A leader tends to make sense a little later, when there are a few sellers who need managing and the founder wants to step away from the day-to-day. 

     

    What to write down before they start

    Before the first seller arrives, put together a short pack. It does not need to be polished.

    The ideal customer and the three questions that tell you whether a prospect is one. The stages of a deal and what has to be true to move between them. The objections you hear most and how you answer them. Two or three recorded calls that show what good looks like, including one that went badly.

    That is the material a new seller uses in their first fortnight. Without it, they invent their own version, and you end up with a process that changes with every hire.

     

    The mistakes we see most often

    Hiring for the sales team the company hopes to have in two years rather than the one it has today.

    Hiring someone from a large, well-known company and expecting them to build their own pipeline, their own materials and their own process at the same time.

    Handing over the deals the founder finds hardest and reading the slow start as a performance problem.

    Stepping back completely on day one. A better pattern is to stay close for the first few deals, then move from running the call to reviewing it.

    Measuring the new seller against the founder’s numbers. The founder was selling to friends of friends with the product half-built in their head. The second seller is doing something different, and the target should say so.

     

     

    So, is it time?

    If you can describe how a deal is won, point to a customer profile you trust and see enough pipeline for another person, then yes, it is probably time to start. Begin with a scorecard for the first role: what the person needs to achieve in twelve months, and what they need to be like to do it.

    If you are somewhere between “not yet” and “definitely”, book a call and we will go through it with you.

     

  • When should a Cybersecurity Vendor hire its first RevOps person?

    When should a Cybersecurity Vendor hire its first RevOps person?

    Is your forecast a number or an opinion?

    Do your Reps each describe a qualified opportunity a little differently?

    Does a new Account Executive take a full quarter to explain the product to a sceptical buyer?

    If so, you may be missing someone. The harder question is who, and when.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    Why operations gets ignored until it hurts

    Most security vendors reach Series A on founder credibility and a small group of strong sellers. The CRM is a shared habit, not a system. Deals are remembered, not recorded. That works for a while, because the founder is in every important call.

    Then the team grows. A second segment appears, a partner starts bringing deals, and the board asks for a forecast it can rely on. Suddenly the person who knows where everything lives is also the person with no time to explain it.

    That is usually when a RevOps role gets written down. And, as with most first hires, it gets written as a wish list: CRM admin, analyst, forecaster, deal desk, enablement lead and process designer, all in one person. That person rarely exists.

     

    Start with the pain, not the title

    The most useful question is not “do we need RevOps?” It is “what is the most expensive thing we cannot see right now?” The answer usually points to one of three jobs.

    The numbers are not trusted. If leadership argues about the data in every pipeline review, you need someone who owns definitions, hygiene and reporting. That is classic sales operations, and it is often the right first hire.

    The process is not repeatable. If every deal is run differently, handoffs between SDR, AE, sales engineer and customer success are messy, and nobody can say why deals stall, you need process design more than reporting.

    The new starters are slow. If ramp time is the problem, you may need enablement before you need operations. A good enablement lead shortens the distance between a start date and a confident first discovery call.

    Be honest about which one hurts most. A single hire can cover two of them at Series A. Rarely all three.

     

    Why security deals make this harder

    Security sales cycles are long and multi-threaded. There is a technical evaluation, a security review of the vendor itself, a champion who is not the budget holder, and often a reseller or MSSP in the middle. If none of that is captured consistently, the pipeline report is a work of fiction.

    Partner-sourced deals add another wrinkle. Who gets credit, how it is registered and how it affects compensation all need to be written down somewhere. An operations hire who has not seen a channel motion before will learn it on your time.

     

    What to look for in the first hire

    A few things matter more than the tooling on a CV:

    • Experience on long, multi-stakeholder software deals, not only high-volume transactional selling
    • The ability to explain the numbers in plain English to a rep and to a board
    • Credibility with sellers, which usually means they have sat close to a live deal
    • A preference for the simplest process that works over another system

    For enablement, add a quick learner. They do not need to be an engineer, but they do need to understand the product well enough to teach it to someone who has to sell it.

     

    Who they should report to

    This catches people out. A RevOps hire who reports into sales will be pulled towards sales priorities. One who reports into finance will be pulled towards control. Neither is wrong, but you should choose deliberately. At Series A and B, most security vendors we speak to put the role close to the VP Sales or CRO, with a clear line to marketing and customer success so the data is not owned by one team.

     

    What the first 90 days should look like

    A good first quarter is dull in the best way. Agree the definitions: what counts as a qualified opportunity, a commit and a closed deal. Clean the pipeline against those definitions. Build one weekly report that leadership actually uses. Then, and only then, look at tooling.

    The warning sign is a new hire who spends the first month buying software. Systems are easy to add and very hard to remove. Ask in the interview what they would fix with the tools you already have.

     

    Common mistakes

    • Hiring a senior systems architect when the real problem is that nobody agrees on definitions
    • Asking enablement to fix a positioning problem that belongs to marketing
    • Treating partner deals as an afterthought in the reporting
    • Writing a job spec that mixes analyst, admin and strategist, then wondering why nobody fits

     

    When it is too early

    If you have two or three reps, a clean CRM and a weekly pipeline review that everyone attends, you probably do not need a full-time hire yet. A founder or a sales leader with a clear process can carry it. The signal to move is usually a mix of team size, a second segment, a forecast the board wants to rely on and the founder’s own calendar.

     

     

    Where to go next

    Which of those three pains is costing you most right now? If it is not obvious, that is a good conversation to have before you write a job spec.

    We recruit RevOps, sales operations and enablement talent for cybersecurity vendors. We do not recruit technical security roles, and we will tell you early if a brief belongs elsewhere.

     

  • What Should a New Sales Hire’s First 90 Days Look Like at a SaaS Company?

    What Should a New Sales Hire’s First 90 Days Look Like at a SaaS Company?

    Did your last sales hire know what good looked like by the end of their first month? Or were they still working it out in month three, while you wondered whether you had hired the wrong person?

    Most of the time, a slow start is not a hiring problem. It is an onboarding problem that gets mistaken for one. The seller was good enough to hire, then dropped into a company where nobody had written down how things work.

    Here is what we think a sensible first 90 days looks like at a tech company, and what you can do before the start date to make it work.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    Before day one: decide what “ramped” means

    If you cannot say what a ramped seller looks like, you cannot tell whether the new hire is on track. So agree it before they start, and tell them.

    Pick three or four things you will look at. How many meetings they are running, how many deals they are managing in the pipeline, how well they run a discovery call, how much of their own pipeline they are building. The right ones depend on the role. What matters is that the new hire hears them in week one, not in a review in month four.

    Be honest about the sales cycle too. If a typical deal takes several months, nobody should be judged on closed revenue in their first quarter. Judge them on the things that lead to it.

     

    Days 1 to 30: learn the product, the buyer and the process

    The first month is for learning, and it works best when it is structured rather than left to the new hire to piece together.

    Get them into customer calls early, as a listener. Give them the recordings of two or three good deals and one that was lost. Let them sit with someone in customer success, because the way customers talk about the product after they have bought it is very different from the way prospects talk before.

    Make them explain the product back to you, out loud, in their own words. It is the fastest way to find the gaps.

    By the end of the month they should be able to describe the ideal customer, the stages of a deal and the three objections they will hear most. They should not yet be carrying a full pipeline.

     

    Days 31 to 60: run the process with a safety net

    In the second month the new hire starts doing the job, with someone close enough to catch mistakes.

    For an AE, that means running calls with a more experienced colleague listening, then getting feedback the same day. For an SDR, it means working a defined list with a defined message, and reviewing the first batch of replies together before changing anything.

    This is where a lot of companies step back too early. The new hire has had a month of learning, so surely they are ready to fly. They usually are not, and the early mistakes become habits because nobody saw them.

    A short, regular review does more than a long one that happens once. Ask what they tried, what happened, and what they would change. Then listen.

     

    Days 61 to 90: build their own pipeline

    By the third month the new hire should be doing the harder part of the job, which is building pipeline that did not exist before they arrived.

    This is the point where you find out whether they have the instincts you hired for. Do they know who to approach? Do they ask for help early enough? Do they follow up on the awkward deals, or let them go quiet?

    It is also the point where an honest conversation is easiest. If the signs are weak, it is far better to say so now, with specific examples, than to wait until the fourth quarter and wonder what changed.

     

    What the company needs to provide

    The new hire carries half of this. The company carries the other half, and it is the half that tends to be missed.

    A named person who is responsible for their onboarding, not “the team”. Access to the tools and the data on day one, not day ten. A written first-month plan, even a rough one. A manager or founder who has blocked out time for the reviews, and keeps it when the quarter gets busy.

    None of it is expensive. All of it is the first thing to go when the company is busy, which is exactly when a new hire needs it.

     

    What this means for the hiring process

    Onboarding starts before the offer. The more clearly you describe the first year in the interview, the more likely it is that the person you hire is the person who can do it.

    We write a short scorecard with every search: the outcomes the person needs to achieve, and the traits that predict them. It is the same document you use to judge the first 90 days. If the interview and the onboarding are measuring different things, something has gone wrong.

     

     

    So, how will you know?

    Look back at your last sales hire. Could you have said, on day one, what you would be looking for on day 90? If not, that is the thing to fix before the next one starts.

    If you are planning a hire and want to talk through what the first quarter should look like, book a call and we will go through it with you.

     

  • SaaS Revenue Team Hiring: Roles, Timelines, and Costs Explained

    SaaS Revenue Team Hiring: Roles, Timelines, and Costs Explained

    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.

     

  • How to Hire Your First Sales Team in a SaaS Startup

    How to Hire Your First Sales Team in a SaaS Startup

    Are you still the person closing every deal?

    Do you know exactly why customers buy, but struggle to explain it to anyone else?

    If so, you’re probably at the point where your SaaS startup needs its first sales team. It’s one of the most important moves an early founder makes, and one of the easiest to get wrong.

    This blog walks through when to build the team, who to hire first, how to assess them and how to set them up to succeed, so your first sales hires add momentum rather than burning runway.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    Know when you’re actually ready

    Hiring salespeople before you understand your own sale is expensive. Before building a team, you want a few signals in place:

    Repeatable wins. You’ve closed a handful of customers who look similar and bought for similar reasons.

    A rough playbook. You know who the buyer is, what pain they feel, what objections come up and roughly how long deals take.

    Demand you can’t keep up with. Founder time is now the bottleneck, not product-market fit.

    If those signals aren’t there yet, a sales hire won’t create them. They’ll inherit the same uncertainty and you’ll both struggle. Spend a bit longer in founder-led sales and document what’s working.

     

    Who to hire first

    Your first sales hires set the tone for everything that follows, so the profile matters more than the title.

    Start with builders, not passengers. Your first AE won’t have a polished playbook, a full marketing engine or a team of SDRs. You need someone who’s comfortable creating their own pipeline, testing messages and feeding back on product and pricing. People who’ve thrived at a similar stage are usually a safer bet than stars from large, well-oiled sales organisations.

    Hire two, not one, where you can. A single rep makes it hard to tell whether results are down to the person or the market. Two early AEs give you a comparison point, shared learning and a bit of healthy competition.

    Hold off on the VP Sales. It’s tempting to hire a senior leader to “own sales” straight away. But a VP who’s used to scaling an existing motion may struggle when there isn’t one yet. Many startups do better with hands-on AEs first, then a first-line leader or Head of Sales once the team reaches four to six reps.

    Bring in SDRs once you know what converts. Pipeline generation is crucial, but SDRs need clear messaging and target accounts to work from. Add them when your AEs have proved which segments and messages land.

     

    Design an assessment process that predicts performance

    A great interview is not the same as a great salesperson. Your process should test the things that actually matter in the role.

    Define the profile up front. Agree on the deal size, sales cycle, buyer persona and stage experience you need. Write it down and score every candidate against it.

    Dig into the numbers. Ask about quota, attainment, average deal size and how they built pipeline. Strong candidates will be specific and consistent.

    Use a realistic exercise. A discovery call or short pitch based on your product shows how someone thinks, listens and handles pushback. Keep it fair and relevant, not a hoop-jumping exercise.

    Probe for startup fit. Ask about times they’ve worked without structure, built something from scratch or changed approach when something wasn’t working.

    Move quickly. The best early-stage sales people often have several options. A clear process of three or four stages over a couple of weeks keeps them engaged.

     

    Get the compensation right

    Your comp plan tells people what you value. For a first sales team, keep it simple and fair.

    A typical structure combines a competitive base salary with variable pay tied to new revenue, often close to a 50/50 split for AEs. Early on, it’s worth being realistic about ramp, with a reduced or guaranteed quota in the first few months while pipeline builds. Equity can be a strong draw for people who want to be part of the early story, but it rarely replaces a fair cash package for sales hires.

    Avoid overcomplicating plans with lots of accelerators and SPIFs at this stage. Clarity matters more than cleverness.

     

    Set them up to succeed

    Onboarding is where many first sales hires quietly fail. Some practical steps make a big difference:

    Share everything you know. Call recordings, win and loss notes, objection handling, competitor intel. Your head is the playbook, so get it on paper.

    Sit in on calls together. Let new hires shadow you, then reverse it. It’s the fastest way to transfer judgement, not just information.

    Agree leading indicators. Revenue takes time. Track meetings booked, pipeline created and deal progression in the early months so you can spot problems early.

    Give them a voice. Your first sales hires are close to the market. Their feedback on product, pricing and positioning is valuable, so build in a way to hear it.

     

    Avoid the most common traps

    A few patterns come up again and again with first sales teams:

    Hiring for big-brand logos rather than stage fit. Hiring a senior leader before there’s anything to lead. Expecting a new AE to hit full quota in their first quarter. Leaving a weak hire in seat too long because replacing them feels painful.

    Each one is avoidable with a clear profile, a disciplined process and honest expectations.

     

     

    Building the foundation

    Your first sales team is the foundation for every hire that comes after it. Get the profile, process and onboarding right, and you create a team that can grow with the business rather than one you have to rebuild in eighteen months.

    So, are you ready to hand over the deals you’ve been closing yourself, and who’s the right person to take them?

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

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

  • How do you build an SDR team at a Cybersecurity Vendor?

    How do you build an SDR team at a Cybersecurity Vendor?

    Has your first SDR booked a single meeting your AEs actually wanted?

    Are you handing the same list of accounts to a new hire and hoping they will know what to say?

    Does every outbound email sound like it could have come from any security vendor?

    If so, the problem is probably not the person. It is how the team was set up. Here is how to build an SDR function at a security vendor that earns replies.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    Why outbound into Security is different

    Security buyers are contacted constantly. Their inboxes and LinkedIn messages are full of vendors promising to stop threats faster, and most have learned to ignore all of it.

    That means volume is a blunt tool. A vendor has a limited number of realistic target accounts, and every careless message to one of them makes a later, better approach harder. The job is quality of targeting and quality of message, not just activity.

    Get the story right before you hire

    An SDR can only be as good as the pitch they are handed. If your founders and AEs describe the product four different ways, a new SDR will pick one at random and the buyer will hear it.

    Before you write a job spec, sit down with your AEs and agree three things: who the ideal customer is, what problem you open with, and what a qualified meeting looks like. Write it down. It does not need to be long, but the SDR needs something to hold onto in week one.

     

    When to hire the first SDR

    The right moment is usually when the founders or first AEs have a repeatable story and a clear target list, but not enough hours to open every conversation themselves.

    Too early, and the SDR is working from a pitch that is still changing. Too late, and your most expensive people spend their week prospecting.

     

    What to look for

    A few things matter more in cyber than in general SaaS.

    Research habits. Ask candidates how they would choose ten accounts and what they would say to the first one. You are looking for a method, not a script.

    Credibility with a technical buyer. Can they explain your category back in plain language, without fear tactics or vague claims about AI?

    Resilience and curiosity. Outbound into security means a lot of silence. The people who do well keep testing what works instead of sending the same message harder.

    A good relationship with AEs and sales engineers. They are the people who know the real objections. SDRs who seek them out improve quickly.

    You do not need a security background. You do need someone who is interested enough to learn the category properly.

     

    What the first month should look like

    Do not start a new SDR on live outreach on day one. Put them in on AE calls and sales engineer demos for the first couple of weeks, so they hear the real objections and the language buyers use.

    Then have them draft messages for a small set of accounts and review them with an AE before anything is sent. It feels slow, and it is much faster than repairing a burned account later.

    By the end of the first month they should be able to explain, in a couple of sentences, who you sell to, what problem you open with and why someone should give them twenty minutes. If they cannot, that is a coaching conversation, not a reason to send more emails.

     

    The mistakes we see most often

    Hiring an SDR to fix a pitch that has not been settled. Giving one person a huge, unfiltered list and calling it a territory. Copying an outbound playbook from a different kind of vendor, where buyers are far less guarded. Treating the SDR as the most junior person in the room rather than the person who shapes first impressions with your best-fit accounts.

    And, perhaps most often, hiring without a manager. A first SDR with nobody experienced to coach them will usually struggle, however capable they are. If you cannot yet afford a lead, make sure an AE or sales leader has real time set aside for it.

     

    Structure and targets

    Decide early who owns the outbound motion. Some vendors put SDRs under a sales development lead who reports into sales. Others have marketing supply account lists and content. Either can work, as long as one person is accountable and sales and marketing agree on what counts as a good meeting.

    Be careful with activity targets. Counting emails sent rewards exactly the behaviour that burns your target list. Measure meetings that progress into real opportunities, and talk to your AEs about which ones they would book again.

     

    Give them a route forward

    The best SDRs want to become AEs or team leads. If there is no visible path, they will go and find one elsewhere, and your candidates will notice that too. Even a simple, honest description of how people move up will improve the quality of your applicants.

     

     

    Back to that first SDR

    If the meetings are not landing, look at the story, the list and the targets before you look at the person. A hire set up well will outperform one who is left to work it out alone.

    We recruit sales development, sales, marketing and customer success teams for cybersecurity vendors, and we are always happy to talk through what your next outbound hire should look like. You can book a call if you would like to talk it through.

     

  • What should an AE Interview Process actually look like?

    What should an AE Interview Process actually look like?

    How many stages does your AE process have? Do you know what each one is for? And if two of your interviewers disagreed about a candidate tomorrow, could you say which of them was assessing the right thing?

    Most sales hiring processes are not designed. They accumulate. Someone adds a stage after a bad hire, nobody removes one after a good one, and eventually you have six conversations that all cover the same ground and none that test the work.

    So here is what a process worth running actually looks like, stage by stage.

     

     

    Start with the Motion, not the Stages

    Before you decide who interviews and in what order, write down what the person will actually be selling and how.

    Deal size. Cycle length. Who signs. Where the pipeline comes from.

    That last one does most of the work. An AE who has spent three years converting inbound at a well-known brand and an AE who has spent three years cold-building a territory are not the same hire, even if their numbers look identical on paper. If you have not decided which one you need, no amount of interviewing will save you, because you will end up picking whoever interviews best.

    Write the motion down in four or five lines. Everything after this hangs off it.

     

    Stage one: The Conversation about what they have actually run

    Not a competency interview. A conversation.

    You are trying to work out whether their experience maps onto your motion, and the way to do that is to get specific fast.

    Which accounts did they target, and why those.

    What did the first touch look like.

    How many of their closed deals started with them rather than with marketing.

    What was the largest deal they ran end to end, and what nearly killed it.

    Reps who have genuinely built pipeline answer these without pausing. They remember the accounts. They remember the objection that came up in three deals running. Reps who have always sat on a full inbound queue tend to drift towards process language – talking about the team, the methodology, the tooling – because the specifics are not theirs to remember.

    That difference is usually visible inside fifteen minutes, and it is worth more than any scored competency framework.

     

    Stage two: The work sample

    This is the stage most teams skip, and it is the one that tells you the most.

    It does not need to be elaborate.

    A discovery call role-play against a realistic buyer persona.

    Or a short written account plan for a target you actually care about.

    Forty minutes of someone doing the job in front of you beats three hours of them describing it.

    What you are watching for is not polish. Plenty of weak Reps are excellent at the polished version. You are watching whether they ask questions before they pitch, whether they can hold a conversation when the buyer does not cooperate, and whether they think in terms of the buyer’s problem or their own product.

    Give them the brief in advance. You are not testing improvisation, you are testing thinking.

     

    Stage three: The peer conversation

    Someone who will work alongside them, not above them.

    This does two things. It gives you a read from a person who knows exactly what the job involves day to day, and it gives the candidate a chance to ask the questions they will not ask a hiring manager. Good reps use this stage to work out whether the pipeline story they have been told is true. Let them.

    If your team is small enough that the peer is also the manager, use a customer-facing colleague instead. Someone from CS or solutions will spot things a sales interview will not.

     

    And then Stop

    Three stages.

    Maybe a short final conversation with a Founder if that matters to the way you hire.

    Every stage beyond that is a chance to lose someone for a reason that has nothing to do with fit. Good Reps are almost always in another process at the same time, and the market rewards speed more than thoroughness at this level. If you genuinely cannot decide after three well-designed stages, the problem is the design, not the amount of evidence.

     

    Brief your Interviewers properly

    This is the cheapest fix on the list and the one most often missed.

    If two people on the panel are assessing different things, you do not have a process, you have a collection of opinions. Before the first interview, agree who is testing what. One person on motion fit. One on the work. One on how they will land in the team. Write it down and send it round.

    Then debrief separately before anyone shares a view. The first opinion voiced in a debrief pulls the rest of the room towards it, every time.

     

    Decide the bar before you meet anyone

    Write down the four or five things this person has to be able to do in their first year. Not attributes – things they have to be able to do.

    Do it before the first CV lands, because once you have met a few people the bar quietly becomes whoever you liked most. That is a different thing entirely, and it is how teams end up with a group of reps who interview brilliantly and sell inconsistently.

     

    The part nobody wants to hear

    A well-designed process will not rescue a badly-defined role. If you have not agreed what the job is, three stages will produce a confident decision about the wrong person just as reliably as six will.

    Most of the sales searches we see go wrong were broken before anyone was sourced. The brief said “AE, SaaS, five years” and left everything that matters unsaid.

    So before you book the first interview, ask the awkward question: if this person hits their number in twelve months, what exactly did they do to get there? If the room cannot answer that in a sentence, the process is not the thing to fix yet.

     

     

    We recruit AEs, SDRs and the wider commercial team for B2B software companies across the UK, the US and Europe, and a good deal of that work is helping teams answer that question before the search starts.

    If you are about to open a role and you are not completely sure what you are hiring against, that is the conversation worth having first.

    Book a call and we will work through it with you.

     

     

  • How Many Accounts Should One CSM Actually Own?

    How Many Accounts Should One CSM Actually Own?

    Have you ever been in the meeting where someone asks how many accounts a CSM should carry, and three people give three different numbers with total confidence?

    It happens constantly. Usually it happens when a board deck needs a headcount line, and the ratio is being reverse-engineered from a budget rather than from the work.

    So here is a more useful way to think about it.

     

     

    The number everyone quotes is the wrong starting point

    You will find published ratios everywhere. Low-touch CSMs owning hundreds of accounts. Mid-market CSMs owning tens. Enterprise CSMs owning a handful. Those bands are real in the sense that they describe what companies actually do, and they are worth knowing.

    They are not worth planning from.

    The reason is simple. A ratio is an output. It falls out of three other decisions you have already made, whether you made them deliberately or not:

    • What your customers pay you
    • What they need from a person, as opposed to from the product
    • What that person is accountable for

    Change any of those and the ratio changes. Which means if you set the ratio first, you are quietly making all three of those decisions by accident.

     

    Start with what the customer actually needs each quarter

    Take one real account. Not an average, a real one.

    Write down what a human being needs to do for that customer in a quarter for the renewal to be safe. Not what would be nice. What is load-bearing.

    For some businesses that list is short. An onboarding call, a check-in, a usage nudge when something dips, a renewal conversation. Four touches, mostly light, largely repeatable. A person can hold a lot of those.

    For others the list is long and awkward. A quarterly business review that needs preparing properly. Two stakeholders who keep changing jobs. An integration that half works. A procurement process that starts ninety days out and involves people the CSM has never met. A person can hold very few of those, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a churn number nobody predicted.

    Do that exercise across five or six accounts that represent your book and you will have a far better answer than any benchmark gives you.

     

    The question behind the question

    Most of the time, when someone asks how many accounts a CSM should own, what they are really asking is whether they can get away with hiring fewer people.

    That is a fair question. Budgets are real. But it is worth being honest that it is the question, because the honest version has a much better answer.

    The honest version is: what part of this job could the product do, or operations do, or nobody do?

    Companies that get good at customer success rarely get there by increasing the ratio through willpower. They get there by taking work off the CSM. Health scoring that flags risk without someone reading a spreadsheet. Onboarding that does not need a bespoke call every time. Renewal admin that sits with someone else. Pooled coverage for the long tail so the named CSMs can concentrate.

    That is a CS Operations conversation, not a headcount one. It is also, in our experience, the hire that buys back the most time.

     

    What this means when you are hiring

    Two practical consequences.

    The first is that account load belongs in the brief, and it belongs there specifically. Good CS people will ask. If the answer is vague, they will assume the worst, and the ones with options will pass. Being able to say “forty accounts, average contract value in this band, you own renewal and expansion, onboarding sits with a separate team” is worth more than another five thousand on the base.

    The second is that the ratio tells a candidate what kind of company you are. An enterprise CSM looking at a book of two hundred accounts knows exactly what that job will feel like by month three. So does a high-volume CSM looking at eight. The mismatch is obvious to them long before it is obvious to you, and it is one of the more common reasons a good hire leaves inside a year.

    If you are not sure which of those two companies you are yet, that is fine. It is quite normal at Series A and B. But it is better to say so in the interview than to discover it together afterwards.

     

    A reasonable rule of thumb, offered carefully

    If you want something to hold onto: work out roughly how many hours of genuine CSM attention each account needs per quarter, multiply by the number of accounts, and see whether it fits in a working quarter with about a third of the time left over.

    That third is not slack. It is where escalations, cover for colleagues, and the accounts that suddenly need ten times their usual attention live. Books planned to a hundred per cent of capacity fail on the first bad month.

    It is a crude calculation. It is still more defensible than a number someone read in a report about a company that sells something quite different to you.

     

    Where this usually lands

    The companies who get the most out of customer success are not the ones with the cleverest ratio. They are the ones who decided early what the role owns, resourced it honestly, and hired against that rather than against a job title.

    That decision is worth making before you open the role, not after the first shortlist. 

     

     

    And if you are staring at a headcount line and a ratio that does not feel right, that is usually a sign the role needs another conversation rather than another candidate.

    Happy to be the excuse to have it – book a call.

     

  • Where Should a SaaS Company Make Its First European Sales Hire?

    Where Should a SaaS Company Make Its First European Sales Hire?

    Has anyone on your leadership team said the words “we should open Europe” in the last quarter? And did the sentence after it start with “London, probably”?

    It usually does. London is the default because it is English-speaking, because the flights are easy and because everyone has a friend who did it that way. Sometimes it is also the right answer. But it is chosen far more often than it is checked.

    So here is a more useful way to make the decision.

    Let’s Dive In!

     

    Start with the deals, not the map

    Before anyone looks at office space, pull every closed deal and every open opportunity from the last twelve months and sort them by country. Not by region. Not by “EMEA”. By country.

    What you will usually find is that Europe is already telling you where it wants you. A cluster of inbound from Germany. A run of Nordic logos that closed quickly and renewed. A Dutch customer who keeps referring you to their peers.

    That cluster is where the first hire goes. The map does not get a vote.

    If the deals are spread evenly across six countries with no pattern, that is information too. It probably means you do not have a European market yet. You have European interest, which is not the same thing, and the first hire needs to be someone who can turn one into the other.

     

    Are you opening a city or a language?

    This is the question that gets skipped, and it changes everything about the search.

    A London-based seller with the right background can cover the UK, Ireland, the Nordics and Benelux from one desk. Those markets buy in English, run similar sales cycles and are comfortable with a rep who flies in for the important meetings. One hire, one contract, wide coverage.

    Germany, Austria and Switzerland do not work like that. Nor does France. Enterprise buyers there expect a native-language seller, usually based in-country, who understands how procurement, works councils and relationship-building actually operate. A London AE with good German is not the same hire as a Munich AE, and the candidates know it even if the job description does not.

    So if your deal data points to DACH, you are not opening London. You are opening Germany, and the search should be run as a German search from day one.

     

    Hire a seller who can open, not a leader who has to sell

    The most common first-hire mistake we see is the regional VP with a mandate to “build the team”.

    It sounds sensible. Hire the leader, let them hire the team, hold them to the number. In practice, the leader arrives, finds there is no team, no local pipeline and no entity, and spends year one doing the founding AE job at a VP salary. Some are good at it. Many are not, because it is not what they were hired to be good at.

    The first hire should be someone who can close a deal on Tuesday and tell you on Wednesday that the pricing does not translate. A founding Account Executive or a country lead with a personal quota. Give them a real territory, a realistic first-year number built from the pipeline you actually have, and a direct line to whoever owns revenue.

    Then hire the leader when there is something to lead. A team of two or three, a number that justifies a manager, a clear view of which second market comes next. That is when a Head of EMEA earns their salary.

     

    Decide the reporting line before you decide the person

    A founding AE in Stockholm reporting to a VP Sales in San Francisco is a different job from one reporting to a UK-based CRO. The time difference alone shapes who will thrive in it.

    Candidates who have done a first-on-the-ground role before will ask about this in the first conversation. If the answer is vague, the strong ones quietly withdraw. So settle it before the search opens. Who does this person call when a deal is stuck at 4pm their time? Who signs off a discount? Who notices if they are struggling in month three?

     

    Be honest about the contract and the number

    Two practical things that catch companies out.

    Notice periods. Across much of Europe they run to three months, sometimes more at senior level. If you need someone in-seat by January, you are hiring in September. Build that into the plan rather than discovering it at offer stage.

    The entity. An employer of record is a perfectly good way to make your first one or two European hires without setting up a company. Candidates at country-lead level will ask what the plan is beyond that, and “we’ll see” is not an answer that lands well with someone being asked to leave a permanent job. Have a view, even if the timeline is loose.

    And the number. First-year European quotas are routinely set by taking the US ramp curve and translating the currency. That is not a plan. Build the target from the pipeline you have, agree what good looks like at six months, and write it down so nobody is guessing later.

     

     

    So, where should the first hire go?

    Where the deals are. Usually that means one of three answers.

    If the pipeline clusters in the UK, Ireland, the Nordics or Benelux, a London-based founding AE selling in English is probably right, and it keeps your options open.

    If it clusters in DACH or France, hire in-country, in the local language, and treat London as a later decision rather than a starting point.

    If there is no cluster yet, hire one person whose whole job is to find it. Make the role narrow, the reporting line clear and the first-year number honest.

    Whichever it is, the person you hire first will tell you more about your European business than any market report. Choose them for their judgement as much as their closing record.

    f you are somewhere between “we should open Europe” and “London, probably”, book a call and bring the pipeline by country. That conversation is usually the most useful hour of the whole expansion.