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Have you started sentences with “once we’ve got a VP Sales in” more than twice this quarter?

Is the founder still on every deal that matters?

And when somebody asks what the VP would actually do in their first ninety days, does the room go a bit quiet?

That last one is the useful question. Most businesses know roughly when they want a sales leader. Far fewer can say what the leader is meant to fix, and that gap is where most of these hires go wrong.

 

The Honest Test: Do you have a motion, or do you have a Founder?

There’s a version of this hire that works, and it starts from something specific. You have two or three Reps carrying quota. At least two of them are hitting it. And you can explain, without hand-waving, why the deals that close, close.

That’s a motion. A motion can be scaled, and scaling it is a real job for a real Leader.

The other version is the one where the Founder is the best salesperson in the business by a distance, nobody has written down why, and the plan is to hire someone who will “work it out”. That person exists, but they’re rare, they’re expensive, and they are almost never the person on the shortlist you’re about to look at. Far more often you hire a good scaler into a builder’s job. They spend six months looking for the playbook that doesn’t exist, then they leave, and everyone concludes the market is thin.

The market isn’t thin. The brief was.

 

Builder or Scaler – pick one out loud

This is the single most useful conversation to have before you speak to a Candidate.

A Builder writes the playbook. They’ll sell personally for a year, work out the ICP by getting it wrong a few times, and hire the first proper team off the back of what they’ve learnt. They tend to be comfortable with mess and less interested in a big org chart.

A Scaler takes something that already works and adds people, process and predictability to it. They’re brilliant when there’s a machine to tune. They’re miserable when there isn’t one, because their whole toolkit assumes a baseline that isn’t there yet.

Very few people are genuinely strong at both. The ones who are usually don’t want the job you’re offering.

Say which one you need, out loud, in the first meeting with your board. If the Founder says Builder and the Board says Scaler, you’ve just saved yourself four months.

 

Don’t skip the layer underneath

The pattern we see most often is an expensive one.

A Business goes from three reps to eight, decides it now needs Leadership, and hires a VP. The VP arrives and discovers they’re running eight one-to-ones a week, doing all the deal coaching themselves, and rebuilding the forecast from scratch every Monday. They’re not leading. They’re first-line managing with a VP title.

Sometimes what you actually need is a strong Head of Sales or a first-line manager, and a Founder who stays close for another two quarters. That’s a cheaper hire, it’s a faster hire, and it buys you the time to build the motion properly before you ask someone senior to scale it.

We’ve told people this and lost the fee. We’d rather do that than place a VP into a job that was never going to work.

 

VP Sales or CRO? The Titles aren’t interchangeable

A VP Sales owns the sales team and its number.

A CRO owns the revenue line – which usually means Sales, Customer Success, Revenue Operations, and often Marketing, all reporting in.

The titles get swapped around a lot, sometimes for fundraising optics, and that causes real problems in a search. Advertise a CRO role that’s really a VP Sales scope and you attract people who’ll be frustrated inside six months. Advertise a VP Sales title for genuine CRO scope and you lose the people who could have done it, because they read the title and assume the remit is smaller than it is.

Candidates ask about scope early. A vague answer reads as a warning sign to the good ones, not as flexibility.

 

Should you promote your best AE?

Sometimes. Just be clear about what you’re rewarding.

Closing brilliantly and leading well are different skills. Building a forecast you’d bet on, coaching a rep through a bad quarter, saying no to a deal that would land this month and unravel next – none of that shows up in a personal quota attainment number.

Some of the best sales leaders we’ve placed were solid rather than spectacular reps who happened to be unusually good at making other people better. And some of the strongest closers we’ve met were quietly relieved when someone gave them permission to stay in the seat.

If you do promote internally, treat it as a genuine change of job. Give them the support that deserves.

 

What to write down before you start

Four things, on one page, agreed by whoever has a vote:

• The number, and what it’s made of. New logo, expansion, or both.
• Builder or Scaler.
• Scope – does CS report in, does Marketing, does the Founder still own the top ten accounts.
• What they’re allowed to change in the first six months. If the honest answer is “not much”, you want a manager, not a leader.

That page is worth more to the search than any long list of candidates. It’s also the thing that stops a board and a founder discovering they disagree at offer stage, which is the most expensive place to find out.

 

So – When?

When there’s a motion to scale, a layer underneath to lead, and a written answer to what the job actually is.

Not when the deck says you should have one by now.

 

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If you’re somewhere between “we probably need a VP Sales” and “we’re not sure what we need”, that’s a good time to talk.

We recruit VP Sales and CRO roles for B2B software companies across the UK, the US and Europe, and we’ll happily tell you if the answer is not yet.

 

 

 

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.

 

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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.

 

How many agencies got in touch the week your last role went live?

Three? Six? More, if the role was posted publicly and the job title had the word “security” anywhere near it.

They will all have said roughly the same thing. Specialists in cyber. Strong network. Some placements you have never heard of at companies you have. And you will have had about twenty minutes to work out which of them is actually going to help.

The problem is not that agencies lie. Most of them do not. The problem is that “cybersecurity recruitment” describes at least three completely separate markets, and almost nobody is genuinely good at all of them. Sorting that out is on you, and it happens in a conversation before anything is signed.

So here are the questions worth asking. They are not clever, and that is deliberate. The useful ones rarely are.

Let’s Dive In!

 

“Which part of the Security market do you actually work in?”

Ask this first and listen to the shape of the answer, not the content.

Security splits into practitioners (Security Engineers, SOC Analysts, Pen Testers, Cloud Security), Leadership (CISOs, Heads of Security, GRC), and Commercial (the people who sell, market and retain the software). Different networks, different candidate motivations, different interview processes. An Agency that has genuinely built a network in one of those has usually done it at the expense of the others.

An honest answer names one, maybe two. “All of it” is a marketing answer.

This one question does most of the work, because it tells you whether you are talking to someone who understands their own business.

 

“What have you placed in the last six months?”

Not what they can place. What they did place.

You are listening for specificity. Role, Stage of Company, roughly how long it took, what made it hard. Someone who has done the work tells you about the awkward bit – the candidate who nearly took the counter-offer, the brief that had to change halfway through. Someone who has not will talk in categories.

You do not need a reference list at this stage. You need to hear that they have actually been in the room.

 

“Explain what makes selling security different.”

This is the one that separates people fastest, and you can ask it without sounding like you are setting a test.

Anyone who has genuinely worked commercial roles at Security Vendors will go somewhere concrete quickly. The proof of concept that sits in the middle of the sales cycle. The security questionnaire that arrives at exactly the wrong moment. The fact that your buyer has been trained, professionally, to be suspicious of the thing you are saying. The way a CISO and a CTO care about different risks and need different conversations.

If the answer stays at “security buyers are more technical”, the network probably is not there.

 

“Who is actually going to work on this?”

The person pitching is often not the person sourcing. That is not sinister, it is just how Agencies are structured, but you should know it before you sign rather than three weeks in when the emails start coming from a name you have not met.

Ask who runs the search day to day, how much of their week it gets, and how many other roles they are carrying. The last one is the question people forget.

 

“What does your process look like, in writing?”

How they screen.

What a first shortlist looks like and roughly when it lands.

How often you will hear from them when nothing is happening, which is when communication usually goes quiet.

What they do if the first slate misses.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Every search has a version where the first shortlist is wrong. The difference between a good Agency and a bad one is entirely in what happens next.

 

“What are your Terms if this goes wrong?”

Fee model, Rebate or Replacement terms, Exclusivity, and what happens if you end up hiring someone they only lightly touched.

None of this is awkward before you start. All of it is awkward later, when there is a candidate on the table and a start date being discussed. Get it done early and it stops being a conversation you have to have.

 

“What would you tell me that I do not want to hear?”

The best answer we ever get to this from the other side of the table is a client saying it back to us.

An Agency that has never talked a client out of a role, or out of a sequence, or out of a salary band, is not advising you. They are taking the brief. Those are different jobs and only one of them is worth a fee.

 

One more, quietly

Ask whether they would refer you elsewhere if this is not their market.

We say no to technical security roles fairly often. Security Engineers, SOC, Offensive Security, GRC, Cloud Security, CISO Search – all of that belongs with a Technical Security Specialist, and there are good ones. We recruit the Commercial team that sells the software, which is a different network built for a different reason.

An Agency that can tell you where they stop is usually telling you the truth about where they start.

None of this takes long. Twenty minutes on a call, most of it. The alternative is finding out in month two, having spent a quarter and a fair bit of your own credibility internally.

 

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If you want the longer version, we have written up the whole selection process – the three markets, what a bad choice costs, and how to run the comparison properly – here: how to choose a cybersecurity recruitment agency.

And if you are weighing up a commercial hire at a security vendor right now, book a call. We will tell you fairly quickly whether it is one for us.

 

Hiring your first – or your next – cohort of B2B SaaS salespeople is one of the highest-stakes decisions a Founder makes, and one of the least systematised.

Most Founders approach it reactively: revenue targets rise, a board deck asks for coverage, and a job advert goes live before anyone has agreed what the role actually is. The result is a long, expensive search that produces a plausible CV rather than a productive rep.

A better approach treats sales hiring as a sequence of deliberate steps – defining the motion before the role, the role before the profile, the profile before the process, and the process before the offer.

This blog walks through that sequence for B2B SaaS founders hiring in 2026, with the practical detail that turns a hiring plan into hired people.

Let’s Dive In!

 

 

Step one: Define the sales motion, not the job title

Before you write a job description, write down how your product is actually bought. Is it a self-serve motion where sales assists conversion, a mid-market motion with a three-to-six-month cycle and two or three stakeholders, or an enterprise motion with security review, procurement and a nine-month runway? Each implies a different hire. A rep who thrives at £15k–£40k ACV running high-velocity cycles is often the wrong person for a £250k enterprise deal, and vice versa. Founders who skip this step end up hiring the most impressive salesperson they meet rather than the one whose experience maps to the motion they run.

Write two or three sentences describing your typical won deal: entry point, buyer, cycle length, average value, and the objection that most often kills it. Everything downstream should be traceable back to those sentences.

 

Step two: Sequence the roles correctly

The order in which you hire matters more than the speed. A common and costly pattern is hiring a VP of Sales first in the hope they will build everything. In practice, most VPs are scalers, not founders of a motion – they inherit a repeatable process and multiply it. If you have not yet closed a handful of deals yourself and cannot articulate why they closed, a senior leader will spend six months discovering what you already needed to know, at a senior salary.

For most B2B SaaS companies the workable sequence is: founder-led sales until roughly ten to fifteen closed deals; then one or two founding account executives who can sell without a playbook; then pipeline generation support (SDR or outbound-heavy AE); then a first-line leader once you have three or more reps; then RevOps once reporting takes more than an hour a week. Marketing and customer success hires interleave, but the principle holds – do not hire a layer of management above a layer that does not yet exist.

 

Step three: Build a scorecard instead of a wish list

Most SaaS job descriptions are indistinguishable from one another: hunter mentality, consultative approach, five years’ experience, SaaS background preferred. None of that predicts performance. Replace the wish list with a scorecard of four to six outcomes the person must achieve in their first year, each with a measure. For a founding AE that might be: generate 40% of their own pipeline; close £350k new ARR; document a repeatable discovery framework; win two deals in a new vertical.

Then list the competencies that produce those outcomes – the ability to sell without collateral, comfort with ambiguity, evidence of self-sourced pipeline – and the handful of hard requirements that genuinely cannot be trained, such as domain credibility with a technical buyer. Everything else is negotiable. A scorecard also gives you something honest to interview against, which is where most processes fall apart.

 

Step four: Get the package right before you go to market

Compensation is where founders lose good candidates late and expensively. Decide before you start: base and OTE, split (typically 50/50 for AEs, 60/40 or 70/30 for enterprise, 70/30 or 80/20 for SDRs), quota, ramp, accelerators, and equity. Quota should be a defensible multiple of OTE – four to five times is the common benchmark for mid-market SaaS – and it should be based on evidence, not aspiration. If no one in the business has hit the number you are setting, you are hiring someone into a target designed to fail.

Be equally clear about ramp. A three-month ramp for an enterprise seller with a nine-month cycle is arithmetic that does not work. Candidates notice this, and the good ones ask.

 

Step five: Run a process that tests the job

A four-stage process is usually enough: an initial screen against the hard requirements; a competency interview against the scorecard using evidence-based questioning; a practical exercise; and a founder or leadership conversation on motivation and fit. The practical stage is the one most often skipped and most predictive. Give candidates a realistic scenario – a discovery call with a member of your team playing a real buyer persona, or a short account plan for a named target – and score it against agreed criteria before you debrief. Do not ask for free work, and do not make it a performance of confidence; you are looking for the quality of their questions, not the polish of their pitch.

Keep the process to two to three weeks end to end. In a market where strong GTM candidates run three or four processes at once, speed is a competitive advantage that costs nothing.

 

Step six: Reference properly and close deliberately

Take references from a former manager and, where possible, a former customer or peer. Ask about quota attainment in specific years, what the territory looked like, and what support existed. “Consistent overachiever” means little without knowing whether the quota was £400k or £1.2m and whether marketing supplied 80% of pipeline.

Close deliberately. The best candidates are usually not motivated primarily by base salary; they are motivated by whether they believe they can win. Sell the evidence – win rates, reference customers, why deals are being lost and what you are doing about it. Founders who are candid about the hard parts convert better than those who oversell.

 

Step seven: Plan the first ninety days before day one

The hire is not complete at signature. Agree what the first thirty, sixty and ninety days look like: product certification, shadowing calls, a first solo discovery by week three, first pipeline milestone by week six. Assign an owner for onboarding who is not the founder alone. The difference between a rep who ramps in four months and one who ramps in eight is rarely raw ability; it is almost always whether someone planned their first quarter.

 

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

Reach out to a member of the team here about Step seven: Plan the first ninety days before day one, or see more about how we can support your growth here about Step seven: Plan the first ninety days before day one.

 

 

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.

 

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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.

 

 

Most Cybersecurity vendors build a brilliant product and then hire the commercial team as if they were selling any other piece of software. 

They bring in a polished Enterprise seller with a great logo on the CV, expect the pipeline to follow, and are surprised when deals stall in the first technical call.

Selling security is a different sport. The buyer is paid to be sceptical, the evaluation is run by engineers, and a single weak reference travels fast through a small, well-connected community.

If you are a Cyber-SaaS Founder or revenue leader about to hire (or rebuild), your Go-To-Market team, it pays to treat that team as a distinct problem, not a generic sales hire.

Let’s Dive In!

 

 

The Cyber Buyer is paid to be sceptical

A CISO, a security architect or a SOC lead does not respond to urgency and charm the way a generalist buyer might. They are trained to look for what a product cannot do, to poke holes in a claim, and to distrust anyone who oversells.

The Reps who win in Security are the ones who can hold a credible technical conversation, admit the limits of the product, and respect a rigorous proof-of-value rather than trying to shortcut it. That is why the strongest Cyber sellers tend to come from another Security vendor, or from years of selling deeply technical infrastructure to engineering buyers. Charisma without technical credibility does not survive the first meeting.

 

Your Sales Engineer is a revenue role, not a support function

In most Security categories the deal is won or lost in the technical evaluation, and that evaluation is run by your sales engineer rather than your account executive. Yet vendors routinely over-hire AEs and under-hire SEs, then wonder why healthy-looking pipeline converts poorly.

A realistic AE-to-SE ratio in complex cyber sales is closer to two or three to one than the five to one a generalist SaaS playbook assumes. If you treat the Sales Engineer as a nice-to-have rather than a revenue-critical hire, you are quietly capping your win rate before the first quarter even starts.

 

The Channel is a growth lever, not an afterthought

Across large parts of Cybersecurity – MSSPs, VARs, distributors, cloud marketplaces and GSI alliances – the Channel carries a major share of revenue.

Vendors who leave Channel and Alliances until it becomes a crisis, or fold it into a direct seller’s spare time, leave their fastest growth lever unbuilt. Partner-sourced pipeline compounds, but it takes time to build, which means the first dedicated Channel hire is often higher-leverage than the third direct AE.

Sequencing the Channel deliberately alongside the direct team is one of the clearest markers of a revenue org that understands its own market.

 

“Cyber experience” is not one thing

It is tempting to filter for the word “Cybersecurity” on a CV and assume the rest will follow. It will not. Selling SIEM to a SOC is a different motion from selling GRC tooling to a compliance team, identity to IT, cloud security to platform engineering, or offensive tooling to a red team.

The buyer changes, the cycle changes, and the technical conversation changes. A rep who smashed quota selling endpoint protection may struggle selling data security to a different buyer with a different rhythm. The right calibration is on buyer and motion, not on the category label. Get that wrong and you can hire someone with an impeccable security background who is still the wrong fit for your specific sale.

 

Hire for the Stage you are actually at

The org chart a generalist recruiter reaches for – VP Sales, directors, a row of AEs and SDRs – is usually more Leadership layer than an early Security vendor needs.

Below roughly three to five million in ARR, the better move is a calibration pod: one or two Senior Enterprise AEs with genuine Security credibility, paired with an excellent Sales Engineer, reporting into the Founder. Their job is to close, build a referenceable base, and become the profile you calibrate every future hire against.

Between five and fifteen million, the highest-leverage hire is a player-coach VP Sales who has carried a Cyber quota and will still run strategic deals personally while building the team – and this is the moment for your first dedicated channel hire.

Only past fifteen million does a full revenue operator, a VP or CRO with forecasting rigour across multiple segments, become the right call. Hiring a level too senior, too early, is one of the most expensive mistakes a Cyber vendor can make.

 

Move at the Speed of a small, connected Market

The senior Cyber-sales talent pool is small, well-networked and, crucially, already employed.

A six-week interview loop with three unstructured rounds loses the best Candidates to a Competitor who moved in two. Worse, a sloppy or slow process becomes a story that circulates, because in a market this connected your hiring process is part of your employer brand whether you manage it or not.

Decide within about three weeks of the first interview, give a comp range in the screen, build a real technical stage into the loop, and keep the whole thing tight. A clean, credible process is not just good manners – in Security it is a genuine recruiting advantage.

 

The Commercial side of Security is its own Discipline

None of this is the same problem as hiring the technical side of a Security company.

Placing CISOs, Security Engineers, SOC analysts and penetration testers is specialist work, and there are excellent Recruiters who do exactly that. Building the team that sells the product – the AEs, Sales Engineers, Channel Leaders and Revenue Executives who can win over a sceptical buyer is a different discipline again, sitting at the crossroads of GTM Sales hiring and the Security Market.

Treat it as its own search, run by people who understand both sides, and the team you build will actually convert the product you have worked so hard to create.

 

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

Reach out to a member of the team here about The Commercial side of Security is its own Discipline, or see more about how we can support your growth here about The Commercial side of Security is its own Discipline.