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The Dead-Simple Signal That Tells You It's Time to Hire Your First Salesperson

Most founders hire salespeople way too early. Here's the exact win rate that tells you you're ready.

Key Points

Don't hire a salesperson until you can close 15-25% of first meetings yourself
Run 50-100 at-bats before deciding your sales motion is repeatable
Onboard 2 reps first, not 10 -- scale only after they succeed
Test in small cohorts of 10 prospects, iterate, then expand

It's kind of like when it runs on your local. Now it's time to see if it reproduces over here.

The 'Runs on My Local' Test

Pete Kazanjy has a rule for when to hire your first salesperson. He calls it the 'runs on your local' test.

If you can sell the product yourself and close deals at a steady rate, great. That's your local environment working. But if you hand it off to someone else and it breaks? You hired too early.

Your sales process needs to work on YOUR machine first before you deploy it to anyone else.

The Magic Number: 15-25%

Here's the benchmark. You need to close 15% to 25% of your first meetings into paying customers. Not 5%. Not 'one out of thirty.'

And you can't base this on 10 conversations. You need 50 to 100 at-bats. That's the only way to know if your win rate is real or just luck.

If you're closing 1 out of 30 prospects, that's not a sales process. That's a prayer.

Don't Hire 10 Reps. Hire 2.

Once you hit that 15-25% close rate, your next move is NOT to hire a sales army. You hire two reps. That's it.

You take everything out of your brain. The slides. The scripts. The email templates. You shove it into their heads and see if they can close at your rate.

You're never going to get two reps successful if you're trying to onboard ten at the same time.

Test in Cohorts, Not Blasts

Most founders blast 100 prospects at once and then ask 'did it work?' That's the wrong move.

Instead, run cohorts of 10. Watch how the discovery questions land. See if your demo resonates. Iterate after each batch. Then run the next 10.

If they say 'I'd love to introduce you to my boss,' that's a green light. If they stare blankly, back to the drawing board.

The B2B Maturity Ladder

Kazanjy says there's a strict order to the B2B maturity journey. Skip a stage and you're toast.

Stage one: you sell it yourself. Stage two: two reps sell as well as you. Stage three: you scale to four, then eight. You earn each next stage by proving the last one works.

Jump stages and you're hosed. Every level has to be proven before you move to the next.