[dandare]

> Additionally, you should be able to answer most of these questions—all of which a candidate is likely to ask you: • How long is the sales cycle (from first conversation to closed contract) on average? • What is the typical deal size (in terms of ARR)? • How is your product priced? • What are the steps of the sales process? • How do you define success in this role? • How are you getting new leads and generating conversations?

As a technical founder, these are exactly the questions I need to ask someone with sales experience!

[landon32]

I think there are 2 common cases for SAAS startups here:

1. The founding team is very technical and doesn't want to make sales/talk to customers themselves. In this case, it will be difficult to achieve success without taking on a non-technical cofounder to do customer development and then early sales.

2. The founding team has technical talent but also at least one person who's happy to go out and do customer development and then make sales. In this case, they should probably wait on hiring someone with Sales experience until they feel that they have product market fit, which means they've probably made enough sales to answer these questions.

[sbinthree]

The challenge is that these are key fit questions. Hiring someone with experience doing high velocity one-call-close sales at $250/month is very different than hiring someone doing high touch field sales for deals that are $10k/month. You might as well be asking a DevOps person to write R for data analytics -- tooled totally differently. Those are the questions sales people have to understand, to understand if they are a fit, if their experience is relevant, etc. If they are experienced they can help define it, but it mostly all starts with pricing, how many calls you can afford to have before you are losing money on CAC and whether they have to do a lot of outbound grinding or not.