[hibikir]

Early B2B sales are definitely hell. I have seen many B2B startup failures up close, and many of them fail because they run out of usable leads, because they just can't convert them. The problem is that figuring out who is going to be a good salesman for your very small startup is far harder than finding early developers. Someone that has done a lot of business sales for a more successful company is using a different skillset, because they have a good brand behind them. Same when you hire from big consultancy: Executives aren't afraid that they are taking a gamble with McKinsey.

I've seen way too many cases where technical cofounders just believe that someone that can use the right buzzwords is as good as any other, and then end up with a defunct sales pipeline. Or you can end up with someone that is great at selling their skills and charisma to technical founders, or even VCs but what you need to convince said people is different than convincing, say, retail executives. The same guy that might be great at raising your seed round, or your series A, might not really be successful at convincing early customers, or knowing what you have to change in your product to be better for said sales. This can fail later too: I have seen companies with a series B, 20+ people in product design and sales, that might not get sales to their name in two years, and then there are major layoffs that don't cut a single salesman, because said sales team's top skill was selling their competence to the executive team.

So it's not that it's easy to be good at sales or product in an early startup, but that interviewing for that is really hard, and that by the time you know whether someone is good or not, your startup is probably in trouble. If this wasn't the case, we'd see far more success in B2B than we see.