[sellmethepen]

I could share a sales perspective on this and hopefully that helps a bit. Depending on the maturity of a company I think the type of sales person you hire changes as you go from early stage (<$1M) to growth ($1M-$15M) to beyond (the right environment will allow your reps to mature and grow with the org). One thing that's crucial at this stage is that you get along well with your first rep. You can't expect to just give them the info and leave it completely to them. As CEO you really need to partner with them and ensure success, essentially teach them the playbook of how you're doing these initial deals and from there most reps will start to add their own touches to the sales process. Begin documenting and tracking some basic items like ideal client profile, sales cycle time and average deal sizes (this is useful for funding and recruiting future employees).

To your question on where do we find reps - honestly a really underrated approach is to do some 1-1 outreach via platforms like linkedin (if you the CEO are reaching out to reps that's enough for most reps to want to take a meeting and learn about you and the company). For these first sales hires I would shy away from the large company reps (e.g. Oracle, Microsoft, etc) - try and find those reps that have some startup experience and have worked at young companies.

Some questions to gauge aptitude, etc: * How they would think about handling initial day to day sales as well as building the foundation for the sales org (if they'd even have any interest in doing some of the foundational work). * Ask them if they've hit their numbers regularly (if not, why - keep in mind early stage sales is a bit of a crapshoot) - you'll start to get a sense of the rep and their style * What early stage experience do they have? How do they do outreach? * A regular ask from most sales managers is a 30, 60, 90 day plan (ask them to do some basic market research and think about potential prospects, etc).

Regarding compensation most early stage SaaS companies I've worked with do a combination of salary, commission and equity. It sound like you guys are majority owned so might not make sense to give equity away if other employees aren't getting any.

If you have some time there's a lot of information out there around the first sales hires (John McMahon's stuff is quite good around sales process/cycle - a lot of the stuff from the sales leaders at AppDynamics is pretty solid).