[tptacek]

It is extraordinarily difficult to hire sales people, one of the hardest "business" tasks there is. Even on teams led by people with a background in managing sales teams, the hit rate on good salespeople is low. I came up in my career with a bunch of people who went on to start companies, and so I talk to a lot of founders, and the number of tech founders who managed early in their company to hire salespeople that actually worked out is (0) zero.

The biggest problem with this task is adverse selection. A salesperson who can take a product with no traction and no awareness and successfully sell it can sell any other product. The world is full of potentially but not kinetically viable products. Good salespeople have their pick of all of them. So if a salesperson is willing to talk to you... you have to wonder why you're their best option.

An approach that can work:

1. You figure out how to sell your product to some subset of its potential users.

2. You execute on that strategy until you can reliably hit some number every month.

3. You hire an inside sales person, a dial-for-dollars robot, to execute on the script that you worked out in the previous step.

Don't kid yourself about steps 1-2, or you'll just throw money away in step 3. It's important to understand the implications of this: it means you can't easily hire someone to figure out how to sell your product. You have to cross that gulf yourself.