Hiring a salesperson often feels like the obvious next step for a growing business.

Perhaps the founder is still doing most of the selling and simply doesn’t have enough time. Maybe opportunities aren’t being followed up consistently. Perhaps there’s an ambitious growth target for the next 12 months, but a sales target on its own isn’t a sales plan, and the existing team doesn’t have the capacity or structure to deliver it.

Whatever the reason, the conclusion can seem straightforward: we need a salesperson.

And sometimes you absolutely do. But recruiting a good salesperson is only part of the equation. Before you start looking for the person, it’s worth asking a different question:

What are they actually going to be stepping into?

Are you hiring someone to sell, or to build your sales function?

I’ve been looking at quite a few sales job adverts recently and there’s a pattern I keep seeing.

The successful candidate will be responsible for generating leads, winning new business, managing existing customers, keeping the CRM up to date, managing the pipeline, producing forecasts and reports, developing the sales strategy and, of course, achieving an ambitious revenue target.

That’s quite a job description. In fact, sometimes it sounds less like recruiting a salesperson and more like recruiting an entire sales function in one human being. There’s nothing wrong with expecting a salesperson to take responsibility for their results. They should. But there’s an important distinction between expecting someone to perform within your sales function and expecting them to create that function from scratch while simultaneously delivering the sales target.

The knowledge in the founder’s head

This becomes particularly important when a business recruits its first salesperson, or when the founder has historically been responsible for most of the selling. Founders often know far more about how sales works in their business than they realise. They know which types of customers tend to be a good fit and which enquiries rarely go anywhere. They know which products or services are easiest to sell, where the profitable opportunities are and what usually matters to a customer when they make a buying decision. They probably also have their own way of qualifying an opportunity, following up a proposal and deciding when something is genuinely likely to close.

The problem is that much of this knowledge has never needed to be written down. It simply lives in their head. That can work perfectly well while the founder is doing the selling. It becomes much harder when somebody else is expected to replicate it.

Then the salesperson arrives

The new salesperson gets a laptop, a CRM login, perhaps an existing database and a revenue target. Then they’re told to go and sell. But if nobody has clearly defined who the priority customers are, what constitutes a worthwhile opportunity, how the sales process works or what should happen at each stage, the salesperson has two jobs. They have to sell and work out how sales is supposed to work in the business. That costs time.

It can also create a lot of frustration on both sides.

A few months later, the business is wondering why the expected sales haven’t materialised. The salesperson may be working hard but pursuing the wrong opportunities, using a different process from the founder or spending time trying to create systems and structure that weren’t there when they arrived.

Eventually somebody starts asking whether they hired the wrong person. Sometimes they did. But sometimes a perfectly capable salesperson has been placed into an environment that made succeeding unnecessarily difficult.

The salesperson should own their performance.

The business should own the sales process.

This is the important distinction. A salesperson should absolutely be accountable for their own performance. That includes managing their opportunities, following up consistently, keeping information up to date and delivering against agreed expectations.

But the underlying sales process should belong to the business. Your ideal customer shouldn’t change depending on which salesperson you ask. Your definition of a qualified opportunity shouldn’t exist only in somebody’s head. Your pipeline stages should mean something.

The business should know which measures matter, how frequently performance will be reviewed and what good sales activity and progress actually look like. This becomes even more important as a business grows. If your sales process belongs to one individual, you risk losing it when that individual leaves. If it belongs to the business, you have something you can manage, measure, review and improve over time.

What should be in place before your salesperson starts?

You don’t need to overcomplicate it or have every detail documented before they start. The important thing is that the foundations are clear enough for your salesperson to understand how sales works in your business and what’s expected of them. before somebody joins.

Do you have a clear commercial objective for the next 12 months, and do you know how much of that growth you realistically expect the new salesperson to contribute? Can you clearly describe the types of customers you most want them to win and the products or services they should prioritise?

Have you decided where their opportunities are expected to come from? If they’re responsible for generating their own leads, is there enough time and resource within the role to do that alongside actually selling? Is there a defined sales process from initial opportunity through to won or lost, with clear expectations around qualification and follow-up? Does your CRM or pipeline reflect the way you actually sell, and does somebody take responsibility for reviewing that pipeline with the salesperson?

And finally, have you agreed how their performance will be measured and managed, particularly during those important first 30, 60 and 90 days? These aren’t complicated questions, but the answers make an enormous difference to what happens after somebody starts.

Give them the best chance of succeeding

Recruiting a salesperson is a significant investment. There’s the salary, commission and recruitment cost, of course, but there’s also management time, onboarding and the opportunity cost of the months spent waiting for somebody to become productive. Putting some thought into the sales structure before they arrive doesn’t guarantee that every hire will work out. It does make it much easier for a good salesperson to get up to speed, understand what’s expected and focus their time on the thing you recruited them to do: sell. And if things don’t go according to plan, having a clear process and agreed measures also makes it much easier to understand why.

Before you recruit your next salesperson

I’ve put together a free Sales Hire Checklist covering the key sales foundations worth considering before your new salesperson starts. It’s designed to help you see what your business already has in place and identify any areas that might need some thought before you make the investment.