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Sales Comp Guy

Five Signs You Need to Hire Your First Salesperson

183:906269490 • June 15, 2022

How do you know when it’s time to hire a salesperson?

Every startup company that endures long enough faces the same milestone question: Is it time to hire a salesperson?

When you’re just starting out, you’re likely doing the selling yourself and networking to make connections, get referrals, and close business. But the time comes when the company is ready to scale and you need to hire your first official salesperson to manage the sales cycle.

You might think that it will be obvious—and in some cases it will—when it’s time to hire. But growth is rarely a linear path with clear benchmarks. Often you have to interpret the signs to know when it’s time to hire that first salesperson.

So if you’re questioning whether it’s time to bring in a new hire, here are five signs the time is now:

You've Developed a Clear Sales Process

A startup’s first salesperson is usually its founder. And if you’ve founded and created a company, you’re probably pretty passionate about it. You believe in the product and have developed a way of talking about it, and over time a way of selling it. You’ve probably also worked out some of the initial kinks in terms of customer experience.


If you’ve reached the point that you now have a fairly consistent sales process and cycle, then it could be time to teach that process to someone else and clear your plate to work on other growth aspects for your business.

You Can't Reach Your Goals Alone

If you’re at the point in your business where you can realistically set some aggressive targets, it’s time to look at what it will take to hit those targets. You don’t want to burn yourself and your team out, or there won’t be anyone left to run things once you’ve reached your goals. Is it possible to hit your targets with your existing team? More importantly, is it realistic? As you answer that, you need to take into account the limitations of yourself and your existing staff.


Many startups are staffed with people who are fulfilling multiple roles. While this is necessary in the beginning, it’s not sustainable. Multitasking is actually bad for productivity. Trying to be all things for too long reduces focus and eventually translates to lower performance. Take this into consideration when choosing whether or not to hire a dedicated salesperson.

You Want to (and Should) Focus on Other Things


If you as the founder or leader of the company feel the calling to be focused on new strategy or innovation of your product or any number of other important aspects of growing a business, it may be time to hire out the sales work.


While you want to make sure your company is financially able to bring in profitable revenue, you also have to factor in the very real value of freeing up your own time to focus on leadership and direction. Without your shift of focus towards vision and growth, beyond the present level, the company may not be able to scale up.

Your Existing Customers Want More

Has communication with your current customer base changed? Has your engagement with your customers evolved from your initial launch? Are they asking for more of your time or leaning on you to help them further integrate your product or service into their lives and the lives of their friends and family?


One of the services a dedicated sales function can provide is addressing complexity with your customers. A good salesperson will continue to pursue existing customer happiness while also ushering new prospects along the customer journey. Don’t disappoint customers by limiting what they can consume (your company's time, talent, and product) because you haven’t felt ready to bring on a salesperson.

Too Many Leads to Manage By Yourself

Probably the most obvious sign it’s time to hire a salesperson is when the demand for your product or service is too high to manage yourself. This is, of course, a very good problem to have! However, if you don’t manage your growth, you can end up in a bad situation. Planning for success is crucial, and hiring a salesperson is part of that planning. 


If your product is in such high demand that people are clamoring to get it, and you just can’t keep up with the communication…it’s definitely time to hire a salesperson. Take advantage of this momentum of growth and expand your capacity.


Are all signs pointing to it being time to hire a salesperson? If so, congratulations! But first, there’s a lot of groundwork to cover before posting that job online. Your next step is figuring out what your organization can afford to offer a salesperson in terms of base and variable pay, clearly defining the role, and whether that amount you can afford will be competitive in your local, unique labor market. 


I’m talking about sales compensation and all of the underlying plan mechanics, and it’s actually quite a complex process. If you’d like a beginner’s guide walkthrough of how to plan for hiring your first salesperson, check out my book here.

By 183:906269490 March 17, 2025
Over the past few weeks, we’ve delved into six crucial aspects of best practices in sales compensation: culture, financial due diligence, job content, pay mix, objectives, and plan mechanics. Each of these elements plays a pivotal role in shaping an effective and motivating compensation plan. Today, we turn our attention to another key component—timing. Defining Performance Period and Payout Timing There are two key aspects of compensation timing that affect how effective your compensation plan is at helping your organization reach its goals. These are: Performance Period : The timeframe over which sales performance is measured in the compensation plan—monthly, quarterly, annually, or per deal. Payout timing: The timeframe when a salesperson receives incentive earnings associated with their level of performance. While these concepts are distinct, they work together to influence sales behavior, business cash flow, and overall organizational success. Aligning Performance Period and Payout Timing with Organizational Objectives A well-structured performance period and payout schedule will reinforce your organization’s goals. For example, if you’re focused on rapid sales cycles and high transaction volume, you’ll probably use a shorter performance period and frequent payout timing to keep things moving along. On the other hand, if you’re prioritizing long-term account growth, large enterprise deals, or strategic selling, you’ll probably want to utilize longer periods (quarterly or annually) to encourage sustained effort and deeper customer relationships. Motivating Sales Teams with the Right Timing Salespeople are naturally driven by immediate, tangible rewards. If the gap between effort and payout is too long, enthusiasm may decline as the connection between work and reward weakens. On the flip side, overly frequent payouts—such as daily or weekly—could lead to transactional thinking rather than strategic selling. This is especially true when there are more frequent pay periods with very small amounts of pay. So before setting your performance period and cadence for payout, it’s essential to ask yourself what kind of behavior you’re trying to reward in your salesperson, as well as the sales function required to execute on your specific market and strategy. For long sales cycles where frequent payout timing simply doesn’t make sense, you’ll need to balance that by making sure your salesperson is aligned with organizational goals and that the salesperson is able to achieve meaningful levels of performance (as well as payout amounts) within that performance period. Best Practices for Performance Period & Payout Timing Choosing the right combination of performance period and payout timing is a strategic decision that shapes sales behavior and business outcomes. When well-designed, this timing structure maintains motivation, supports financial sustainability, and aligns sales incentives with broader company goals. A few best practices prevail: Align the payout to as close to the performance event (deal closing or otherwise) as possible, conditional on company affordability/sustainability Ensure that the performance period selected is closely aligned with the average sales cycle length. Generally, if there is a very short sales cycle, then a short performance period with quick pay is expected. That does scale up to very long sales cycles and longer performance periods with lesser payout frequency. Most organizations are somewhere in between. Be sure to recognize that it is specific to the sales role and not the company as a whole.
By 183:906269490 March 3, 2025
In a way, we’ve already talked a lot about several components of sales incentive plan mechanics. We’ve covered the importance of culture , fundamental financial model ing, establishing job content , determining pay mix , and setting objectives . The next step will bring it all together. Some Important Sales Compensation Vocabulary We’ve previously described, at length, the two primary types of sales comp models (bonus plans and commission rate plans) as well as how to determine which plan best supports different sales roles. But there are a few other terms that are important to know when developing the underlying plan mechanics. The following list comes straight from my book Starting Simple: Sales Compensation . If you want a full but easy-to-understand breakdown of sales compensation, that book is the place to start. Accelerator--An increase in the rate of pay that occurs at a certain level of performance. Generally, this starts after the achievement of 100% of the target performance objective. Deal Cap--The maximum amount of pay on any single transaction Leverage--The sales incentive that would be paid out for performance between the target and the point of excellence. It is represented as a multiple of the target incentive Pay Curve--The slope of the line of the rate of pay throughout all levels of performance. Think of performance as the x-axis and payout as the y-axis. The pay curve represents the relationship between the two. In a fixed-rate plan, this is a straight line, representing a fixed rate of pay for every unit of measured performance (activity completed, dollar of revenue acquired, or percentage point of margin sold, etc.) Plan Cap--Maximum amount of pay under the construct of the plan Point of Excellence--The point on the pay curve that represents the 90th percentile of salespersons’ performance levels (should be greater than 100% of performance achievement) Rate of Pay--The amount of pay per unit of measurement. This encompasses the relationship between performance and payout at any point along the pay curve. Target--A point on the pay curve that represents 100% payout and 100% performance or (100%, 100%) Target Incentive--The sales incentive amount paid for achieving 100% of sales performance objectives Threshold--The point at which pay for performance starts. The threshold point should sit somewhere between 0% and 100% performance levels. It can be zero, which essentially means there is no threshold. Zero--The first point on the pay curve, represented by (0%,0%) for zero level of payout and zero level of performance Best Practices for Plan Mechanics A well-structured sales compensation plan aligns with your business objectives while keeping your team motivated. You need to balance risk and reward, ensuring that pay mix, thresholds, and accelerators drive the right behaviors. To evaluate whether your plan is driving the right behaviors, map your sales team’s performance along the pay curve—identifying where top, mid-level, and low performers fall. If most reps cluster near the threshold, the plan may not be motivating enough, while a heavy concentration at the high end could indicate overly generous payouts. A well-balanced distribution should show a clear progression, with incentives effectively encouraging continuous improvement and rewarding top achievers appropriately. Caps are controversial, and while they can help control costs, they can also discourage high performers. Accelerators, on the other hand, can be a powerful tool to motivate salespeople to exceed expectations. The key is to strike a balance—rewarding overachievement without creating unsustainable payout structures. Finally, sales compensation plans should evolve with business needs. In a future post, I’ll be talking about the importance of a regular review cadence for maintaining performance and fairness. When done right, plan mechanics create a system that doesn’t just pay salespeople but actively inspires them to excel.
By 183:906269490 January 31, 2025
Setting objectives is a constant balance between meeting your organizational goals and being realistic about the capabilities of your sales team. You want to be aggressive enough to reach revenue and profitability expectations as well as keep everyone motivated, but you don’t want to be so aggressive that your team feels it is impossible to succeed and just gives up. In part 5 of my Best Practices in Sales Compensation Series, we’ll go over some of the top things to consider for keeping your sales team engaged and successful. (Read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , and Part 4 ) When setting objectives for your organization, consider what you absolutely need versus the ideal you want; take into account the resources you have to work with (as well as the market situation and sales productivity); and create a target range ranging from easy to impossible—and place your target somewhere in the middle of that range. Types of Objectives There are several different types of objectives you might set for your sales reps. They can be sales process activities like making calls or qualifying leads. They can be progression milestones like hand-off triggers between internal teams or customer signoffs. But for our purposes, we’re going to focus on financial objectives such as revenue and profit. Best Practices for Setting Objectives Objectives need to align with organizational goals and provide achievable but challenging targets for the sales team. To accomplish this, consider these practices: Make sure that the salesperson has the ability to influence if not fully control, their capability to meet and exceed the objectives. Set realistic expectations. Unrealistic targets will stagnate your growth potential and give you a poor reputation with employees (as well as the labor market). Provide a clear and visible path to achieving the objective. Try to limit the quantity and types of objectives. More is not better. It’s better for a sales rep to be able to focus on a singular goal than to have their attention split in too many directions. Lastly, make a plan for what to do if your salesperson exceeds the target as well as underachieve target objective levels. These are just a few of the very important considerations in setting your objectives. Take some time to explore my blog or check out my books for a more in-depth look into sales compensation.
By 183:906269490 January 14, 2025
Best Practices in Sales Compensation Part 4
By 183:906269490 December 16, 2024
In my first Best Practices post, I talked about the importance of knowing what you can pay for your sales roles before worrying about what the market is saying. In my second post, I covered ways to utilize culture in a sales organization . The following Best Practice in sales compensation involves job content. Job content plays several roles in your compensation plan: 1. It gives your salesperson a guide to what success looks like in their role. 2. It gives you a guide to evaluating the performance of your salesperson. 3. It rationalizes differing levels of variable pay outcomes for varying performance levels. 4. It provides your organization with the structure needed to comply with any reporting, pay transparency, or other regulations. Hopefully, that’s enough to convince you of the importance of taking the time to define your new roles and revisit the definition of your existing roles. Now, here’s how job content actually does those things. Defining the job The first role of job content is to define the who, what, where, when, and how of the function. It can be tempting to borrow a job description from LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc., with the assumption that the content will be similar enough to fit your needs. However, the way a specific role performs is unique to the organization it’s acting in, which is why it’s important to take the time to define the job from scratch. Here are the questions you should be answering in your job content: What does the person need to do on a daily basis? How does this individual pursue sales, and in what segment or with what type of customer? Where should they focus their time and attention when building a pipeline of deals? Who should they be interfacing with, both internally and externally? When do they engage with customers and/or prospects? What portion of the sales process do they own or support? How do they interface with and influence decision-makers? Now, even though I said to write your job description from scratch, that doesn’t mean this is the time or place to get too creative. Job seekers are going to be searching by job title or category, so it’s essential to stick to the common vernacular regarding industry jargon and expected job titles. Job Description: A Byproduct of Job Content Another positive outcome of creating job content for your roles is that you will have generated much of the information needed for a job description if or when you’re ready to hire. Information such as: Job duties and responsibilities that clarify the type of work and engagement with customers. Qualifications/Requirements that are both minimum and desired. Those include education, knowledge, skills, capabilities, and competencies. Performance measures of the role include items like achieving sales targets, new logo acquisition, development of pipeline, accuracy in forecasting, etc. With all of this information on file, it will not only be easier for you to prepare to hire for the roles you want, but it will also be easier to evaluate existing employees in those roles. Beyond all of that, you’ll be well prepared for competitive market research and establishing your variable pay program. I’ll be posting more best practices on the blog, but if you’re anxious to dive deeper into the subject of sales compensation, you can grab a copy of my book Starting Simple: Sales Compensation and consider working through the companion Workbook to build a sales compensation plan from scratch.
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