When should a growing company hire its first salespeople?

At some point the founder cannot be the only person who sells. Hire too early and you pay salaries for a pipeline that does not exist. Hire too late and growth stalls because the founder is the bottleneck. In our podcast, Inside the Growth Engine, four guests talked about exactly this moment, including what they would do differently.

Short answer: Hire your first salespeople when customers outside your own network are buying, when the founder’s calendar is full of demand rather than prospecting, and when you have a repeatable story to hand over. Add more people only when the existing ones are at the limit of their capacity. More salespeople do not fix a pipeline problem.

Start with the founder

Jürgen Ingels, founding partner and chairman of Smartfin, is direct about it: in the first two or three years, the CEO should be a salesperson. A CEO who does not sell is, in his words, not good. Founders know the product, the market and the weak points, and customers like talking to the person who built it.

Jan Hollez, co-founder of Deliverect, describes the same advantage. Selling yourself helps you make decisions about features and win the difficult first customers. It also creates referenceable customers, which makes the job easier for the team that follows. A sales team is far easier to build once you have happy customers it can point to.

The signals that it is time

From the four conversations, three signals come back:

1. People outside your network buy. Ingels says the moment you sell beyond the people you already know, and they keep buying, is the moment to add one or two external people and take part of the job off the CEO.
2. The first customers are happy and referenceable. Without them, a new salesperson starts from zero.
3. Someone has done it before. Hollez and his co-founders brought in a co-founder who had run go-to-market at a previous employer early on. They did not have to invent the sales machine from scratch.

What changes when you hire

A new salesperson thinks differently from a founder. Ingels puts it plainly: they ask how much they can earn, what the commission is and how fast they can close a deal and hand it over to operations. That is not a criticism. It means the company has to be ready to absorb it: a clear offer, a clear process and a delivery team that can take over.

Mistakes the guests made

Scaling sales on a weak foundation. Thomas Van Eeckhout, co-CEO of Easi, scaled his sales team and saw people hit their numbers with the wrong customers. Contracts were signed, but little follow-up work came, so the lifetime value of those customers was too low while the sales cost was high. His simple test: if you are paying bonuses while your result is bad, something was not done well. The fix was to profile which customers lead to long relationships and to talk about that with sales continuously. It took around two years to get back on track.

Hiring ahead of capacity. Steve Declercq, co-founder of Bizzy, says his team made the same mistake in hiring. His rule looking back: hire salespeople only when the existing ones are at the limit of their capacity. If three salespeople each have one meeting a week, you do not have a conversion problem, you have a pipeline problem. Optimise the pipeline first, then the infrastructure, then efficiency. Adding ten people to a pipeline that does not flow does not make it perform better.

A short checklist before you open a vacancy

• Can you name your ideal customer and show who bought outside your network?
• Do you have at least a handful of customers who would speak for you?
• Is the existing team’s calendar full? If not, fix lead flow first. See how to get more revenue from the leads you already have.
• Is your bonus tied to the right customers, not just to signed deals?
• Can delivery handle what sales will promise?
• Is the CEO, CCO or CRO ready to coach rather than sell? Someone has to own the process.

Where to start

Write down what the founder does in a sales conversation that a new colleague would not know. Turn that into a short, shared playbook, then hire one person and measure for a quarter before you add the next. If you want an outside view on whether your sales set-up is ready to scale, a Growth Audit looks at pipeline, process and data together. For the wider picture, see what commercial excellence means and how marketing and sales alignment supports a growing team.

Hear it from the people who do it

• Jürgen Ingels on the CEO as the first salesperson, around 20:00
• Steve Declercq on hiring at the limit of capacity, around 34:00
• Thomas Van Eeckhout on scaling sales on the wrong customers, around 14:00
• Jan Hollez on founder-led selling and referenceable customers, around 14:00