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“I need a good salesperson.” It's one of the phrases we hear most from SaaS founders and leaders. The problem is that “good salesperson” means nothing on its own: someone can have been the number one on their team at one company and not move the needle at another. Their talent didn't change; the context did.
In this article we show you the four factors that determine whether a commercial profile will work in your SaaS. Understanding them is the difference between hiring well the first time or paying the —expensive— cost of fixing it later.
The sales motion is how your product reaches the customer, and it completely defines the profile you need. A high-velocity model (low tickets, short cycles, many accounts per month) is not the same as an enterprise sale (large contracts, cycles of months, several decision-makers involved).
A high-velocity salesperson shines through volume, pace and the ability to close fast. An enterprise salesperson needs patience, the ability to manage long processes and the skill to build relationships with multiple stakeholders. Putting one in the other's place almost always ends badly, no matter how talented they are.
Before hiring, define clearly: is your sale inbound, outbound, product-led or channel-based? Is it transactional or consultative? The answer organizes everything else.
Someone who was excellent at an established company —with a recognized brand, leads coming in on their own and processes already in place— can feel completely lost at a startup where everything still has to be built from scratch. And vice versa.
There are builder profiles, who enjoy the ambiguity of early stages and build the process while they sell. And there are scaler profiles, who perform better when there's already a machine that just needs to grow. Identifying which stage your company is in —and what type of person thrives there— avoids one of the most common frustrations.
Selling to an SMB is not the same as selling to a large enterprise. The language, the cycle, the ticket and the number of people involved in the decision all change. A salesperson used to closing with a single owner who decides on one call may sink in a corporate process with a procurement department, legal and several approval levels.
That's why we look for the candidate's prior experience to match your ideal customer: who they sold to, what size and with what decision complexity. Affinity with the ICP is one of the best predictors that the person will ramp up quickly.
Selling a simple, self-explanatory tool is not the same as selling a technical solution that requires understanding the customer's operation and translating value to different profiles. For complex products —very common in SaaS and AI— we look for people capable of holding technical conversations, asking good questions and earning the credibility of demanding stakeholders.
Underestimating this factor leads to hiring profiles that sound good in the interview but who, in front of the customer, can't sustain the depth the product demands.
Before opening a search, we answer four questions with each client: how they sell, what stage they're in, who they sell to and how complex their product is. With those answers we build the real profile —not a generic “salesperson” description— and evaluate each candidate against that reality.
We tell you the full evaluation method in: How we evaluate GTM talent
And if your question is still which role to hire first, the starting point is usually understanding the difference between an AE and an SDR.
We look at it here: AE vs SDR: which profile you need first (/blog/ae-vs-sdr). This article is part of our GTM Recruiting guide
Choosing your SaaS's first salesperson well isn't a matter of luck: it's understanding the context and searching based on it. If you want to make sure you hire the right profile for your moment, let's talk.