Working Together to Hire Your First Salesperson

Many B2B tech founders struggle to successfully make their first sales hire. Why is it so difficult? There are three main reasons. 

1) what sales support founders think they need and what they actually need to get their business to scale are often misaligned. Founders often lean towards salespeople with the best rolodex or who are the most extroverted, neither of which are characteristics required for this role.

2) even with an awareness that they need a Pathfinder salesperson to build a repeatable, scalable, profitable sales process, they’re unaware of the skill sets unique to the Pathfinder.

3) given the challenges of dealing with a pile of resumés and without knowing what makes a Pathfinder, many great candidates are cast aside without interview.

That’s why we developed The Right Five, the system that helps B2B tech founders hire their first salesperson, right the first time. 

Our proprietary assessment technology is specifically designed to identify Pathfinders, those people with the unique, must-have skill sets that have been proven to be common among those who have been successful as the first Sales hire in startup environments.

That process of getting from an unmanageable number of resumés to an identified, manageable number of Pathfinders is an automated one. Then, with the knowledge that any of the Pathfinders could successfully fulfil the role as your first salesperson, you just need to select the one that best fits your business.

The process looks like this:

It’s your job to source the candidates in the first place through your website, LinkedIn ads, or wherever. Having signed up as a client with The Right Five, you will have received a unique url for your own branded Pathfinder assessment. Include this in your job ads and candidates will take the assessment and be scored as Pathfinders or Non-Pathfinders.

Note that the Non-Pathfinders will automatically receive an email informing them that they haven’t been successful for this role. This is important because, a) it saves you time, and b) they may be good candidates for other roles as your business scales. Treating them with respect now can pay dividends down the line.

As a client, you also have access to your own dashboard in The Right Five. Our system will send you daily update emails letting you know how many candidates have taken the test and how many Pathfinders have been identified. You can use the dashboard to more closely evaluate the Pathfinders. The system ranks them by overall score but, remember, they can all do the job. You might want to, for example, trade off location with a specific skill.

For example, if you’re based in Salt Lake City, it may be that your 8th ranked Pathfinder is local but has some weaknesses in marketing, say. If you’re a strong marketer yourself, you may prefer this local candidate over a higher ranked Pathfinder from New York. That all happens in the dashboard.  You’ll see their assessment results and resumés and you can compare and contrast your Pathfinders and choose the five that you want to interview.

Note that communication with Pathfinders is your responsibility. We will have sent them an email post assessment letting them know they were classified as Pathfinders and that you will reach out to them directly with next steps. It is up to you to let them know if you’re going to interview them etc.

There is no limit on how long you can use The Right Five but once you have hired your Pathfinder (and communicated with all Pathfinders) you can pause your campaign which will disable your assessment url. Even then you will have ongoing access to your candidates via your dashboard. Not only may there be good candidates for other Sales roles once your Pathfinder has defined the playbook, there could also be leads for your business going forward given an effective communication campaign.