6 Tips for Building Your First Sales & Marketing Team

It’s an exciting moment in a company’s life when the time comes to build out your sales and marketing team. Volume has started to scale beyond founder selling, customers are liking (and sticking with) the product, and the team has struck repeatability. It’s the proverbial “pour fuel on the fire” moment, but founders are often struck with the same question — how do we build that first go-to-market team?

Nearly all startups begin with founders doing sales and marketing. Founders know the product best, and customers like the personal touch of a founder being in the room. At some point, however, the volume of customers will scale beyond a founder’s abilities — and the founder will have to turn their attention back to product (and putting out fires in other parts of the growing organization). We’ve seen this typically occur around $1M — $2M of ARR. This is the moment when a go-to-market team becomes critical.

As founders think about launching this team, we wanted to share some rules of thumb we’ve seen work well through the years.

1. Marketing and sales, together. Marketing is responsible for demand generation and filling top of funnel. Sales takes those leads and runs them through the funnel to close. These two functional areas work hand-in-hand and you need both to run a successful go-to-market effort. It can be hard to determine if one is working without the other — without leads, sales folks have nothing to close (and without closers, you’ll have poor conversion rates). It’s good to hire both simultaneously because it ensures that they will be on the same page organizationally and it establishes the precedent that both are critical to the team’s success. There is an art and science to the handoff between the two teams and by bringing both in at the beginning, you can establish best practices off the bat.
2. Start small, and then scale. We typically advocate that a GTM team start with two to three people — often two on sales and one on marketing. We like to start smaller because it allows a founder to figure out the right recipe for each functional area before getting too far down the path. Every company is different and until someone is in the role day-to-day, it’s hard to know exactly who to recruit (and how to best manage the role). It’s very possible to recruit the wrong persona in the beginning — it’s much easier to start over with only a couple people on the team. Of course, if it’s working, you’ve now nailed the successful archetype and you can double down and recruit along the same lines. By the way, this isn’t advice to wait a year to make the next hire — try to glean early signals within the first two quarters and if it looks like you’re on to something, double down.
3. Size the persona to the market. Yelp and Snowflake recruit for very different types of sales and marketing folks. The type of person a team needs is typically correlated to average ACV and sales cycle. If ACV is high and / or sales cycle is long, you will typically want older, more experienced sellers who are experienced with the right type of customer (and likely come with a higher price tag). If ACV is low and the sale is highly transactional, you will probably need younger, more transactional sellers who can manage a lot of balls in the air and don’t mind spending a day launching outbounds. Also, on the sales side, you will need to determine the right mix of business development reps (BDRs) to handle inbound / generate leads and account executives (AEs) to close, which is highly dependent on the product. Founders usually have a good sense for which personas are right for their product — lean into this instinct when you hire.
4. Stay in the middle. Don’t start with a VP or a first year sales enthusiast. Hiring senior too early can be really expensive and, until you know the right formula, can lead to a very expensive mistake. VPs will want to bring in a large sales team off the bat, and unless you know the VP well and implicitly trust them, you run the risk of ballooning your GTM budget quickly with limited evidence of success. You also shouldn’t hire folks without experience. When founders hire their first GTM folks, it typically pays to recruit folks with a couple years of experience under their belt at a relevant company since you will not have the time to train them yourself. We’ve found the best archetype to be 2–5 years of relevant experience. This is the sweet spot where you can find domain expertise, but folks are still willing to get in the weeds.
5. Be quantitatively ruthless. One of the good things with sales and marketing teams is that they are one of the easiest teams to hold to a rigorous quantitative standard. Both sales and marketing, when done right, operate like mathematical functions ($x marketing generate y leads which close at z%) and each sales and marketing person can be assessed based on their production against pre-determined goals. Set quotas for each team member from the start and constantly assess progress against expectations. Keep in mind that each new team member will need to ramp (could be 6 months for sales, and shorter for marketing, depending on your product) and you’ll probably get quota wrong the first time you set it. However, you should constantly assess whether the dollars you’re putting into the GTM team are amplifying at the bottom. In a future post, we’ll go into some tips on how best to set up your sales team economics.
6. Don’t neglect customer success. So far we’ve focused on marketing and sales; however, another critical piece of the GTM pie is customer success. Customer success isn’t technically part of this post, so we won’t spend as much time on it, but we just wanted to flag that this is also often the time to institutionalize the team and bring on your first CS member. Now that you’ll be bringing a lot more customers into the product, the next challenge will be retaining them (don’t look at your sales folks — they’ll be onto the next customer). Too often we see founders over-focus on GTM and forget about retention — you might be okay for a couple months, but pretty quickly you’ll realize you’re pouring customers into a leaky bucket. By bringing someone in early to focus on this, you’ll go a long way toward not having a headache come the first renewal cycle.

Institutionalizing a team’s go-to-market motion is one of the most exciting points in a company’s journey. It’s a stage we love at Reformation — we work closely with bootstrapped teams that are bringing on their first institutional capital to help de-risk this team growth. We know how overwhelming it can seem, but we’ve been there and we’re here to help.