Your first couple sales hires
One of the challenges of building an early-stage sales team is that salespeople often have to do a lot of other stuff, other than selling.
When a startup is tight on resources and still figuring out exactly who its ideal customer and positioning are - salespeople need to step up and do more than sell.
Find their own leads.
Test selling to different customer profiles and verticals.
Experiment with pricing and packaging.
Try different sales processes and messaging.
Onboard and manage their own Accounts.
Figure out how to structure and capture data in their CRM (and all sorts of “sales ops” work)
Etc.
This is why you need to hire for a different profile with your first 5-10 salespeople. You need to find people who believe in the vision of the company, people who will do whatever it takes.
Unless they are “all-in” on the mission- hiring veteran salespeople from big companies is a mistake.
Look for mission-driven utility players that are able and willing to play other positions- that also happen to be great sellers.