When and How to Hire and Build your GTM Team

all right hi everyone my name is Chris Ganon I'm the founder of a company called Captivate Talent um my first little bit of advice today is if you're a founder and you just started take a picture now because that's what you look like at the beginning this is the after six seven years of it you age a little bit quicker than you think um so real quick Captivate Talent we focus on building go to market teams and hiring Executives for startups and over the next 20 minutes we're going to teach you about assessing your Readiness if you're

a Founder that's looking to transition from founder lead sales to a firsttime hire preparing for that right hire and then finding the perfect hire and how to grow with them real quick our expertise we've hired over 500 people uh in the last seven years and that comes off of 15,000 interviews that myself and my team's conducted so we have talked to a lot of go to market people in the startup world so what could a good hire do for you here's two clients that we've worked

with uh one of them brand name that you probably know paddle uh we hired their first VP of North America which led to their acquisition of profit well and turned into over $40 million at sales for them HR Acuity we did a hire for them scaled them from4 to $24 million in sales those are good hires we're not going to talk about company C here's what a bad hire can do for you this is really really really important because if you don't hire the right people it doesn't matter how good your product is is because this was a really good

product they hired the wrong leader and they went down they missed their marketing opportunity somebody else caught up to them and then they got smoked so first off you need to assess your Readiness um real quick anyone in here trying to create demand need a little demand that's what you're looking to do so if you're trying to create demand you do not hire an SDR

if you are a founder and you have a product and you're bringing it to Market and you're like I need more demand a 23-year-old out of college that you're going to pay $555,000 a year that has absolutely no training and barely knows how to write an email will not take you to the promised land so make sure you have conviction make sure you've identified your ICP you have a repeatable sales motion are you starting to lose deals because you are over capacity do you not have enough time in your calendar do you

have product Market fit and if you're expanding to the US do you have expansion product Market fit if you're yes on these that's when it's time to hire so we've assessed quite a few of the clients that we've worked with over the last few years and we looked at trigger points of when they hired their first go to market hire uh we're going to break down a few of the scenarios and some of the learnings we took from them company one they were under 200k in ARR um there was a very technical driven founder and we get this a lot there's

technical driven founder you are geniuses you can code you can build a product but you hate sales this is dangerous if you are trying to get out of sales this early it's really dangerous this company should have hired a consultant a senior level consultant to help them build out sales processes and the technical founder should have stayed in sales with that consultant's help but instead their board pushed them to make a full-time hire they had budget constraints so they hired an AE 7 months later

coincidentally after the ae's ramp ramp out he quit sales plummeted they had no sales because the AE didn't have any help or support the founder got bumped out by the board he's now the CTO and they put a CEO in place because they lost faith in him really really dangerous if you're this small to make a full-time hire that's my business to make full-time hires for you and I'm telling you do not do this do not call me if you're this small figure out how to get a little bit bigger work with some consultants get

to closer to this stage this is a really good stage to execute your first time hire uh we met a Founder they were trying to get figure out how to get to over a million they did something really really special here they paved the way for a full-time hire that was a VP of sales I say that in quotes because that wasn't really what they were doing every day they brought in Consultants set up HubSpot figured out pricing went through all their leads

made sure that there was somewhat of a playbook in place when this person got hired they were able to accelerate their growth their first three months wasn't figuring out what leads in HubSpot were good or not is there an inbound motion what do I need to do the Playbook is their product Market fit all this stuff was already figured out by their consultant scenario 3 is a really dangerous one there's a lot of blogs out there by SAS ex Founders and leaders

that say hire an up-and-comer now up-and-comers could potentially be really good but does anyone know who was drafted before Derek Jeter no so that's the chance you take with an upcomer you could get an absolute All-Star from a brex a Gong whatever it might be or you can get the person that's really used to working in a system has a lot of resources and has been successful because they have a

brand name and an infrastructure around them when you go to hire somebody and you're at this part of your scaling find somebody who's done it before and has made all the decisions already find somebody who's been early and can make those decisions quickly without mistakes because an upand Comer is going to make all those decisions for the first time and if they make the wrong ones you're going to have to learn from them with them and it's going to be very expensive so you hire up incomers be really really cautious that's really

the right thing you want to do and you want to make sure it's the right person so it's a quick little takeaway for everyone your go to market fit checklist um check these boxes off and I'll preview them real quick this is what it looks like if you're expanding to the US this is what it looks like part of

the preview if you're ready to hire okay so how do we minimize ramp how do we understand what an AE is versus what a director is versus what a VP is and how do we avoid bad hires is this going to play come on zero sound nothing all

right we'll summarize it real quick so this is Rebecca price she's a head of talent for primary Ventures um her advice is her Founders if they are not spending onethird of their time every week recruiting and On hiring they're going to fail series A and B companies a Founder profit people vision is what they should be doing people being one of those that third of the time so if you're a founder and you're getting ready to hire look at your calendar right now do you have 15 20 hours a week

that you can spend interviewing sourcing screening job design if no there's a high chance you could fail at making this higher right so here's how we ramp people we talk talked about this on the bottom you need to generate demand if you're hiring an AE a VP of sales an SDR you cannot expect them to come in and just pick up the phone and make phone calls it doesn't work anymore you need to make sure you have an understanding of your metrics and data because that will shorten the ramp

time and again use Consultants build an infrastructure for them to come into if you're not blocking 25 to 50% of your week to help them on board that person will most likely fail in a startup you have to build a structured checklist for them build a true onboarding program and involve your whole team and your customers book meetings with your customers before this person starts have everything blocked out in their calendar where they ramp and they can ramp successfully and quickly because a leader is going to

take three or four months to ramp if you haven't done any of these things at least a contributor could take at least one to two months to ramp and if you're in an Enterprise space it's probably going to be more like three or four so prepare yourself to on board this person the right way way it's really important and it's not only good for you but it's good for them so there's three buckets there's one bucket missing up here at C anybody in this room if you're 10 20 $30 million you're probably in the wrong room you don't have to listen to me talk about

this but if you're one to 10 and you come and you say I want to hire a cro because we're at $4 million you're going to step on a landmine it's going to be the wrong person it's going to be way too heavy on the strategy side of things not enough on the execution side so here's the things we look out for um first off there's some comp data for you those are large estimates depending on the market you're in the type of person you're hiring if you're hiring a VP and it's a

true VP their job is to scale their job is not to be on every demo for you they're not generating early stage demand they are scaling they are building they're strategizing directors are running point on your sales team they're opening doors they're managing they're hiring nic's they're managing leads they're managing demand they're closing deals they're making you Revenue now in the startup world we can hire people in

between these buckets but if you start looking on the left and then you start looking on the right you start trying to pull things together you can find somebody who can do all that stuff but eventually they're going to lean one way or the other and if they're leaning too high on strategy when you really need to accelerate sales you're going to lose Revenue and then if you lean too heavy on accelerating sales and they're a really good closer but they don't know any of the strategy you're never going to be able to build around them so be really careful when you look at a list like this and say what do I want and I

need to be somewhere in the middle you can't have it all uh this is the cost of a higher um you know salar is a really funny number because you say you're paying 100K to somebody you're actually as an employer paying closer to like 140 as an employee they're probably getting closer to like 70 so salary is really just a fake number that we throw around um there's a lot of hidden costs in here this is without using somebody like me as a

recruiter but this is just Baseline what somebody's going to cost you to bring on board so when you say 100K make sure you have 140 in the budget everyone knows guy here he comes to every event ever from EA um this is the cost of what a bad hire does this the 8020 rule 80% reps or 20% of reps are contributing to roughly 80% of the revenue right now so

that means those other 80% of reps they're not really dishing out much revenue um we saw a lot of this in 2021 a lot of the over hiring and now we're optimizing to hire the right people our clients are a lot pickier now and they're rightfully so because you hired we were hiring people in 2021 with quotas of 800k that never sold more than 300K that's why we all ran into to a wall so how do we find the perfect hire

what should we expect from a senior hire a junior higher and how do we align our interview process and growth and stage with the right fit for the job so this is the difference between a leadership and an IC hire these are both looking for salespeople with 10 years of experience but there are such things as individual contributors acquire new accounts achieve exceed goals quarterly make sales close deals Make It Rain versus the leadership person Implement and

adjust performance ramp new hires training higher scaling you have to know the difference of what you're trying to do you cannot do both not for very long somebody like Sam super talented guy here in the front row he could probably do both for a little while but eventually he's going to want to be a leader or a contributor he's not going to want to do both forever um so just make sure you're really intentional about when you design your job the type of person you're looking to hire when we analyzed a lot of the companies we worked with we looked at their

revenue stage and the type of person they hired and when these titles in here align with those duties for the job that they were doing so if you're sitting here and you're at two or three million ARR and there's somebody you have your person and they're like I want to be a VP of sales and you're like no Chris told me director only don't be silly just make sure they align with the job duties and the types of jobs that they're doing that are a director or a VP or a cro and also

anticipate where your company's going because if you're here and you're hiring a VP that might not be the person that's going to get you to the next level so be really intentional about where you're going to go and again if you're here and somebody wants to be called the C kick them out of the door don't hire them please it's not going to get the right person it's a company called yard stick uh Lucas built a really good Competency Based hiring and interviewing platform

uh we worked with them to build this out so if you're hiring for any of these roles you can grab this and it shows you the types of competencies that you should be designing around the job and these are things that you should be interviewing for from a characteristic and trait standpoint um and then you could build out questions from these competencies and look for the right answers uh for the people that you're interviewing so over the last 20

minutes we looked about how we're going to assess if we're ready to make a hire do we have product Market fit do we have demand or are we hiring a sacrificial SDR that we think is going to create demand for us at 55k and teach them how to write an email um what mistakes we can make when we're making a higher if there's somebody to Junior somebody to senior what that could lead into uh if we're looking at candidates with the right size scale experience are we trying to hire somebody from gong to

work at our seed stage startup with 10 people people and we're going to hope they're going to be successful with the very different amount of resources and then when we need to hire a leader when we need to hire a contributor how do we align our interview with our growth stage and our job and our culture