This module outlines the foundational principles for building an early commercial organisation, from identifying, evaluating and enabling high-performing sales talent from the first hire to scale, including,
- A Standardised Hiring Process
- The Ideal Sales Profile
- Scorecard Design and Interview Architecture
- Team Dynamics
- Compensation Principles and Incentive Alignment
A Standardised Hiring Process
Recruiting is a top founder responsibility. The quality of your team is the highest leverage input for long-term performance. At the early stages you are not just hiring, but laying the foundation culturally, operationally, and commercially of your company. The ability to attract and retain top talent aligned with your vision, pace and standards, is a strategic advantage.
Early candidates need to hear the ambition directly from leadership. Not just what the company is, but where it is going, and why it matters. That clarity sets the tone for ownership. Some core principles,
- Own the pitch: sell the vision, opportunity and urgency of problem as candidates calibrate on what you communicate
- Hire proactively not reactively: build a solid pipeline of strong profiles and keep the shortlist warm before you need it.
- Leverage your network: ask board members, investors, operators for referrals as these outperform cold outreach. After every hire, ask for 2–3 peer referrals as high-performers know high-performers.
- Hire in cohorts: parallel onboarding improves peer learning, builds internal calibration benchmarks, and reduces single-point failure.
The Hiring Flow
A high-quality hiring process increases the probability of a high-quality hire. A standardised and structured process creates a repeatable path for identifying talent at scale and under pressure. Below is a flow with the key steps that helps consistency find, evaluate and recruit talent,
- Define the Ideal Sales Profile – start with exactly defining what you are hiring for. What are the core functional skills (e.g. pipeline discipline, enterprise negotiation), behavioural traits (e.g. ownership, curiosity), and expected outcomes at 30/60/90 days. This is your bar. Everything else measures against it.
- Source Deliberately – fill the top of the funnel with intent and calibrate fast by prioritising referrals, direct outreach to relevant profiles in adjacent companies, and immediate network. Your best candidates are often 1-2 steps aways. Select external recruiters only for specific roles (see Section: On Using External Recruiters).
- Screen with intent – run structured calls with scorecards to filter candidates by baseline fit. Focus on i) motivation, why this company, why this role, why now?, ii) experience, is it relevant to GTM stage and customer motion, iii) self-awareness, can they describe past failures with clarity, iv) red flags, culture mismatches, short tenures, vague track records.
- Interview across stakeholders – run 3-4 step interviews with each owning a vector i) role fit, skills, stage fluency, execution depth, ii) traits, resilience, structured thinking, iii) culture, ownership, collaboration, pace. Standardise playbooks, scorecards and centralise debriefs with clear ownership.
- Run rigorous reference checks - use backchannel references from previous managers and peers to confirm strengths, collect feedback and pressure test potential gaps in the interviews. Ask would you rehire them, how did they perform under pressure? What type of environment brings out their best work? Where did they struggle?
- Move fast, decide precisely – top candidates will not wait. If there is alignment across scorecards and reference checks, act decisively. If there are flags or mixed signals, reopen the search. A slow hire is expensive, but a misaligned hire is worse.
- Onboard with structure - build a 30/60/90-day ramp plan tied to i) commercial deliverables (e.g. first demo, first close, first Q target), ii) internal milestones (e.g. playbook mastery, CRM, call reviews), iii) cultural integration (e.g. team rituals, decision-making frameworks), and set expectations early by scheduling check-ins weekly and tracking progress.
On using external recruiters
External recruiters can be useful but should never be the default.
The ability to identify, attract and retain top talent is an internal competency that is critical to build. It gives you control over the pitch, alignment between skills, values, culture and the nuances of the specific role, and strategic advantage long-term. Relying on third parties too early can dilute this clarity.
That said, external recruiters can extend reach in targeted cases and are usually most effective for senior commercial roles, sales leadership hires, enterprise sellers post-PMF and specialised roles when internal reach has stalled. If you do engage an external recruiter,
- Brief them deeply on your company, stage, product, expectations, and culture
- Align expectations to reflect the early stage budget constraints and operating realties
- Incentives quality over volume as you want fewer better candidates
Recruiters can be used to expand reach but never replace ownership. A misaligned hire costs more than a slow one.
Further reading: The Hiring Process by a16z, 6 Strategies to Address the Challenge of Sales Hiring by Korn Ferry.
The Ideal Sales Profile
To build a high-performing sales team before you hire there needs to be a set definition of what great looks like for your company, your motion, and your stage. The first commercial hires in a technical company are operating in ambiguity – often building the process as they sell. What matters is not just what they have sold before, but how they think, learn, and operate under uncertainty.
This is where the Ideal Sales Profile (ISP) comes in. Just as you define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), you should define who is most likely to succeed in your sales motion and why.
These are some of the traits that are consistently shown across high-performing sales teams and individuals,
- Resilience - momentum in the face of rejection, long sales cycles, and product ambiguity.
- Curiosity - asks questions that uncover real needs, and seeks to deeply understand the product, customer, and market.
- Structured Thinking - disciplined pipeline and process orientation.
- Ownership - bias for action and owns outcomes, operates as an extension of the founding team.
- Coachability - improves visibly over short cycles, signals high ceiling, not just a strong base.
- Commercial Judgement - understands qualification, buyer behaviour and how to adapt accordingly.
Look for trajectory, not just tenure. Were they promoted, did they expand a territory, did they build something from scratch? Experience at the top companies is not a signal unless it maps to your stage. Prioritise trajectory over logos.
Scorecards and Interview Architecture
Scorecards: Repeatable Evaluation
Your Ideal Sales Profile should be operationalised into a structured and repeatable framework. This ensures consistency across interviewers, removes bias, and increases the probability of hiring aligned, high-performing talent.
Interviews should be designed to map to a predefined set of skills, traits, and behaviours of the candidate.
Each score must be grounded in observable behaviour. Use a 1-5 scale with every interviewer noting rationality.
What Are You Really Evaluating?
Behind each score lies a set of underlying questions. Use the following prompts to guide the debrief, not just during interviews, but in post-interview discussions.
- Mindset – Do they demonstrate a growth orientation? Can they give examples of how they’ve adapted over time?
- Track Record – What have they done before that’s analogous to this role? Where did they create real value?
- Trajectory – Are they on the way up? Have they stretched beyond their job title?
- Motivation – What’s driving them? Why are they looking now?
- Judgment – Can they articulate why deals were won or lost? What they learned
- Culture Fit – Do they operate at your pace? Can they own outcomes with limited structure?
- Personal Fit – What do they do for fun? What brings them energy? Are they self-aware about what environments they thrive in?
Look for specificity. High-performers tell stories with detail—dates, names, outcomes. Vague generalities are a red flag.
From Framework to Practice
Once you have defined your scorecard,
- Share it with every interviewer. Make it a non-negotiable step in your process.
- Assign each interviewer 1–2 criteria to assess. Avoid everyone assessing everything.
- After the round of interviews run a structured debrief where opinions are not allowed without evidence.
- Document scorecards centrally. Use them to track hiring patterns and improve quality over time.
Example: HubSpot built its early inside sales team around a competency model that heavily weighted coachability and cultural alignment. These traits were predictive of high performance—so they designed their entire hiring loop to test for them explicitly. Technical skills were viewed as trainable. Mindset was not.
Further reading: Sales Hiring Scorecard Template by J12, Inside Sales Best Practices: HubSpot — A Case Study by David Skok.
Interview Architecture
Hiring exceptional talent requires more than just functional skill assessments. Ultimately you are selecting for people who thrive in pace, pressure and ambiguity. The purpose of the interview process is not just to validate skills, but to test different facets of the profile. For companies at the early stages, this means testing for adaptability, ownership, learning velocity, and operating judgment beyond domain knowledge. Focus on observed behaviour over hypotheticals.
A well-structured interview process enables consistent assessment of these traits, and each step should exist to isolate and evaluate specific attributes from your Ideal Sales Profile, mapped clearly to your hiring scorecard. Focus on observed behaviour over hypotheticals.
Recommended interview flow,
- Introductory Call (15–20 mins): assess motivation, baseline alignment, clarity of intent
- Competency interview: dive into past performance, sales process, and problem-solving
- Simulation: test execution ability in context by live selling, objection handling, customer context
- Culture and values: validate alignment with pace, ownership mindset, and team norms
- Reference check: consistency across roles, teams, and past performance under pressure
Follow a three touchpoint rule. Assign three interviewers, across functions and seniority, to assess different scorecard criteria. Use advisors or board members to calibrate senior hires or ambiguous decisions.
Use Role-Specific Sales Scenarios
Strong candidates thrive in context. Instead of abstract questions, present real-world scenarios drawn from your GTM such as,
- “Sell me our product in five minutes - assume I’m a Head of Ops at a mid-market company.”
- “You’re on a call with a skeptical CFO - what’s your approach to objection handling?”
- “You’ve just inherited a dormant pipeline - how do you triage, qualify, and close?”
Simulations reveal mindset, structure, and communication in ways a traditional interview cannot. They test preparation and are a reliable proxy for performance.
Example: Gong.io asks candidates to analyse a real recorded sales call and provide feedback on what went well, what did not, and how they would handle it differently.
Reference Checks
Reference calls done well surface patterns you did not catch during interviews.
Always go beyond the provided references and prioritise backchanneling. Speak to former managers, direct peers, or clients where possible – do not settle for general praise but ask for specific examples, challenges faced and how they handled them. Sample question to ask,
- Would you rehire this person? Why or why not? How would you rate the candidate’s performance?
- Where did they thrive, and where did they struggle? What was their biggest achievement in the role?
- How did they handle pressure, rejection, or change?
- What were their main development areas? How did they respond to feedback?
- What is one thing you would coach them on if they joined again?
This step is often overlooked, yet critical in the recruitment process to understand who you are hiring and how they show up to work – under pressure, on bad days, when they disagree, when no one is watching. When done thoroughly, referencing can lead to the offer being rescinded or it significantly mitigates risks in hiring.
Example: Amazon’s ‘bar-raiser’ process ensures multiple rounds of reference even before any offer is made.
Further Readings: Top 20 Interview Questions for Sales Reps (+5 Tips) by Melanie Taube, Psychometric Testing vs Structured Interviews by Hubert.ai
Team Dynamics
Sales is an individual sport played in a team environment. How your commercial team operates day-to-day will determine how effectively individuals perform, how consistently they grow, and how long they stay.
At the early stages, culture scales faster than process. While founders often focus heavily on hiring, many fail to set the tone for how the team should operate once assembled. The first few sales reps set the norms from day one, what is acceptable, what is celebrated, what is corrected.
Set a high bar for entry. Set an even higher bar for retainment.
High-functioning sales cultures share five traits,
- Clear targets and role expectations
- Individual accountability for pipeline, process, and performance
- Shared learning loops through weekly debriefs, peer feedback, and reviews
- Visible performance metrics, recognition, and leaderboards
- Cultural rituals that reinforce excellence
The culture you want to build must be reinforced through behaviour and cadence of weekly focused pipeline reviews, win/loss breakdowns, and visible leaderboards. Internal transparency with visible metrics, dashboards, and feedback loops matters more than performance pressure.
At the early stages, you cannot afford the “toxic top performer” but should prioritise collaborative competitiveness and collective excellence over individual exceptionalism. No single hire should compromise team trust.
Example: In many high-performing sales teams (e.g. Figma, Notion), team-based targets are layered on top of individual quota to reinforce cohesion without diluting ownership.
Compensation and Incentive Alignment
Compensation is not just about pay, but about alignment. When designed right it reinforces the behaviours that drive consistency in performance, accelerate learning, ownership, and predictability.
Early-stage sales teams often operate with limited historical data, uneven deal flow, and an evolving messaging framework. That makes designing incentive structures more art than science – but no less important. If you get it right, incentives become a quiet force multiplier. If you get it wrong, they drive noise, short-termism, and churn.
Guiding Principles by Stage
Early Stage: Pre-PMF
At the early stage, your commercial motion is still forming and sales cycles are uneven without quota baselines or conversion benchmarks. Complexity is your enemy – the goal is clarity and motivation rather than scale so compensation should be,
- Simple — easy to explain, administer to explain and administer
- Predictable — reps should know how much they can earn
- Achievable — within direct influence and control to achieve
- Aligned — tied to what actually creates enterprise value
Example plan for milestone based bonus,
- Base Salary: €80K
- Milestone Bonus: €20K tied to specific events (e.g. pipeline volume, number of qualified demos, first 3 signed contracts)
The milestone bonuses can be based on,
- Qualified meetings booked with target personas
- Initial customer contracts signed
- CRM hygiene and process adherence
- Learnings contributed back into the GTM playbook
Blend objective and subjective indicators, but keep them explicit. These bonuses exist to drive focus while acknowledging the ambiguity of early traction.
Growth Stage: Post-PMF
Once PMF is evident and you have some early funnel data that establishes leading indicators of success, evolve into a formalised variable plan with On-Target Earnings (OTE).
- Base Salary: €60K
- Bonus: €60K tied to ARR closed against quarterly quota
Best practice for structuring quotas,
- Use a 70/30 rule – set quotas where top performers should hit 130%, average reps around 70%
- Reps should close ~4–5× their OTE annually in new ARR annually
- Quotas should evolve every 6–12 months as conversation rates, sales cycles and ICP maturity evolves
Compensation plans should evolve alongside your performance system. Revisit plan logic every quarter, not just annually.
Commission Plan Design
Example: HubSpot tied commission not only to new customer acquisition, but to retention and expansion—creating long-term alignment between sales, success, and the company.
SPIFFs and Strategic Incentives
Short-term incentives can enable momentum when used in targeted ways with precision,
- Launching a new product or feature
- Entering a new market, segment
- Driving activity during slower periods or near quarter-end
- Reinforcing lagging behaviours (e.g. CRM updates, deal handoffs)
Rules for SPIFFs design should be:
- Time-bound (e.g. 48–72 hour window)
- Simple with clear eligibility and criteria defined
- Targeted, reinforce a narrow, high-priority behaviour
- Paid out fast, immediate reinforcement increases effectiveness
Avoid incentive fatigue. When everything is incentivised, nothing is.
Implementation Infrastructure
Once your commission plan is live with KPIs and targets, document the model and explain in 1-pages, build a commission calculator tool for reps. Integrate the plan into your CRM or sales ops space to automate tracking, reporting, and prevent errors. Review quarterly to ensure alignment with business priorities.
Good Incentives as Self-Reinforcing
A well constructed incentive model reinforces the behaviours you want by signaling what great looks like, encouraging process not just the outcomes, and builds trust between leadership and team, and makes performance scalable.
Good incentives are self-reinforcing. A well constructed incentive model reinforces the behaviours you want by signaling what great looks like, encouraging process not just the outcomes, and builds trust between leadership and team, and makes performance scalable.
Further readings: How to Create an Effective Sales Incentives Program by Steli Efti, Simple Math to Set Up a Sales Team by David Sacks, 10 Typical Sales Commission Structures To Motivate Reps by Spotio, The Right Way to Use Compensation by Mark Roberge, Compensation Calculator by Hubspot.
Final Note
Compensation is not a retention mechanism, It is how you architect high-performance and reward the people who deliver it. Done right, it attracts the right people, sets clear expectations, and allows high-performers to outperform predictably.
