Hiring your first salesperson: a playbook for MSMEs

Founder-led sales scale to a point — usually somewhere between ₹50 lakh and ₹2 crore of annual revenue — and then the founder becomes the bottleneck. The fix is hiring your first salesperson. The trap is hiring them the way everyone else does: a biodata, a vibe, and hope.

First, are you actually ready? Three signals: your product sells repeatedly without custom hand-holding; you can describe your last ten deals in writing (who, why, how much); and you have a rough pipeline source that isn't only your personal network. If any of these is missing, hiring salespeople just relocates your problem.

Scorecard beats biodata. Write down what the first 90 days must produce — for example, 20 qualified meetings, 5 trials, 2 closed deals. Interview against that. A candidate from a big brand who has never sourced their own leads will struggle in a role that is 60% hunting.

Run a paid two-week sprint before committing. Give a real list, a real pitch and a real incentive; watch how many conversations they generate and how honestly they report. Salespeople who are good show it fast; the ones who aren't show you something more valuable — that they overreport.

Compensation: for a first hire, 60:40 fixed-to-variable is a sane start, with incentives on collections rather than bookings when you sell on credit — a lesson most distributor businesses learn the expensive way.

The 30-60-90: first month, product knowledge and shadowing, CRM hygiene from day one; second month, supervised calling with weekly reviews; third month, own targets and a proper pipeline review. Write it down and share it in the offer letter.

The most common failure isn't hiring wrong — it's hiring right and then under-managing. A first salesperson without a weekly review becomes an expensive friend. Fifteen focused minutes a week on numbers and next steps is the entire management system you need at this stage.

If you'd rather have specialists run this — scorecards, structured interviews, a six-week sales bootcamp for your team — our Operations & Hiring partners handle single hires and full bootcamps with fixed fees.