Your first go-to-market hire should own a specific commercial problem. Decide whether you need someone to discover a repeatable sales motion, execute one the founders have demonstrated, or manage an existing team. Those are different jobs.
This guide is a planning framework. It does not claim a universal salary, hiring timeline, or success rate.
Choose the job before the title
| Current situation | Role to consider | Evidence to examine |
|---|---|---|
| Founders can win customers but need help repeating the process | Founding account executive or hands-on GTM lead | Deals personally sourced, qualified, and closed in a similar environment |
| Salespeople are active but lack coaching and operating discipline | Sales manager or sales leader | Coaching, forecasting, hiring, and performance management |
| Positioning and demand are the main constraints | Product marketing or growth specialist | Customer research, channel experiments, and learning from results |
Treat this table as a starting point. Interview the founders and customer-facing team before combining several jobs into one title.
Prepare a commercial evidence pack
Give candidates a sanitized overview of your buyer, use case, current sales process, and where deals stall. Distinguish observations from hypotheses. If you have only a small number of customers, say so; do not imply a proven sales motion.
Record what the founders will continue to own. A new GTM lead cannot independently fix product gaps, invent positioning, generate every lead, and close every deal without priorities and support.
Assess the work they actually did
Ask for a deal walkthrough: how the opportunity appeared, what the buyer needed, who opposed the purchase, what the candidate personally changed, and why the deal closed or failed. Ask about a lost deal as well as a win.
Compare the selling environment with yours: buyer seniority, product maturity, technical depth, available pipeline, brand recognition, and support from founders or solutions engineers. A strong result in a well-supported organization may require different skills from creating demand at a young startup.
Use an interview exercise that reveals judgment
Provide a fictional account and a short product description. Ask the candidate to propose discovery questions, identify missing information, and describe a next step. Evaluate how they reason about the customer rather than how confidently they deliver a polished pitch.
Agree on the exercise length and expectations beforehand. Keep it separate from live prospecting or real client work.
Define success and compensation together
Set responsibilities, territory, lead ownership, cash compensation, and incentive rules before the offer. Explain the assumptions behind any quota or variable-pay target. A target is a plan, not proof that the earnings are attainable.
For the first operating period, agree on observable milestones such as completing customer discovery, documenting qualification criteria, or moving specific opportunities to a defined next stage. Choose milestones appropriate to your business rather than importing another company's quota.
What to send a recruiting partner
Send the role outcome, buyer profile, product maturity, founder involvement, location, approved budget, and interview process. Ask the partner to explain each candidate's relevant selling environment and what remains unverified. The hiring brief template makes those tradeoffs explicit.
Hiring with Refery
Refery helps early-stage startups hire engineering, AI, and GTM talent through introductions from founders, operators, investors, and specialist recruiters, with screening for the role. The current service and pricing are 15% to 25% of first-year base salary, paid only when you hire; scope and fee are agreed upfront.
Share your role with Refery, or use the hiring brief template to prepare your search.