Building a Global Sales Engine From Zero
As the founding sales hire, you don't inherit a playbook — you write it. Here's the order of operations I use to turn a blank page into repeatable revenue.
Joining a company as the founding sales professional is a different sport than scaling an existing team. There is no pipeline to inherit, no CRM hygiene to clean up, no playbook to tweak. There is only a product, a market thesis, and the responsibility to prove that strangers will pay for what you've built.
Start with the buyer, not the funnel
Before touching tooling, I spend the first weeks in conversations — with prospects, with the founders, with anyone who has felt the pain the product solves. The goal is a crisp ICP and a clear articulation of the economic buyer's problem. Everything downstream, from messaging to pricing, collapses if this foundation is fuzzy.
Codify before you scale
The temptation is to start dialing immediately. Resist it. The first ten deals are your research lab: every objection, every stall, every reason a deal dies is data. I capture all of it and turn it into a written playbook — qualification criteria, discovery questions, and a forecast methodology — so the eleventh rep doesn't have to relearn the first ten lessons.
Infrastructure is a sales asset
A CRM that mirrors how you actually sell, partner programs that extend your reach, and a forecast you can defend to the board — these aren't admin overhead, they're leverage. Build them early, while the cost of changing them is low, and the org you hand to the next ten reps runs itself.