Building your early GTM function: How to get your first commercial hires right

Recruiting your first “Go To Market” (GTM) hires in a startup is a positive sign: for one reason or another, your business has evolved to the point where you need commercial support. But pulling the trigger on making your first commercial hires is fraught with difficulty, in part because of just how important these hires are to your startup. There are infinite variables that will affect the decision-making process for founders, but there are a few rules of thumb that can guide founders in bringing the first marketing, sales and customer success team members on board.

What about the new hires themselves? The biggest lesson, from seasoned operators and founders, is to “get ready for really hard work,” in the words of Ben Freeman, an early employee at cybersecurity pioneer Tessian and now founder and CEO at leading procurement intake and orchestration scaleup Omnea.

A startup’s first hire in any GTM function will be tasked with a huge range of responsibilities, most importantly generating pipeline and/or revenue for the business.

In this article we bring together perspectives from early employees, as well as founders, to uncover the traits that set great first hires apart.

Sales: when’s the right time to transition away from founder-led selling?

As a sales leader at Tessian before founding Omnea, Ben was Omnea’s main salesperson in the early days. “I would always recommend that founders try and close as many deals as they can before handing over the reins to a salesperson,” Ben suggests. “This won’t work for everyone: a technical founder will clearly need sales support more quickly than a sales specialist who’s become a founder. But every founder should look at where they are weaker and seek out a first hire that’s going to fill those capability gaps.”

In this regard, a sales hire should be ready to tailor their work to optimise processes around what is and isn’t working already. “If your sales calls are converting well, you should ideally look to orient the first hire’s initial work around maximising the number of calls and demos you’re booking,” says Ben. Conversely, if you have good pipeline coverage but you’re struggling to close enough deals, the sales hire might be charged with delivering enablement materials and handling objections to nudge buyers down the funnel and towards closing.

When do you know when the time is right to bring your first salesperson on board? “If you’ve raised a good amount of money, you might not have to wait too long to make your first sales hire,” thinks Ben. “But if you’re capital-constrained, wait until your capacity is totally maxed out and there is some early promise, either with your messaging or with a particular buyer segment. If nothing is working, don’t hire someone to ‘figure it out’ – a founder will always be better at figuring it out. Give your first hire something to work with.”

From Ben’s experience as an early sales employee at Tessian, how can first sales hires hit the ground running? “You need to get your head around doing things that won’t scale. We knew that law firms were our most important customer segment, so I went around every law firm in London and handed out flyers. I don’t know whether that’s a tactic I’d recommend for a SaaS startup today, but every early hire will need to get creative at one stage or another.”

Early hires should have an eye on how they can make the job easier as the team grows around them. “Write a lot,” says Ben. “When I started at Tessian there were no sales enablement materials whatsoever. If salespeople can summarise their learning, creating templates, scripts and other documentation, they’re paying it forward for the next new joiner. You don’t want your team to face the same challenges you did. That attitude, not just in sales but in all functions, contributes massively to your success as you scale.”

Marketing: what does a first marketer need to do?

A first marketing hire is usually an answer to a pipeline problem, suggests Alex Sorisi, co-founder of care startup Gladys and a former early-stage marketer. “Essentially, companies realise they don’t have enough leads, and so they get a marketer on board to generate pipeline and grow the business.”

According to Alex: “So many marketers focus on the doing – writing a newsletter, hosting a webinar, etc – and neglect the results. Founders need to have a strong sense that, in a chaotic startup environment, can this person spend £1 and get £1.50 back?”

The first marketing hire quickly assumes responsibility for the top-of-funnel stage of the sales pipeline. It’s a hugely important role. So what kind of marketer should founders aim to bring on board as the first team member? Alex recommends pitching job descriptions at a mid-to-senior hire. “You’re looking for someone who’s high enough up the food chain to have made mistakes and wasted other companies’ money, so they don’t waste yours. But you don’t want someone so senior that all they’ve been doing for the last five years is strategy and dashboards.”

Above all, a first marketer needs to have a sound approach to attribution. “They need to have the muscle memory and the desire to do the hard yards of writing emails, editing videos, organising events, and so on. But critically, they need the commercial and technical nous to figure out where their leads are actually coming from,” says Alex.

Customer success: finding a hire who’ll make the role their own

Customer success is a newer discipline than sales or marketing, but it forms a critical part of the revenue engine for B2B companies. Steve Morrison was the first customer success hire at payments specialist Truelayer, joining when the company had just over 20 employees. Because Truelayer’s customers were companies with complex requirements when it came to payments and other financial processes, Steve came on board when the company had just six customers. But managing complex accounts was already generating internal friction. “When I joined, our CEO was still directly managing clients,” Steve says. “It was taking up a significant proportion of his time, and account management was starting to detract from his ability to strategise and focus on scaling the rest of the business.”

While Truelayer’s founders had been responsible for customer success prior to Steve joining, they were not domain experts. “The founders were willing to let me assess what the business needed, so while I worked closely with them, I essentially defined my own KPIs.” The level of autonomy in an early customer success role means that Steve recommends founders skew more senior when thinking about the ideal first hire. “Junior hires need to learn, and an early-stage startup doesn’t always offer the right learning environment. People building a customer success function from the ground up should come in with their own understanding of best practice and be prepared to blend strategy and planning with less glamorous hands-on work.”

Over the last 10 years, the goals of the customer success function have shifted markedly.

The nature of the first customer success manager (CSM)’s work will shape their own progression as the business grows. “The first CSM will inevitably be an individual contributor. When there’s no team to manage, the biggest value-add is ensuring that customers are truly happy and willing to evangelise about the product or service,” says Steve. “But if an early CSM is going to quickly hire more team members under them and start building out the function, it’s really important that they deliver commercial impact and quickly start taking accountability for revenue.”

Hiring lessons from founders and operators who’ve been there

So you’ve decided that the time is right to make your first hire in a GTM function. How do you go about making sure you hire the right person? As Alex says, “Any new hire in an early-stage startup is like dropping a boulder into a pond. The ripples are massive.

One piece of good news: the hiring journey in a startup doesn’t need to be hugely complex. As Alex says, “You aren’t Google – you don’t have to have 10 stages in your recruitment process. The first conversation should be a deep dive, where you open up and let them know all the stuff that’s not working and everything that they could help fix. If they’re worried or put off by your candour, they probably aren’t the right first hire. The task stage will let you see how the best candidates think and the way they approach problems. Then, it’s a matter of meeting co-founders or other senior leaders with whom they’ll collaborate. At an early stage, those phases should give you everything you need to make an informed decision.”

Founders should set thoughtful tasks that give the new hire a flavour of what’s important in the business, while letting you see how they approach problems. In Steve’s view, hiring tasks should be highly specific. He gives an example using the customer success context: “You should invent a customer with an account value of £X,000 and an NPS of Y. Provide some dummy customer conversations that offer a glimpse into the nature of the customer relationship. Frame the problem as, ‘We want to grow the revenue earned from this customer by Z% over the next six months. Thinking about the customer relationship at a high level, and bearing in mind their exposure to the different products and services we offer, how would you achieve this?’”

Tasks aside, how can you ensure you’re attracting – and progressing – the right people? To Ben the “anti-sell” is a useful way to winnow out the great candidates in a process. “The only thing you can guarantee is that it’s going to be really hard work. Think about how you can get tangible evidence of grit and resilience. Where in their lives have they shown massive dedication and outperformed? That could be in their career but it could be in academia, or even in a sporting context.”

The profile of the candidate matters hugely. No matter whether it’s a sales, marketing or customer success hire, founders and operators advocate for hiring someone who can boast first-hand experience of the role in question, but who is prepared to “take a short-term step back in order to accelerate their career much faster in the longer run,” in Ben’s words. “No-one is too good, or too senior, to book meetings and send emails.”

Building your commercial team: the first hires make all the difference

The cliché of ‘fixing the plane while flying it’ could have been invented for a startup’s first commercial hires. They’ll likely take on a chunky set of problems, while needing to deliver results at pace.

For founders, it’s crucial to bear in mind that your first hire will ideally be the first of many. How well-equipped are they to document their success and failures as they go, making sure that the lessons they learn are passed on to subsequent hires? Technical skills are only part of the picture: the mindset and attitude of your early GTM hires set the standards for every new joiner to follow.