How to hire an early-stage sales team from $0 to $1M ARR

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

Crazy that we’re already on the 10th edition of The Pipeline. The response has been great, and I appreciate you reading.

Today, I’m going to walk you through how I think about hiring for sales at an early-stage startup. I’ll share specific traits we screen for, how we run mock demos, and more.

Pretty much everything I wish I knew when I started making the move out of founder-led sales.

Shall we?

📒 GTM Playbook

How we built our early-stage sales team

An inside look at Unify’s hiring playbook

Just over a year ago, I was the only seller on our team. Before product-market-fit, sales was a lot of hand-to-hand combat. As a founder, I was often selling the vision instead of the actual built-out product (because we didn’t have much built).

In late 2023 when we were still figuring it out, we hired Skyler Mickunas as our Founding Account Executive. The idea was that Skyler and I would tag team closing deals until we felt confident the product was sell-able by an AE solo.

Over the past year, we’ve scaled our sales team (just AEs and SDRs) from Skyler and myself to 7 people. This team helped us scale into the mid-7 figures of revenue and grow ARR 24x in 2024.

Here are the things I’ve learned about hiring Account Executives at a startup. Not everything will apply to you, but hope there are some nuggets that resonate.

Hire for slope over intercept.

I’ll start with one of our overarching hiring philosophies at Unify—hire for slope over intercept.

Selling in the early days of a company is a gauntlet. The product isn’t perfect and it’s just not that impressive yet. You need sellers who are excited and eager to roll with the punches.

We’ve found that hiring folks who are eager to grow (high slope) is a winning formula. These candidates will see a challenge as an opportunity to prove themself, and they’ll help you build the foundations for your team. Often these folks that you hire as ICs also grow into team leaders.

Early sellers need to be improving their pitch with every call. Some who is high slope is more likely to do this.

Hire reps in pairs.

One of the main mistakes we made with early sales at Unify not hiring two reps off the bat.

If you're committed to having a sales-led motion, you’ll want to hire two reps at once when making your first sales hires. You’ll find success more quickly this way.

We hired Skyler in November ‘23 and didn’t bring on a second AE until summer ‘24—which was too long of a break in hindsight.

Skyler and I would have been able to learn a lot faster and pattern match more effectively if he had a co-pilot from Day 1.

Look for AEs who thrive in ambiguity.

Selling at a pre-product-market fit product is fundamentally different from selling at an established company.

Being an AE at an early-stage company is hard. In the early-stages, you don’t have playbooks to lean on. You don’t have pre-made pitch decks ready for you to use. You don’t have a RevOps team or sales enablement team to consult with.

Our AEs need to thrive with:

• Limited sales collateral

• No formal sales enablement

• Minimal supporting resources

• High ambiguity

We look for people who are excited by this challenge, not deterred by it. They need to be builders who can roll up their sleeves and create processes where none exist. This requires work outside of direct selling—like creating sales materials, for example.

I think we got that right with Skyler and then with Tameem. They were both just ready to get in the trenches and figure things out.

The best AEs brag about quota attainment.

When you check your candidate’s LinkedIn profile, you should see them bragging about exceeding their numbers.

Did they make President’s Club?

Did they hit 120% of quota in every quarter?

Did they close some of the biggest deals in the company?

Top AE talent will let people know about it.

If someone's a top performer, they're typically quite vocal about these achievements. And they should be—in sales, you want people who are proud of their numbers.

When we’re vetting AE candidates, we need to see those examples of top performance.

Top AEs care about making a ton of money.

This one’s a bit of a sales cliche—but you want your sales team to be excited about the prospect of making a lot of money.

Being mission-driven and in it for reasons other than the cash are great. But if your sales team isn’t also money-drive…good luck.

If you have reps who are blowing OTE (on target earnings) out of the water, word will travel quickly. This will get other top sellers excited about joining your company.

Hire top performers from #2 and #3 companies.

Hire the best sellers from #2 and #3 companies in a given category.

AEs who thrive selling a not-great product will have a field day working for a category leader.

High performance at a challenging company means they've mastered their craft—they know how to run a tight sales process and close deals even without having the market-leading product.

For example, Neema was a top seller at Cognism (123% to quota, Presidents Club). Cognism sells in the highly competitive landscape of contact data where they’re going up against Zoominfo, the incumbent.

Test for deep product knowledge.

Every AE we hire has to do a mock demo of their current product during our interview process.

This allows us to see exactly how well the candidate knows their product, and how comfortable they feel with it.

We’ll also try to use this to screen for folks who are comfortable selling without support. At larger companies, AEs might have a sales engineer to lean on in demos. We’re not at that stage—so we need folks who can hold their own solo.

One tactic we love to deploy in mock demos is purposefully pulling candidates off-script.

When doing this, we are assessing how the candidate responds to being thrown off track. Are they overly reliant on their talk track? Or can they adapt and show real product knowledge and resourcefulness? Can they objection handle well?

Another nuance we’ll look for in mock demos: we avoid candidates who sell features. Some AEs will focus too much on features, and not enough on what the business initiative or problem that the customer has. During demos, top AEs will keep pointing back to these initiatives.

It’s not: “Hey Austin, here are these 20 features we launched in the past 4 months.”

It’s: “Hey Austin, you care about this because you want to drive more pipeline. Here's how this feature is going to generate more pipeline for you.”

I’ve found that great reps will come with a slide or two prepped to frame the conversation ahead of time. They’ll confirm with the prospect why they showed up to the call that today, so they make sure they’re framing the conversation around the right topics.

A bad rep doesn’t prep at all. A decent rep will probably ask what you care about. A great rep does their homework ahead of time and confirms their hypothesis with the prospect.

Your early-stage AE hires should deliver impact immediately.

This might be Unify-specific, but we’ve noticed that many of our sellers blow their ramp quota out of the water. They close their first deals in 1-2 weeks on the job.

For example, we hired Emma last month. She came in with a month 1 quota of $10K. She’s already closed $63K of ARR this month.

We hired Anthony in September, and by December we’d moved him to leading the team.

We originally hired Tameem as an SDR. 3 months into the job we put him on a demo because we didn’t have the closing capacity. He closed that deal.

When you hire great sales talent, you’ll know quickly.

Shameless plug, if you want to join our sales team, we’re actively hiring for our next AEs to help us service the massive influx of pipeline we’ve experienced over the past quarter.

If you respond to this email with your Linkedin and resume I’ll connect you internally.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Last week, I wrote about how we used automated outbound (powered by Unify) to generate $7M of pipeline.

I have another exciting milestone to share. Last week, we used that same system to book $1M in pipeline in one week (on our 2nd birthday as well 🎉).

I’d recommend reading the playbook if you haven’t yet.

And if you want a demo of how to use Unify to generate pipeline for your company, book one here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks again for following along. I’m excited to grow The Pipeline in 2025. The reception so far has been great.

Like I mentioned at the end of the main piece, we’re hiring for AEs right now. If you think you’re a great fit based on what you read here, respond to this email.

And if you know someone who would be a good fit, also shoot me an email 🙂 

Thanks a ton,

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.