Hiring

When to Hire Your First Salesperson

• No invented stats
• Written for UK readers
• 5 min read
• Published 9 November 2026

The wrong reason to hire a salesperson is that you are too busy to sell. The right reason is that you have a repeatable way of winning customers and not enough hours to run it. Those sound similar and lead to completely different outcomes — the first produces a hire who is handed a laptop and a hope, the second produces one who has something to execute.

Four readiness tests

Work through these honestly before you write a job advert. Failing any one of them means the first hire is likely to fail too, and the failure will look like a hiring mistake when it was a timing mistake.

1. You have closed the deals yourself, repeatably

Not one deal, and not deals that came through your personal network alone. You want somewhere in the region of ten or more closed customers won through an identifiable process, with enough similarity between them that you can describe the pattern. If every deal you have won happened differently, there is nothing to hand over.

2. You can describe the process in writing

One page: who the buyer is, what problem triggers them to look, what objections come up, what the typical steps are from first contact to signature, and how long it takes. If you cannot write this, you do not have a process — you have intuition, and intuition does not transfer.

3. The unit economics work

You need to know your average deal value, your rough win rate and your gross margin. Without those three numbers you cannot tell whether a salesperson is affordable, and you will find out the expensive way.

4. There is enough market to work

Count the addressable accounts that fit your ideal customer profile. If there are 80 of them and you have already spoken to 60, a new rep has nothing to do. This sounds obvious and is a surprisingly common failure, particularly in narrow B2B niches.

What the hire actually costs

The figures below are illustrative planning numbers for a UK small business, not market data — check your own region and sector before relying on them.

Then add the cost of ramp and the cost of failure. A rep who takes four months to become productive costs, on the illustrative figures above, roughly £25,000 before contributing anything. A rep who does not work out and leaves at month seven costs the ramp, the recruitment, your time, and the six months of selling you did not do because you were managing them.

Worked payback

Average deal value £9,000, gross margin 60%, so £5,400 of gross profit per deal. Total first-year cost around £85,000 plus £8,000 of recruitment, so £93,000.

Deals needed to break even = £93,000 ÷ £5,400 = 18 deals.

If your sales cycle is 90 days and ramp is four months, the rep has roughly eight productive months in year one. Eighteen deals in eight months is more than two a month from a standing start. Is that plausible given what you personally achieve? If you close one a month yourself while also running the company, expecting more than double from someone new is optimistic, and the honest conclusion is that this hire will not pay back in year one — which may still be the right decision, as long as you have gone in knowing it and can fund it.

The sales target calculator will work back from a revenue goal to the daily activity implied, which is the fastest way to sanity-check whether the number is reachable. It is also worth calculating your customer acquisition cost before and after the hire, because the answer sometimes changes the decision entirely.

What to hire

For most first hires, the choice is between an AE and an SDR, and it turns on where your bottleneck is. If you have more good conversations than you can follow up, hire a closer. If you have closing capacity and an empty diary, hire someone to fill it. Getting this backwards is a common and expensive error — the trade-offs are set out in SDR vs AE: how to split sales roles.

The other tempting mistake is hiring a senior person to "build the function" before there is a function. A head of sales with no team and no proven process becomes an expensive consultant with a salary.

Signals it is time

• You are turning down or slow-responding to inbound enquiries
• Deals are stalling because you cannot follow up consistently
• You know exactly which activity generates pipeline, and you are not doing enough of it
• Revenue is flat while your working hours are not
• You could name, today, the 60 accounts a new rep would start on

Signals it is not

• You hope a salesperson will work out what to sell and to whom
• Your product still changes materially every few months
• You cannot afford six months of salary with no revenue attached
• Churn is high — adding customers to a leaky bucket just makes the leak louder
• You have not written down how you sell

If you are not ready, do this instead

1. Document the process. Record your own calls for a month and write down what actually works. This is the asset the eventual hire needs most.
2. Fix the measurement. Get deal value, win rate and cycle length out of the CRM reliably.
3. Hire support before sales. An admin or marketing hire that returns five selling hours a week to you is often a better first investment, and considerably cheaper.
4. Build the target list. A ready-made list of qualified accounts turns a new rep's first month from research into activity — see building a prospect list worth calling.

If you are ready, prepare properly

Before the start date, have three things written: a 30/60/90 plan with numeric milestones, a commission plan published in full, and a starter account list. Set the ramp expectation to match your sales cycle rather than your impatience — with a 90-day cycle, judging a new rep on closed revenue in month two is measuring nothing. The 30/60/90 onboarding plan covers the sequencing, and the commission design guide covers the pay structure.

And block the time. A first sales hire needs several hours a week of your attention for the first three months. If you cannot commit that, delay the hire — because the version of this that fails most often is not a bad salesperson, it is a good one left alone.

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