You hired a salesperson. You thought they would build your pipeline. Six months later you fired them. Now you're asking whether you should hire someone else or if the problem is your product.
The problem is neither. It's what you asked them to do.
This is what you tell yourself.
Your sales person couldn't close. They didn't network effectively. They didn't have the energy or hunger you expected. Maybe they came from a bigger company and couldn't adjust to startup chaos. Maybe they just weren't cut out for your space.
So you fired them and you're now interviewing round two.
But here's what's actually true. Your first sales hire probably failed because you gave them an impossible job, not because they were bad at sales.
You hired a salesperson and asked them to invent your entire sales strategy from scratch.
You had a product. You had some customers who loved it. But you didn't know exactly who your best customer was. You didn't have a clear story about why they needed you. You didn't have a repeatable way to reach the people who needed you most.
So you handed your new salesperson a business card and said "go find customers."
That's not a sales job. That's a founder job. And you shouldn't have asked them to do it.
A salesperson is good at one thing: closing people who already believe they have a problem you solve. They are not good at discovering who your customer actually is. They are not good at figuring out what words will make someone listen. They are not good at inventing a way to reach people from nothing.
When you hire someone before you've done that work, you're not hiring a salesperson. You're hiring a very expensive consultant to figure out what you should have figured out yourself.
And when they can't make it work, you assume they failed. But they didn't. You set them up to fail.
Before you hire your second salesperson, three things have to be locked in.
First: You need to know exactly who your customer is.
Not "mid-market SaaS companies." That's useless. You need specifics: which companies, which job titles, which problems, which budget, how they actually buy.
If you can't describe your ideal customer in two paragraphs without saying the word "and" more than twice, you're not ready to hire a salesperson yet.
Second: You need messaging that actually works.
You need to know what words make your target customer stop and listen. Not the words you think sound good. The words that actually move them.
This comes from talking to customers. Real conversations. Not surveys. Sit with them and listen to how they describe their problem before you ever mention your solution.
If your messaging was invented in your head, your salesperson will spend six months discovering it should have come from those conversations. That's wasted time and money you don't have.
Third: You need one way to reach them that produces results.
You don't need ten channels. You need one. One way to get in front of your customer that actually works and that you can repeat.
Maybe it's cold email. Maybe it's warm introductions. Maybe it's events. Maybe it's content. Doesn't matter which. But it has to work before you hand it off.
If you hire a salesperson and tell them "figure out how to reach people," you've handed them a research project. Again.
Your salesperson should execute a plan you've already tested. Not invent a new one.
Here's the diagnostic.
Did your sales person spend the first three months asking you who your customer was?
Did they question your messaging because something felt wrong about it?
Did they struggle to find a consistent way to get prospects to respond?
Did they produce a list of "ideal companies" and ask you to check if they were right?
If yes to any of these, your salesperson didn't fail. You hired them too early.
A strong salesperson will tell you these things are missing. A weak salesperson will nod, take the job, and then disappear into chaos for six months before you fire them.
The strong ones usually know faster that the job is impossible. So if your hire lasted only two or three months before leaving, that's actually a good signal. They recognized you weren't ready.
When you hire after you've done this work, everything changes.
Your salesperson comes in and sees a clear picture of who your customer is. They see messaging that lands. They see a process that works at small scale. Their job is simple: make it work at bigger scale.
That takes skill. That takes experience. That takes the right person in the role.
But it's a sales job. Not a startup strategy job.
Your salesperson will close deals faster. They'll refine the messaging. They'll spot what's broken in your process. They'll double down on what works.
They'll do what salespeople are actually good at.
Your first sales hire probably didn't fail because they couldn't close. They failed because you didn't give them anything to close.
Before you hire your next salesperson, nail down exactly who your customer is. Lock in messaging that resonates. Prove that one way of reaching them actually works.
Then hire someone to scale it.
That's when sales actually works.
If you have product-market fit but your growth is stuck, Nexdation helps you build the go-to-market foundation that makes sales hires actually succeed.
The right conversation at the right moment changes everything. Let's have it.
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