Before you hire another salesperson, answer these questions

Hiring a salesperson adds capacity to the commercial system you already have. If that system is defined, capacity compounds. If it is not, you have bought an expensive, slow and demoralising experiment.

The decision is usually framed as whether you can afford the hire. The more useful question is whether the hire can succeed, because a commercial hire who fails costs far more than the salary — the search, the ramp, the pipeline that did not get built, the market impressions spent badly, and the conclusion the team draws about whether this works.

The readiness check

Answer these before writing the job description. They take an afternoon.

• Can you state the value proposition as a problem? If your answer describes capabilities, a new seller will describe capabilities too, with less credibility than you.
• Is the ideal customer profile written down, with exclusions? Without it, a new seller pursues whoever replies, and you learn nothing from the result because the sample is noise.
• Is pricing settled enough to quote? If every deal is bespoke and every exception needs you, you have not hired a seller, you have hired a scheduler.
• Does a documented sales motion exist? Stages, qualification criteria, what good discovery sounds like, what artifacts move a deal forward.
• Is there proof that survives without you in the room? Something a buyer can forward to a sceptical colleague.
• Is there an onboarding plan beyond shadowing? Thirty, sixty and ninety-day expectations that are about learning and leading indicators, not a quota in month two.
• Is the CRM configured for how you actually sell? A seller who cannot log work in a way that reflects reality will stop logging it.
• Who manages this person? Honestly — with what weekly time, and have they done it before? Unmanaged sellers do not self-correct; they drift and then leave.

Reading your own answers

Mostly solid, with one or two gaps: hire, and close the gaps during the search.

Several unanswered: the hire is premature. Not forever — usually by a defined number of weeks. Building the system first costs a fraction of a failed hire and makes the eventual hire dramatically more likely to work, partly because the role becomes describable, and good people can tell the difference between a defined role and a vacuum.

Most unanswered: the constraint is not capacity at all, and adding a person will obscure that rather than reveal it.

None of this argues against hiring. It argues for hiring into something. The founder who builds the system first usually gets to a productive seller sooner than the one who hires in month one, which is counterintuitive right up until you have watched it happen a few times.

Closing those gaps before a search starts is a Foundation Build. If you would rather build it with someone in the seat, that is Fractional Commercial Leadership.

Katie Jackson is the founder of Unbound Growth Advisory, which builds the commercial foundation healthcare companies skip. Twenty-seven years inside healthcare’s buying process, then three commercial organizations built or rebuilt from nothing. Start a conversation or read the FAQ.