I’ve spent years hiring sales talent as a revenue leader and now help founders find the right sales professionals for their startups, so I’ve seen how critical these early hires are to a company’s trajectory from different viewpoints.

But what is consistent is that most founders I’ve worked with have never hired salespeople before and don’t know where to start or what makes a sales candidate exceptional.

Don’t get blindsided by big company brands

I see too many founders getting attracted by the massive competitor. I spoke to a founder recently who was running a 25 person business and had a candidate in process that was working at a 5,000 person enterprise.

They thought their experience would help. But the reality is very different.

That 5,000-person company has a 35-person marketing function, customer success teams, and established infrastructure that made selling fundamentally different. Their salespeople are often just picking up the phone to prospects who already know who they are, handling inbound leads, and working with robust systems. That experience rarely translates to the scrappy, build-it-as-you-go environment of an early-stage startup.

Look beyond experience to values and soft skills

Using my revenue leader experience, what I’ve always found most effective is to not focus exclusively on job history. Yes, experience matters because you want to verify they’ve done the job for a period and been successful at it. But the truly good salespeople stand out through their values and soft skills.

These attributes are more important than where they’ve worked. You can do a lot with someone who has well-aligned values and the right soft skills on top of their experience, compared to someone who only brings an impressive resume.

The four critical soft skills that predict success

Through years of hiring, I’ve identified four soft skills that consistently predict sales success in startup environments:

1. Grit

I’ve made the mistake before of hiring someone who had been successful at another company but simply didn’t have that get-up-and-go attitude. They were a bit lazy. A nine-to-fiver who wasn’t prepared to come in earlier when behind target or make that extra call at 8:30 in the morning before a CEO starts their day.

You need driven people who, when they have a bad quarter, just keep going. People with the grit to make 30, 40, 50, even 100 calls when nobody answers, and then make another 100 calls and act like nothing happened. This takes a certain kind of individual, and that grit is absolutely crucial in a startup.

2. Coachability

We’re not hiring people with 20 years of experience here. We’re hiring people we want on the upward trajectory of their career. They’re not the polished article, yet.

Having people who proactively want to develop, who we can add value to, who we can coach and make better, that’s really important. I’ve always found that coachability is a key factor in successfully predicting long-term performance.

3. Curiosity

You want people who are genuinely engaged during onboarding, who listen and ask good questions: “Why are we solving this problem? If we can solve that problem, what does that mean to the business?”

Look for someone who is naturally curious and asks intelligent questions, because that’s one of the biggest skillsets when you’re speaking to people. The ability to probe thoughtfully and understand prospects’ real challenges separates average salespeople from great ones.

4. Ownership mindset

Sales roles aren’t black and white, especially in early-stage businesses. There will inevitably be responsibilities that aren’t in the job description but simply need to get done. Having someone who can take ownership and accountability, makes your life as a founder a hell of a lot easier.  

Why these soft skills are so important

All of these soft skills, when layered on top of relevant experience, are the true differentiators.

And I’ve learnt the hard way that you can’t teach someone to have these qualities. They’ve either got it or they don’t. You can’t teach someone to be more gritty or more curious; it simply doesn’t work that way. That’s why it’s so important to identify these qualities in someone during the hiring process.

Find people with something to prove

This doesn’t fall into the soft skills list, but is a personal one for me because before I started selling at 17, everyone from my teachers to my peers thought I’d be a failure. I didn’t go to university, and I was constantly up against people with more credentials and experience. But I wanted to prove people wrong. It gave me a hunger to work harder and persist longer than my competitors.

Whatever a candidate’s story, I always look for that personal motivation that’s going to make them truly hungry and drive forward despite obstacles. That hustle goes a long way.

How to assess these qualities

Of course, most candidates will claim they’re curious and motivated and give you surface-level assurances that tell you nothing about their actual capabilities.

That’s why it’s essential to create a systematic way to assess what you’re looking for. Consider developing a scorecard or criteria framework that evaluates the four or five attributes most important to your business. Those might include the soft skills above, plus skills like prospecting ability, cultural fit, and stage fit.

Personally, I wouldn’t compromise on soft skills and prospecting abilities, they’re must-haves. But having a methodology to assess them in an interview environment is crucial. This means digging deeper and creating tasks or scenarios that bring these qualities to light.

The stage fit factor

Beyond soft skills, one of the most critical elements is stage fit. This is almost as important as culture fit. As I mentioned, we don’t want people from a big company who can’t adapt to startup conditions.

Ask yourself: Have they worked at another seed or Series A company before? Have they sold products with similar ACVs (Annual Contract Values) to yours? If you’re selling to SMBs, you probably don’t want enterprise-focused salespeople.

Consider your GTM strategy. Is your business inbound-focused, outbound-heavy, or partner-led?

Make sure their experience aligns with your approach. From what I’ve seen, about 80% of early-stage businesses are outbound-heavy with not many having the luxury of generating loads of inbound leads.

That said, even if you currently run a 100% inbound business, I would still hire people who are strong on outbound. Who knows where these inbounds are coming from? Maybe they’re primarily from Google or LinkedIn. If there’s an algorithm change or some drastic shift overnight, you’ll want someone who can generate demand if that tap suddenly stops flowing.

Also consider whether they’ve sold to similar markets. They don’t need industry-specific experience necessarily, but if you sell marketing technology software, someone who has sold something remotely similar to marketing tech or to similar personas will face a shorter learning curve.

Watch what they do between interview stages

I always tell founders to pay close attention to what candidates do outside the formal interview process. When you’re selling and progressing from discovery to demo to proposal stages, it’s normally the work you do between those formal interactions that demonstrates real value.

The best candidates I’ve seen take initiative between interview stages. After a first call, do they send a thoughtful follow-up? Have they connected with you on LinkedIn? After subsequent stages, are they continuing to demonstrate their interest in concrete ways?

Do they reach out to others in your business to learn more about the opportunity or prepare more thoroughly? The greatest candidates hustle outside the formal environment, taking extra steps that few others bother with. This behaviour gives you a real insight to how they’ll perform when selling your product.

The bottom line for founders

When evaluating sales candidates for your SaaS startup, look beyond impressive logos on resumes. Focus on the combination of relevant stage experience and those critical soft skills that really drive success in early-stage environments.

Create systematic ways to assess these qualities, watch for signs of genuine hunger, and pay attention to how candidates behave throughout the entire interview process, not just during formal conversations.

Get these early sales hires right, and you’ll build a foundation for sustainable growth. Get them wrong, and you’ll waste precious runway figuring out why your seemingly impressive new hire can’t deliver in your unique environment. The right sales talent doesn’t just execute your current strategy, they help shape it, adapt it, and drive it forward with the kind of ownership that transforms early-stage companies into market leaders.  

Author: Matthew Codd

I’m Matthew, I have 15 years of commercial leadership experience, helping VC-backed B2B technology companies scale revenue and transition from founder-led sales.  

I use my experience to help early-stage start-ups with GTM expertise, sales best practice, and hiring insights.  

I co-founded Cosmic Partners in 2022. We are SaaS sales recruitment specialists for VC backed B2B tech companies.