The Right Five

Many B2B tech founders struggle to successfully make their first sales hire. Why is it so difficult? We've identified three main reasons:

1. what founders think they need in a salesperson and what they actually need to get their business to scale are often misaligned. Founders often lean towards salespeople with the best rolodex or who are the most extroverted, neither of which are characteristics required for this role.

2. even with an awareness that they need a salesperson to build a repeatable, scalable, profitable sales process, founders are often unaware of the skill sets unique to, what we call, the Pathfinder salesperson.

3. given the challenges of dealing with a pile of resumés and without knowing what makes a Pathfinder, many great candidates are cast aside without interview in favour of candidates who 'look good' or match a certain set of pre-conceived biasses.

An estimated less than 1 in 10 salespeople have the necessary skills to be successful as your first sales hire. With these odds stacked against you, together with the potentially devastating consequences of getting this hire wrong, you need all the help you can get.

What options do you have?

Hire a Recruitment Agency

Apart from the cost (around 20% of first year base salary) there are two major challenges with this:

1. is your recruitment agency of choice a specialist in first sales hires? Can they positively provide answers to the three main reasons behind why it's such a difficult hire (see above)?

2. they're a screen to your brand. Does every candidate who expresses interest in the role get visibility of your brand? If they're not right for this role, might they be a candidate for future roles? Might they even be interested in your product now or in the future? With a recruitment agency, you'll never know because you'll never know who was considered.

Work with The Right Five

Here at The Right Five, we have codified the skills that make the first Sales hire successful in a tech startup and developed an online assessment and rules engine that classifies candidates as a Pathfinder (meaning they will be successful) or a Non-Pathfinder (they won’t).

Not only will our solution automatically identify the Pathfinders who you can interview, it communicates with the Non-Pathfinders (saving you a bunch of time) while leaving you with a full list of all those who could be good candidates as future hires or potential customers.

Best of all, we deliver this at a fraction of the cost of hiring a recruitment agency - a $997 one-time fee with the solution available for as long as you need it.

My VC is Offering to Help

Far be it for us to suggest you get in an argument with your friendly VC, but you might ponder if they are radically different to a recruitment agency and , if not, propose that they use The Right Five to underpin their own efforts at finding you your successful first salesperson.

If you'd like to watch a demo of The Right Five, you can do so at: https://therightfive.com/the-right-five-overview-and-demo/