Vercel COO Jean Grosser's litmus test for a great salesperson is that engineers shouldn't be able to tell they aren't a PM for at least 10 minutes. This requires deep product knowledge, enabling sales to act as an R&D function by translating customer feedback into valuable product signals.

Many companies mistakenly hire salespeople and then define their job and compensation. The correct sequence is to first determine the business need, then construct the specific job role to address it, and finally design a compensation plan that incentivizes the required activities before ever posting the job.

In the pre-product-market fit stage (the first ~20 deals), the sales leader's primary role is not just closing revenue, but acting as a product manager. They must be in every meeting to gather objections, find pockets of value, and translate raw market feedback into actionable insights for the engineering team.

At the $1-10M ARR stage, avoid junior reps or VPs from large companies. The ideal first hire can "cosplay a founder"—they sell the vision, craft creative deals, and build trust without a playbook. Consider former founders or deep product experts, even with no formal sales experience.

A one-size-fits-all sales role fails in consumption models. Success requires segmenting the team into specialized roles—new business acquisition, customer onboarding, and account management—each with distinct incentives aligned to their specific function, from initial sign-up to value realization and expansion.

A startup's initial salesperson should prioritize mirroring the founder's successful sales approach. Their job is to deconstruct the founder's "hook" through observation and trial-and-error, not to immediately implement formal sales processes, metrics, or a CRM. Success comes from successful knowledge transfer, not premature system building.

Don't expect the parent company's sales force to sell your nascent product. Their focus on core business means they will ignore emerging tech. An internal incubator must have its own dedicated go-to-market team to find new personas and develop sales plays before a handoff.

To build effective GTM automation, hire people who understand both the technology and the sales process. Vercel found success by transitioning its technical sales engineers—who were already former developers—into GTM Engineer roles. This ensures automated workflows are grounded in proven, real-world sales best practices.

This emerging role applies engineering and AI to GTM functions, building agents to automate tasks like lead qualification and personalized outreach. This dramatically increases efficiency, allowing one person, with an AI agent, to do the work of ten.