Stagnating at $45k ARR, the engineering-focused founders believed their product would sell itself and lacked respect for sales as a discipline. Hiring an experienced VP of Sales was the catalyst to grow to $3.5M ARR in one year by implementing a real inside sales motion.
Related Insights
The ideal growth leader for defense tech is a unicorn. Instead of searching for one, founders should do sales themselves first to understand the pain points, then train technically curious people internally by creating a playbook and throwing them in the deep end.
Blings hired talented salespeople early on, but they couldn't close deals without a repeatable process. The founder learned the true signal to scale the sales team is when the playbook is so refined that even a mediocre rep can succeed, proving the process works, not just the person.
Getting to $1M ARR can be driven by a founder's personal hustle. To scale to $10M and beyond, you must have a repeatable GTM recipe. The key question is: can you hire an average account executive off the street and teach them to replicate your success? If not, you don't have a scalable business.
Anticipating a future need for revenue, Fathom hired salespeople a year early and embedded them in customer success. This allowed them to develop deep product knowledge and user empathy. When the market shifted, this fully-ramped team could immediately sell the product roadmap, securing Fathom's first $100k ARR in a month.
The key to accelerating from $1M to $10M in revenue was evolving the sales narrative. They moved from discussing technical details with CTOs to explaining business impact, like compliance and audit readiness, to non-technical buyers like Chief Compliance Officers and CFOs.
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.
While founder-led sales are critical, StackAI believes they waited too long to hire their first salesperson. Bringing in help earlier, around $500K ARR, would have accelerated their ability to test and refine their go-to-market strategy much faster.
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.
Fueled by massive inbound demand, some AI B2B companies scale to $50M ARR with sales teams of five or fewer. This represents a 20x reduction in sales headcount compared to the traditional SaaS playbook, which would require over 100 reps to achieve the same revenue milestone.
Peets identifies a critical hiring error: founders hire sales leaders with experience managing a large, scaled organization for their future goals. This backfires because those leaders often lack the essential skills to build a sales function from the ground up, preventing the company from ever reaching that future state.
