---
title: What to prepare before your first B2B sales hire
description: "What to write down before the first B2B sales hire: what the hire sells from, who qualifies leads, what good looks like in 90 days, who owns the CRM."
---

[Vlad Buyanov](https://vladbuyanov.com/?hsLang=en)

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# What to prepare before your first B2B sales hire

The first salesperson sells from what you learned closing the first deals. If that lives only in your head, the hire spends months rediscovering it, or leaves. Below: what I ask founders to have written down before the offer, a worked excerpt and a checklist.

Vlad Buyanov, B2B sales consultant. 20+ years in B2B sales since 2006; 100+ companies consulted since 2021.

## Who supplies the knowledge, and who structures it

No consultant can tell you who buys your product and why. You closed the first deals, so you hold what a salesperson needs: which buyer said yes, what they asked first, what they objected to, what made them sign, and what the lost deals had in common. That knowledge comes from selling and from nowhere else.

A consultant’s job is different. I take that knowledge out of your head and structure it into working sheets, test each sheet with you against the deals you closed and lost, and transfer it to the person who sells next. You supply the material; I supply the structure, the test and the transfer. When a founder asks me to supply the material as well, the answer is no: a pack written from a website and my assumptions is a pack nobody can sell from.

In my work since 2021, no founder started on sales too early; the common mistake was a hire made before the knowledge existed.

## What goes wrong when the hire comes first

The request to the market at this point sounds like "I need a strong salesperson who will bring in a lot of money". Such a person is hard to manage: you don't know which tasks to set them or what to check. An experienced seller senses on day 1 that there is no system and often takes the job anyway: a paid deferral of a few months, until you notice they aren't selling and come back with "the market isn't ready, the clients are wrong, the product is raw".

The working request is a person who will do specific tasks, and to write the tasks down you have to run the process yourself a few times. The ladder I give founders here has 3 rungs:

1. **You sell**, until you can see which tasks repeat and which of them can be handed over.
2. **You hire an assistant**, not a salesperson: emails, meetings, follow-up, CRM data, a log of objections, frequent questions and discounts. No revenue plan and no sales experience required; this is sales operations.
3. **Only then the first salesperson.** They learn the process from the assistant and learn to sell from you. The second hire comes later, with the first as their mentor.

The one mistake on this ladder is skipping a rung. An experienced hire covers a missing playbook with their own background for a while; the bill arrives with the second hire.

## What the hire sells from

Before the offer, 5 sheets exist on paper, in the order a conversation with a buyer runs:

- **Target Segments.** Who you sell to, as a passport: who, what is happening to them now, why you, how they buy, what the deal is worth. An industry is not a segment: a startup and a bank share the word "fintech" and nothing else.
- **Elevator Pitches.** For each segment and buyer role, how you open: who you are, 1 advantage for this role, an open question from their world, and the question that books the meeting. Under 30 seconds.
- **Discovery Questions.** A bank of 10 per segment, sorted by how much each answer moves the deal, with the reason next to every question. On a call you ask 5–7 from the top, so a call cut short still covered what mattered.
- **FAB+ Analysis.** Each feature with its advantage, the benefit for this buyer and their problem in their own words. Filled from features, spoken backwards: benefit first, feature last, and you stop once the buyer believes the benefit.
- **Objection Handling.** 5 objections per segment, each with a clarifying question, a script of up to 3 sentences and the next step you propose the moment the script lands.

This is the 5D Sales Pack: 2 working sessions, 7–10 working days, 1 working file your team sells from. It needs 5 inputs: the product description, the target market, the buyer roles, the 3 competitors you actually lose to, and the team’s background. The strongest input is you describing the product in your own words, on a demo or call recording; a landing page on its own is never enough.

The pack is the specified working file. It is not proof that the first sale will repeat, and it does not replace evidence from customers: every row is a hypothesis until deals confirm it, and the rows that deals contradict get rewritten.

The better founders know their product, the worse they sell it: they explain everything at once and lose the buyer. The pack is used the other way round. Before a call the seller filters the segment, takes a few rows for this buyer and assembles the conversation from them.

## Worked excerpt

1 buyer role across 4 of the sheets. The company and every figure are invented.

Illustrative example, fictional company

Orbit Compliance: software that keeps supplier certificates current for mid-size food manufacturers. Founder-led, 9 paying customers, first sales hire planned.

**Buyer role (Target Segments).** Head of quality at a food manufacturer with 2–5 plants. Their year runs from audit to audit; an expired supplier certificate stops a shipment and lands on their desk. They buy through the plant director, and IT signs off on the integration.

**Pitch (Elevator Pitches, networking).** "I'm Anna, founder of Orbit Compliance. We keep supplier certificates current for food manufacturers, so an audit doesn't stop on an expired document. How do you track expiring certificates today, in the ERP or in a spreadsheet one person owns? If it's the spreadsheet, 20 minutes next week to see how 2 plants replaced it?"

**Discovery questions, top of the bank, each with the reason the seller gives when asked why.**

- How many active suppliers hold certificates with you, and who notices when one expires? Reason: the volume, and whether anyone owns the problem. "Nobody" is the pain in their own words.
- When was the last audit finding tied to supplier documents, and what did it cost? Reason: urgency and budget come from a real finding, not from us.
- What have you tried: the ERP module, a spreadsheet, a person? Reason: our position against the alternatives, including doing nothing.
- If this were solved by the next audit, what date is that? Reason: a date set by an event the buyer can't move is worth more than a wish.

**Objections (Objection Handling).**

- "Our ERP already has a document module." Clarify first: which part of it do you use, and who updates it? Answer: the ERP stores the certificate; it doesn't chase the supplier for the new one or escalate when it's late, and Orbit does both. Next step: 30 minutes together over your current list of expired certificates.
- "Too expensive for a reminder." Clarify: compared with what, the ERP module, a person or the last finding? Answer: priced against the finding, 1 held shipment covers a year of Orbit. Next step: a 1-page comparison of the 3 alternatives after the call.
- "We need to discuss it internally; come back next quarter." Rarely about time: usually an objection the buyer won't hand over. Clarify: which part needs the discussion, the price, the integration, or whether the problem is big enough? Answer: a short account of a buyer with the same doubt and what happened next, told flat, so they can name their own. Next step: a date, and who joins the next call.

## What good looks like in the first 90 days

Write it down before the offer, as events with dates. The measure I use: how long does a new rep take to sell your product without a colleague’s help? That number is your playbook’s grade.

An example to replace with your own: by day 30 the rep runs discovery calls from the questions sheet, and the 5 qualification fields (budget, who decides, need, timing, alternatives) are filled for every deal they touched; by day 60 the first proposals go out on deals they qualified themselves; by day 90 a first close, or a pipeline in which every stage is an event the buyer confirmed. The aim is a rep at a predictable share of plan that you can explain, not a star whose number nobody can.

## Checklist: before you make the offer

- **What the hire sells from.** The 5 sheets exist, and you have sold from them yourself at least once; an empty sheet gets filled with the hire’s guesses.
- **Who qualifies leads.** Who takes the first call, which 5 fields are filled before a deal moves a stage, and who may say "not a fit" and close the deal with a reason.
- **What good looks like in the first 90 days.** Written as events with dates, with the plan and the bonus floor next to them, said out loud at the offer.
- **Who owns the CRM.** 1 person owns the stage list, the mandatory fields and the weekly review. A stage is an event the buyer confirmed, not a switch the rep moves; mandatory fields arrive in waves, about a third at the start.
- **Who the hire learns from.** You for selling, the assistant for the process, and the hours a week you will spend with them, already in the calendar.

## Where a consultant fits

If you have no working sales materials, the 5D Sales Pack is the format for this. If the hire is 1 piece of a bigger change (a team, a pipeline, a manager to run it), that is the B2B Sales System Build: 3–9 months in 4 phases (strategy, structure, management, enablement), built with your team on live deals and handed to an internal owner. In both I do all the consulting work myself.

I do not guarantee a revenue increase. We agree the scope, deliverables and responsibilities before the engagement. The examples on this site describe individual engagements, not typical results.

## Request an introductory conversation

Bring the deals you closed, the ones you lost and the hire you are planning. In the call we decide whether a pack is enough or the hire is part of a bigger build. Scope and cost are agreed after it. Or write to [sales@vladbuyanov.com](mailto:sales@vladbuyanov.com).

[Request an introductory conversation →](https://vladbuyanov.com/meetings/salessprint/intro-zoom?hsLang=en)

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Vlad Buyanov, B2B sales consultant. 20+ years in B2B sales since 2006; 100+ companies consulted since 2021.

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