How To Build Your First Go-to-Market Team with Swing Search
This episode breaks down the realities of building your first go-to-market team with insights from Swing Search on hiring, scaling, and founder misconceptions. The discussion challenges the common founder belief that they can step away from sales, arguing instead that successful CEOs remain deeply involved in go-to-market activities even at $100M+ revenue companies.
Key takeaways
- •Founders never truly leave sales - even $100M+ ARR company CEOs still attend sales calls and remain central to go-to-market efforts.
- •Evaluate sales candidates not just on quota attainment but on their ranking relative to peers, since someone hitting 70% might still be bottom quartile on their team.
- •'Vibe hiring' is just a rebranded version of culture interviews from 2015, focusing on personal fit rather than hard skills.
- •The best early sales hires act like founding AEs, building tools and processes for the company before they're even officially hired.
- •Experienced sales ops professionals often struggle at early-stage companies because they want to build formal territories and processes when you're still 'throwing spaghetti against the wall.'
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Best moment
This is literally the job that you're signing up for is a sales job. So, man, let's get good at it and, of course, bring on help.
the folks to come work with them. They're selling a product. They're selling investors. Right? It's never ending. And I think that message bears repeating. Like, I talk to very, very early stage founders about it all the time that this is literally the job that you're signing up for is a sales job. So, man, let's get good at it and, of course, bring on help. And that kinda leads to some of the questions that were submitted before this. One of the general themes was, like, how do I define our founding go to market role and how do I evaluate what should come first? And, Magda, I know that's a question that you hear often. Where do you start that conversation with founders?
Yeah. So the conversation starts actually where we started, which is my first question is gonna be, what's your product? Who's your buyer? How are you selling today? What's the motion that you're looking to build? And I think all of that matters into
“But the reality is you're never gonna leave sales.”
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