Hiring for growth stage companies

The reality of hiring sales and marketing teams without a clear plan… is that it’s messy and expensive, to say the least. Between burning cash on the wrong senior hires and piling up junior roles that don’t actually help you shift the dial, it’s a chaos loop that far too many startups fall into. 

Join SeedLegals CEO and Co-Founder Anthony Rose as he discusses the hiring journey with Beacon Talent founder David Berk – who is also the former go-to-market leader at Hired.com as well as a 20-year veteran of the VC tech ecosystem. 

Together they dissect why most founders conflate job titles with functions, and what experienced sellers are silently sniffing out for in your interview process. 

Key takeaways 

Defining growth stage 

• Growth stage doesn’t always have a clean, universal definition, because product-market fit is often elusive and something you’re constantly validating, not a box you tick once.

• A key inflection point typically comes around the Series B stage, where investors expect strong data on product-market fit and are writing cheques specifically to scale go-to-market resources.
• Founders are constantly balancing two pressures at once: generating more leads to prove validation for the next round, while also planting seeds and plucking weeds with existing customers (acquisition vs. retention).

The first hire mistake you’ll probably make

• Most founders feel the pain when basic demand generation starts working – but they’re still the only person closing deals, and they desperately need someone they can trust to close as well.
  
• The first real investment is typically on the marketing side (demand generation), which then puts downward pressure on the closing function – and that’s where talent decisions get messy.

Experienced salespeople are secretly looking out for this 

• Avoid conflating job titles with functions – founders need to think about functional need first, not just search for a title on LinkedIn.
• In B2B sales, you’re often selling to 5-7 different decision makers (financial buyer, end user, IT/engineering), so you’ll need someone who can handle all of them, which is why technical sales engineering expertise can be critical.
• Experienced salespeople will ask sharp questions (average contract value, sales cycle length, inbound lead volume, base vs. on-target earnings) to quickly determine how mature your sales motion really is and whether they can actually win at your company.

The founder’s dilemma 

• Early-stage founders struggle with whether to hire a VP of sales (leadership and management experience) or an account executive (an individual contributor who can close the next 10 clients).
• You have to make trade-offs. Stack-rank what you actually need: does someone need to build a sales organisation, or just close your immediate pipeline?
• The role you hire for must match your functional priority at that exact moment – hiring a leader when you need a closer (or vice versa) is a quick way to burn cash and momentum.

Founders need a formula – time to scrap the wishlist 

• Most early-stage founders don’t know the art and craft of building sales and marketing teams – they think they’ll just code something cool and customers will appear.
• More common mistakes include: hiring too many junior people (so the CEO never stops closing), or hiring a hugely well-paid head of marketing who spends their time selling themselves and building a team instead of driving revenue.
• Having a clear go-to-market strategy – including the right nomenclature, team structure, and functional priorities – means you’ll recognise the right candidate immediately, because you’re describing the problem space accurately.