Building Your First Sales Team: Essential Tips for Startups

Uliana Martynova
Dec 15
4 min read

Founders often expect their first sales hire to be a kind of superhero—someone who walks in, picks up the product, and starts closing deals immediately. But anyone who’s been through a true early-stage sales build knows that reality looks nothing like that.

The first sales team you assemble will shape how the market sees you, how your customer relationships begin, and how predictable your revenue becomes. And unlike in later stages, the "right hire" at this moment isn’t just a skill match—it’s a mindset match.

The good news? Startups don’t need a big team to get it right. They need clarity, intentionality, and an understanding of what early sales actually require—especially as more companies build their first sales function through remote jobs and home office roles rather than traditional in-office teams.

You’re not hiring salespeople yet—you’re hiring market translators

At the earliest stage, your product is still shifting. Your ICP is still shifting. Your messaging? Also shifting.

Your first sales hire is listening to objections you didn’t know you’d hear. They’re identifying patterns that the product sometimes misses. They’re figuring out whether your pitch actually lands with customers or needs reshaping—often through dozens of online conversations and remote sales calls.

Startups sometimes hire someone highly polished from a corporate environment… and then wonder why nothing moves. But early-stage sales has nothing to do with polish. It’s adaptability, curiosity, and comfort with mess—whether the role is based in an office or set up as a home office job.

Your first sales hire needs the emotional stamina to work in a space where half of the answers simply don’t exist yet.

Don’t hire "the perfect profile" - hire the profile that fits your stage

Founders often search for the same ideal candidate: someone from a well-known company or someone with a track record of closing big deals.

Except… these candidates often underperform in early-stage environments because they’re used to structure, brand recognition, and inbound opportunities you don’t have—especially in startups hiring for remote sales roles without an established engine.

The better fit is usually someone who:

has sold in unstructured environments
can build a process without being handed one
doesn’t panic when ICP shifts
thinks in terms of motion, not maintenance

Experience matters, yes—but relevance matters as well.

Your first salesperson must be comfortable being wrong at least once a day

Early sales is experimentation.

Pricing experiments. Messaging experiments. ICP experiments. And because everything is new, being wrong isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s part of the job description, particularly in online-first or fully remote jobs where feedback loops are fast and visible.

What founders should look for:

someone who talks about past failures openly
someone who adjusts quickly when something doesn’t land
someone who doesn’t take customer objections personally
someone with a genuine learning reflex

If a candidate can’t calmly explain a moment when they misread a market or changed direction based on feedback, they may not be ready for first-stage sales.

Process comes from doing the work, not writing the work

A mistake founders make is trying to create a perfect sales process before the sales function exists. So they write documents, frameworks, and scripts—all before anyone’s had ten real customer conversations.

Your first reps create the process by doing it:

what customers react to
what actually converts
what parts of the pitch fall flat
which questions get asked the most
how long deals naturally take

This is especially true when sales happens through remote workflows and online meetings, where real-world behavior quickly replaces assumptions.

Process evolves from reality, not from slides.

Give your first sales hires a clear but flexible playground

Early sales hires don’t need micromanagement—but they do need guardrails. The worst thing you can do is hire someone and then hand them total ambiguity, especially in home office or remote job setups.

What early hires need is:

a clear definition of the first ICP
clarity on what success looks like in the first 90 days
an understanding of how product decisions happen
collaboration with marketing, not silos

They’re not just looking for rules but for orientation.

Your first sales team sets the culture, whether you mean it or not

Even if you start with one or two hires—often through remote jobs rather than local hiring—those people will define how sales is done in your company.

They shape the pace, the philosophy, the customer experience, the internal communication style, and eventually the team’s reputation.

The "culture" of your sales org is built quietly in the first six months. Choose people who model the way you want the team to grow.

How Avomind helps startups build their first sales teams

At Avomind, we’ve supported many early-stage companies through their first sales hires—from the very first Account Executive to the first GTM pod, including remote and home office sales roles.

We help founders avoid costly mis-hires by aligning talent with stage, not hype—whether they’re hiring locally or building distributed teams through online job searches and remote positions.

We support startups by helping them: